The official newsletter of the Land Stewardship Project
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1999 VOL. 17, NO. 4
The 3 F’s: Farming, Fertilizing & Fishing
The growing zone of oxygen-deprived water in the Gulf of Mexico is sending experts in search of answers. Maybe their first stop should be Dan Specht’s farm.
By Brian DeVore
Donald Lirette lives in Louisiana’s Terrabonne Parish, which is to Gulf of Mexico fishing what Pennsylvania’s Lancaster County is to farming — roughly half the state’s commercial anglers reside in the parish. His part of the bayou alone is home to nine fish processing plants. So it’s no surprise that Lirette, who is the president of the Terrabonne Fishermen’s Organization, has long been involved in local efforts to protect the Gulf’s commercial and recreational fisheries. But several years ago it became clear that conserving such a resource was going to take more than making sure passing ships weren’t dumping their waste on spawning grounds. It was the early 1980s and Lirette was fishing for shrimp, using "try nets" to determine if it was worth dropping bigger nets.
"As soon as that try net would hit the deck, it would smell decomposed," the Cajun recalls. "Even the hermit crabs were dead, and.nothing kills hermit crabs. I just kept traveling and traveling and then I realized this wasn’t local."
In fact, it was the harbinger of a problem that has linked one of the most productive agricultural regions in the world with one of its most vital fisheries. Within a few short years, the "hypoxic" (low oxygen) zone forming in Lirette’s backyard has become one of the biggest environmental issues of the decade. And the cause, according to a growing community of scientists, is excessive fertilizer and manure runoff from Midwestern farms. How society deals with this problem may have a significant impact not only on the future of the Gulf, but the future of sustainable, family-farmer based agriculture in the Upper Midwest. The Gulf hypoxia issue has become the ultimate example of how what is done on a farm in Minnesota or Iowa has an impact downstream, way downstream.
"This is a problem that is enormous in scale," says William Mitsch, a professor of natural resources at Ohio State University. "We are asking for solutions from the Upper Midwest for the Gulf."
And it starts with individual farmers like Dan Specht.
Upstream-downstream
More than 1,000 miles upstream from Lirette’s bayou, Specht finishes up hog and cattle chores, hops in his pickup truck and winds his way down to the Mississippi River, just a few minutes drive away. This particular summer evening, he has fishing gear in the back, northeast Iowa soil under his fingernails, and nutrient runoff on the mind. That’s not unusual. It’s difficult for the farmer to separate his various passions — even if they seem to conflict.
"I’m trying to be more efficient in my nutrient cycling," says the soft-spoken Specht as he guides the pickup in a 500 foot drop in elevation past corn, soybeans, alfalfa and pastures before hitting the heavily timbered river bottom. "The thing is that corn and beans is not a very complex rotation. It’s a real leaky system. It’s annual, warm season row crops, and it’s the middle of June before the roots start picking much up. Before you know it, your drainage tile lines are running full of nutrients the whole months of April, May and June."
That’s a succinct description of the beginnings of the Gulf’s ecological problems. Those nutrient-rich tile lines eventually drain into creeks and ditches, which then dump their loads into larger waterways, which empty into the Mississippi, the 10th largest river in the world. Eventually, this river rolls into the Gulf, carrying with it the waste from an agricultural system that generates 52 percent of all U.S. farm receipts — $98 billion annually.
Key research reports released this spring and summer paint a damning picture of Midwestern agriculture’s contribution to the largest marine hypoxic zone in the Western Hemisphere. Analyses done by a federally mandated Nutrient Task Force, as well as the Council for Agricultural Science and Technology, have concluded that excessive nutrients are the cause of the Gulf’s woes. Nitrogen, which is ubiquitous in Midwestern farm country, is particularly guilty, say scientists. In fact, nutrients to some extent are responsible for making the Gulf such a rich fishery. But when too much of a good thing hits that salty water, it sets off a fish-killing chain reaction. A super-growth of phytoplankton results, which in turn causes over-production of bacteria. All of this eats up oxygen at an extraordinary rate, particularly close to the bottom. That produces a zone so low in oxygen that the fish flee — or die.
