Letter from the Land-April 1, 2002

The Dirt on Corn & Soybeans

By Brian DeVore

CLARKS GROVE, Minnesota—When is the last time you saw a soil scientist receive a standing ovation?

Such a thing happened on a recent Saturday morning in March at the Clarks Grove First Baptist Church, just off Interstate 35 in southern Minnesota. The receiver of the accolades was Gyles Randall, a doctor of dirt at the University of Minnesota's Southern Research and Outreach Center in Waseca. The occasion was the annual meeting of the South Central Chapter of the Sustainable Farming Association of Minnesota. The people doing the clapping were crop, livestock, seed and vegetable farmers. Ironically, Randall was cheered by the farmers after an hour-long PowerPoint presentation that bailed out bad news by the bucketful. His message? The corn-soybean cropping system that dominates much of southern Minnesota, and the Midwest, is not sustainable.

Randall has been studying soil, cropping systems and the interaction between the two for more than 30 years. "I've seen a lot of changes," he told the 30-some farmers that were crammed into one of the church's classrooms. "Some of these changes I've seen in the last few years are very disturbing to me as a soil scientist."

Namely, plantings of hay, pasture and small grains-systems that protect the soil and help disrupt pest cycles-have plummeted to all time lows. Researchers at the Southwest Minnesota Research and Outreach Center near Lamberton have put together a series of charts that show how a two-crop rotation of corn and soybeans has replaced a system that, at the turn of the century, included wheat, oats, barley, rye, alfalfa, and pasture. Ninety-one percent of the cropped acreage in a nine-county area of Minnesota is now planted to either corn or soybeans. This pattern has tracked throughout the Midwest.

This shift to more row crops has simplified the agricultural landscape, says Randall. The environmental result has been devastating.

"I've never seen as much erosion as I have in the last couple of years."

It's not just soil we're losing. Since 1973, Randall has been tracking nitrate-nitrogen levels in drainage tile lines running under southern Minnesota test plots. He has found that nitrate-nitrogen losses from corn and soybean fields can be 30 to 50 times higher than from land planted to perennial plant systems such as hay or grass. That means more contamination of water all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico.

Randall lays a lot of the blame for the unsustainability of agriculture on a Federal farm policy that pays farmers to plant row crops like corn and soybeans, and penalizes them for diverse systems that utilize pasture, hay, small grains and livestock. Change that policy, he says, and we will take a big step toward making today's agriculture sustainable. Maintain the status quo, he warns, and risk trashing the Midwest's rich soil resource beyond repair. With the soil will go the farmers. And with the farmers will go the farm communities.

In August 2001, Randall created a bit of a hubbub in the agricultural community when he went public with his concerns and published a short commentary that appeared in newspapers and on the Internet. The scientist has received grief for his views, particularly from farmers who receive plump government subsidy checks for planting lots of corn and soybeans. However, Randall says many of those same people know they are on a dead-end road.

"I've had a lot of large, large growers identify with what I'm saying. They've made a lot of money off this system, but feel trapped."

Randall's message, although hard to digest for much of agriculture, goes down easily in Clarks Grove. Farmers who are proud that they use stewardship methods such as diverse rotations, perennial plant systems and conservation tillage are nodding their heads. They respect Randall's courage for telling the truth and then admitting his "life would be a whole lot easier" if he had kept his mouth shut. They also like that a respected land grant scientist is saying their kind of farming is an asset to society.

Dwight Ault, who raises crops and livestock near Austin, thanks Randall and admits that his commentary, "…really moved me." Dick Thompson, a sustainable farming pioneer from Iowa who is scheduled to speak next, shakes the scientist's hand. Ault and Thompson are two of the many farmers who have spent decades hammering their heads against the dense dogma that there is only one way to do agriculture.

Then comes the standing ovation from the rest of the room, a mix of farmers who range in age from 20-something to over 80. It's only a couple dozen people, and they are definitely a choir that's just been preached a very agreeable sermon. But in the tight confines of the church classroom, their clapping sounds like thunder.

Brian DeVore is the editor of the Land Stewardship Letter. The Land Stewardship Project encourages distribution and republication, with proper credit, of this commentary. For the text of Gyles Randall's commentary on the corn-soybean system, log onto www.extension.umn.edu/extensionnews/2001/IntensiveCornSoybeanAgriculture.html.