The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food Page 37

  I unraveled this to mean Glenn was experimenting with intermixed varieties of cowpeas, an animal-feed crop, and evaluating the plants’ ability to resist pests (“allelopathic suppression”). He was also measuring the benefits to the soil that would come from planting a leguminous crop before wheat. The tradition in organic farming, as Klaas illustrated with his rotations, is to precede crops like wheat and corn with clover, a legendary nitrogen fixer, but Glenn had a hunch that cowpeas would be just as beneficial. More important, he suspected that cowpeas would make the wheat taste better.

  The research site was surrounded by large, manicured fields and high-tech greenhouses with commercial plant-breeding experiments. Thriving in between were Glenn’s chaotic experimental plots—the cowpeas, various inter-plantings with rye, and patches here and there of ancient varieties of wheat. These wheat experiments, in particular, stood out in striking relief: varieties like emmer, so old they’re referenced in the Bible, allowed—actually, encouraged—to express their unique traits next to university-controlled seed varieties so new they hadn’t yet been named and grown under a regime of strict uniformity and control.

  “They’re doing their thing, and I’m doing mine,” Glenn said. “Which is celebrating landrace farming and honoring a tradition of seed saving and seed improvement that reaches back into prehistory.”

  By “landrace,” Glenn meant a kind of farming that encourages variation in the field, with less distinct and less uniform varieties. He wasn’t overstating it. Though the first breeze of the morning made the hodgepodge of ancient varieties sway and rustle in unison, nothing about it suggested cohesion or uniformity. You’d be forgiven for thinking that it looked a little all over the place. Which is the point, really, of landrace farming. Glenn’s not bothered by the diversity. In fact, he’s banking on it.

  Plants in a landrace system are different, but only slightly so. As opposed to a modern field of wheat (or corn, or really any cultivated variety)—all the plants identical in size, shape, and growth patterns—a landrace crop’s in-built diversity allows it to thrive under a variety of circumstances. It’s a natural insurance policy for the population, ensuring that, while some of the crop may succumb to a disease or a natural disaster, some of it will not. In periods of drought, for example, most of the wheat will fail, but the plants with greater drought tolerance will survive and pass their advantage on to future generations.

  I once heard a lecture given by Abdullah Jaradat, a USDA agronomist, to a group of grain enthusiasts. “When you domesticate a plant like wheat, you spoil it,” he said. “You have to provide it with all its needs; otherwise it will not produce what you expect.”

  Glenn’s old-world, chaotic plots were exactly that—unspoiled. And they offered a glimpse into what had been, until recently, the only farming system possible.

  SAVING SEEDS

  From the beginning, which is to say from around 8000 B.C., when agriculture is thought to have begun, farmers knew to save at least a small portion of their seeds to plant for future harvests. By the time agriculture replaced hunting and gathering as humanity’s primary source of food, seed saving had emerged as one of the community’s most important responsibilities. With each community preserving and selecting its own seeds, thousands of locally adapted landrace varieties evolved across the globe. These varieties were not static. They adapted and changed depending on the environment and the preferences of the culture, producing the characteristics most likely to thrive under the circumstances. It was a rich reservoir of diversity that came to a very sudden end.

  At the start of the twentieth century, plant breeders discovered a way to farm more efficiently. They learned that two distinct lines of corn could be crossed with each other to create a new genetically uniform generation imbued with “hybrid vigor”—making it faster-growing and more robust than plants left to pollinate naturally (the same idea that led to the foie gras industry’s Moulard duck). The vigor would last only a year; subsequent plantings would not be as successful. So farmers bought new hybridized seeds every year to maximize their yields and turned away from the ancient practice of seed saving. Commercial seed companies came to dominate the market for corn and then, as the trend toward hybrid seeds continued, for most other grains, fruits, and vegetables as well.

