We own a small bit of farmland, and my wife Mandy hopes to grow organic produce. We will allow some years of trial and error for our endeavor because organic farming is only now emerging as a practical method for farmers, and experience is scarce here in south Jersey. The move toward organic is slow in some ways because of the intransience of the dominant system — a familiar problem, but not unreasonable.
Our soybean field
Most farmers must pressure their land to produce as much as possible to meet all the financial strains of a farm. And, as in fisheries, most of the profits for this resource don’t go to the person doing the cultivation or harvest but to the industries that sell seeds, pesticides, herbicides, fertilizer, and store, process and sell the crop. Many farmers sit on a knife edge of firm financial commitments (mortgages, vehicle loans, crop costs) and the not-so-firm prospects of producing a crop in an unpredictable environment. To make matters worse this unpredictability is increasing with climate change. So far, this year is the hottest year on record, and most of the rain has been infrequent and comes in a deluge. Making your living off of a crop must be a nail-biter experience.
It helps to decrease some of the uncertainty with genetically-modified seed and petroleum-based chemicals to fertilize, kill weeds and pests. Their use has grown dramatically in the last decade. Do the American people know that most US-grown corn and soybeans come from genecially-modified seeds that include a bacteria gene that resists the herbicide called Roundup? The seed is produced by one company, Monsanto, who also markets Roundup. This provides some insurance against weeds overrunning a crop. This happened in our field.
While we figure out how to convert to organic, we allow a farmer to keep our land in production. This year he planted Roundup-Ready soybeans but in a way that should not have required the use of a herbicide (with tilth rather than no-till seeding). The lack of rain in spring and the recent deluges favored weed growth, and before long the crop was threatened. As a last resort he employed a huge machine to spray the crop with Roundup and the soy once again thrives.
You can’t use Roundup on an organic farm; in fact to be certified the land must be free of all chemicals for three years. This is a high hurdle because farmland abounds in animal, fungal and plant pests. As a wildlife biologist one must admire their tenacity. Coming from the soil or the air, they can rise up and take down a crop in short order if not for all the chemicals. The chemicals give our farmers some assurance that they will prevail and make a profit. However, it’s an arms race — there are already >10 weed species known to be Roundup resistant.
Transitioning to organic practices requires patience, flexibility and, to be truthful, a bit of courage. The solutions need to be practical, not unlike the solutions farmers have always been good at creating. Some solutions are downright ingenious. For example, Rodale farms, a pioneer of organic farming, is now marketing a new method of both weed suppression and creating green manure (the age old practice of growing a cover crop, and leaving it as food for the next crop). A tractor pushes a roller that knocks down the cover crop and crimps, rather than cuts, the stalks so that it won’t grow back. This way the cover crop stops gowing and the food-crop seed is drilled into the soil under the crushed cover crop. It then gows without competition from weeds and can draw on the resources left by the cover crop. We hope that these kinds of advances will help on the rocky road to organic produce.
