Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

by Barbara Kingsolver

  As Elsie had said, the drought here was manifest. The animal pastures looked parched, though David’s corn still looked good—or fairly good, depending. The lane divided two fields of corn that betrayed different histories: the plot on our left had been conventionally farmed for thirty years before David took the helm; on our right lay soil that had never known anything but manure and rotation. The disparity between the two fields was almost comically dramatic, like a 1950s magazine ad, except that “new and improved” was not the winner here. Now David treated both sides identically, but even after a decade, the corn on the forever-organic side stood taller and greener.

  The difference is an objective phenomenon of soil science; what we call “soil” is a community of living, mostly microscopic organisms in a nutrient matrix. Organic farming, by definition, enhances the soil’s living and nonliving components. Modern conventional farming is an efficient reduction of that process that adds back just a few crucial nutrients of the many that are removed each year when biomass is harvested. At first, it works well. Over time, it’s like trying to raise all children on bread, peanut butter, and the same bedtime story every night for ten years. (If they cry, give them more bread, more peanut butter, and the same story twice.) An observer from another planet might think all the bases were covered, but a parent would know skipping the subtleties adds up to slow starvation. In the same way, countless micronutrients are essential to plants. Chemicals that sterilize the soil destroy organisms that fight plant diseases, aerate, and manufacture fertility. Recent research has discovered that just adding phosphorus (the P in all “NPK” fertilizers) kills the tiny filaments of fungi that help plants absorb nutrients. The losses become most apparent in times of stress and drought.

  “So many people were taken in by the pesticide-herbicide propaganda,” David said. “Why would we fall for that?” He seemed to carry it like an old war wound, the enduring damage done to this field. By “we” he means farmers like himself, though he didn’t apply the chemicals. He came of age early in the era of ammonia-based fertilizers and DDT, but still never saw the intrinsic logic in poisoning things to make a farm.

  As we crested the hill he suddenly motioned for us to stop, get out, and look: we’d caught a horned lark in the middle of his courtship display. He shot straight up from the top of a little knoll in the corn and hovered high in the sky, singing an intense, quivery, question mark of a song, Will she, please, will she? He hung there above us against the white sky in a breathless suspense until—zoom—his flight dance climaxed suddenly in a nosedive. We stood in the bronze light, impressed into silence. We could hear other birds, which Elsie and David distinguished by their evening songs: vesper and grasshopper sparrows, indigo buntings, a wood thrush. Cliff swallows wheeled home toward their bottle-shaped mud nests under the eaves of the barn. Tree swallows, wrens, bluebirds, mockingbirds, great horned owls, and barn owls also nested nearby. All seemed as important to David and Elsie as the dairy cows that earn them their living.

  Elsie and David aren’t Audubon Club members with binoculars and a life list, nor are they hippie idealists trying to save the whales. They are practical farmers saving a livelihood that has been lost to many others who walked the same road. They spare the swallows and sparrows from death by pesticide for lots of reasons, not the least of which is that these creatures are their pesticides. Organic farming involves a level of biotic observation more commonly associated with scientists than with farmers. David’s communion with his cornfield is part meditation and part biology. The plants, insects, birds, mammals, and microbes interact in such complicated ways, he is still surprised by new discoveries even after a lifetime spent mostly outdoors watching. He has seen swallow populations fluctuate year by year, and knows what that will mean. He watches cliff swallows following the mower and binder in the fields, downwind, snapping up leafhoppers and grasshoppers, while the purple martins devour crane flies. The prospect of blanketing them all with toxic dust even once, let alone routinely, strikes him as self-destructive, like purposely setting fire to his crops or barn.

  Losing the Bug Arms Race

  * * *

  What could be simpler: spray chemicals to kill insects or weeds, increase yields, reap more produce and profits. Grow the bottom line by spraying the current crop. From a single-year perspective, it may work. But in the long term we have a problem. The pests are launching a counterattack of their own.

