Green Fields Forever: The Conservation Tillage Revolution In America

ABOUT ISLAND PRESS

Island Press publishes, markets, and distributes the most advanced thinking on the conservation of our natural resources—books about soil, land, water, forests, wildlife, and hazardous and toxic wastes. These books are practical tools used by public officials, business and industry leaders, natural resource managers, and concerned citizens working to solve both local and global resource problems.

Founded in 1978, Island Press reorganized in 1984 to meet the increasing demand for substantive books on all resource-related issues. Island Press publishes and distributes under its own imprint and offers these services to other nonprofit research organizations. To date, Island Press has worked with a large cross section of the environmental community including: The Nature Conservancy, National Audubon Society, Sierra Club, Conservation Foundation/World Wildlife Fund, Environmental Policy Institute, Natural Resources Defense Council, Wilderness Society, National Parks and Conservation Association, and National Wildlife Federation.

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© 1987 Charles E. Little All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher: Island Press, Suite 300, 1718 Connecticut Ave., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20009.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Little, Charles E.

Green fields forever.

Bibliography: p. 147

Includes index.

1. Conservation tillage—United States. I. Title.

S604.L57 1986 631.4’5 87-4157

9781610912747

Brief parts of this book have appeared in different form in Country Journal and in American Land Forum.

Photo credits appear following the index.

MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

This book is dedicated to the memory of

EDWARD H. FAULKNER 1886–1964

His agricultural heresy was common sense. His legacy is the everlasting soil.

I can lime it, cross-plough it, manure it, and treat it with every art known to science, but the land has just plain run out—and now I am putting it into trees in the hope that my great-grandchildren will be able to try raising corn again—just one century from now.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt speaking of his Hyde Park, New York, farm in the mid-1930s

Do you realize that now, for the first time in ten thousand years, people can grow crops without destroying the land?

Greg Schmick, agronomist and executive of a Spokane, Washington, farm-machinery manufacturer, speaking of no-till agriculture in the mid-1980s

Table of Contents

Title Page

ABOUT ISLAND PRESS

Copyright Page

Dedication

Praise

Foreword

Acknowledgments

1 - The Tillage Revolution

2 - A Different Kind of Farmer

3 - The Saga of the Moldboard Plow

4 - Old Yellow

5 - A Handful of Earth

6 - The Enemy Beneath

7 - Beyond the Mongongo Tree

8 - Old Farms, New Lives

Postscript: A Personal Note

List of Principal Sources

APPENDIX I - Conservation Tillage Information Center Survey of Tillage Practices, 1985

APPENDIX II - National and State Sources of Information on Conservation Tillage

Index

Also Available from Island Press

Photo Credits

Foreword

No other human occupation opens so wide a field for the profitable and agreeable combination of labor with cultivated thought as agriculture. I know nothing so pleasant to the mind as the discovery of anything that is at once new and valuable—nothing that so lightens and sweetens toil as the hopeful pursuit of such discovery. And how vast and how varied a field is agriculture for such discovery.

—ABRAHAM LINCOLN

(Address before Wisconsin

Agricultural Society,

Milwaukee, 1859)

In the United States, agriculture has progressed from an economy of scarcity to one of abundance in the space of a century. In 1862, during Lincoln’s presidency, Congress passed three pieces of legislation—the act that created the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Homestead Act, and the Morrill Land Grant College Act—that helped the American farmer make invaluable contributions to our agricultural productivity. If judged only by standards of productivity, American agriculture in the twentieth century has been an unparalleled success.

At the same time, agriculture in the United States has been marked by persistent problems, including severe financial stress for many farmers and serious soil erosion. A wide range of environmental problems that signal the degradation of natural resources plague today’s highly specialized, capital-intensive agriculture. Production technologies too often have been developed and adopted without sufficient knowledge about their cumulative effects on natural resources and the environment. Policies designed to conserve soil and protect the environment frequently have been afterthoughts to the rapidly evolving crop production methods designed to maximize short-term profits.

National Resource Inventories conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1977 and 1982 documented that nearly 1 acre out of every 4 of our 421 million acres of cropland experienced serious soil erosion. The Food Security Act of 1985 recognized the need for new provisions to better link commodity and conservation policy. The Conservation Reserve Program is aimed at converting the most marginal cropland to grass or trees by 1991. By denying federal subsidies, the Sodbuster and Conservation Compliance provisions should slow down the use of fragile soils for crops. However, since most of the land currently under cultivation in the United States will continue to be needed for the production of food and fiber, erosion will continue to be a major concern.

Conservation tillage is emerging as the common denominator in efforts by people from various disciplines to find a solution to this chronic problem of soil erosion. The enthusiasm of the participants in the first National Conservation Tillage Conference, held in Nashville in October of 1984, indicated the depth and scope of interest in this technique. Few topics continue to spark as much discussion in both agricultural and conservation circles as conservation tillage.

