The botany of desire: a plant's-eye view of the world (26 page)

By way of driving home a point, Heath dug some of his Yukon Golds for me to take home. “I can eat any potato in this field right now. Most farmers can’t eat their spuds out of the field.” I decided not to mention my lunch.

For fertilizers, Heath relies on “green manures” (growing cover crops and plowing them under), cow manure from a local dairy, and the occasional spraying of liquefied seaweed. The result was a soil that looked completely different from the other Magic Valley soils I’d fingered that day: instead of the uniform grayish powder I’d assumed was normal for the area, Heath’s soil was dark brown and crumbly. The difference, I understood, was that this soil was alive. Much more than an inert mechanism for conducting water and chemicals to the crop’s roots, it actually contributed nutrients of its own making to the plants. The biology, chemistry, and physics of this process, which goes by the name “fertility,” is not at all well understood—soil truly is a wilderness—yet this ignorance doesn’t prevent organic farmers and gardeners from nurturing it.

Heath’s crops looked different, too: more compact plants (chemical fertilizers tend to make plants leafier); the occasional weed, and loads of insects flitting around. Here were the very opposite of “clean” fields, and, frankly, their weedy hedgerows and overall patchiness made them much less pretty to look at. To the eye, at least, the order of these fields seemed much softer and less complete, with a great deal of disorder percolating at the margins. Of course, what the eye failed to see was a more complex, less human order—the order, that is, of an ecosystem, one that is not so much imposed by the farmer as it is nourished and tweaked by him. It is the very complexity of such fields—the sheer diversity of species in both space and time—that makes them productive year after year without many inputs. The system provides for most of its needs.

On the drive back to Boise, I thought about why Mike Heath’s farm remains the exception, both in Idaho and elsewhere. Here was a genuinely new paradigm—a biological paradigm—and it seemed to work: Heath spends a fraction as much on inputs as Danny Forsyth or Steve Young, yet he was digging between three and four hundred bags per acre—just as many as Forsyth and only slightly fewer than Young.
*
But while organic agriculture is gaining ground, few of the mainstream farmers I met considered it a “realistic” alternative to the way we presently grow our food.

They may be right. In a dozen different ways, a farm like Mike Heath’s simply can’t be reconciled to the logic of a corporate food chain. For one thing, Heath’s type of agriculture doesn’t leave much room for the Monsantos of this world: organic farmers buy remarkably little—some seed, a few tons of manure, maybe a few gallons of ladybugs. The organic farmer’s focus is on a process, rather than on products. Nor is that process readily systematized, reduced to, say, a prescribed regimen of sprayings like the one Danny Forsyth laid out for me—regimens that are typically designed by companies selling chemicals. Most of the intelligence and local knowledge needed to run Mike Heath’s farm resides in the head of Mike Heath. Growing potatoes conventionally requires intelligence, too, but a larger portion of it resides in laboratories in distant places such as St. Louis, where it is employed developing inputs like Roundup or the NewLeaf.

This sort of centralization of agriculture is not likely to be reversed any time soon, if only because there’s so much money in it and, in the short run at least, it’s so much easier for the farmer to buy prepackaged solutions from big companies. “Whose Head Is the Farmer Using?” asks the title of a Wendell Berry essay; “Whose Head Is Using the Farmer?” At a certain point, a point already long past, the farmer’s attempt at the perfect control of nature evolved into the control of the farmer by the corporations that promoted that dream in the first place. It is only because that dream is so elu-sive that the control of farmers by its merchants became so inescapable.

• • •

Organic farmers like Mike Heath have turned their backs on what is unquestionably the greatest strength—and still greater weakness—of industrial agriculture: monoculture and the economies of scale it makes possible. Monoculture is the single most powerful simplification of modern agriculture, the key move in reconfiguring nature as a machine, yet nothing else in agriculture is so poorly fitted to the way nature seems to work. Very simply, a vast field of identical plants will always be exquisitely vulnerable to insects, weeds, and disease—to all the vicissitudes of nature. Monoculture is at the root of virtually every problem that bedevils the modern farmer, and from which virtually every agricultural product is designed to deliver him.