  Within one field, an application of pesticides will immediately reduce insect populations but not eliminate them. Depending on the spray density and angle, wind, proximity to the edge of the field, and so forth, bugs get different doses of the poison. Those receiving a lethal dose are instant casualties.

  Which bugs stay around? Obviously, those lucky enough to duck and cover. Also a few of those who did get a full, normally lethal dosage, but who have a natural resistance to the chemicals. If their resistance is genetic, that resistance will come back stronger in the next generation. Over time, with continued spraying, the portion of the population with genetic resistance will increase. Eventually the whole population will resist the chemicals.

  This is a real-world example of evolution, and whether or not it’s showing up in textbooks, it is going strong in our conventional agriculture. More than 500 species of insects and mites now resist our chemical controls, along with over 150 viruses and other plant pathogens. More than 270 of our recently developed herbicides have now become ineffective for controlling some weeds. Some 300 weed species resist all herbicides. Uh-oh, now what?

  The standard approach has been to pump up the dosage of chemicals. In 1965, U.S. farmers used 335 million pounds of pesticides. In 1989 they used 806 million pounds. Less than ten years after that, it was 985 million. That’s three and a half pounds of chemicals for every person in the country, at a cost of $8 billion. Twenty percent of these approved-for-use pesticides are listed by the EPA as carcinogenic in humans.

  So, how are the bugs holding out? Just fine. In 1948, when pesticides were first introduced, farmers used roughly 50 million pounds of them and suffered about a 7 percent loss of all their field crops. By comparison, in 2000 they used nearly a billion pounds of pesticides. Crop losses? Thirteen percent.

  Biologists point out that conventional agriculture is engaged in an evolutionary arms race, and losing it. How can we salvage this conflict? Organic agriculture, which allows insect predator populations to retain a healthy presence in our fields, breaks the cycle.

  * * *

  STEVEN L. HOPP

  David and Elsie were raised by farmers and are doing the same for another generation. Throughout the afternoon their children, in-laws, and grandchildren flowed in and out of the yard and house, the adults consulting about shared work, the barefoot kids sharing a long game of cousins and summer. Now we stopped in to meet the son and daughter-in-law whose house stood just beyond David’s cornfield. As we stayed into evening, conversation on the porch debated the most productive pasture-grass rotations for cattle; out in the yard it was mostly about whose turn it was for the tire swing.

  Many months later when I described this visit to a friend, he asked acerbically, “What, not even a mosquito to bother heaven?” (He also mentioned the name Andy Griffith.) Probably there were mosquitoes. I don’t remember. I do know this family has borne losses and grief, just like the rest of us. But if they are generally content, must such a life inevitably be dismissed as mythical, or else merely quaint? Urban people may be allowed success, satisfaction, and consequence, all at once. Members of David and Elsie’s extended family share work they love, and impressive productivity. They are by no means affluent, but seem comfortable with their material lot, and more importantly—for farmers—are not torn by debt or drained by long commutes to off-the-farm jobs. They work long hours, but value a life that allows them to sit down to a midday lunch with family, or stand outside the barn after the evening milking and watch swallows come in to roost.

  They belong to a surprisingly healthy community of s
imilar small farms. Undoubtedly, some people in the neighborhood have their ludicrous grudges, their problem children, their disputed fencelines; they are human. But they are prospering modestly by growing food. At a vegetable auction in town, farmers sell their produce wholesale to restaurants and regional grocery chains. Nothing travels very far. The farmers fare well on the prices, and buyers are pleased with the variety and quality, starting with bedding plants in May, proceeding through all the vegetables, ending with October pumpkins and apples. The nearby food co-op sells locally made cheeses, affordably priced. The hardware store sells pressure canners and well-made tools, not mechanical singing fish.

  It sounds like a community type that went extinct a generation ago. But it didn’t, not completely. If a self-sufficient farming community has survived here, it remains a possibility elsewhere. The success of this one seemed to hinge on many things, including steady work, material thrift, flexibility, modest expectations, and careful avoidance of debt—but not including miracles, as far as I could see. Unless, of course, we live in a country where those qualities have slipped from our paddock of everyday virtues, over to the side of “miracle.” I couldn’t say.