Growing new crops in old crop residue is viewed by conservationists and farmers alike as the most cost-effective means available to achieve soil and water conservation. Many advocates also note that labor and fuel savings are major reasons for the widespread and growing use of conservation-tillage techniques. However, environmentalists are increasingly concerned about the continued reliance on herbicides that characterizes most of the reduced-tillage management systems now being practiced.

Green Fields Forever: The Conservation Tillage Revolution in America is a timely contribution to this discussion. Charles E. Little, a noted author who has written widely on issues of wise land use and agriculture, takes a broad look at both the practice and the promise of conservation tillage. This is an affirmative and provocative book that tells the story of an evolving technology that holds great potential for ameliorating a number of agriculture’s problems.

Conservation tillage brings a more complex soil-plant ecosystem back to farming. This complexity, in turn, may provide more balance to nutrient cycling and natural pest management, leading eventually to the discovery of farming methods even less dependent on chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Present knowledge will need to be reinforced with more research to realize fully this promise, which has as its goal a return to health for America’s seriously degraded cropland.

In every region of this country’s vast and varied landscape, land users are seeking answers to their conservation problems. Innovations developed by the individual farmer, working within his or her local social system, often are more readily accepted than are solutions imposed from the outside. Green Fields Forever captures this grassroots approach as an effective channel for technology development and adoption. Through interviews, research, and on-site visits to several farmers in widely differing environments, Chuck Little shows that conservation tillage is an evolving technology that is being shaped by the inventiveness of individual farmers.

The farmer who uses conservation tillage must abandon the traditional system of cropping and learn a set of management skills that require new methods and faith. Conservation tillage is not a panacea, but it is proving to be one of the best ways now known to meet our national priorities of soil and water conservation. Where conservation tillage alone will not control erosion, we can combine it with other practices to substantially reduce topsoil destruction.

Unlike other information available on conservation tillage, which usually focuses rather narrowly on the technical details, Green Fields Forever places the technology in a broad context. Beginning with the character of the soil (conservation tillage must work with the soil, letting the soil handle the task of growing plants as it was meant to do) and ending with a discussion of the impact of conservation tillage on the future of American agriculture, Chuck Little has made the story both entertaining and significant.

What is new in this book for you? For those of you who are now concerned with conservation tillage, as environmentalists, conservationists, policymakers, or plain citizens, Green Fields Forever offers reinforcement, encouragement, and new information. For those of you who are involved with or interested in America’s largest industry—agriculture—this book should enlist your support. A renewed emphasis on conservation tillage is most appropriate at a time when the federal deficit threatens the future of many domestic programs, including conservation research, extension programs, and financial and technical assistance for land users.

When I returned to Idaho after Marine Corps duty in World War II, the Soil Conservation Service and the Soil and Water Conservation Districts utilized every means possible to increase the use of crop residues. Our first task was to stop the use of the match. At that time, the autumn skies darkened with smoke from the burning of wheat stubble as farmers prepared to plow and plant the new crop. Eventually, stubble-mulch farming and crop residue management became part of the technician’s conservation tool kit, but the odds of widespread acceptance were stacked against us then.

We have come far in four decades with research, innovation, and farmer participation in soil and water conservation. Now I find it difficult to be anything but a very realistic optimist for the future. Although we need to continue to guard against solutions that create more problems, Charles Little has reinforced my belief that most problems do have solutions.

Green Fields Forever expands our thinking and enhances our understanding. In these pages, you will appreciate anew the dedication of those who till, or no-till, the soil as a way of life for themselves and as the substance of life for you and me.

NORMAN A. BERG

Chief, Soil Conservation Service,

1979–1982

Acknowledgments

This book is a work of synthesis and therefore depended on many, many people for its completion. For helping to organize my research afield—as well as for tutoring me in the fundamentals of agronomy—I owe much to William Moldenhauer at Purdue University, Robert Papendick at Washington State University, and Charles Elkins at Auburn University, all of the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service. For generous hours taking me about their own operations and offering endless cups of coffee, pastries, lunches, and dinners, I wish to thank the farmers who are the centerpiece of the book: Todd Greenstone of Brookeville, Maryland; Carl and Rosemary Eppley of Wabash, Indiana; Morton Swanson of Colfax, Washington; and Jerrell Harden of Banks, Alabama. And, while I am at it, I should also like to thank People Express Airlines, without whose cut-rate fares this writer could never have undertaken as much research as he did.

Kenneth A. Cook, an agricultural policy analyst; Roy M. Gray, an agricultural economist; and William Moldenhauer, an agricultural soils scientist, read the manuscript for factual error, misapprehension, and plain wrong-headedness. To the extent that these problems persist, it is my fault, not theirs. I am grateful for the time and care they took with the work. I am also grateful to Sara Ebenreck, formerly editor for the Conservation Tillage Information Center and now editor of American Land Forum, for guidance throughout; to Marcella Kogan, for collecting many hundreds of photographs from which to choose the illustrations for the book; to Marvin Craig and Trap Henderson, for their keen literary insights; to Ila Dawson Little, professor of English, whose editorial counsel was essential; and to Roberta Pryor, my redoubtable literary agent. Finally, I should like to thank Barbara Dean, editor at Island Press, who kept the project on track and, most notably, was ever ready to defend the right of the author to express views not always consonant with her own.