To put the matter baldly, a farmer like Mike Heath is working hard to adjust his fields to the logic of nature, while Danny Forsyth is working even harder to adjust his fields to the logic of monoculture and, standing behind that, the logic of an industrial food chain. One small case in point: when I asked Mike Heath what he did about net necrosis, the bane of Danny Forsyth’s potato crop, I was disarmed by the simplicity of his answer. “That’s only really a problem with Russet Burbanks,” he explained. “So I plant other kinds.” Forsyth can’t do that. He’s part of a food chain—at the far end of which stands a perfect McDonald’s french fry—that demands he grow Russet Burbanks and nothing else.

This, of course, is where biotechnology comes in, to the rescue of Forsyth’s Russet Burbanks and, Monsanto is betting, to the whole industrial food chain of which they form a part. Monoculture is in crisis. The pesticides that make it possible are rapidly being lost, either to resistance or to worries about their dangers. As the fertility of the soil has declined under the onslaught of chemicals, so too in many places have crop yields. “We need a new silver bullet,” an entomologist with the Oregon Extension Service told me, “and biotech is it.” Yet a new silver bullet is not the same thing as a new paradigm. Rather, it’s something that will allow the old paradigm to survive. That paradigm will always construe the problem in Danny Forsyth’s field as a Colorado beetle problem, rather than what it is: a problem of potato monoculture.

• • •

What Mike Heath’s disarming answer to my question about net necrosis—“That’s only really a problem with Russet Burbanks”—suggests is that the problem of monoculture may itself be as much a problem of
culture
as it is of agriculture. Which is to say, it’s a problem in which all of us are implicated, not just farmers and companies like Monsanto. I was starting to appreciate that the conventional journalistic narrative that usually organizes a story like this—evil technology foisted by greedy corporation—leaves out an important element, which is us and
our
desire for control and uniformity. So much of what I’d seen in Idaho—from the clean fields to the computer-controlled crop circles—goes back to that perfect McDonald’s french fry at the eating end of the food chain.

On my way back to Boise I did a drive-through at a McDonald’s and ordered a bag of the fries in question. There’s no way of knowing for sure, but these fries may well have been my second meal of NewLeafs in a day; at the time, McDonald’s used NewLeafs in its french fries. A Monsanto executive had told me that without McDonald’s early support the NewLeaf might never have gotten off the ground, since McDonald’s is one of the largest buyers of potatoes in the world.
*

You know, their fries really are gorgeous: slender golden rectangles long enough to overshoot their trim red containers like a bouquet. A farmer had told me that only the Russet Burbank will give you a fry quite that long and perfect. To look at them is to appreciate that these aren’t
just
french fries: they’re Platonic ideals of french fries, the image and the food rolled into one, and available anywhere in the world for somewhere around a dollar a bag. You can’t beat it.

I wanted and fully expected to find precisely the same Platonic french fry here in Nowhere, Idaho, that I’d had countless times at home and could expect to find anytime I wanted to in Tokyo, Paris, Beijing, Moscow, even Azerbaijan or the Isle of Man. What is that, if not a control thing?—and not just on the part of McDonald’s. But whatever is behind it, this expectation can’t be fulfilled unless McDonald’s has seen to it that millions of acres of Russet Burbanks are planted all over the world. The global desire can’t be gratified without the global monoculture, and that global monoculture now depends on technologies like genetic engineering. It just may be that we can’t have the one without the other.

This alignment of global desire and technology has been a great boon for the Russet Burbank, at least in terms of sheer numbers. Has there ever been a more successful potato in the history of the world? Yet its success is a precarious thing, for this particular set of potato genes (or rather now, potato genes plus one Bt gene and one antibiotic-resistance gene, courtesy of Monsanto) has also never been more vulnerable to the vicissitudes of nature or the fecklessness of a single species: us. Whether in evolutionary terms a monoculture really represents long-term success for a species is an open question. The Lumper, Ireland’s favorite potato before the famine, was once nearly as dominant as the Russet Burbank; today, its genes are as hard to find as the dodo’s.