  It was dark by the time we headed back through the cornfield to Elsie and David’s house. At low speeds our car runs solely on battery, so it’s spookily quiet, as if the engine had died but you’re still rolling along. We could hear night birds and the tires softly grinding dust as we turned into the field.

  “Stop here,” David said suddenly. “Pull ahead just a little, so the headlights are pointing up into the field. Now turn off the headlights.”

  The field sparkled with what must have been millions of fireflies—the most I’ve ever seen in one place. They’d probably brought their families from adjacent states into this atrazine-free zone. They blinked densely, randomly, an eyeful of frenzied stars.

  “Just try something,” David said. “Flash the headlights one time, on and off.”

  What happened next was surreal. After our bright flash the field went black, and then, like a wave, a million lights flashed back at us in unison.

  Whoa. To convince ourselves this was not a social hallucination, we did it again. And again. Hooting every time, so pleased were we with our antics. It’s a grand state of affairs, to fool a million brainless creatures all at the same time. After five or six rounds the fireflies seemed to figure out that we were not their god, or they lost their faith, or at any rate went back to their own blinky business.

  David chuckled. “Country-kid fireworks.”

  We sat in the dark until after midnight, out in the yard under the cherries, talking about the Farm Bill, our kids, religion, the future, books, writing. In his spare time (a concept I can hardly imagine for this man) David is a writer and editor of Farming Magazine, a small periodical on sustainable agriculture. We could have talked longer, but thought better of it. People might sometimes wish to sleep in, but cows never do.

  In the morning I woke up in the upstairs bedroom aware of a breeze coming through the tall windows, sunlight washing white walls, a horse clop-clopping by on the road outside. I had the sensation of waking in another country, far from loud things.

  Lily went out to the chicken coop to gather eggs, making herself right at home. We ate some for breakfast, along with the farm’s astonishingly good oatmeal sweetened with strawberries and cream. This would be a twenty-dollar all-natural breakfast on the room service menu of some hotels. I pointed this out to David and Elsie—that many people think of such food as an upper-class privilege. David laughed. “We eat fancy food all right. Organic oatmeal, out of the same bin we feed our horses from!”

  We packed up to leave, reminding one another of articles we meant to exchange. We vowed to come again, and hoped they’d come our way too, though that is less likely, because they don’t travel as much as we do. Nearly all their trips are limited by the stamina of the standardbred horses that draw their buggy. David and Elsie are Amish.

  Before I had Amish friends, I imagined unbending constraints or categorical aversions to such things as cars (hybrid or otherwise). Like many people, I needed firsthand acquaintance to educate me out of religious bigotry. The Amish don’t oppose technology on principle, only particular technologies they feel would change their lives for the worse. I have sympathy for this position; a good many of us, in fact, might wish we’d come around to it before so much noise got into our homes. As it was explained to me, the relationship of the Amish with their technology is to strive for what is “appropriate,” making that designation case by case. When milking machines came up for discussion in David and Elsie’s community, the dairy farmers pointed out that milking by hand involves repeatedly lifting eighty-pound milk cans, limiting the participation of smaller-framed women and children. Milking machines were voted in because they allow families to do this work together. For related reasons, most farmers in the community use tractors for occasional needs like pulling a large wagon or thresher (one tractor can thus handle the work on many farms). But for daily plowing and cultivating, most prefer the quiet and pace of a team of Percherons or Belgians.

  David summarizes his position on technology in one word: boundaries. “The workhorse places a limit on the size of our farms, and the standardbred horse-drawn buggy limits the distances we travel. This is basically what we need. This is what keeps our communities healthy.” It makes perfect sense, of course, that limiting territory size can yield dividends in appreciation for what one already has, and the ability to manage it without debt. The surprise is to find whole communities gracefully accepting such boundaries, inside a nation that seems allergic to limitations, priding itself instead on the freedom to go as far as we want, as fast as we can, and buy until we run out of money—or longer, if we have credit cards.