  In some ways, wheat was an exception. Bread wheat is a hexaploid, which means it has six sets of chromosomes (and therefore six copies of each gene), whereas corn and most vegetables—and even human beings—possess only two. So it doesn’t open itself up to easy manipulation. It is also self-pollinating, each wheat plant containing both male and female parts. Since the plants fertilize themselves, crosses between different varieties are less likely to occur, either naturally or through deliberate intervention. Saving seeds is always possible, without any loss of genetic integrity.

  Which isn’t to say that farmers continued to do so. As breeders began to develop new and improved varieties (albeit without the staggering success of hybrid corn), more farmers began buying their wheat seed. Why engage in the laborious ritual of saving seeds when a better-yielding, more consistent crop was now readily available for purchase? Genetic uniformity became the status quo.

  In Glenn’s landrace system, by contrast, every grain of wheat contains a germ with a distinct destiny. It’s impossible to know exactly what the wheat will be like until you cast the seed on the ground and see what grows. Most of it will look quite uniform; a good percentage might even remind you of a monoculture. But there will be the inevitable wild cards, the offshoots—called “sports”—and they provide not only an insurance policy for the crop but also the potential for new flavors.

  “Going sportin’,” which means venturing out into the fields to find these irregular plants, re-creates what farmers did throughout history—seek out the one plant in the crop that doesn’t look like the others, the ugly duckling of the bunch, and celebrate it for its distinctiveness. Should that offshoot turn out to taste good and be encouraged by the farmer, the entire crop and cuisine might change, at least slightly, to include this distinctive first cousin.

  Sporting is also, one could argue, the most democratic of farming practices, because it allows recessive traits (those qualities we all have hidden in us somewhere) to express themselves. No one knows why certain genes lie dormant for hundreds, or even thousands, of years. But landrace farming leaves open the possibility that an unexpected trait might reveal itself at any time. An environmental event, such as a heat wave or even a sprinkle of rain at the right moment, can trigger a genetic awakening.

  Glenn’s goal is not efficiency. What if, he asks, instead of forcing nature to go in a particular direction, we allowed nature to dictate how the seeds should evolve, and then adapted to those changes? It would mean more variation in each crop, which would, in turn, cause there to be slightly different ripening times and different kernel sizes. Without identical characteristics, our plants would have better disease and pest resistance, more vigor, and greater resilience in the long run. It might also mean the discovery of a superior flavor, a concept I had always found a little abstract, until Glenn told me that the Eight Row Flint corn Jack had managed to cultivate so successfully at Stone Barns had come from a landrace farming system—generations of farmers selecting ears by hand and tasting them.

  “This is what farmers have always done. Throughout the ages they managed to broaden the genetic base and deliver a very rich source of variation,” Glenn said. “You’re not just looking for change,” he added. “You’re celebrating change.”

  But this rich source of variation, cultivated over thousands of years and supported by countless generations, changed irrevocably in the middle of the twentieth century. Wheat was transformed on a global scale, and practically overnight. It was a revolution that began, improbably, with a dwarf.

  THE AGE OF DWARFS

  No one was looking to grow short wheat—not at first. The beginning of the Green Revolution, that period
of agricultural modernization and massive productivity gains across the globe, is often traced to dwarf wheat, but dwarf wheat actually came out of an impromptu visit by an American to the hillsides of Mexico.

  In 1940, vice president–elect Henry Wallace attended the inauguration of the Mexican president, Manuel Ávila Camacho. The trip was a show of support, and Wallace, the former secretary of agriculture, seized on an invitation to visit the hillside fields of the local Mexican farmworkers. Before entering politics, Wallace had started the Hi-Bred Corn Company, which came to lead the industry, and soon the world, in hybrid corn-seed technology. Wallace was a wealthy man. He was also a progressive for his times—an early advocate for civil rights and government health insurance. His heart went out to the Mexican peasants who worked their small plots in miserable conditions. The soil was failing, their seeds were unproductive—they had no machines and no fertilizers.