Part of the pleasure those fries gave me was how perfectly they conformed to my image and expectation of them—to the Idea of Fries in my head, that is, an idea that McDonald’s has successfully planted in the heads of a few billion other people around the world. Here, then, is a whole other meaning of the word
monoculture.
Like the agricultural practice that goes by that name, this one too—the monoculture of global taste—is about uniformity and control. Indeed, the monocultures of the field and the monocultures of our global economy nourish each other in crucial ways. The two are complexly intertwined expressions of the same Apollonian desire, our impulse, I mean, to elevate the universal over the particular or local, the abstract over the concrete, the ideal over the real, the made over the natural. The spirit of Apollo celebrates “the One,” Plutarch wrote, “denying the many and abjuring multiplicity.” Against Dionysus’s “variability” and “wantonness” he poses the power of “uniformity [and] orderliness.” Apollo is the god, then, of monoculture, whether of plants or of people. And though Apollo has surely had many more exalted manifestations than this one, he is here, too, in every bag of McDonald’s french fries.

• • •

Ireland, 1846.
“On the 27th of last month [July] I passed from Cork to Dublin, and this doomed plant bloomed in all luxuriance of an abundant harvest.” So begins a letter written in the summer of 1846 by a Catholic priest named Father Mathew. “Returning on the 3rd [of August] I beheld with sorrow one wide waste of putrefying vegetation. In many places the wretched people were seated on the fences of their decaying gardens, wringing their hands, and wailing bitterly the destruction that had left them foodless.”

The arrival of the blight was announced by the stench of rotting potatoes, a stench that became general in Ireland late in the summer of 1845, then again in ’46 and ’48. Its spores carried on the wind, the fungus would appear in a field literally overnight: a black spotting of the leaves followed by a gangrenous stain spreading down the plant’s stem; then the blackened tubers would turn to evil-smelling slime. It took but a few days for the fungus to scorch a green field black; even potatoes in storage succumbed.

The potato blight visited all of Europe, but only in Ireland did it produce a catastrophe. Elsewhere, people could turn to other staple foods when a crop failed, but Ireland’s poor, subsisting on potatoes and exiled from the cash economy, had no alternative. As is often the case in times of starvation, the problem was not quite so simple as a shortage of food. At the height of the famine, Ireland’s docks were heaped with sacks of corn destined for export to England. But the corn was a commodity, determined to follow the money; since the potato eaters had no money to pay for corn, it sailed for a country that did.

The potato famine was the worst catastrophe to befall Europe since the Black Death of 1348. Ireland’s population was literally decimated: one in every eight Irishmen—a million people—died of starvation in three years; thousands of others went blind or insane for lack of the vitamins potatoes had supplied. Because the poor laws made anyone who owned more than a quarter acre of land ineligible for aid, millions of Irish were forced to give up their farms in order to eat; uprooted and desperate, the ones with the energy and wherewithal emigrated to America. Within a decade, Ireland’s population was halved and the composition of America’s population permanently altered.

Contemporary accounts of the potato famine read like visions of Hell: streets piled with corpses no one had the strength to bury, armies of near-naked beggars who’d pawned their clothes for food, abandoned houses, deserted villages. Disease followed on famine: typhus, cholera, and purpura raced unchecked through the weakened population. People ate weeds, ate pets, ate human flesh. “The roads are beset with tattered skeletons,” one witness wrote. “God help the people.”

The causes of Ireland’s calamity were complex and manifold, involving such things as the distribution of land, brutal economic exploitation by the English, and a relief effort by turns heartless and hapless, as well as the usual accidents of climate, geography, and cultural habit. Yet this whole edifice of contingency rested at bottom upon a plant—or, more precisely, upon the relationship between a plant and a people. For it was not the potato so much as potato monoculture that sowed the seeds of Ireland’s disaster.

Indeed, Ireland’s was surely the biggest experiment in monoculture ever attempted and surely the most convincing proof of its folly. Not only did the agriculture and diet of the Irish come to depend utterly on the potato, but they depended almost completely on one kind of potato: the Lumper. Potatoes, like apples, are clones, which means that every Lumper was genetically identical to every other Lumper, all of them descended from a single plant that just happened to have no resistance to
Phytophthora infestans.
The Incas too built a civilization atop the potato, but they cultivated such a polyculture of potatoes that no one fungus could ever have toppled it. In fact, it was to South America that, in the aftermath of the famine, breeders went to look for potatoes that could resist the blight. And there, in a potato called the Garnet Chile, they found it.