The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food (9 page)

The answer came from the Albrecht soil test, which had indicated a deficiency in sulfur, one of the macronutrients that’s essential for the development of vitamins in plants and plays an important role in root growth. Actually, the soil test merely proved what Klaas had already noticed: the field was filled with yellow flowers. Older farmers had always told Klaas that yellow-flowered weeds thrive in sulfur-depleted fields.

“Here’s a classic case of ‘see what you’re looking at,’” Klaas said. “It wasn’t until the soil test confirmed a deficiency in sulfur that I could see the yellow flowers for what they were—a virtual advocacy group for the addition of sulfur.”

Eliot Coleman has
compared a good organic farmer to a skilled rock climber. Both “are interested in solutions, each one simpler and more elegant than the last.” On first glance, the analogy seems a little asymmetrical: one inelegant move by the rock climber can be catastrophic, while a bad rotation decision by the organic farmer might only amount to a few yellow flowers in
his field. But as the mistakes accumulate, the results for the farmer can be just as disastrous, including a much less delicious harvest.

And herein lies the point: if the farmer is made to believe that his rotation decisions don’t really matter, that their equivalent “next step” up the rock face isn’t critical, then he is not motivated to forgo a profitable harvest to plant yellow mustard.

Klaas turned the mustard into the soil, allowing the sulfur to take full effect. But he knew he needed to again restore nitrogen levels. “I could have planted soybeans for the nitrogen at this point—they’re a legume, after all, so they fix nitrogen. But to be honest,” he said, leaning in very close to me as if he were afraid of offending the surrounding crop, “soy is a little lazy. It’s a profitable plant, but it’s lazy. I got more out of what I went with: kidney beans. My kidneys get top dollar for canning. Not huge money, but who cares, right? I’m banking the nitrogen that the beans are fixing into the soil for a future crop.”

After the kidney beans, the obvious choice was to go back to corn. “I went with wheat instead,” he said, turning away too late to hide another grin. “I chose wheat because I don’t like to go too long before I plant a crop that actually feeds people. Going back to corn was totally possible—the nitrogen was there—but at the end of the day, I want people eating what I grow.”

The fact that a farmer can make more money feeding animals than feeding people is a problem with the marketplace, Klaas said, reiterating a point he had made to me many times before. “If too much of the farm is cultivated in corn, I’m encouraging a diet where herbivores [grass eaters like cows and sheep] are fed grain.” He paused to consider the implications. “It gives me indigestion just thinking about it.”

But then the question was, what kind of wheat? Modern wheats are hard on the soil—extractive rather than restorative, like spelt—and Klaas is judicious about planting them. “I obviously get more money from the newer varieties, but, again, I pay for it,” he said. “The full accounting includes what’s drawn from the soil bank.” Klaas chose emmer, an ancient wheat once grown
throughout the American Northeast. Emmer is known for its large root systems, providing optimum yields without large fertility requirements.

Almost as soon as the emmer had been harvested, Klaas noticed a change in the velvetleaf. “It was still there in big numbers, but it wasn’t as tall. It didn’t look as healthy,” he said. “The environment was changing.”

A group of agricultural scientists, having heard about Klaas’s experience with the velvetleaf, came to his farm to study it. “They visited every week and eventually pinned the declining health of the velvetleaf on a fungus, anthracnose,” Klaas said. “But anthracnose had never killed anything on an organic farm. They were convinced, I think, because they were fungal guys. They knew fungus, and to them the velvetleaf was dying because of a fungus attack.” He laughed. “They turned out to be right—the velvetleaf had anthracnose—but they were wrong, too. That’s not what was killing the velvetleaf. They completely missed the whiteflies.” Klaas turned the leaf over once more so I could again see for myself. It seemed impossible that anyone could have missed them.

“It’s true. It wasn’t until I came out here one day that I saw the velvetleaf for what it had become—a diminished, sick plant—not a healthy plant that happened to have a fungal virus. That’s when I could see it. Just like Albrecht said:
See what you’re looking at
. The whiteflies suddenly appeared for me. They’re nature’s cleanup crew, attacking the least fit species.”

I looked at the soybean plants (Klaas’s most recent rotation) and realized they were growing a mere three inches from the velvetleaf, yet they remained completely untouched by the whiteflies. The soil conditions had changed so drastically that the soy had become the dominant species, impervious to attack, while the velvetleaf, once twelve feet tall with a mile of hardened roots, had shrunk. It was literally suffocating, a weed shriveling in on itself.

W
HY
SHOULD
A
CHEF
CARE
about how farmers manage weeds and pests? Spraying the problem away has damaging environmental implications, so there’s that, of course. And because we prepare food, chefs are closer to farming than, say, lawyers and accountants are. But everyone eats, which means that chefs presumably shouldn’t be more outraged about bad soil management than lawyers or accountants are. Poor soil health, with its resulting weed and pest problems and the chemicals needed to solve them, affects chefs no more than it affects everyone else.