  After returning to the United States, Wallace persuaded the Rockefeller Foundation to support a special collaboration with Mexico to improve farmers’ crop yields. (He had failed to convince Congress.) Until then, aid had come in the form of donations. Wallace’s idea was to send the best American agricultural scientists to train their Mexican counterparts in the latest breeding science. A young scientist and developer of agricultural chemicals for DuPont liked the idea and agreed to join the effort. His name was Norman Borlaug.

  Borlaug was born in Iowa and attended college in the Midwest at the height of the Dust Bowl. That great environmental disaster had many people reconsidering large-scale modern agriculture, but Borlaug saw it as proof that technology and a greater emphasis on high-yield farming were the only options for the future of food production. The International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), formed as a collaboration between the Rockefeller Foundation and the Mexican government, allowed him to put his ideas to work.

  Borlaug was ferociously dedicated. He spent fifteen-hour days in the fields, examining different crops and soil conditions and heading a small team that managed to cross more than six thousand distinct varieties of wheat. His research showed that adding fertilizer to wheat production could triple growth, but the kick was so powerful that the wheat stalks shot up too quickly. Without full development and enough strength to support their heavy seed heads, they fell over and rotted on the ground. Harvesting was nearly impossible.

  Then, in 1952, word arrived of a newly developed short-straw wheat from Japan called Norin 10. Using samples of Norin 10, Borlaug began growing new semidwarf crosses and found that fertilizer enabled this wheat to mature more quickly without falling over. Within a few short years, Borlaug had produced wheat that yielded three times more than its predecessors. By 1963, 95 percent of the wheat grown in Mexico was his semidwarf variety, and the country’s wheat harvest was six times what it had been when he arrived. Encouraged by the results, Borlaug next sent his dwarf wheat to India, which was on the brink of mass famine. Farmers planted the new seeds and followed the fertilizer regimen, and within a few years the results were just as incredible: crop yields had more than tripled, and India became a net exporter of wheat.

  The new varieties continued to spread throughout Asia, with the same effect—displacing local landrace varieties (and thousands of years of genetic refinement) and upending the traditional practices of millions of farmers. New strains of “miracle” rice soon followed, which matured fast enough to allow farmers to grow two crops in a year instead of just one.

  Such was the power and, indeed, the aim of the Green Revolution: to increase food production without bringing more land under cultivation. From 1950 to 1992, harvests increased 170 percent on only 1 percent more cultivated land. Today, more than 70 percent of the wheat grown in the developing world carries genes that Borlaug developed in Mexico. And semidwarf varieties make up the majority of wheat in the United States as well.

  It is estimated that a billion lives were saved by Norman Borlaug’s work, which makes questioning the success of the Green Revolution complicated. How do you argue against a system of agriculture that saved a billion people?

  One way has been to look at the global increase in diet-related diseases since the 1970s. Certain types of cancers, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and obesity are, many argue, the enormous collateral damage the revolution inflicted. Lives were saved by providing calories, but the Green Revolution ultimately altered the way we eat, and, for the most part, not in a good way.

  Without question, it altered the way we grow food on a large scale. The world is now awash in monocultures of genetically uniform varieties, fed by chemical fertilizers. And their legacy has been disastrous for soil health. The short wheat came with equally short roots, like those whispery filaments I saw on Wes Jackson’s banner, diminishing important highways of bacterial and fungal activity. Soil became compacted, degraded.

  “They took beautiful stuff like this,” Glenn explained as he pointed to his test plot, “and dwarfed it, dwarfing the roots, too, limiting their ability to uptake micronutrients from the soil. Questionable nutrition and zero flavor.” (There was nothing dwarfed about Glenn’s wheat. Every stalk reached to my chest, and a few them extended well above my head. “Tall straw, deep roots,” he said.)