Although not technically a "dead zone," as it’s been portrayed in news reports, the region is low enough in oxygen to qualify for the intensive care unit. Lirette says this affects the fishing business in two ways. First it requires shrimpers and others to travel further and further to fill their nets. But perhaps even more importantly, the hypoxic zone serves as a biological force field that blocks fish from traveling between spawning grounds and other parts of the Gulf. Even though it represents only about 1 percent of the Gulf’s total area, this necklace of sick water (it’s almost 300 miles wide) is in a strategic location when it comes to the region’s ecological health. It now stretches from the mouth of the Mississippi past where the Atchafalaya River enters the Gulf. Between those two waterways is one of the richest aquatic systems in the world.
By the early 1980s, shrimp catches were dropping dramatically in areas where bottom waters were hypoxic. In the hardest hit areas, a boat hauling a 40-foot net for six hours might not catch a single shrimp, according to marine biologists. Shrimpers can often fill out their quotas by going to the edge of the zone, where escaping aquatic life is heavily concentrated, but people like Lirette worry about the long-term future of the Gulf’s sport and commercial fisheries, which together produce $2.8 billion in economic activity annually. Fisheries in areas like the Black Sea and France’s Sommons Bay have been devastated as a result of hypoxia.
The Gulf’s hypoxic zone appears to be growing. Between 1985 and 1992 it averaged about 3,000 to 4,000 square miles. There’s little doubt the zone fluctuates with the amount of fresh water flowing into the Gulf from up north. It disappeared late in the summer of 1988, which was a time of severe drought in the Midwest. And after the catastrophic flood of 1993, the size of the hypoxic area doubled to 7,000 square miles, making it twice the size of Chesapeake Bay. Then the zone shrunk to pre-flood levels, leading some to believe that it was a temporary phenomenon influenced solely by the amount of fresh water making its way into the Gulf.
But the relief was temporary. In late July it was announced by scientists that the oxygen-short zone for 1999 was the largest on record. At 7,728 square miles, it’s now almost one-quarter the size of Lake Superior. To have the zone grow at a time when precipitation levels were not extremely high is baffling to scientists.
Organizations such as the Fertilizer Institute, American Farm Bureau Federation and the National Corn Growers Association dispute there is a strong connection between Midwestern ag nutrients and dead fish in the Gulf. But the scientific evidence, some of which is based on research emerging from hypoxic zones in other parts of the world, is becoming increasingly hard to dismiss.
Between 1955 and 1996, nitrogen concentrations in the lower Mississippi River tripled. About half of that nitrogen is from commercial fertilizer and 30 percent is from livestock manure. And most of it is coming from the Corn Belt: Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and southern Minnesota. In fact, the upper Mississippi basin (above the Missouri River) comprises about 15 percent of the drainage area of the Mississippi basin but contributes more than 50 percent of the nitrogen discharged to the Gulf, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
But groups like the Fertilizer Institute have a point when they argue that nitrogen fertilizer use in the U.S. has actually leveled off during the past few years, and most individual farmers are using less. So why is the hypoxic zone growing? Part of the reason is that Midwestern fields are so saturated with nitrogen, and so much water is running off them, thanks to artificial drainage, that it could take several years to see positive effects down in the Gulf, says Dennis Kenney, director of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture. Studies have shown that high levels of nitrogen can show up in tile lines even if it’s been years since fertilizer was added to the land they drain.
In a six-year study of southwest Minnesota tile drainage systems, soil scientist Gyles Randall found that nitrate-nitrogen losses from continuous corn and corn-soybean systems were about 37 times and 35 times higher, respectively, than from land planted to perennial hay crops or in perennial grass systems. The study period took place when precipitation levels ranged from 36 percent below normal to 66 percent above normal.
Between 1970 and 1992, researchers with the Michael Fields Institute measured nitrogen levels in water draining from crop fields in Illinois. Changing a field from a rotation of corn, oats and hay to corn-soybeans and increasing the rate of nitrogen fertilizer by about 18 percent almost doubled the nitrogen concentration in the drainage water.
