Does the National Geographic Want Low-Yield Farming or Wildlife?
July 7, 2004
The National Geographic has a love affair with low-yield farming. Granted, primitive farming tends to be much more picturesque than tractors or galvanized-metal grain bins. However, one of the Geographic’s recent articles even praises a U.S. Midwestern farmer who can’t yet grow successful crops.
Wes Jackson, founder of the Land Institute in Kansas is trying to cross-breed perennial deep-rooted wild grasses into productive grain varieties so they’ll better withstand the frequent dry years in the Great Plains. He’s also hoping to breed such staple annual grain crops as wheat, corn and sorghum into perennial plants. He wants an agriculture that needs only seeds and soil. He’s opposed to fertilizers, biotechnology and other avenues of “quick, cut-rate science.”
There’s only one problem: Jackson thinks it will take another 25 years of intricate cross-breeding to get something usefully productive. Even that’s a big maybe. And if he succeeds, it is very doubtful that the yields will be high.
Why does the National Geographic, which wants more room on the planet for wildlife, promote low-yield U.S. farming? If the Great Plains doesn’t produce its annual 5 billion bushels or so of grain, other farmers will have to produce that grain somewhere else. Perhaps they’ll clear more species-rich tropical forests, where crops will not only displace wild species but the tropical monsoons will produce horrendous soil erosion.
While Jackson is trying to turn plants into something they aren’t-without biotechnology-the world will increase its human population by another one billion people or so. The growing wealth of densely populated Asia will create more and more demand for chicken and pork. We’re already farming half the global land area not under deserts or glaciers.
It’s sad that the National Geographic can’t applaud the technological miracles that have made the Great Plains so much more drought-proof than they were in the 1930s. The year 2002 was the region’s driest year since the Dust Bowl, but there were no huge dust clouds, new gullies, or silt-choked streams.
Fertilizer, conservation tillage, and center-pivot irrigation are making the Great Plains fully sustainable. Computer-controlled center pivots achieve far greater water efficiency.
Fertilizer replaces the soil nutrients plants take out as they grow. Conservation tillage cuts soil erosion by 65-95 percent and doubles the moisture retained in the soil.
Conservation tillers keep lots of residue on their fields, and control the weeds with herbicides instead of bare-earth farming systems like plowing. Jackson doesn’t like herbicides, however, and apparently the Geographic doesn’t either.
The magazine seems to hope that the grain farmers and cattle ranchers in the Great Plains will simply give up, and let the land go back to the bison. The idea of a ‘Buffalo Commons’ was first raised by Frank Popper, an urban studies professor from New Jersey. But Popper made a common mistake: he evaluated the importance of the Great Plains by the number of people living there.
That’s no way to evaluate farmland. Dr. Michael Huston, the ecologist who wrote Biological Diversity, grew up in Iowa. He says the way to evaluate farmland is by the yields it can produce, gauged against the number of species that will be displaced by the farms.
The Great Plains has good soils, and it never had many wild species.
There were zillions of bison, antelope, prairie dogs, and grasshoppers; but that’s only four species. As the Geographic has told us, there are more species in five square miles of the Amazon rain forest than in the whole of the U.S. Nor are any of the Great Plains species threatened with extinction. We just have them in smaller numbers.
By Dr. Huston’s measure, the Great Plains are enormously important-for the millions of tons of food they can now sustainably produce without driving any wild species to extinction. We hope the National Geographic and Wes Jackson of the Land Institute can open themselves to that necessity.
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