Or does it? The more I learned from Klaas, the more I saw the error in that way of thinking. These kinds of questions matter quite a bit more to chefs, because how soil is managed, and how a farmer negotiates weeds and pests, is the single best predictor of how food will taste.

Fruits, vegetables, animals—and, for that matter, grains—grown in poor soils make it harder for chefs to cook delicious food.
Truly
delicious, like the Eight Row Flint corn polenta I tasted as if tasting polenta for the first time. If soil is compromised, there can be no such thing as great food. Which is unfortunate, since the short history of soil in this country, like that of wheat, is another story of degradation and death.

Soil is alive, and not just in the metaphysical sense
.
It inhales and exhales, procreates, digests, and constantly changes temperature. When growing properly, soil organisms breathe as we do—taking in oxygen and releasing carbon dioxide into the air. In that sense, an open field of pasture grass is not unlike a packed stadium of football fans during a tense fourth quarter.

And like us, soil contains a lot of tiny living creatures—a complex community of bacteria, microbes, fungi, worms, grubs, bugs, and slugs. I remember Klaas dropping to his knees during my first visit to his farm and digging to fill his palm with dirt. “Right here, there are more organisms in this soil than the entire population of Penn Yan!” he said. “That’s a lot of life to feed.” I raised my eyebrows in a futile attempt to look impressed. But Klaas was merely being modest; the number of creatures in soil is really much greater. One teaspoon of the good black stuff has been said to contain more than a million living organisms, though scientists now consider even this figure far too conservative—it’s well over a billion. Soil is literally teeming with life.

Klaas’s handful of soil most likely contained ten thousand different species of microbes—not individual organisms, but
species
—all of which aggressively modify their habitats to suit themselves. And yet they are also so interrelated, so connected to one another and the surrounding ecosystem, that studying them individually under a microscope has until very recently been next to impossible. They simply cannot survive long enough without their neighbors.

Soil has a personality, too. It manipulates its environment to get what it needs (think of weeds), and, according to Klaas, it talks to you—if you learn to speak the language. In his book
The Tree
,
Colin Tudge describes living tissue, with its complex design and endless capacity for self-renewal, as “
not a thing but a performance.” The same is true of soil. Now that I was beginning to see that food’s flavor depends on soil health, and that soil health
depends on a thriving population of organisms, I wanted to know, if only in the crudest way, how the performance works.

Soil covers itself. On any bare patch, a green carpet of plants and weeds sprouts immediately, protecting the earth from the elements. Whispers of grass, poking their way out of sidewalk cracks, are evidence that even urban soil, sheathed in concrete, hankers for protection.

As the plants grow up, the roots grow down, until eventually the roots (and dead grass, if cut and left on the surface) decompose into a sheet of humus. This nearly magical process—recommissioning plant material into organic matter—is accomplished by soil organisms, from earthworms and insects down to bacteria, the proletariat of the soil. The humus is then turned into salts—not the
salt
we sprinkle on food, but nitrates and phosphates, which help the plants grow. Add animals into a system, and their manure can help bring about the same outcome, but more quickly—in just a few months rather than several years. There is faster decay and faster growth.

That’s a rough explanation of a complex system, but the core of the idea is that soil sustains itself (and actually improves itself) by working in a circle. Live roots become dead roots. Dead roots become food for soil organisms. What’s not eaten either nourishes new grass or becomes humus, a kind of long-term bank account that provides for the future needs of plants.

What happens when farming is introduced? We upset the balance. By harvesting crops, we extract and export (and eventually eat) soil fertility, which requires that an equal or greater amount be returned to the soil. Sir Albert Howard, the British scientist and father of organic agriculture, called this
the Law of Return, the word
law
suggesting—rightly, it turns out—that it’s nonnegotiable. Unless fertility is restored, soils suffer. Restoring fertility is the key to soil health, which means it’s key for flavor, as well.

There are three parts to soil fertility, and Klaas described them to me by
using the analogy of a successful company. The first is the profit part—we cash in on this in the harvest. Then there is the working capital—the engine of any business, which in the case of soil fertility are things like manures and composts that feed the soil directly. Finally, there’s the reserve, the bankable funds that feed the company’s productivity over the long run. Humus serves this purpose; as Albrecht said, it’s what gives any
soil its “constitution.” Without all three in good working order, a company is likely to go bankrupt.

Farmers have pretty much always understood soil fertility—even if they couldn’t explain it—and when they broke the law of return, either because they didn’t have animal manure or because they didn’t know how to apply it, they simply moved on to virgin land. Virgin land brims with fertility, so one needn’t be concerned with depletion—until, of course, it
is
depleted—as colonial Americans quickly learned.