Keeping it covered
Specht, who’s been farming near the Iowa community of McGregor for almost 30 years, is willing to shoulder some of the blame for gasping fish in the Gulf. Whether the main hypoxia-causing culprit is too many nutrients, too much water flow or some combination of the two, he believes the key is for farmers like him to keep their runoff to a minimum. That’s a challenge on the more than 500 acres of steep land that produces crops and livestock for Specht. Local squirrel hunters joke about hiking to the top of backbone-like ridges and pointing their .22 rifles down at the trees, rather than up, and that’s not much of an exaggeration.
Specht produces beef on his steepest ground using management intensive grazing. This system, which consists of moving livestock in concert with the rate of the growth of the grass, has proven to be an effective method for making soil- and water-holding perennial plant systems pay on a farm. It also allows nutrients in the form of manure to be spread evenly across the landscape at a rate the plant system can make use of. This means he doesn’t have to raise corn and soybeans on his most erosive acres.
On the rest of the land he farms, Specht uses a sophisticated mix of rotations and cover crops. One method the farmer uses is to sow oats in early spring. Later, after the field is covered with growing oat plants, he disks them up and plants corn. Specht is also excited about a recent experiment where he seeded soybeans and rye together using a fertilizer spreader. The rye helps suppress weeds while covering the soil.
The result of all this effort? A soil surface protected by green vegetation throughout much of the growing season, rather than just a few months in the summer. These plants soak up nitrogen as they grow and create a soil structure that stymies runoff.
Such a system can be labor-intensive, but it hasn’t hurt Specht’s production. He recently won a local yield contest with a stand of organic soybeans that produced more than 77 bushels per acre, bettering his county’s average by 30 bushels.
Livestock plays a major role in managing nutrients on Specht’s farm. It’s difficult to justify the production of small grains like oats and forages like alfalfa, let alone pasture grasses, if there are not hogs or cattle to add value to these commodities.
Before doing his chores, Specht placed on his kitchen table a graph showing that before 1958, Iowa had about the same amount of row crops (corn and soybeans) and non-row crops (small grains and hay). After that, the two trend lines part company in dramatic fashion. Non-row crops are now down to levels not seen since 1860. Meanwhile, row crop plantings have skyrocketed, mostly in the form of soybeans. In addition, pasture acres are now below what they were in 1900. This trend has tracked in other Midwestern states. If one were to lay this chart over a graph showing how much nitrogen enters the Gulf every year, the parallel rising lines would be hard to dismiss as mere coincidence: as more corn and beans were planted and more pasture, hay and small grains went by the wayside, nitrogen levels in the water went up. Corn is a nitrogen-hungry plant. Soybeans fix their own nitrogen, but present the problem of only covering the soil for a short time during the growing season. In addition, specialized mega-livestock operations with liquid manure lagoons often inject their waste into field soil during the fall, after crops are harvested and there’s no biological activity available to use up the nutrients.
Specht is right: The dominant system of Midwestern agriculture leaks nitrogen like a bucket full of bullet holes.
"The system of agriculture where you’ve got these livestock operations eating the crops they grow on the farm is way more efficient at recycling those nutrients, especially if you can use forages and small grains as part of your rotation," says Specht, who has done on-farm nutrient management research with the Practical Farmers of Iowa. "You’re going to be keeping your nutrients where they belong."
The farmer’s latest project is a low-cost "hoop house" for raising hogs. This allows him to use bedding from corn stalks and straw from small grains to captured nutrients in the form of manure.
"I’m always working on my nutrient cycle," says Specht.
Why this desire to zealously control nutrient movement? Part of Specht’s concern about what runs off his fields is based on a big picture view of the effect he is having on downstream neighbors. That was reinforced a few years ago when, as a guest of the Mississippi Riverwise Partnership, he visited the Gulf and met with commercial fishermen and women.
"It’s really fragile. It’s vast, but it’s fragile," he says of the area where the Mississippi meets the Gulf.
But as Specht pulls into a boat landing below McGregor and meets up with frequent fishing partner and fellow farmer Jeff Klinge, it becomes clear he is concerned about the local effects of his farming methods as well. While Klinge guides a small aluminum boat out through the backwaters, the two farmers point out the natural beauty of the area and talk passionately about fishing. A bald eagle coasts overhead while a great blue heron stands on a point as still as a lawn ornament. Tent caterpillar webs droop from trees along the water’s edge, just a few yards from where a Burlington Northern freight train is rattling the bank. Massive barges ply their way up and down the main channel as the farmers begin trolling for walleye. This area is vast and fragile too.
