Biomimicry

by Janine M Benyus

  Livestock would also require less babying. Beef cattle are now being bred with buffalo, for instance, to produce animals with tougher hides, like barns on their backs. These beefalo could be left outside in winter, obviating the need for lumber to build protective structures. Throughout the year, they could be moved from one polyculture to another in a rhythm that does not jeopardize flowering and seed set. Their wastes would contribute to the crumb structure of the soil, which, along with root action, allows the sod to wick moisture in and allocate it slowly. More water-holding capacity would mean less call for irrigation. It might even encourage springs to reopen as underground reserves are recharged.

  Until we are farming in the sunshine future, Jackson has written, groups like The Land Institute are, in the Buddhist sense, “making a path and walking on it.” Research, economics, and community will all play a role in how successful their journey is. The following is an attempt at an itinerary.

  Consulting the Genius of the Place: Research

  Wes Jackson compares the typical agricultural researcher to the proverbial drunkard who is looking for his lost keys under the streetlight. When asked why he is looking here when the keys were lost up the street, he replies that the light is better here. In like fashion, our research institutions have searched for agricultural advances where the money is—in the glare of industrial farming. Taxpayers foot the bill in the form of appropriations to USDA research and in the form of 20 percent investment credits to new private research facilities.

  What are we paying for? Right now, the bulk of research helps to shore up the system of farming that is already in place. Most disease dollars, for instance, are spent on diseases that afflict only crops grown in continuous culture, a system we know is anathema to soil fertility. Instead of investigating markets for alternative crops (those that can be grown in rotation), our economists continue to invent new markets for the big input-hungry four: wheat, corn, rye, and soybeans. And, of course, a lot of money goes toward breeding crops that will withstand chemicals.

  “Where are our values?” asks Gary Comstock, a philosopher at Iowa State University. “Now that atrazine has turned up in the wells of some farm families, 2,4-D has been linked with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in farmers, and Alachlor, the most heavily used herbicide on corn, is suspected to be a carcinogen, why are land-grant universities doing research to find crops that can be grown in the presence of stronger doses of it?”

  If research is a form of social planning, as Chuck Hassebrook of the Center for Rural Affairs says, what does this say about where we want to go as a society? Instead of pledging allegiance to a method of farming that we know destroys land and people, shouldn’t we be tackling the problems of getting crops to grow the way we want them to grow—in polyculture and rotations, for instance? Shouldn’t we be taking nature’s advice and giving farmers the tools they need to farm sustainably, rather than giving chemical companies bigger needles to poison us with? The Land Institute had been striving to keep arable land arable for twenty years now, with negligible federal assistance. It was time, they decided, to knock on government’s door and bring research spending in line with society’s hopes for the future.

  Wes Jackson had been waiting for just the right moment. When The Land staff members had scored five articles in prestigious scientific journals, he put on his meeting clothes and went to Kansas congressman Pat Roberts, who was the Agriculture Committee chair at the time. Jackson laid out a plan for several sites around the country that would be centers for Natural Systems Agriculture. This network would take this agricultural Kitty Hawk and put it through fifteen to twenty-five years of wind-tunnel tests in different climatic regimes. Look here, said Jackson to Roberts, isn’t the marriage of ecology and agriculture the sort of research that government should support? The congressman answered with a question. “What does the university think about all this?”

  So Jackson trudged back to Kansas and received a glowing endorsement from Kansas State University. After many more visits and yeoman phone work from a man who would rather be threshing gamagrass, the committee told Jackson: “We’ll look into it.” Those four simple words had never before crossed the lips of conventional agricultural researchers. Nor had statements like the KSU mission statement, which admits, “A new agricultural research paradigm is needed.” The people sitting near me at the Politics of Sustainable Agriculture conference in Eugene, Oregon, were understandably shocked, then, when Jackson announced, “On September twenty-eighth, 1995, the conference committee of both houses agreed to include language in the 1995 Farm Bill that essentially instructs the Secretary of Agriculture to investigate and support Natural Systems Agriculture.”

  A spontaneous cheer combusted in that room, and we gave Wes Jackson a standing ovation.

  Setting Up the Books: Energetics

  After we all sat down, Jackson started rhapsodizing about his latest passion. He’s been telling everyone who will listen that accounting is going to be the most exciting profession of the new century. Accounting. We laugh, and then he explains that ecologists are a breed of accountant. One of the ecologist’s primary tools for measuring and describing the sustainability of ecosystems is to draw a circle around the system, tote up all the inputs and outputs, and then analyze the energy cycles inside the circle. Again and again, in terms of energetics, natural systems miraculously “pencil out”—they remain viable without drawing down their resources. If we are to switch to a more natural agriculture, says Jackson, our systems must also pencil out, in at least two ways: 1) Economically, they must sustain farmers and their communities, and 2) ecologically, they must pay their own energy bills and not draw down the resources of the local landscape or the planet.

