Growing a Revolution, page 15
My phone guided me through the countryside where cornfields surrounded individual houses and all but enveloped a big church on a hill. Eventually, I pulled into a gravel parking lot past a white RODALE INSTITUTE sign. When I asked for Jeff at the visitors’ center, I was told, “He’s in the main house—go past the barn and the old stone building to the white house.”
Driving away, I noticed a cloud of butterflies flitting among the vibrant wildflowers that were thriving between the fields. As I passed a great stone barn with big red doors, a guy in a white cowboy hat drove by on a tractor hauling compost. I’d arrived at the home of the longest ongoing field trial of organic, no-till farming.
Cast beneath big cotton-ball clouds, it was a nostalgically pastoral scene—a collection of white buildings with green trim and a pair of big red barns. But there were a few modern touches, like the electric golf carts shuttling people around. Water barrels collected runoff from the roof downspouts, vegetable and flower beds spread out between buildings, and a couple of geodesic domes and hoop-houses full of tomatoes stood out by the fields. A few tourists, half of them kids, were walking around the grounds, vastly outnumbered by the bees, butterflies, and insects dancing around the flowers.
I found Moyer out behind one of the barns, up on a red tractor. He was wearing a Rodale Institute hat, a red-and-white checkerboard shirt, jeans, and a major-league handlebar mustache. He’s short and solid, with hands that look accustomed to dirt, and he doesn’t look a day over fifty. Later, I learned he was just about to celebrate his sixtieth birthday. He speaks fast and clear, with the conviction of a man who has seen what he’s talking about.
Over his shoulder by the barn door, I caught a glimpse of what I’d come to see: his tool for managing weeds for organic no-till farming. It was a heavy metal roller that looked like a steamroller drum, just not as tall. Raised, square-profiled iron chevrons protruding from the surface of the drum made it look like a stray gear salvaged from some enormous machine. But it’s actually pretty simple. Mounted on the front of a tractor, it knocks down, crushes, and kills cover crops, turning them into weed-smothering mulch by pinning their stems between the chevrons and the ground, then breaking them like crimping a straw. This kills the plants and lays them down as mulch all at once. Put one on the front of a planter and a farmer can, in a single pass, plant seeds directly into fresh mulch and achieve effective weed control.
Moyer’s roller-crimper makes turning cover crops into mulch simple and easy for large farms.22 You just need the right piece of iron mounted on the front of a tractor. Rolling over the remains of the prior crop as you plant the next one offers practical, chemical-free weed control—exactly what’s needed for organic no-till. By using the roller-crimper, conventional farmers can control weeds and save the money they’ve been spending on herbicides. Studies in other regions report that roller-crimpers provide weed control comparable to herbicides—with no resistance problem.
As Moyer led me to his office, he said that J. I. Rodale’s views profoundly shaped his beliefs about the necessity of healthy soil to grow healthy food and healthy people. Once inside, I noticed a coat tree festooned with name badges from dozens of conferences he’s spoken at. His opinion is in demand. After all, the institute was set up to identify problems, promote education about organic farming, and work out solutions like his roller-crimper. Over all his years at Rodale, figuring out how to farm organically without plowing has presented the biggest dilemma—the problem Moyer most wanted to solve.
Were his fields left to nature’s devices, annual weeds would show up first, followed by perennial weeds, and then trees. Eventually, the landscape would try to grow back into a hundred-foot-tall forest. Unfortunately, we don’t eat trees. And while you can mulch out annual weeds, you can’t hold back nature forever with mulch. Jeff called perennial weeds an organic farmer’s biggest nightmare.
Conventional farmers can plow or use herbicides, but Moyer compares tillage to the RESET button on a computer—it works well once in a while, but you can’t be depending on it day in and day out. Moyer mostly relies on cover crops to suppress weeds because he won’t spray herbicides, and doesn’t like the disturbance and erosion that come with routine tillage. But while his roller-crimper can hold perennial weeds at bay for a few years, they continue to be enough of a problem that he ends up tilling about every third year. So organic no-till is a bit of a misnomer for his method. He calls what he does “rotational tillage.”