And rural residents in this region have been even more aware of where ag nutrients end up since the 1980s, when a vast research project called Big Spring was started here. Well water in the area is contaminated with nitrogen, posing a public health threat, particularly to babies. Much of the blame for that contamination can be placed on a Swiss cheese-like limestone geological system called "karst," which underlies much of northeast Iowa’s topsoil. It allows water, and anything that’s along for the ride, to easily flow through. Big Spring is tracking the source of the nitrogen that’s making its way from the surface into underground water supplies. The ongoing research has shown that agriculture is the main culprit. But it is also showing that techniques such as tillage that disturbs the soil as little as possible, management intensive grazing and diverse rotations that consist of small grains and forages can significantly reduce nutrient runoff.
Good deeds punished
As night closes in and the two fishing farmers head back to the landing, they begin discussing a subject they obviously feel passionately about: how to stay economically viable while taking care of the land. Both Specht and Klinge raise certified organic crops and beef. This has forced them to mind their nutrient cycle — how much nitrogen, phosphorous, etc., they bring onto the farm, and how much eventually leaves it — even more. They can’t rely on chemically-based fertilizer to fill out those ears of corn. This means keeping that ground covered and making efficient use of all the nutrients on the farm — manure from livestock and green manure from plants.
"Organic farmers are forced to mind their nutrient cycle whether they realize it or not," says Klinge.
The price premiums they receive for their organic crops and livestock help the bank account a little, but that market is still on wobbly legs.
And while the government pours millions of dollars into investigating the causes and solutions for hypoxia, farmers like Specht and Klinge are punished financially for cutting the amount of nitrogen they send down the river.
In fact, despite a lot of rhetoric about using the so-called "Freedom to Farm" law to end a 60-year-old system that rewards farmers for raising corn on the same fields year after year, recent government action has supported the status quo. In response to disastrously low commodity prices, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has been providing loan deficiency payments to farmers who raise row crops. If you have pasture land, forage crops, etc., you’re out of luck.
Will a catastrophe-in-the-making like hypoxia finally prompt the scientific and political communities to seriously reexamine our support of farming systems that are addicted to leaking nitrogen? The hypoxia report released by the federal Nutrient Task Force does make a passing reference to the role diversified farming can play in reducing nutrient loading: "Significant reductions in losses can be achieved by...changing from row to perennial cropping systems; planting a cover crop during fall and winter; switching from conventional to reduced tillage... ."
Down on the bayou, Lirette isn’t waiting passively for Midwestern agriculture to find the right cork for its leaky nutrient cycle. His home state has certainly played a role in trashing aquatic systems that are key to the survival of species such as shrimp and blue crabs. Lirette and others are working hard to reclaim sick estuaries, and they’ve made some progress. But the veteran waterman has lived on the delta long enough to know that upstream problems can quickly wipe out downstream solutions.
"I’ve been to Iowa and Minnesota; all I ever saw was cornfields and hogs, and I know all those things have runoff," he says. "But we’re guilty too. This is a good exercise in trying to get people to work together."
COVER STORY SIDEBAR:
Nitro-powered farming: We've harnessed the power of fertilizer...or have we?
"Nitrogen has always been key," says farmer Dan Specht. "If you don’t have enough it’s always a problem."
Specht is referring to his northeast Iowa fields when he makes that comment. But he could just as easily have been talking about the Brazilian rain forest. Nitrogen makes the biological world go ‘round. Just about every ecosystem in the world — from pristine wilderness to an Iowa corn field — has its production limited by the amount of nitrogen available to it biologically. There has always been plenty available in the atmosphere, but it’s not always in forms plants (or humans) can use. In fact, for most of the world’s history only lightning or specialized bacteria had the ability to convert atmospheric nitrogen into biologically usable forms.
But after World War II, factories that had made ammonium nitrate for explosives were suddenly available to help pry a living from the land. This has led to a dubious achievement in less than half a century: humans now fix more nitrogen than nature does.