  The surest path to sustainable farming, says Jackson, is to make sure the lion’s share of rewards runs to the farmer and the landscape. Marty Strange, codirector of the Center for Rural Affairs, puts it this way: “To be sustainable, agriculture must be organized economically and financially so that those who use the land will benefit from using it well and so that society will hold them accountable for their failure to do so.” For society, it may mean changing economic policies so that our well-being, including our environmental well-being, is reflected in the gross national product. It may mean pricing food commodities to reflect their true costs. It may mean eliminating some of the tax breaks that encourage the substitution of capital for labor and essentially subsidize irrational farm expansion and overproduction. In their place, says Strange, we should design policies that give a hand to farmers who are more likely to treat the land well—those on owner-operated, family-held, and internally financed farms. To stay viable, these farms must ultimately break the unhealthy coupling they now have with the petroleum and chemical industries.

  Whenever you break the cycle of dependency, you inevitably hear the anguished moans of the addict in withdrawal. Without large farms and fossil-fuel amendments, will we still be able to feed ourselves? Will we be able to feed the world? Piper’s answer to the first question is yes. “Although yields may not be as high, we ought to be able to feed ourselves and then some. Consider that we have had a grain surplus every year since the thirties in this country, and that eighty percent of our grain is not fed to people but to livestock.” (We feed cows grain to “finish them,” that is, to marble their meat with the fat that clogs American arteries.) Piper feels there’s obviously some slack to be taken up here. As for feeding the world, he says, “Maybe the better goal would be to enable the world to feed itself.” But that’s another subject.

  The point is that the sanctity of seeking higher yields—the agronomic equivalent of the search for gold—makes it virtual heresy to drop down to more realistic yields, to what the land will support over time. The Land realized that in order to defend the yields of perennial polyculture against those of conventional monocultures, it would have to somehow level the playing field. Piper puts it this way: “If we said to a wheat field, ‘Sponsor your own fertility, grow without pesticides or diese
l fuel for traction,’ then what would the yields be? Once you take away the crutches of industrial farming, would it be more economical to grow perennial polycultures or conventional crops?”

  Piper answers his own question cautiously: “The perennial polyculture scheme—planting a prairie that stays put—is designed for low inputs. Cutting down on maintenance, fertilizer, and pesticides is bound to save money, perhaps enough to make this form of farming as competitive as its fuel-dependent cousin.” Jackson is less circumspect: “Perennial polycultures would beat the pants off conventional crops grown in a sustainable way. Period. But now we need the data to prove it.”

  Once again, The Land staff went to the literature, and once again, they were disappointed. There were studies on organic (pesticidefree) farms, but none on organic farms that also grew their crops without fertilizer and without diesel fuel. After twenty years, a lack of published data had come to look more like a red cape than a stop sign to this group. So in 1991, they pawed at the ground a few times and began the Sunshine Farm project: one hundred and fifty acres, conventional crops, tractors that use vegetable oil for fuel, photovoltaic panels for electricity, draft horses for some field operations, longhorn cattle for manure and meat, hens that turn compost (then turn a profit with eggs), and broilers that forage in alfalfa. In all, a demonstration farm where biological and solar energy are expected to pay the bills.

  “Sunshine Farm is really one big accounting project,” says Marty Bender, the towheaded energy accountant of the farm. Over coffee, he stokes up his computer and shows me a giant database. “We draw a big circle around the farm in our minds, and then we count up everything that comes into the farm and everything that goes out, using techniques that are very similar to what ecologists use to describe the energetics of an ecosystem. We literally measure the size, weight, and amount of everything—every fencepost, every galvanized gate, every foot of chicken wire, every plastic pail. We figure out how much energy it takes society to make that product, and then we record it in kilocalories.”

  To track labor, Bender has devised a taxonomy of tasks done on the farm—weeding, fence-mending, broiler feeding, and so on, so that every finger that is lifted can be accounted for in kilocalories. A trip to the store for ten-penny nails takes fuel, labor, and the energy society expended to manufacture the nails—all debits against the farm. In turn, everything the farm produces—all crops, livestock, biofuels, and so on—is recorded as an asset. The trick is to balance the budget so the farm is not a drain on the planet.

  Bender’s energy estimations come from an enormous literature search. When you are with him, he frequently dashes to his wall of filing cabinets to grab one of the hundreds of articles he has gathered, with titles like “The Embodied Energy Content of Polyethylene Pipe.” Each article is covered with the furiously scribbled notes (sometimes corrections) that are his trademark, an artifact of his brilliance.

  “There’s nothing else even remotely as thorough as the Sunshine Farm database,” Bender tells me. “So far, we’ve logged over twenty-seven hundred transactions and we’re not even half through. Keeping the ecological books this way will tell us whether a farm can run on sunlight and keep its books balanced—that is, pay all its own bills without going into debt to the larger environment.” In other words, can the farm itself produce enough food over time to support the human and animal labor, provide fuel for its machines, and manure for its fields? Can it do all this and grow crops that will reimburse society for the energy embedded in material off-farm purchases? Answers like these will tell us what agriculture really costs, and perhaps, says Bender, suggest a more accurate, long-term cost for what we eat. “That’s real important.”