  The dwarfed root systems also retained less water, a shortcoming that many countries have compensated for with enormous, government-backed irrigation projects. From 1950 to 2000, the amount of irrigated farmland tripled. One-fifth of the grain grown in the United States is irrigated; in India, it’s more like three-fifths, resulting in the rapid depletion of the country’s groundwater sources. According to author and activist Vandana Shiva, India’s water crisis is clearly linked to the introduction of Borlaug’s green-revolution varieties. “Although high-yielding varieties of wheat may yield over 40 percent more than traditional varieties,” she writes, “they need about three times as much water.”

  Green Revolution varieties consume fossil fuels, in the form of synthetic fertilizers, just as greedily. As Cary Fowler and Patrick Mooney note in their book Shattering: Food, Politics, and the Loss of Genetic Diversity, the relationship between dwarf seeds and chemical fertilizers is “akin to the relationship of the chicken and the egg. The fertilizers made the new varieties possible. The new varieties made the fertilizers necessary.”

  By conservative estimates, more than a third of the Green Revolution’s yield gains are owed to synthetic fertilizers, which, as many have pointed out, makes the revolution not exactly green in the environmental sense. Modern, commerically bred seed varieties depend on chemicals now more than ever. To get them to work, you need the chemicals; once the chemicals are in use, soil organic matter falls off, and the soil is less able to transport nutrients to the plants efficiently. The result is that more chemicals are needed to get the same kick.

  All true. And yet . . . a billion lives.

  Susan Dworkin, a former assistant to a breeder who worked alongside Borlaug for many years, once described how breeders working on hunger tend to see the problem purely in terms of yield. “How much food could you get out of an acre? How many people could you feed? That’s where they are. That’s what they think,” she said. “They are not looking at the dinner table. They’re looking at the swollen belly.”

  With a billion lives at stake, the single-minded pursuit of yield is both defensible and important. But what if, all along, our math has been wrong? What if, in our mad dash for greater productivity, we’ve miscalculated the true yields?

  Consider the farmer who grows a variety of semidwarf wheat. He applies the requisite chemical fertilizers and sits back, with hopes of watching his yields (and his profit) soar. But shorter straw means less to plow back into the ground to become food for soil organisms. Or, if the wheat is being used as food and bedding for cattle, dwarfed straw means there’s less feed for the cows. Either way, it amounts to less food for someone. And not just anyone. As Klaas liked to remind me, soil organisms and cows are partners in makin
g a healthy system work. In the modern calculus of efficient farming, those things are left out of the equation because they’re not feeding our bellies (at least not directly). And it’s a critical omission.

  There is another miscalculation, too. I once attended an agriculture conference where a scientist argued that organic agriculture could not feed our growing population. One of the studies he cited compared a small plot of conventionally fertilized corn with another small plot of organically grown corn. A photo showed the two plots planted right next to each other: same variety, same soil. The conventional corn was tall, vigorous, and thriving. The organic corn looked dry and stooped over, a sickly cousin. The photo, as convincing as Wes Jackson’s side-by-side analysis of annual and perennial wheat, seemed to prove that yields for conventional corn far surpass those for organic corn.

  It wasn’t until Glenn pointed to his landraces, and then to the university trials, with their military uniformity, just beyond, that I could consider another side-by-side comparison. And this one looked different. Glenn’s wheat wasn’t a shriveled, sickly cousin (with its varying heights, it was more like a crazy uncle), because Glenn had prepped the soil. He had rotated in different crops—cowpeas, barley, and oats—to ensure fertility. He gave his wheat a fair shot at thriving.

  Of course, even thriving landrace wheat might not yield as much as the conventional varieties, at least not consistently. Growing one variety with fertilizers usually wins. But that doesn’t mean the corn study was right. It was wrong—and here’s the heart of the bad math. Barley and oats make a good meal. They are delicious and full of nutrition. So, while an acre of conventional wheat may yield more than an acre of organic wheat, that does not mean it yields more food. It just yields more wheat. The equation is missing the sum total of its parts: barley plus oats plus wheat will yield more food than wheat on its own.