Food Fight

by Mckay Jenkins

  Especially for a farmer who has experience working organically, Schmidt has very little patience for the way some companies market the “organic movement.” She now considers the label “organic” to be little more than a cynical marketing ploy that ends up making food more expensive than it needs to be and—worse—pits one kind of farmer against another.

  Take Chipotle. In 2015, the fast-food burrito franchise received both praise and rebukes for announcing that it would provide GMO-free ingredients in its many restaurants. This was initially hailed as a victory by anti-GMO forces, until they learned that Chipotle would continue to sell both soda (made with GM corn syrup) and meat (raised on GM corn and soybeans). Pro-GM farmers and scientists were equally appalled, but for far different reasons.

  Chipotle’s campaign creates “a disservice to American farmers,” the Danforth Center’s Jim Carrington told me. “It creates the impression that there’s evil farming and happy idyllic farming, and they source their meat from happy farms. That’s simply marketing. Science has shown that the feelings they are marketing are not grounded in reality.

  “In general, people who have not come from a farm have notions of farming and agriculture that are romantic,” Carrington said. “The wholesome farm with happy cows and all that. But the organic industry is a very advanced and well-organized industry that has grown in part by having a villain, and the villain is conventional agriculture. Organic claims to be much better than conventional and commands a price premium. It’s a very lucrative premium and is in part defended by marketing campaigns, blogging campaigns, websites, and many other ways with the intent of seeing the organic industry increase in size. There is money to be made.”

  Indeed, like virtually every farmer I spoke with—organic, conventional, or GMO—Jennie Schmidt practically spat when I asked her about the marketing campaigns that tout a food company’s “values.” She laughed bitterly when I asked her about the posters in Whole Foods that inevitably portray farmers as beautifully tanned models with a bunch of carrots in one hand and a smiling baby in the other.

  “When Whole Foods or Chipotle runs these ad campaigns saying they only use food from ‘farmers with values,’ it’s just like, ‘Really? You have to throw everybody under the bus to further your own marketing campaign?’” Schmidt told me. “Painting everyone as bad except for the people they do business with? That’s really frustrating. That’s led a number of us to become more vocal and more transparent. We have to say, ‘That’s not true for me.’”

  “If All Farmers Used GMOs Like I Do, We Wouldn’t Have These Problems”

  Like Jennie Schmidt, Steve Groff is a third-generation farmer; he works his acres ninety miles to the west, in Pennsylvania’s Amish country. Groff’s grandfather started growing tomatoes in the 1950s; his father grew pumpkins in the 1970s. Like Jennie Schmidt, Groff has won awards for his environmental stewardship.

  And like Jennie Schmidt, Groff grows everything from non-GM sweet corn and tomatoes to (in his case) 165 acres of GM corn and soybeans.

  Groff plants Liberty Link soybeans and uses a sprayer mounted on a tractor to spray glyphosate to kill dandelions, Canadian thistle, hemp dogbane (a heavily rooted perennial weed), and annual rye grass. Glyphosate “does a really good job,” Groff says.

  Groff doesn’t grow herbicide-resistant corn, but he has planted Bt corn, which stands up better because the corn borers can’t get it. That’s where you get the argument that GMOs help farmers use less pesticides, he said.

  “The success of Bt corn—they’ve really knocked down the corn borers nationwide,” Groff told me. “You’d really have to have your head in the sand to dispute that. So with GMOs, I can argue why you should use them, and why you shouldn’t. I tend to think objectively and scientifically. I think we need to keep monitoring this, but it’s my feeling that people are overreacting to every little sniffle.”

  Groff, like Jennie Schmidt, thinks GMOs and synthetic pesticides have their places, provided they are used intelligently and as part of a larger, sustainable approach to farming. Groff also practices integrated pest management, which means (among other things) that he uses one-quarter of the usual amount of fungicides—and almost no insecticides.

  Groff sprays some fields twice a year, and others once every two years. It depends on the rotation, he says, but probably rounds out to about once a year per field—about a third as much as most farmers, he said.