Moyer’s goal is to “keep something green and growing in every field all the time.” He sees thick, dense stands of cover crops as the best way to combat weeds, and the right cover crops provide the added benefit of building up soil nitrogen during periods when cash crops are not growing. How much nitrogen can organic methods add to the soil? He finds that hairy vetch, a winter-hardy annual legume, can add more than 250 pounds of nitrogen per acre—more than enough to fertilize a subsequent cash crop.
Surprisingly, it’s the economics of organic no-till that make Moyer optimistic about the potential for wider adoption of his methods. Consider, he said, a direct side-by-side comparison of organic corn grown under a conventional plow-based system and his no-till system. In a field previously planted with hairy vetch, growing no-till corn took a total of just two passes of diesel-fed machinery: one to simultaneously roller-crimp the cover crop and plant the corn, and another at harvest time. Meanwhile, growing it conventionally without a cover crop involved multiple passes across the field to plow, disk, pack, plant, rotary-hoe, cultivate, and finally harvest. The conventional plot produced 143 bushels per acre; the no-till one produced 160 bushels per acre. In short, the cover-cropped organic plot took less diesel and produced a greater harvest. A neighbor’s comment succinctly captured the advantage of organic no-till compared to his conventionally grown crop: “I got 150 bushel corn too, and you didn’t do anything, you just planted it.”
Moyer laughed as he related how an economist at Penn State once responded to this example with, “Yeah, but can you prove you saved money?” All it took was a little math: with organic corn at $8.36 a bushel and conventional corn at $4.15 a bushel, the organic no-till produced a net $578 per acre profit, whereas the conventional till produced a net loss of $16 per acre. With organic no-till it cost less to make more.
To illustrate how well his method worked for weed control, Moyer told a story about an organic farm in Wisconsin. There the soybean harvest was 24 bushels an acre with conventional tillage, and a third more, 32 bushels an acre, for no-till involving just rolling and planting. On a field-day tour of this farm, Moyer offered to pay visitors a dollar for every weed they could find in the organic no-till field. The visitors looked all day, but in the end he didn’t have to pay anyone—there were simply none to be found.
Moyer didn’t seek out a job in organic farming for political or ideological reasons. He grew up on a small farm near the institute, and he went to high school with one of the Rodales. When he graduated from a forestry program in 1975 and was offered a job in Colorado, his then-girlfriend—now wife of almost forty years—didn’t want to move. So he answered an ad in the paper for a greenhouse technician. The next thing he knew, he’d put in four decades at Rodale.
He didn’t know it when he started, but his family had history with the farm that would become the institute, going back to when it was first cleared in the 1720s. In researching their family tree, his sister-in-law found that Moyer’s great-grandmother nine generations back had been born on the farm. When Bob Rodale bought it in 1971, locals said the “organic people” would soon turn the farm into a weedy mess. Moyer didn’t let that happen.
Attitudes have changed though. A couple of weeks ago, a local farmer told him, “I have to say thank you, Jeff.”
Surprised, Moyer asked, “What for?”
“I came to hear you speak and thought, He’s not any smarter than I am, so if he can do it, I can do it. At the time, we were thinking of getting out of farming. But we converted, and last week we bought our second organic farm, for our son. I’d never wanted our kids to be in agriculture, because it was too hard, and you couldn’t make a living at it. But now that we’re making money again, I can work with my son for the rest of my life.”
Moyer said that, for him, this captures the mission of the Rodale Institute. “The point is to be a catalyst for change, to inspire people to change and provide them the tools. One acre at a time, one farmer at a time.” He argues that modern farming could be transformed if society were to recognize that, if done properly, even intensive agriculture can improve soil health.