"What this means is we have taken over the nitrogen cycle. Now there’s nothing inherently wrong with that, OK, but it’s not completely clear to me that you want a major geo-chemical cycle run by chemical companies," says Calvin Alexander, a University of Minnesota professor of geology and geophysics.
As a result, humans have roughly doubled the rate of nitrogen input into the terrestrial nitrogen cycle, and that rate is still rising, according to the journal Ecological Applications. Scientists are raising concerns that our super-abundance of nitrogen is doing everything from reducing biodiversity in prairies and aging our soils before their time to contributing to the greenhouse effect.
A photo from a 1953 high school chemistry textbook tells the story of why man-made nitrogen fertilizer became the cornerstone of modern row-crop production so quickly. It shows a stand of corn that’s short, spindly and pale in color. Right next to it are two rows of corn that are tall, green and succulent. The sickly looking stand received no nitrogen fertilizer and produced 24 bushels per acre, according to the photo caption. The green giants got nitrogen and produced 110 bushels per acre.
Francis Childs took that lesson to heart. According to the National Corn Growers Association, the Manchester, Iowa, farmer produced 338 bushels to the acre — more than double the average for his county — in 1998 to become the nation’s corn growing king. Childs put 510 pounds of nitrogen fertilizer on each acre of the winning field. The second place winner put 278 pounds of nitrogen per acre on to produce a yield of 274 bushels per acre.
Consider this: A site in northeast Iowa produced drainage water that exceeded the drinking water standard by 400 percent when only 180 pounds of nitrogen per acre was applied on corn.
Granted, most farmers aren’t applying 510 pounds of nitrogen on each acre of corn they produce. In fact, in most cases farmers have dramatically reduced application rates. In 1985, the average Iowa crop farmer applied 145 pounds of nitrogen on each acre of corn raised. By 1995, that rate had dropped to 120 pounds. When spread over millions of corn acres, that adds up. But the emphasis Childs placed on his nitrogen applications to win the national yield contest shows just how key nitrogen fertilizer still is to the Corn Belt. It’s no accident the Upper Midwest accounts for more than 80 percent of the nation’s corn crop and better than half of the amount of commercial nitrogen fertilizer applied.
The cost of nitrogen fertilizer is still relatively cheap (it makes up less than 10 percent of the total input costs of producing a bushel of corn) and farmers often apply more than the crop needs because of its tendency to leach out of the soil.
"There are very good economic reasons for over-application of nitrogen," says Purdue University agricultural economist Otto Doering.
The importance of nitrogen to corn production explains why groups such as the Fertilizer Institute and the American Farm Bureau Federation have reacted so strongly to a recent report that concluded we need to reduce its use significantly if we are to solve the Gulf of Mexico’s hypoxia problem. The report, which was done by the federal government’s Nutrient Task Force, included an economic cost-benefit analysis conducted by Doering and other researchers. They concluded that reducing fertilizer use by 20 percent and restoring five million acres of wetlands in the river basin would help cut nitrogen loads by 20 percent. Reducing nitrogen loads by less than that didn’t help meet goals of reducing nitrogen loads in the basin, and reducing it by more imposed too high a cost on agriculture, according to Doering.
The analysis also found that as fertilizer use is restricted and more wetlands are restored, per-farmer profitability goes up in the basin: there will simply be less corn around to glut the market. For example, in one scenario Doering and his colleagues ran through the computer, cutting nitrogen use by 60 percent moved 42 percent of the crop acreage out of the basin. The result? The corn price went up 65 percent. However, the economist warns, someone, somewhere, will continue to raise corn.
"What we are successfully able to do then is export the pollution to another part of the country, which is a very acceptable thing to do unless you live in another part of the country."
The ag drainage express: Tile lines have made the Midwest what it is today: a top producer of corn, soybeans…and nutrient runoff
Artificial drainage, just like nitrogen, has been a major player in making modern agriculture so successful at producing mass quantities of commodities. It’s estimated that 40 percent of the Minnesota River basin alone is so wet that it needs some sort of drainage to produce crops.
But according to several scientific analyses released this year, drainage has also been a major player in carrying excess nutrients to the Gulf of Mexico, where they contribute to the growing hypoxic zone. What tiling does is short-circuit the system by sending water on an express train into rivers, eliminating any opportunities for nutrients to be captured by vegetation and soil along the way. Water that might normally take decades or even centuries to move from fields to waterways now goes through the system in a matter of hours.
