The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food (8 page)

On a grain farm the size of Klaas’s, weeding by hand is impossible. So weed suppression (without spraying the problem away) means listening to the soil and maintaining plant health. If your farm becomes so large you can’t identify the different grasses and what they are telling you about the health of the soil, then you’re not really farming, at least not at the right scale. Limiting yourself to what you can see, either by choice or, like the Mennonites, through the decree of steel tires, isn’t such an antiquated idea.

So how do you grow great wheat?

I think that’s what I was learning. But I couldn’t be sure, because by late afternoon that same June day, Klaas and I had covered only two fields, and all the talk had been about wild grasses (formerly known to me as weeds). I was also learning that while I traffic, for the most part, in simple sums, farmers like Klaas deal in calculus. Klaas had spent the day not so much answering questions as making connections, a habit that made him slightly less frustrating to consult than the Oracle of Delphi.

I finally got my answer when we walked into a field growing soybeans, another profitable crop for the farm. Klaas reached for a broad-leaved green plant that seemed to be everywhere and, to my rookie eye, looked very nearly as vibrant as the soybeans around it. Velvetleaf, he told me. He turned over one of its leaves and smiled broadly. The underside was blanketed with tiny flies. There must have been several hundred, maybe even several thousand, on that one leaf. He turned over another infected leaf, and then another. Walking down the row, he continued turning leaves over for me to inspect, like a magician showing his cards.

“I wanted you to see what I consider to be my greatest success,” he said.

That the velvetleaf is a noxious weed (yes, absolutely a weed) and the tiny flies are a troublesome pest named whitefly not only didn’t trouble Klaas—it thrilled him. He was in that moment as satisfied and contented as I would ever know him to be.

Why the exuberance in the middle of a field riddled with pests and weeds? Klaas found inspiration in another soil scientist. “When we went organic, I started reading Dr. William Albrecht. “You know how sometimes we read something and immediately recognize we’re not going to think quite the same way again? That’s what it was like to read Albrecht. He said, ‘See what you’re looking at.’ I love that quote. Think about that. It requires close observation without prejudice. How often do we see something without really
seeing
?”

Klaas looked down at the velvetleaf blanketed with flies and held it in his hands. “A field of velvetleaf with an infestation of whiteflies can actually be a good thing. It can be the greatest success, actually, but you’ll only understand it if you’re able to see what you’re looking at.”

Albrecht, the longtime chairman of the Department of Soils at the University of Missouri, was born on a farm in central Illinois in 1888. After spending some time as a Latin professor, Albrecht studied biology and agricultural science at the University of Illinois as farmers plowed up the surrounding prairie soil. He earned a medical degree but then abandoned formalized medicine because (like Eliot Coleman) he found treating disease much less interesting, and a lot less effective, than exploring its causes. Albrecht went to the cause.

He began with a simple observation, which more or less informed his life’s work. He saw cows straining their necks to eat grass on the other side of the fence, much like the cows I had once watched at Blue Hill Farm. Why, he asked himself, would a cow risk entanglement with barbed wire when acres of pasture were free for the taking? The question (which I never bothered to
ask about
our
cows as a boy) led Albrecht to discover that cows—
supposedly “dumb beasts,” passive and indiscriminate about their diet—actually spend their days in one long, exhaustive search for more nutritious pasture. Cows determine their next bite by swiping their facial hairs against the tips of the grass. The hairs act like antennae, sensitive to the grass’s richness. A quick calculation is made: Does this plant hold enough nutrition to be worth expending the energy required to take a bite? In many cases, Albrecht noticed, the cows didn’t bother.

He had a hunch that these discerning diners made choices based on minerals potentially available in certain grasses. Chemistry, in other words, could explain a cow’s preference. Albrecht watched as cows
walked past what was commonly considered “good grass” to eat seventeen different types of weeds that had been fertilized with calcium limestone, magnesium and phosphate. No wonder the cows deemed the other grass a waste of their energy.

“
The cow is not classifying forage crops by variety name, nor by tonnage yield per acre nor by luscious green growth,” he wrote, but she is more adept than any biochemist at assessing their true value. Albrecht came to the humbling conclusion that we can’t really identify a healthy pasture just by looking at it—we have to really
see
it, and that requires a deeper understanding.

“Albrecht embraced chemistry for the answers,” Klaas told me. “He made the direct connection between soil health and pests and weeds by determining which nutrients were lacking, or, more to his brilliance, which nutrients were out of balance in the soil. He always said, ‘Feed the soil and let the soil feed the plants.’ And he saw the whole thing as a measurable, repeatable process.”

Either cows are smarter than people or they’re just better eaters.

“The field was a total disaster back then,” Klaas said, still holding the velvetleaf in his hand. He and Mary-Howell had rented the adjoining farm in 1994, after the previous farmer abandoned it out of frustration. The farmer had “misused” the plow, Klaas explained. There were several places where the topsoil was so whisper thin, you could see the subsoil.

“It was a crime lab of past sins,” Klaas said. “He said this field was worthless. He told me it would never produce anything of value. And when I got in here to really look around, I started to believe him. Weeds were exploding. The velvetleaf was this tall—” Klaas reached his hand high above his head. “Some grew to twelve feet. They looked like trees, with root systems like trees. They were so strong, I couldn’t pull them out with my hands.”

