13.3: Soil Comes Full Circle

An editorial essay by 2024 Leopold Conservation Award winner Valerie Dantoin, Full Circle Farm.

As you know, the soil is the place where plants grow and therefore where our food grows. Sometimes the average person forgets that food comes from land, especially if they aren’t closely connected with soil and farming or growing food. A family farm invests in its soil because it cannot simply pick up and move production operations to a new factory in another state. It has to take care of the soil it is stuck with. The farmer has to move the soil, full circle forward, from perhaps mistreatment in the 1970s through the early 2000s to a better way of management, now that we know better. This full circle includes picking up the best ideas of the past--crop rotations, fallowing, perennial crops, composts, and manures--and then rolling them forward into a new way of farming.

For the last 50 years, farmers have sometimes lost sight of the fact that they are actually growing food that people will eat and that they are stewards of this precious resource. We have purchased bigger, more muscular machines, and we have more bills to pay. Sometimes farmers just go about their everyday business of plowing and putting seed in the ground, spraying down the weeds, and harvesting all from an enclosed tractor with computer-guided GPS points to tell them where to add a little more fertilizer or to record the harvest as it flows in off the acreage. They forget to get out of the tractor seat and walk the land. Farmers forget that the land remains, even after they are done with it.

Farmers have been asked to produce food--and a lot of it--in great quantity, to feed the world by maximizing bushels per acre. Farmers in America’s Midwest today are great at growing corn and soybeans. But both of these are ingredients and not in themselves food we can eat. Most farmers would starve if they lived off the crops of their land. In fact, the state of Iowa is a net importer of food. Think about it, they export mountains of corn, soy, pork, and beef, but they must import the actual food on the grocery store shelves. Some of the most fertile farmland on the planet, and it is not feeding its own people.

What farmers are really growing are commodities and not true, edible food. A commodity describes mass-produced items that are identical, indistinguishable, and undifferentiated from each other. Yellow dent #2 corn from one farm is exactly like that from the farm down the road. Food, on the other hand, is that delicious, delectable bite that needs no processing or fancy recipes to fill our eyes, our plates, our stomachs, and our souls.

Indeed, the Midwest farmer's job is to “feed the world” (since we sit on top of a bread basket) so we currently aim for quantity over quality. But we are following a sadly well-worn path other civilizations have trod as they feed the population today but lose the capacity to feed the people of tomorrow because the soil becomes a commodity and is compromised or lost from the land. Our society is losing the nutritional value of its food while at the same time losing its soil resources and future productivity. The same thing has been repeated by civilizations for the last 7,000 years. Maybe this time it can be different since we are a global society and have everything to lose, not just one culture. Let's not give in to the fear of having to feed more than 8 billion human mouths and just go pedal to the metal across our fields.

The very definition of sustainability is “the ability to meet the needs of the current generation without compromising the needs of future generations”. We are not doing that since we are losing topsoil that grows our food at rates faster than it can form. Also, we are growing commodities that have much lower nutritional values than foods grown on richly mineralized soils from half a century ago. It is like we are trying to sustain ourselves on very flavorful cardboard 'food' devoid of true nutrients. This results in people who eat and eat and eat empty calories but who are never filled. We grow fat, not healthy. There is something almost biblical in that. It is almost like a curse when a society is not thankful for food, wastes much of it, over-processes it, overeats it, and then looks away as soil washes down the rivers and into wetlands and lakes. Wildlife habitat was destroyed as farmers ripped out fence rows and followed a 1970s edict from USDA Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz to get bigger or get out. Are the results of empty food and mistreatment of the land--obesity, diabetes, cancer, high blood pressure, drought, flood--modern-day plagues? Do we want to live in a dirty, muddy world with invasive species, confined animals, and people in ill health?

Here are a couple of quotes from Wisconsin’s leader in modern conservation, Professor Aldo Leopold:

“There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.”

“We abuse land because we see it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.”

Change is afoot, however, as people are reconnecting the dots between their health, the food they eat, and the environment in which we all live. The sustainable, local, organic (SLO) food movement is gaining traction as evidenced by the sustained double-digit increases in sales of organic foods each year as well as the growth of farmers markets and farm-to-school movements. The next big change is that the healthcare system may get involved and purchase fresh vegetables from local farmers as a method of treating illness. (Let thy food be thy medicine.) Also, more people, including many of you who are reading this essay, are trying to get back on the land and help make a change for the better in food and farming. Good farmers, as land stewards, are being treated with respect and paid justly for good food.