"Tile drainage is one of the most important mechanisms for transfer of nitrate-nitrogen to the Mississippi basin," says David Mulla, a University of Minnesota soil scientist.
Drainage has been undertaken in the Midwest since the 1800s, when farmers hand-dug ditches. Now it’s a sophisticated process that involves a labyrinth of plastic pipes, called tiles, that are buried in fields. They are designed to remove water from field surfaces within 24 hours; corn and other crops suffer severe damage when submerged longer than that. It pays off big time. An analysis by the University of Minnesota’s Vernon Eidman shows that good subsurface drainage of poorly drained soils can increase per acre corn yields 32 to 36 bushels and soybean yields eight to 10 bushels above the levels obtained with good surface drainage alone. Eidman estimates that in one case a farmer could make $450 per acre in drainage investments, and get a net return of $60 an acre.
"Even with today’s tough commodity prices, we’re looking at a five to 15 percent rate of return on a drainage investment," says Jerry Wright, an agricultural engineer.
It was thought for a time that just about all the land that could be tiled had been. But yield monitors and other aspects of "precision farming" have allowed farmers to determine more precisely than ever what effects, say, a wet patch is having on the productivity of the farm. Suddenly, tiling has become economical in areas not thought so before. Tiling contractors report being busier than ever, and some farmers are even buying their own equipment.
Agricultural engineers and farmers are experimenting with drainage alternatives, such as tile inlets that allow water to percolate through soil and vegetation first, using wetlands to filter water and spacing the tile lines further apart. Such methods are effective at reducing the amount of nitrogen leaching into local waterways, but it’s unknown what long-term impact they can have on reducing nutrient loads in the Gulf.
And water movement experts like the University of Minnesota’s Calvin Alexander worry that all this tiling is being done during a decades long period when above-average moisture levels (as National Weather Service records show) are allowing us to get away with it. Tiling not only sends nutrients through the system intact, it also reduces opportunities for the water table to get recharged through percolation.
"Yield monitors show tiling works beautifully in a wet system. It’s going to be interesting to see what those same yield monitors say in a dry period," says Alexander. "A decade from now or two decades from now, whenever that precipitation curve turns around, we will be wishing we had that water back. And it’s going to be in the Gulf of Mexico with all those nitrates."
LSP & nutrient management
Through its involvement with the Sustainable Farming Systems Project, the Land Stewardship Project is working with the Minnesota Institute for Sustainable Agriculture (MISA), the Sustainable Farming Association of Minnesota and the Minnesota Project to determine the impact controlled grazing, conservation tillage and other practices have on water quality.
One phase of the project involves partnering scientists with farmers in the Chippewa (southwest Minnesota) and Sand Creek (Twin Cities area) basins. Both basins drain into the Minnesota River, one of the Mississippi's major sources of nutrient and other ag-related pollutants. Farmers participating in the research have agreed to have automatic water samplers buried in their fields. This research dovetails with the work of the Chippewa River Whole Farm Planning and Monitoring Team and the Sand Creek Project, two initiatives developed with LSP's assistance that help farmers team up with others to improve watersheds.
Initial findings indicate that sustainable farming systems contribute less nitrogen, phosphorous and sediment to the environment, according to Christopher Iremonger, a soil scientist working with MISA and a member of the Farming Systems team.
For more information, contact Audrey Arner or Terry Van Der Pol in LSP's Montevideo, Minn., office (320-269-2105), or Caroline van Schaik in the Twin Cities office (651-653-0618).
Hypoxia: What now?
The United States Congress is scheduled to take up the Gulf hypoxia issue early in 2000. The scientific basis for any decision federal lawmakers make to control hypoxia is the work the Mississippi River/Gulf of Mexico Watershed Nutrient Task Force has been doing the past few years. Formed in 1997 by the Environmental Protection Agency, the Task Force commissioned the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to conduct an assessment of the causes and consequences of Gulf hypoxia.
The result is Hypoxia in the Gulf of Mexico, an umbrella title representing six interrelated reports that were released earlier this year.