That first summer, he decided to just walk the field and get to know it, mimicking Albrecht’s patience for detail. Klaas saw a field depleted of fertility and set out to restore it by planting a series of different crops.

For more than three decades, the previous farmer had primarily grown corn. “I remember his corn started to go downhill,” Klaas said. The crop got smaller, and Klaas suspected it was also losing sugar content. “Albrecht always said compromised fertility shows up first in the quality of what’s harvested,” he said.

“You can taste decline?” I asked.

“Yes, you can. Before yield declines, before weed and pest pressures, you can taste it. The doom before the doom.” Considering that the farmer had been growing feed corn, I thought Klaas might be exaggerating its need to be delicious. Then again, if we’re going to eat the beef, why wouldn’t we want the cow to be provided with the best feed possible? This was Albrecht’s point.

Klaas’s first move was to plant spelt. But it wasn’t the spelt itself he was
after, because in the mid-’90s a large market for spelt didn’t exist. He wanted spelt in the ground so it could pave the way for clover. Spelt is a perfect soil builder, because its extensive root systems reach deep into the earth, creating air pockets that allow the soil to breathe (aeration) and beginning what Klaas referred to as “the cleanse.” And spelt’s stalk, or straw, which Klaas plows back into the soil, provides a hearty boost of carbon.

Clover was planted in the early spring, interspersed with the spelt that was just beginning to peek up out of the ground. Clover does the miraculous work of “fixing” nitrogen: grabbing it from the atmosphere, where nitrogen is abundant, and storing it in its roots. It also provides the soil with sugars, proteins, and minerals, and it furthers the soil’s aeration by attracting earthworms. All this had been missing from the previous farmer’s chemical regime. Synthetic fertilizers supplied the corn with nitrogen for fast growth, but the soil itself was ignored, never paid back for the harvests. According to Klaas, it was “like burning your house to keep it warm each year.”

Nitrogen from clover is better than nitrogen from chemicals, Klaas told me later, because all the carbon keeps it in a stable form. “Without carbon, and without microbial activity in the soil, you can’t hold on to the nitrogen,” he explained. “It leaches like crazy.”

He turned and pointed to Seneca Lake, less than a mile from where we were standing. It was picturesque and serene, but Klaas pointed out something I couldn’t have seen on my own. “Seneca used to be so clear it looked like a tall glass of water. But the nitrogen leaching from soils like this, over so many years, has darkened it. It’s polluting the great lake because the soils of Penn Yan can’t hold on to the fertility.”

As the weather started to warm that spring, both the clover and the spelt grew in earnest. Since the spelt had a head start, it dominated the clover and was soon ready for harvest. (Had the clover dominated the spelt, we would be calling clover a noxious weed, which is why Klaas sees
weed
as such an arbitrary term.) With the spelt no longer competing with it for sunlight and nutrients, the clover exploded.

“At this point, there were choices to be made,” Klaas said. “If we had cows, I’d have run them on the clover. Have you ever seen a cow on good clover grass? It’s a beautiful thing. It’s rocket fuel for ruminants. Even better, there’s no loss of minerals, because the manure returns them to the soil.” I pictured a herd of his cattle grazing energetically through the field, but then I remembered that Klaas didn’t have cows, or any animals at all, on his farm.

“Mary-Howell doesn’t want to have to deal with animals,” he explained, adding quickly, “I don’t blame her, of course.”

But Klaas and Mary-Howell view soil organisms as a kind of livestock in and of themselves. “What I say is, we have livestock—we have a lot of livestock on the farm—they’re just very small,” Mary-Howell once told me. “But we have to tend them with just as much intention and care as if they were larger livestock. Which means we have to feed them.”

Klaas plowed the clover into the ground, along with what was left of the spelt stalks, which he kept instead of selling as straw. Nitrogen from the clover infused the soil, and the straw provided the expected hit of carbon—all the while supplying a rich diet for the soil’s “very small” livestock. The sick land started to heal.

Klaas turned again to Albrecht and took a soil test. “That’s when it got really interesting,” he said.

By “interesting,” Klaas meant complicated for those without a degree in chemistry. Soil tests, one of Albrecht’s many contributions to the field, measure mineral levels in the soil. That means macronutrients—nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, calcium, magnesium, sulfur—as well as micronutrients (otherwise known as trace elements) such as copper, iron, and manganese, which are needed only in small quantities. All are key ingredients in healthy plants—and tasty foods.

The results of the soil test were surprising. The nitrogen levels had
returned so completely that Klaas decided to plant corn. “I planned on waiting,” he explained, “but the soil test gave me a green light, and since we’re running a business here, and organic corn is always at a premium, I figured I’d go for it.” Even though the velvetleaf still persisted, the corn yield was good, with a sugar content that, while lower than those of corn harvests from his other fields, was still respectable. The gamble had been worth it.

So what was next? Most farmers would follow a successful corn harvest with soybeans or, if feeling lucky, another planting of corn. Plant the most profitable crop, in other words, if the soil allows it.

“I went with yellow mustard,” Klaas said, and then he leaned his head back and smiled mischievously. My expression didn’t change, which I could tell confused him. Had I known about the improbability of planting yellow mustard, I would have said, “Holy shit, Klaas. You planted a weed in your already weed-infested field?!” That’s what his Penn Yan neighbors said. Why cultivate a weed, they wondered, and on top of that lose all potential revenue on the harvest?