  “Let’s get real about this: if all farmers used glyphosate and GMOs like I do, we wouldn’t have these problems,” Groff told me. “They’ve been way, way overused. Sure, it’s made farming easier for farmers. It’s easy to kill stuff. When Roundup first came out, your crops were really clean—there were no weeds. Now you can see resistant mare’s tail on this farm. It may have blown in from other farms, but so far they have not been an issue for me. I’m not sitting here worried about how to control weeds.”

  Steve Groff’s genius lies far beyond his limited use of GMOs and pesticides. What he is really interested in is radishes—and not the kind people eat. Working with Raymond Weil, a soil and crop scientist at the University of Maryland, Groff has developed something called a tillage radish, which he considers a radically simple way to fix many of the problems created by industrial-scale agriculture.

  “Farmers have nitrogen leaks,” Groff told me. “If you had a leak in your barn, you’d fix it. I tell farmers they should fix the leak in their fields.”

  Planted as a cover crop, tillage radishes perform all kinds of jobs now done with chemicals: they control weeds, so farmers can reduce their need for herbicides. They loosen soil compaction and prevent runoff. Since the radishes pull nitrogen out of the soil and store it in their tubers, they greatly reduce the need for synthetic fertilizers: when the radishes die and break down (without the need for chemical burn down), the nitrogen goes back into the soil, where it can be taken up and used by cash crops.

  “I think generally speaking we’ve plateaued with where we can go with chemical management styles,” Groff told me. “We’ve seen that soils are not holding up during weather extremes. We have to build up soil resiliency. I’m not saying we have to eliminate fertilizers and pesticides, but we’ve forgotten and ignored our soil for fifty or sixty years. Some farmers are blind—they say, ‘That’s the way my granddad did it.’ Maybe it served them well, but we’re starting to see the limits of that way of thinking. That’s where the younger generation of farmers can really help.”

  For farmers, there are no margins, Groff said; you either make it big or you go under.

  “Once you understand cover crops and the value of taking care of your soil, it’s like opening a savings account,” he said. “By the very nature of keeping green things in the field, collecting sunlight, changing it into organic matter, it’s money in the bank.”

  When he started planting radishes—along with nitrogen fixers like hairy vetch and legumes—Groff’s soil contained just 2 percent organic matter. With cover crops now depositing up to 40 pounds of nitrogen a year into the soil, he’s gotten it up to a very healthy 5 percent—all without the use of petrochemicals.

  Farmers should be saving and creating nitrogen, not buying it, Groff said. “The nitrogen is here. I own it. I’m reaping the interest. And by the way, I’m not polluting the Chesapeake Bay. I don’t get paid to plant cover crops, but it’s an investment in your soil health. Add it up over ten years, and it will begin to pay off. In extreme weather—wet, dry, hot, or cold—having more organic matter in your soil will make your crops much more biologically resilient. I’ve seen thirty to forty bushels per acre increase with corn in dry season. You can have soils that are working like an IV without the chemistry.”

  Groff’s research into cover crops is on the leading edge of a national trend. In the Chesapeake Bay watershed, state officials have pledged to nearly double the amount of farmland planted in cover crops to 460,000 acres, or roughly half of all croplands in t
he state.

  Across the country, cover cropping has grown 30 percent over the last couple of years and is being used on everything from small organic farms to large industrial operations.

  “I don’t know of any other concept that’s sweeping agriculture like this,” Groff told me. “They’re all getting into it. Eighty percent of the Amish farms around here have radishes in them. I had a guy in Illinois say he wanted to buy radishes for 1,000 acres. I said, ‘Whoa—you ought to start small.’ But he said he had 40,000 acres, so I said okay.”

  Groff’s tillage radishes, which he now sells nationwide, have been so successful he now has twenty-two people working for him: selling seeds, doing marketing, conducting research, and influencing agriculture nationwide. Not bad for someone who never went to college.