He rejects the idea that organic farming necessarily leads to a loss in yield, or risks starving people in a more populated future. And he chafes when conventional agronomists tend to paint organic farming as primitive. He knows organic farmers don’t shun science and agricultural engineering, they emphasize practices rooted in soil biology. And these, Moyer says, are “not high-tech and human-designed, so some people think it’s silly and not modern, but what we’re doing is science.”
Chemistry is clean and predictable—you get the same reaction every time. But biology is messy because so many things influence it. Extension agents keep telling Moyer that if he had a simple recipe, organic would be more easily accepted. But he thinks that’d be a recipe for disaster. Biology is just too variable, so the key is adaptablity. That organic farming works at scale shows “that we can grow all the food we need and still have a healthy environment.” He knows this works because he’s done it.
Moyer describes himself as someone who has “never been known to take the easy road.” He is definitely persistent. You have to be to run an experiment for thirty-five years.
The Rodale Institute’s Farm Systems Trial is America’s longest-running side-by-side comparison of organic and conventional farming. It began in 1981, after a USDA study on organic agriculture identified the lack of such studies as a barrier to farmers transitioning from conventional to organic production. So the institute started a direct field-scale side-by-side test of three different farming systems: (1) organic with livestock manure; (2) organic with legume cover crops; and (3) conventional chemically fertilized. After 2008, a no-till version of each of these three systems was added to the experiment by splitting the area in each trial system. The organic no-till plots were then tilled every three years (to beat back perennial weeds) and GMO seeds were used on the conventional plots.
On the way out to the plots, Moyer introduced me to the new project leader on the field trial, Dr. Emmanuel Omondi. A native Kenyan, Omondi had been at Rodale for a month, after researching conservation agriculture for a decade in Wyoming. The three of us hopped into a golf cart–like vehicle called an E-Z-GO and puttered out to the field, where a six-foot-tall billboard-like set of panels tells the story of the field trials. Omondi walked me through it.
As a light rain began falling, he explained that if you want to control weeds, you mulch. I told him that’s exactly what Anne does in our garden. He replied, “If I told you to put mulch on a thousand acres, you couldn’t do it. But if you could grow the mulch on your field, that would be a different story.” This is exactly what cover crops and a roller-crimper do.
The total area in the field trial was about the size of six city blocks (6 hectares or about 15 acres), consisting of row after row of side-by-side 60-foot-wide-by-300-foot-long plots stretching across a gentle hillside, each plot subdivided into three 20-foot-wide ones. Before the trial, the site had been farmed with conventional corn for more than twenty-five years. Rodale’s study was set up with an external scientific advisory board, and results have been published in dozens of peer-reviewed journal articles, mostly written by independent, non-Rodale scientists. In addition to measuring crop yields, the standard measure of agronomic success, the study also tracked economic returns, energy consumption, greenhouse gas emissions, and soil health.
The organic systems consistently performed better by all measures, except for yield, which was comparable after an initial several-year period of lower corn yields in the organic plots. Averaged over the full duration of the trial, including the transition years when organic plots went “cold turkey” off chemicals, there were no statistical differences between organic and conventional yields.
The difference was only in the first three years. Without any fertilizer, after a quarter-century of conventional monoculture corn, the yields were initially lower in the organic systems. But there was no initial loss in yield on plots where the rotation started with soybeans. Lesson learned: If the soil is degraded, don’t start the transition by planting nitrogen-hungry corn. Instead, begin with a nitrogen-fixing crop, like soybeans. Moyer suggested that another source of the initial yield drop was the experience gap on the part of farmers needing to learn new skills around working with rotations and new cover crops.
Right from the start, soybean yields were highest in the organic-manure system. And after the initial transition period, overall crop yields were statistically similar across all three systems, except in drought years when the organic systems produced 30 percent higher yields. The bottom line was that, after a several-year transition, there was no yield penalty for adopting organic methods. There was even a yield bonus in years with little rainfall.