  Farmers like Elsie and David are a link between the past and future. They’ve declined to participate in the modern century’s paradigm of agriculture—and of family life, for that matter, as they place high value on nonmaterial things like intergenerational family bonds, natural aesthetics, and the pleasures of shared work. By restraining their consumption and retaining skills from earlier generations of farmers, they are succeeding. When the present paradigm of extractive farming has run its course, I don’t foresee crowds of people signing up for the plain wardrobe. But I do foresee them needing guidance on sustainable agriculture.

  I realized this several years ago when David and Elsie came to our county to give an organic dairy workshop, at the request of dairy farmers here who were looking for new answers. It was a discouraged lot who attended the meeting, most of them nearly bankrupt, who’d spent their careers following modern dairy methods to the letter: growth hormones, antibiotics, mechanization. David is a deeply modest man, but the irony of the situation could not have been lost on him. There sat a group of hardworking farmers who’d watched their animals, land, and accounts slide into ruin during the half-century since the USDA declared as its official policy, “Get big or get out.”

  And there sat their teacher, a farmer who’d stayed small. Small enough, anyway, he would never have to move through his cornfield too quickly to study the soil, or hear the birds answer daylight with their song.

  * * *

  Organically Yours

  BY CAMILLE

  The word organic brings to my mind all the health food stores I’ve roamed through over the years, which seem to have the same aroma no matter how many miles lie between them: sweet, earthy hints of protein powder, bulk cereal, fresh fruit, and hemp. I guess the word means different things to different people. When applied to food (not a college sophomore’s most dreaded chemistry class), “organic” originally described a specific style of agriculture, but now it has come to imply a lifestyle, complete with magazines and brands of clothing. The word has sneaked onto a pretty loose-knit array of food labels too, tiptoeing from “100% organic” over to “contains organic ingredients.” Like overused slang, the term has been muddled by rising popularity. It’s true, for examp
le, that cookies “made with organic cocoa” have no residue of chemical pesticides or additives in the chocolate powder, but that doesn’t vouch for the flour, milk, eggs, and spices that are also in each cookie.

  Why should we care which ingredients, or how many, are organic? The reasons go beyond carcinogenic residues. Organic produce actually delivers more nutritional bang for the buck. These fruits and vegetables are tougher creatures than those labeled “conventional,” precisely because they’ve had to fight off predators themselves. Plants live hard lives. They don’t have to run around looking for food or building nests to raise their young, but they still have their worries. There’s no hiding from predators when you have roots in the ground, and leaves that require direct contact with sunlight. You’re stuck, right out in the open. Imagine the Lifetime Original movie: the helpless mother soy plant watching in agony, unable to speak or move, as a loathsome groundhog gobbles down her baby beans one at a time. Starting to tear up yet?

  Next plant-kingdom heartache: there is no personal space for the garden vegetable. If you’re planted in a row of other tomatoes, there you’ll stay for life, watching the neighbors get a nasty case of hornworms, knowing in your heart you’re going to get them too. If nobody is spritzing chemicals on the predators, all a plant can do is to toughen up by manufacturing its own disease/pest-fighting compounds. That’s why organic produce shows significantly higher levels of antioxidants than conventional—these nutritious compounds evolved in the plant not for our health, but for the plant’s. Several studies, including research done by Allison Byrum of the American Chemical Society, have shown fruits and vegetables grown without pesticides and herbicides to contain 50 to 60 percent more antioxidants than their sprayed counterparts. The same antioxidants that fight diseases and pests in the plant leaf work similar magic in the human body, protecting us not so much against hornworms as against various diseases, cell aging, and tumor growth. Spending extra money on organic produce buys these extra nutrients, with added environmental benefits for the well-being of future generations (like mine!).