When Congress starts discussing the hypoxia issue next year, contact your representatives and tell them to consider the role sustainable agriculture techniques like management intensive grazing and diverse crop rotations can play in reducing nutrient runoff.
For more information on the latest hypoxia-related research, check out these resources:
o Hypoxia in the Gulf of Mexico, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 301-713-3074; http://www.nos.noaa.gov/
o Gulf of Mexico Hypoxia: Land and Sea Interactions, Council for Agricultural Science and Technology; 515-292-4512; http://www.cast-science.org
o The Role of the Mississippi River in Gulf of Mexico Hypoxia, sponsored by the Fertilizer Institute; 202-675-8250; http://www.tfi.org/
o "Nitrate Losses through Subsurface Tile Drainage in Conservation Reserve Program, Alfalfa, and Row Crop Systems," by G.W. Randall, et. al., Journal of Environmental Quality, Vol. 26, no. 5, Sept./Oct. 1997, pages 1240-1247.
o "Impact of agricultural management on nitrate concentrations in drainage water," by Walter A. Goldstein, et. al., American Journal of Alternative Agriculture, Vol. 13, No. 3, 1998, pages 105-110.
Chicken-fried farming
By David Kruse
In June, government statisticians made it official: the hog industry, as reflected in a U.S. Department of Agriculture hogs and pigs report, is becoming integrated and corporate like poultry. This report showed that despite record low prices during the past year or so, this nation’s hog herd is not shrinking. In fact, some mega-corporations actually expanded their herds during the preceding months, confounding all economic common sense. This report was nothing but bad news as far as the future of the independent hog farmer is concerned.
Is it an unalterable trend? Certainly if nothing is done to change it, yes it is.
Independent producers have made a miscalculation. They thought that in order to survive it required getting bigger than ever. While there are benefits to bigness, there are also pitfalls. In order to get big, many operations extended their capital which made them more, not less, vulnerable to a shake-out of the magnitude we’re experiencing today. It doesn’t matter if you are selling 1,000 head or 50,000 head of hogs annually, scale won’t save you. Access to capital and access to markets, not size, will decide who survives long term.
The eventual winners are already apparent. Strict risk management may prolong staying power but inevitably the ability to hedge profitability will be taken away as well. The lowest cost producer won’t necessarily be the survivor. Efficiency will not guarantee success. When corporations mount a takeover of an industry, it’s not due to economic right, it’s due to economic might.
The industrialization of agriculture isn’t coming about because the corporate operations are the more efficient producers. A friend of mine went to work in a corporate farrowing unit for a few weeks primarily to investigate how they operated. I’ve been urging him to write a book on the appalling corporate operation he witnessed. For example, at the end of a month employees killed a sow near farrowing and stripped her of her pigs to boost the live birth average. They lost a sow but gained more pigs overall, making their pigs-born-per-sow statistics look better to the boss (and the investors).
These aren’t farmers. Independent livestock producers are more efficient than corporates, but if corporates have the deeper pockets and are willing to absorb enough losses to force independents out of business, efficiency doesn’t matter.
Smithfield, Seaboard, Premium Standard Farms and Continental Grain are integrated or integrating so they sell pork, not hogs. Selling pork makes money and when it doesn’t, it loses a whole lot less than selling hogs. Without the ability to market pork, hog producers are toast. The integrators don’t plan on letting any independent producers survive, regardless of size. Even mega-hog pioneer Wendell Murphy is vulnerable, as we saw recently when Smithfield announced its intentions to purchase Murphy Family Farms.
How integrators absorb producers may vary. Some will be bought up and some will just be put under contract to work for nothing under the guise of self-employment. Oh, not entirely for nothing: the USDA says that contracted poultry producers make half of what they made pre-integration.
Current law, both federal and state, has proven impotent. The Packers and Stockyards Act is full of good intentions, but ineffective in practice. Iowa laws banning packers from owning hogs proved so easy for Smithfield Foods to sidestep they probably didn’t even need to consult their legal department to do it. A stand-in supplies his or her name as the "owner" of the hogs, then Carroll Foods and Smithfield gets the animals just the same as if they’ve technically owned them all along.