  “There was never a day I didn’t think I was going to be a farmer,” Groff told me. “People ask me where I graduated from, I tell them I haven’t finished learning yet.”

  Like Steve Groff, Jennie Schmidt is willing to use any farming technique—GM or non-GM, pesticides or no pesticides—as long as it produces for the farm and doesn’t run down the larger environment.

  “We tried to tap into the organic market, but it wasn’t sustainable for us,” Schmidt told me. “People can’t believe it when I say that. I don’t mean organic is not sustainable. It’s just not sustainable for us. There’s no universal cookie-cutter method for all soil types, or all regions, or all farming sizes. Maybe if we had been less diversified, and had been just in grains, we could have focused on organic farming.

  “If we didn’t have so many irons in the fire, and weren’t trying to sustain a family farm, and had more time to focus on things like doing organic practices, maybe that would have worked for us. It’s a balancing act: this is what works for our farm and our level of risk that we were willing to take. Soil types dictate a lot of it. Smaller organic operations can overcome that, because they plant a smaller variety of many different things and have smaller acres to take care of. When you have 200 acres and a variety of different crops going, you need a very different approach.”

  Organic? Sustainable? Or Regenerative?

  These ideas sit very nicely with Brian Snyder, head of the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture and one of the country’s leading voices for farming done with the health of the planet in mind. Snyder wonders whether produce grown by farmers like Jennie Schmidt and Steve Groff might be given its own label: not “GMO” or “organic,” but “sustainable.” Marking food as “sustainable” would reward farmers for preserving topsoil, for example, or building soil quality through the use of nitrogen fixers, cover crops, or composting—even if they used GM seeds.

  “People accept that ‘organic’ is never going to include GMO, but the question is whether the term ‘sustainable’ can include GMO,” Snyder said. “The problem is, none of these things are simple. Compared to ‘organic,’ ‘sustainable’ offers a bigger tent that includes more than organic produce. No-till agriculture would qualify, and no-till farmers mostly use GMO seeds. We might have to consider a world with GMOs, to save soil and build soil quality. Instead of labeling foods with a skull and crossbones, they’d rather have a ‘sustainable’ label that is a positive thing, even though it may have GMOs in it. That idea is not completely without merit.”

  GMOs themselves will never cause a fraction of the problems caused by the industrial food system itself. “We are going to waste a lot of time and energy on whether GMOs are helpful or harmful to people, when that’s not the most important question,” Snyder said. “The most important question is what kind of system do they generate and support? The most effective criticisms of GMOs are about the peripheral realities of this system. It used to be that farmers always retained a percentage of their crop for seeds for the next year. They did this for thousands of years. Now, in the last couple of decades, almost none do that.”

  These ideas also sit nicely with Blake Meyers, the University of Delaware geneticist, who thinks GMOs may one day be a key component in sustainable agriculture. “I buy and eat organic food, and I don’t like chemical residue on my food,” Meyers told me. “So the question is, why should you not have organically grown GM crops? So far the USDA has said you can’t have GMOs and label them organic, but I would prefer to get rid of all the chemistry and confer the desirable traits with genetics. Petroleum won’t be with us forever. I’m perfectly okay with transgenics: imagine if we could create a wonder crop that requires genetic modification but is grown organically, free of chemical inputs, and resists drought, resists pests, and outcompetes weeds. I’d be okay with that.”

  Some of the critics of GMOs “are the same people who spray copper or sulfur on their plants and say it’s okay because it’s ‘organic,’” Meyers said. “They apply Bt to their crops, but God forbid you take the same genes they’re eating in the bacteria and insert them into the plant. Ultimately, our agriculture has got to be sustainable, or we’re not going to be here long term. GM will be a large part of that. Fifty years from now, we’ll see that spraying anything on plants created a huge amount of waste and pollution. We’ll see that 90 percent of the chemicals washed off, ending up in our soil and water. If you eliminate that waste, if you can use GMOs to replace these inputs, achieving similar yields, without all the chemical inputs, you’ve done a world of good.”