In their book
Empires of Food: Feast, Famine, and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations
, Evan Fraser and Andrew Rimas argue that, historically, food empires such as ancient Rome and Greece and medieval Europe built their success on the same system of careless banking. They grew food and transported it long distances to feed a growing population. They cashed in on the fertility without paying back the bank. This worked for a while, but ultimately the
soils stopped producing.

Among the most important ingredients for fertility is nitrogen. Plants demand it; without it, they cannot grow. Nitrogen can be restored to the soil in two ways. The first is through leguminous plants like beans and peas (or, in Klaas’s example, clover), which “fix” nitrogen from the air.

The other is through manure, which contains nitrogen (in the form of either ammonium or organic material) as well as other valuable nutrients. Historically, it was held in such high esteem for its value to the farm that, as late
as the 1900s, a French girl from the countryside had her
dowry measured by the amount of manure produced on her family’s farm. But this method of fertilization has a couple of drawbacks. Not all of manure’s nitrogen is available to the soil. And it’s a time-consuming process: animals graze slowly, and as long as they’re doing so, the land isn’t available for growing food.

Farmers found their solution in 1840 with the publication of
Chemistry in Its Application to Agriculture and Physiology
, by the German chemist Justus von Liebig. Rather than recycle nutrients, Liebig suggested that farmers could simply add certain chemical amendments to the soil. He reduced soil fertility to just three nutrients indispensible for plant growth: nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium—N-P-K, in shorthand.

It seems crazy to think that soil’s rich biological fertility could be ignored in favor of just three chemical elements. But from a farmer’s point of view, the logic is tantalizing. If it’s the minerals in manure that provide fertility, why not just add in the minerals and forget the manure altogether? Age-old and laborious farming techniques no longer seemed so important when a one-way transfer of nutrients proved not only possible but also highly efficient.

David Montgomery, in his book
Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations
, argues that Liebig’s discovery was a pivotal point in humans’ understanding of the universe, in that it showed us how to manipulate nature:

Now a farmer just had to mix the right chemicals into the dirt, add seeds, and stand back to watch the crops grow. Faith in the power of chemicals to catalyze plant growth replaced agricultural husbandry and made both crop rotations and the idea of adapting agricultural methods to the land seem quaint . . . large-scale agro-chemistry became conventional farming.

If the death of wheat is impossible to pin on any single thing—a “conjugation of seemingly unrelated events”—the demise of soil is more transparent.
There was motive (farmers working to produce as much as possible), justification (increasingly exhausted soils), and now the means (science). Liebig’s findings opened the door for a few simple drivers of plant growth to replace the natural complexity of healthy soils.

Liebig’s N-P-K model might have revolutionized farmers’ thinking, but it did not do it overnight. Initially, at least, buying minerals was prohibitively expensive.

Another German chemist named Fritz Haber would help change that. In 1909, Haber succeeded in tapping into the atmosphere’s reservoir of nitrogen gas and turning it into molecules useful to living things. Like legumes, his new process “fixed” nitrogen, but in a handy and highly concentrated chemical form that farmers could simply feed to their soil. This Haber-Bosch process (Carl Bosch gets credit for upsizing the invention, in 1913, to factory scale) produces liquid ammonia, the raw material for making nitrogen fertilizer. By the time World War II was over, some of the munitions factories that had produced so abundantly for the war effort had been converted, in some cases literally overnight, to producing chemical fertilizer. (Ammonium nitrate is also the key ingredient in explosives.) Suddenly our attention turned from winning the world war to winning the war with nature.

If there is such a thing as a smoking gun in the murder of soil, this was probably it. Natural limits on crop growing became irrelevant. As long as there was nitrogen (the air has a limitless supply) and the energy to run ammonia factories (which, thanks to the growth of the petroleum industry, there was), farmers would never again need to run animals on farmland or rotate their crops. Specialization was suddenly not only possible but practical.

Writer and journalist Michael Pollan, who’s often described the pitfalls of an industrialized food chain, sees this relentless drive to monoculture as the
“
original sin” of agriculture. Monocultures breed more monocultures: once you’ve determined what it means to be efficient, and you have the technology to do it, why wouldn’t you, for instance, remove cows and haying from your farm and just grow corn?

Which is exactly what happened.
In 1900, diversification (at least on some level) was inherent to agriculture; 98 percent of farms had chickens, 82 percent grew corn, and 80 percent raised milk cows and pigs. Less than a hundred years later, only 4 percent of farms had chickens, 25 percent grew corn, 8 percent had milk cows, and 10 percent raised pigs. And, in many cases, the farms producing these commodities did so exclusively.

Armed with synthetic fertilizers and new plant varieties (bred to soak up more and more nitrogen), grain farmers saw incredible results. Wheat yields at least doubled between 1900 and the 1960s. And corn showed even more staggering increases. Today we’re growing corn on fewer acres yet harvesting four times as many bushels (10.8 billion in 2012, versus 2.7 billion in 1900 ).