CHARLES E. LITTLE

Kensington, Maryland

1

The Tillage Revolution

Since the achievement of our independence, he is the greatest patriot who stops the most gullies.

—PATRICK HENRY

Nature can take centuries to build an inch of topsoil. And it can be washed away in a season. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s farm, two hundred acres, had grown championship corn in the mid-nineteenth century. By the time Roosevelt took it over in 1910, most of the topsoil was gone, and yields were down by 50 percent. He never could bring it back.

Nowadays, the failure of the soil can be made up for by chemical fertilizers, irrigation, better hybrids, and pesticides—to a point. But eventually, run-out land makes run-out farms and a run-out agricultural landscape: the lifeless stretches of near-desert in the High Plains and parts of the Far West; the gullied, red-raw lands of the South and parts of the Midwest; the abandoned fields choked with bindweed and puckerbrush in the East, much of it dotted with young red cedar, sure signs that a farmer has left the land.

If Greg Schmick is right—and his view, quoted as an epigraph alongside that of FDR in the front matter of this book, may not be as overblown as it sounds—the fate of farmland need not be the eventual exhaustion of its soils, the buildup of hardpan, or the lowering of water tables. Schmick is young, scarcely past thirty, but he knows about our agricultural history—one of forced migrations of often desperate farmers who could no longer scratch a living from eroded hillsides, undrainable fields, or dried-out land where rain was supposed to follow the plow but didn’t. He also knows that Americans did not invent agricultural land failure. The two hundred million acres of land we have so severely abused in America is but a small fraction of what has been ruined over the millennia, and is still being ruined, worldwide. Still, we have less excuse than anyone in the world thoughtlessly to deplete what is conceded to be the best patch of farmland on the face of the globe.

Gullies like these in Coffee County, Alabama, as well as less visually dramatic but equally serious soils problems throughout the United States, have plagued American agriculture for centuries. Now, with conservation tillage, there’s a means at hand to eliminate virtually all erosion from wind and water and to prevent soil compaction and the farmed-out land these problems create.

Now, perhaps in the nick of time, our agriculture is changing, courtesy of a revolution in the technique of tillage. Curiously, it is a revolution that is going on largely outside of public view. There are no newspaper headlines or television documentaries about it. But it’s a revolution nevertheless. It is called conservation tillage because it conserves the soil, and the water, and the tilth of the land. When properly practiced, it means that the land need not run out as it did for Franklin Roosevelt and millions of others and that there can be green fields forever, not just for a few generations.

Economic stability and permanence, as exemplified by this peaceful winter scene of a Connecticut farm, have been elusive goals in American agriculture. Conservation tillage has important implications in this regard. To see it merely in technical terms is to miss the broader significance of this advance in the practice of agriculture. Conservation tillage can help stabilize both the ecology and the economy of rural America, and for that reason it should be understood by all Americans, not just farmers and agricultural specialists.

This book aims to tell the story of conservation tillage and how this technical revolution is likely to affect not only farms, and farmers, and farmlands, but all Americans. The plan of the book is relatively straightforward. The next chapter, Chapter 2, introduces, via a young Maryland farmer named Todd Greenstone, one particular technique of conservation tillage popular in the Middle Atlantic states. The chapter goes on to provide a general summary of various other forms of conservation tillage (they are quite different from one another) along with an introductory discussion of benefits, drawbacks, and origins. Chapter 3 provides a historical perspective through a discussion of the tillage technique now being replaced: the use of the moldboard plow. Chapters 4,5, and 6 show the different techniques in situ in three major commodity-producing regions of the country: the western drylands, the Corn Belt, and the southeastern coastal plain. Chapter 7 takes up the ecology of conservation tillage and the environmental controversy surrounding it: it is a serious one, but it is not insoluble. And Chapter 8 provides some concluding speculation about the effect of conservation tillage on the overall structure and economy of agriculture in the United States.

This is an affirmative book. The tillage revolution bids fair to eliminate gullies and a whole lot more that is troubling our agriculture. And these days, there are troubles aplenty. There are economic troubles, environmental troubles, and most troubling of all, the real possibility of a cultural failure in an enterprise—indepen- dent farming—that is the historic and symbolic cornerstone of the American way of life.

These are not small matters. And because conservation tillage can affect them in profound ways, this new kind of farming is herein interpreted in a broad context rather than a narrow, mechanistic one—which is the way it has been treated so far in the farm press as well as the few nonspecialist publications that have chosen to discuss it. It’s