Big differences in soil conditions developed, though, as soil quality and health improved in the organic plots. At the start of the field trial, in 1981, soil tests showed similar carbon and nitrogen values across all plots. By 1994, soil carbon and nitrogen concentrations had increased significantly in the organic systems but had not changed in the conventional ones. And the soil quality in the organic plots that received manure or legumes kept improving. Some plots rose from about 1 percent soil organic matter at the start of the trial to more than 6 percent today. But all the organic plots now have soil organic matter contents greater than 4 percent, whereas the conventional ones remain less than 2 percent. By conservative estimation, the amount of carbon in the soil doubled over several decades. A number of other studies have also reached the same conclusion: that organic farming and organic-matter input increase soil carbon and nitrogen content as well as microbial biomass and activity.
This matters. By increasing soil organic matter, aggregate stability is improved, which, in turn, allows more water to infiltrate into the soil instead of running off.
To see these changes, all you need is a shovel. When Moyer and I marched off into the plots to take a look, we found that soil from the organic plot was brown, moist, and composed of stable aggregates perforated by visible pores. The conventional soil had few visible pores and was yellower, drier, and disaggregated if held. This means that the conventional soil falls apart easily and sheds erosive runoff. Here, Moyer says, is why Iowa is washing down the Mississippi.
In terms of energy use, the organic systems used just under half as much to produce the same harvest. The difference mostly lies in the energy that’s needed to produce fertilizer and herbicides for the conventional plots. All in all, the organic systems produced comparable harvests while increasing soil organic matter, improving soil health, and using less energy. That sounds more efficient to me.
I found the economic analysis more surprising. Conventional systems produced higher profits than organic systems for the first several years when they outpaced the latter in yields—if you assumed that both organic and conventional crops receive the same market price. After that initial period, the two systems were comparable. But organic and conventional crops generally don’t receive the same market price. When the price premium for organic produce was factored in, organic production was over three times more profitable than the conventional system. The lesson was that if conventional farmers switched to organic they could maintain high yields, improve their soil, and make more money.
Moyer describes the Rodale Farming Systems Trial as pulling back the curtain on the feasibility of transitioning conventional agriculture to organic through a rigorous scientific analysis. He emphasizes that it doesn’t matter what metric you use—water, energy, soil health, profitability, or nitrate pollution—organic production performs better, except for yield, which is comparable after the transition. This is the point that high-profile, meta-analysis comparisons of conventional and organic farming can miss. While there has been very little long-term research on organic production, Rodale’s thirty-five-year field trial has shown that intensive organic farming offers an economically viable, energy-efficient alternative for maintaining high crop yields. Other studies also suggest that the organic yield penalty is greatly reduced, if not eliminated, after the several-year transition period.
This raises the question: Why is the USDA not going all out to support research on and a transition to agricultural practices that not only deliver yields comparable to conventional yields, but greatly lessen or solve many of the problems that plague conventional agriculture? Could it be because that’s not what influential Big Ag suppliers might want? Moyer wants to see a new research imperative for the USDA to investigate how to adapt farming to regenerative practices in different regions and with different crops to achieve yields comparable to conventional, reduce erosion, and improve soil health. “You look at the data, you look at the science, and you have to come to the conclusion that we have to change.”
I asked Jeff, “Why aren’t more farmers converting to organic methods?” Without missing a beat, he pointed out that crop insurance zeros out the risk of bad years for conventional farmers. “There are two ways to drought-proof your soil—one is with biology and the other is with crop insurance.” He likens a farmer with crop insurance to a gambler heading to Vegas with $100,000 and the guarantee that, if he loses, the casino will give him the money back and he’ll get to try again. Farmers will always take big risks with a deal like that. “Conventional corn is like a racehorse,” Moyer told me. “It runs great on a perfect track. Organic corn is like an old workhorse. It produces reliably but won’t win big.” He says organic farmers don’t need much crop insurance because what they do is not as risky, since yields from organic plots are more reliable and consistent.