  As we talk, Jack Worman, the farm manager, comes in, wearing a ten-gallon hat that makes me remember how far west we are in Kansas. The creases in his face, if you counted them, might tell you something about the drought cycles in this part of the world. With impeccable cowboy manners, he touches his hat, apologizes for interrupting, then consults with Bender, not about the chickens or the crops but about the kilowatt meter that monitors the solar-panel array. This is not your ordinary farm operation, I conclude, at least not yet.

  Right livelihood might be voluntary today, but The Land Institute predicts that someday it will be mandatory. When fossil fuel runs out or becomes too expensive, people will have to do sunshine farming. In the meantime, Jackson hopes the Sunshine Farm will not be an isolated experiment. He writes, “Until we have the physical manifestation of sustainable livelihoods demonstrated in enough places, we are going to continue the folly. So the good examples, whether they are the good examples among organic farmers, or the good examples among research efforts, or just the good examples of ordinary right livelihood, give us a standard.” Nature as measure.

  Becoming Native to This Place: Community

  None of this is going to happen in isolation. If we want to weave the ecological paradigm into our research and our economy, we need to bring people back to farm country. Nature teaches us that ecosystems are made up of habitat specialists—local experts who know how to work the system. One hundred and fifty years of farming the American plains has also resulted in an accumulation of local knowledge. People have learned how to time plantings, how to read the weather, and what to expect from soils, insects, diseases, and each other.

  The problem is that with the rapid depopulation of the countryside, this knowledge has been disappearing. At this point, only 1 percent of the U.S. population is growing our food, and that figure is falling. Half of all farmland is owned by nonfarmers; only seven companies run 50 percent of the farms. As Wendell Berry observes, no one bemoans the fact that a farm Grange is closing for lack of members; in fact, we are more scandalized by the loss of indigenous rain forest cultures than we are by the loss of American rural cultures.

  Jackson notes that this loss of farmers is not the first but the second wave of loss. Native Americans were the repository of a much longer cultural history, but we’ve already moved them off the land. Now we’re on to our second wave of “surplus” people. If Natural Systems Agriculture is to be successful, insists Jackson, we need a homecoming of people willing to “become native to their place,” tuning their senses to local conditions, and farming the land in a way that will last. You can’t expect people to buy small farms and repopulate the countryside, however, unless they are able to make a living and a fulfilling life for themselves far from town. That will require a restoration of community, says Jackson, not because it’s nostalgic but because “more eyes per acre” is a practical necessity.

  Moved by this belief, Jackson decided to learn what he could about human communities in rural areas. “We asked the question, why shouldn’t human communities run on sunlight and recycle materials the way natural communities do? Why can’t our home places be sustainable instead of simply being quarries to be mined by the extractive economy and then abandoned? After all, native peoples lived here for hundreds of years, in far greater concentrations than we have today in some rural counties. How was it that the land could support them in a sustainable way?”

  To answer that, Jackson decided to spend some time with the remaining inhabitants of one of the quarries—the fifty-some-odd townspeople of Matfield Green in Chase County, Kansas (the site of William Least Heat-Moon’s PrairyErth). During the late 1980s and early 1990s, he bought the abandoned elementary school (a beautiful, ten-thousand-square-foot brick structure built in 1938) for $5,000, the hardware store for $1,000, and with some friends, seven abandoned houses (including one he plans to retire in) for less than $4,000. His nephew bought the bank for $500, and The Land Institute bought the high school gym for $4,000. Friends and employees of The Land have since begun to move into town, restoring their homes with used lumber and other renewable technologies and transforming the school into an education center and conference space for artists, scholars, and teachers interested in becoming native to their places.

  Emily Hunter is the smart and passionate coo
rdinator of the Matfield Green Project. “Forget Paris,” says Hunter. “The cultural capacity to live sustainably resides right here, in the residents of Matfield Green, those people who decided to stay after the boom-and-bust and figured out how. We realize that if we want to join them in this beautiful tallgrass prairie, we can’t repeat the mistakes of the extractors. We have to live in a way that doesn’t spend the ecological capital of the Flint Hills region. Instead we’re asking, what is the wisdom being expressed today by this tough, rooted town? It’s been pruned and burned back by the fossil fuel economy, and maybe it’s back to rootstock. What can we safely graft onto that? How can we create patterns of sustainability together? The people of Matfield—like Evie Mae Reidel who knows what phase of the moon is best for planting potatoes—can help us discover those patterns. With their help, we can teach other homecomers.”

  For now, the learning takes place over coffee at the restored lumberyard and in meetings at the renovated school. Each month, the Tallgrass Prairie Producers, a cooperative devoted to raising prairiefed cattle, gathers to strategize in one of the old, high-ceilinged classrooms. During the summer, workshops will be held here for teachers who are designing a place-based curriculum for rural schoolkids.

  In the meantime, staff from The Land are conducting an environmental history of the area to see decade by decade how land use has changed. This is the first phase of an ecological community accounting project designed to determine the human carrying capacity of a place. “We know we are in deficit,” says Hunter. “Our job is to find out how to be sustained by a place without bankrupting it. Our teachers are the prairie and the people who have been shaped by the prairie for generations.”