sustainable ag

Postmechanistic Agricultural Ethics

The Mississippi . . . is a river of mulatto-hued water; more than four hundred million tons of mud, carried by that water, insult the Gulf of Mexico each year. (Jorge Luis Borges)

Why are we sending the best crop land in the world to the Gulf of Mexico?

"In coping with problems such as these, the only sensible approach is to discontinue the unnatural practices which have brought about the situation in the first place. The farmer has a responsibility to repair the damage he has caused. Cultivation of the soil should be discontinued. If gentle measures such as spreading straw and sowing clover are practiced, instead of using man-made chemicals and machinery to wage a war of annihilation, then the environment will move back toward its natural balance and even troublesome weeds can be brought under control."
~
Masanobo Fukuoka, The One-Straw Revolution

Is THIS a sustainable system?

Nice shots in Boone County, IA during the winter
Right: the only pasture along E26 for about 15 miles.
Left: the rest of those 15 miles.

"I devote myself to a kind of crop rotation. I have a piece of land, and sometimes I cultivate rye and sometimes clover."
-Ingmar Bergman, Swedish film director, on his years in Malmö, when he produced 17 plays and 8 films, including Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal.
~
Why does Bergman,a filmmaker, know something fundamental about agronomy that so many professional agronomists choose to ignore?

OK, here's a photo of a section of Humboldt County, IA (northcentral) taken in 1953 (left) and revised in 1999 (right). Note the crop diversity in 1953; today, the area is almost entirely corn (C) or soybean (B).

A red X is placed on farms that no longer exist.

(Thanks to Lee Burras for the photo and info for 1999.)

Continually increasing sales of herbicides, insecticides, nematicides, synthetic nitrogen, and antibiotics for livestock; accelerating spending on biotechnology to get us out of this mess; chronically low commodity prices; and expensive efforts to find something else to do with our crops so they will be profitable, all suggest that the system we have developed DOES NOT WORK!

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