There are those who understand that soil is a limited natural resource. Unlimited growth in the economy is not truly possible because of the physical and biological limits of soil. Oh, we can add synthetic fertilizers and optimize their application with computer aids. We can genetically engineer crop plants to withstand herbicides and pesticides. We can concentrate cows to the tune of a thousand per acre, store their poop in a pit and pump it into the land twice a year. But if we do not keep soil on the land, in a well-aggregated, physically sound form, then nature will catch up with us and make us pay.

When we cleared the virgin forests in the 1870s in the Midwest and plowed with horse-drawn implements in the early 1900s we changed the landscape almost irrevocably. We paused when the Dust Bowl days blew in the 1930s and when World Wars diverted steel and engines to other uses. But now, after just 75 years of fossil fuel-powered plowing and cultivation, we have degraded the soils of the American Midwest and washed them into the Bay of Green Bay and the southern gulf resulting in sedimentation of wetlands and hypoxia in productive fisheries close to the point of collapse. We have an “acceptable” erosion rate of 5 tons of soil per acre per year. We drive truly monstrous-sized tractors to pull gigantic implements on consolidated fields from which fence lines have been cleared, sub-soil water has been drained away, and liquid manure has been knifed into the ground to grow annual crops year after year--but this is not sustainable.

The soil literally cannot hold up under the increasingly heavy load of bigger and bigger machinery. The fragile nature of soil aggregation is squashed. The soil cannot hold up under the expectation of higher and higher yields. This is especially true as farmers try desperately to spread costs over more and more acres; so the farmer starts tilling and planting too soon in the spring, ends too late in the fall, and drives too often on cold, soggy soil. The good biology and microscopic life in the soil are blasted by both compaction and a kind of holocaust of salt-based fertilizers and liquid manures and loss of pore space. Soil collapses. It literally puddles up and dies. But that’s OK, right? Surely we can always add more synthetics, and genetically engineered band-aids or power bigger tractors to fix it. No, sorry folks, technology will not save us from our folly. The soil cannot be cornered or trapped in a technology box, it must breathe and be treated as a living organism with an ecosystem we still do not fully understand.

Our society is losing the nutritional value of its food while at the same time losing its soil resources and future productivity. Well, the same thing has been repeated by civilizations for the last 7,000 years. Maybe this time it can be different since we are a global society and have everything to lose, not just one culture.

For the last 30 or so years, the price of land has always gone up. Many farmers bank on that as their retirement nest egg. If they bought land at $1,000 per acre in 1990 it is now worth $10,000 per acre. Our 260-acre grass-covered farm is now worth $2.6 million dollars. But what will become of this oasis of green, with soils built up to be sustained for at least another generation if not another 100 years since our family first took title to this acreage, if we sell? Should we sell it to a corn and soy cash crop farmer and watch the soil, organic matter, and nutrients drain from the land as if someone pulled a plug? Do we watch the Bay and local waters become so covered in sediment and algae that our grandchildren cannot fish or swim there? We are searching for a way to pass this land on to the next farmers who will care for the land the same way we have, or even better.

“Ethical behavior is doing the right thing when no one else is watching- even when doing the wrong thing is legal.”

– Aldo Leopold

The ethical thing to do is to care for the land and the soil. To care for it as if your children’s children are the ones who will farm it after you are gone. It’s ethical to bank wealth in the soil as you add stable, organic matter through grazing, green manures, and cover crops. It is ethical to include hay in between annual crop rotations to build soil. It is ethical to graze cattle carefully so that their feet touch the earth and the sun is on their backs. It is ethical to treat people right by growing nutrient-dense food for them. It is ethical to leave a corner of the farm as a wetland for frogs and migrating waterfowl. It is ethical to enjoy the sunset and see the fruits of your labor in the earth--to marvel at the magic of the land around you without eyes set only on what it’s worth. It is ethical to appreciate all that the land will gift you and then to deliver that gift, whole and healthy, into the future.

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): A sustainable farm at sunset. Photo by: Valerie Dantoin 2022. Full Circle Farm