  There are legitimate worries, of course, that a comparatively loose term like “sustainable” could be distorted and abused—“greenwashed”—by industrial farms in ways that a strict, legally precise term like “organic” cannot. The word “sustainable” has been “overused, misused, and it has been shamelessly co-opted by corporations for the purpose of greenwashing,” write veteran food activists André Leu and Ronnie Cummins. Indeed, they note, the word is featured prominently on Monsanto’s website, where the company boasts of a “commitment to sustainable agriculture—pledging to produce more, conserve more, and improve farmers’ lives by 2030.”

  “Industrial agriculture today, with its factory farms, waste lagoons, antibiotics and growth hormones, GMOs, toxic pesticides and prolific use of synthetic fertilizers, doesn’t come close to ‘not using up or destroying natural resources,’” Leu and Cummins write. Instead of “sustainable,” they would like to see foods affixed with one of two labels: “degenerative” or “regenerative.” Consumers could then choose food produced by chemical-intensive, monoculture-based industrial systems that “destabilize the climate, and degrade soil, water, biodiversity, health and local economies,” Leu and Cummins write. Or they could choose food produced using organic regenerative practices that rejuvenate the soil, grasslands, and forests; replenish water; promote food sovereignty; and restore public health and prosperity—“all while cooling the planet by drawing down billions of tons of excess carbon from the atmosphere and storing it in the soil where it belongs.”

  Such rhetoric—powerful, convincing, and justifiable as it may be—is plainly directed at giant corporate farms, and the global food companies they serve. The question for midsize farmers like Jennie Schmidt and Steve Groff is: Can they operate inside this system in a way that is more benign? And can GMOs be a part of this? As with everything else in the American food system, there are no simple solutions: as enlightened as Jennie Schmidt and Steve Groff may be, they are still plugged into a larger food system that uses enormous amounts of chemicals on vast swaths of land to create huge quantities of unhealthy food. But it’s a start.

  To Jennie Schmidt, this global food system—with all its downsides—will continue to evolve because people will continue to enjoy foods they can’t grow themselves.

  “I’m not going to give up coffee or chocolate,” she told me. “I love the fact that we have so many food choices. Yes, there are downsides, but there are lots of upsides to it too. I like the fact that in February I can go to Millington, Maryland—two miles away is the closest grocery store—and get fresh produce. Think about what we�
�d have to do to grow that produce around here, in winter, in hoop houses, and at what cost? When you have to use so much propane to heat the hoop house, that can be more energy-intensive than getting it from Mexico.

  “My concern with people’s resistance to the technology of GMOs is that the next generation of products, and the next round of benefits for folks in developing countries—for traits they need to resist certain diseases or yield—don’t come about because they are not allowed to, because there has been so much pushback,” Schmidt said. “All of plant breeding, whether it’s traditional or GMO, has benefits, and my concern is that science will be stifled because there has been so much resistance to it. Think of what we could do if we could get rid of food allergies from soy or peanuts. If you could silence the protein that causes peanut allergies, that would be a big deal. I’m afraid we’re going to throw the baby out with the bathwater.”

  10.

  The Farm Next Door

  There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm,” Aldo Leopold wrote in his landmark book A Sand County Almanac, first published in 1949. “One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.”

  Almost seventy years later, these dangers—as Jennie Schmidt knows all too well—are clear and present. As suburban sprawl has continued to eat millions of acres of the nation’s prime farmland, fewer and fewer of us—especially those of us living in and around large cities—ever have a chance to connect with the way our food is grown.

  When it comes to our food, we are all blind, even if it is for different reasons. If we live in the city, we rarely have the chance to see where (or how) food is grown. Ditto for the suburbs: even if there were once crops occupying the fields where subdivisions now sit, they aren’t there anymore. Even in rural America, where there are plenty of farms, it’s hard to get your eyes on actual food: the corn and soybeans growing across America are sold to industrial food processors, feedlots, and energy companies, not on farm stands or in supermarkets.