Comments due by March 29, 2015
— Gabe Brown is in such demand as a speaker that for every invitation he accepts, he turns down 10 more. At conferences, like the one held here at a Best Western hotel recently, people line up to seek his advice. “The greatest roadblock to solving a problem is the human mind,” he tells audiences. Mr. Brown, a balding North Dakota farmer who favors baseball caps and redstriped polo shirts, is not talking about disruptive technology startups, political causes, or the latest selfhelp fad. He is talking about farming, specifically soilconservation farming, a movement that promotes leaving fields untilled, “green manures” and other soilenhancing methods with an almost evangelistic fervor. Such farming methods, which mimic the biology of virgin land, can revive degenerated earth, minimize erosion, encourage plant growth and increase farmers’ profits, their proponents say. And by using them, Mr. Brown told more than 250 farmers and ranchers who gathered at the hotel for the first Southern Soil Health Conference, he has produced crops that thrive on his 5,000acre farm outside of Bismarck, N.D., even during droughts or flooding. He no longer needs to use nitrogen fertilizer or fungicide, he said, and he produces yields that are above the county average with less labor and lower costs. “Nature can heal if we give her the chance,” Mr. Brown said. Neatly tilled fields have long been a hallmark of American agriculture and its farmers, by and large traditionalists who often distrust practices that diverge from timehonored methods. But soilconservation farming is gaining converts as growers increasingly face extreme weather, high production costs, a shortage of labor and the threat of government regulation of agricultural pollution. Farmers like Mr. Brown travel the country telling their stories, and organizations like NoTill on the Plains — a Kansasbased nonprofit devoted to educating growers about “agricultural production systems that model nature” — attract thousands. “It’s a massive paradigm shift,” said Ray Archuleta, an agronomist at the Natural Resources Conservation Service, part of the federal Agriculture Department, which endorses the soilconservation approach. Government surveys suggest that the use of notillage farming has grown sharply over the last decade, accounting for about 35 percent of cropland in the United States. For some crops, notillage acreage has nearly doubled in the last 15 years. For soybeans, for example, it rose to 30 million acres in 2012 from 16.5 million acres in 1996. The planting of cover crops — legumes and other species that are rotated with cash crops to blanket the soil yearround and act as green manure — has also risen in acreage about 30 percent a year, according to surveys, though the total remains small. Farmers till the land to ready it for sowing and to churn weeds and crop residue back into the earth. Tilling also helps mix in fertilizers and manure and loosens the top layer of the soil. But repeated plowing exacts a price. It degrades soil, killing off its biology, including beneficial fungi and earthworms, and leaving it, as Mr. Archuleta puts it, “naked, thirsty, hungry and running a fever.” Degraded soil requires heavy applications of synthetic fertilizer to produce high yields. And because its structure has broken down, the soil washes away easily in heavy rain, taking nitrogen and other pollutants with it into rivers and streams. Soil health proponents say that by leaving fields unplowed and using cover crops, which act as sinks for nitrogen and other nutrients, growers can increase the amount of organic matter in their soil, making it better able to absorb and retain water. “Each 1 percent increase in soil organic matter helps soil hold 20,000 gallons more water per acre,” said Claire O’Connor, a staff lawyer and agriculture specialist at the Natural Resources Defense Council. In turn, more absorbent soil is less vulnerable to runoff and more resistant to droughts and floods. Cover crops also help suppress weeds. Environmental groups like the Defense Council have long been fans of soilconservation techniques because they help protect waterways and increase the ability of soil to store carbon dioxide, rather than releasing it into the air, where it contributes to climate change. One recent study led by the Environmental Defense Fund suggested that the widespread use of cover crops and other soilhealth practices could reduce nitrogen pollution in the Upper Mississippi and Ohio River basins by 30 percent, helping to shrink the giant “dead zone” of oxygendepleted water in the Gulf of Mexico. The Defense Council, Ms. O’Connor said, has proposed that the government offer a “good driver” discount on federal crop insurance for growers who incorporate the practices. But the movement also has critics, who argue that notillage and other methods are impractical and too expensive for many growers. A farmer who wants to shift to notillage, for example, must purchase new equipment, like a notill seeder. Tony J. Vyn, a professor of agronomy at Purdue, said the reasons growers cite for preferring to fully till their fields vary depending on geography, the types of crops they grow and the conditions of their soil. But they include the perception that weed control is harder using notillage; that the method, which reduces water evaporation, places limits on how early in the year crops can be planted; and that the residue left by notilling is too difficult to deal with, especially when corn is the primary cash crop. Even farmers who enthusiastically adopt notill and other soilconservation methods rarely do so for environmental reasons; their motivation is more pragmatic. “My goal is to improve my soil so I can grow a better crop so I can make more money,” said Terry McAlister, who farms 6,000 acres of droughtstricken cropland in North Texas. “If I can help the environment in the process, fine, but that’s not my goal.” For years, Mr. McAlister plowed his fields, working with his father, who began farming outside the town of Electra in the 1950s. But he began having doubts about the effects of constant tilling on the soil. “We were farming cotton like the West Texas guys were, just plow, plow, plow,” he said. “And if you got a rain, it just washed it and eroded it. “It made me sick,” he said. “You’re asking yourself, ‘Is there not a better way?’ But at the time, we didn’t know.” Mr. McAlister said that he switched to notillage in 2005, when an agricultural economist calculated that the method offered a $15peracre advantage over full tilling. Now he is a convert. Standing in a field of winter wheat, he pointed proudly at the thick blanket of stubble sprinkled with decaying radishes and turnips. “One of the toughest things about learning to do notill is having to unlearn all the things that you thought were true,” he said. Mr. McAlister grows cotton, wheat, hay, grain sorghum and some canola as cash crops, using a GPSguided notill seeder that drills through residue, allowing him to plant precisely and effectively. He credits notillage for one of his biggest wheat crops, in 2012, when extreme drought left farmers throughout the region struggling to salvage any harvest. His healthier soil, he believes, made better use of the tiny amount of rain that fell than did the fully tilled fields of other farmers. But few growers go as far as Mr. Brown in North Dakota, who produces grassfed beef and has given up most agricultural chemicals. Mr. McAlister, for example, still uses nitrogen fertilizer. He plants seeds that are genetically modified for drought or herbicide resistance. And he depends on herbicides like Roundup to kill off his cover crops before sowing the crops he grows for cash. The philanthropist Howard G. Buffett, a proponent of soilconservation practices, said that the drought and flooding that have plagued much of the country in recent years have drawn more farmers to notill. “When you get into a drought, that gets everybody’s attention,” said Mr. Buffett, the middle son of Warren E. Buffett, the billionaire investor. “Farmers don’t really change their behavior until they see that they have to, which is pretty much human nature.” The Environmental Protection Agency’s regulation of nutrient pollution in the Chesapeake Bay under the Clean Water Act in 2010, Mr. Buffett said, should also be “a wakeup call that the E.P.A. is coming soon” and if farmers do not address fertilizer runoff, the government will do it for them. Still, he said, reaping the benefits of notillage farming demands patience, given that it may take several years for deadened soil to recover. Some farmers try notilling for one season and then get discouraged. And there is no onesizefitsall solution: Farmers must adapt what they have learned to their own land and crops. Mr. McAlister and other notill farmers said that perhaps the biggest barrier to the spread of notill is the mindset that farmers must do things the same way as earlier generations did them. “We have a saying in our area: ‘You can’t notill because you haven’t buried your father yet,’” Mr. McAlister said. “You can’t take on an endeavor like this with someone leaning over your shoulder every day telling you you’re wrong and it’s not going to work,” he said.
NYT March10, 2015)