As it stands today, corporations are using superior financial might to conquer industry after industry. It’s no different than when warrior nations conquered and pillaged their neighbors with military muscle throughout history. It’s not ethnic cleansing, it’s economic cleansing. It is destroying the fabric of society and community in rural America, and the Air Force isn’t coming to the rescue. The corporations own the politicians and the public is complacent.
Farmers think corporations may get the livestock industries but not the land. Ha. When they get around to it, they’re coming for that, too. The dominoing subjugation of the different ag industries — poultry, pork, dairy, etc. — reminds me of the parable of the man who didn’t speak out when the Nazis first came for the Jews, then the Gypsies, and so on until there was no one left to speak out when they came for him.
The poultry industry is gone. The hog industry is gone. Grain farmers are silent to these events but their time is coming. They’ll drop your subsidies and then drop your land values as you’re competing against $500 per acre farmland in Brazil. They may let you farm if you can call it that, but you’ll be working for them too.
Industrialization has been sold as the future. I beg to differ. The restructuring being touted as progress does not resemble the principles and ideals that we’ve been taught represents America. It is incredible to me that this is occurring and so few are even conscious of what’s transpiring.
David Kruse is with CommStock Investments, Inc., which is based in Spencer, Iowa.
LETTERS:
Please help protect Barry
Dear Editor:
Many of us know how time-consuming and expensive it is to use the legal system to fight a feedlot that threatens to move in next door. But imagine this: Kristi and Doug O'Neill are working on their third feedlot battle.
The push behind their endurance is their only son Barry. Barry, now 11, contracted spinal meningitis when he was an infant. Barry suffered extreme damage from the infection. He is a cerebral palsy quadriplegic, blind, suffers from seizure disorder and has undergone feeding tube surgery to help stop him from inhaling fluid into his lungs after vomiting.
Barry's doctors at the Mayo Clinic have expressed concern about exposing Barry to hog odors. Barry cannot vomit because of the surgical feeding tube procedure. If the odor would make him gag, his parents would have to open the feeding tube to let him vomit. If the feeding tube were not opened, the vomit would aspirate into Barry's lungs, which would kill him.
The O'Neills have spent thousands of dollars on legal fees to stop the previous two feedlot permits from locating next to their home (and won!). The third factory farm proposal was denied by the Renville County Commissioners and then appealed by the feedlot owner. The feedlot owner won the appeal because of a technicality: Barry's medical records were not entered into the county's records and the county failed to build and document a record to defend its decision to deny the permit. The court has ruled that the county must grant the operation a permit with reasonable conditions. We're now working on reasonable conditions to add to the permit. When a child's life is at stake I'm not sure how to define "reasonable conditions."
I would like to ask you to help me help the O'Neills protect their son. They have hired an attorney to make sure we can legally get everything we can to protect Barry. Please help us raise the funds to cover the fees and expenses. Help us protect Barry! Contact: Protect Barry Project, 74548 360th St., Olivia, MN 56277.
—Julie Jansen
Olivia, Minn.
Easements offer lasting protection
Dear Editor:
I thoroughly enjoyed your article "Surprising land protection foes" in the June/July/August Land Stewardship Letter. However, it's important to clear up one point. In the article, you refer to a meeting in which a landowner expressed cynicism "about the forever nature of an easement [feeling] such a conservation tool would only last until the next official with a different agenda reversed the decision." Unfortunately, you granted him his point, albeit reluctantly, citing a telephone call from a farmer whose land was enrolled in the Agricultural Preserve Program and was being forcefully bought from him for a county road.
The Agricultural Preserves, Metropolitan Agricultural Preserves, and Green Acres programs all provide important benefits for landowners. They do not, however, entail the placing of conservation easements on the properties. They are essentially tax reduction and/or tax deferment programs. They reportedly do provide some additional protection against eminent domain proceedings, but they do not provide the protection that a conservation easement does. Conservation easements are governed by Minnesota Statutes Chapter 84C. In almost all cases, conservation easements are perpetual, running with the title of the land. Future landowners are bound by the terms of the easement.
Eminent domain is an express right of government agencies provided they can make the necessary and difficult legal case. A conservation easement cannot preclude the possibility of eminent domain. It does, however, prevent future development by private parties. And it certainly makes an eminent domain case much more difficult. The only known case of a Minnesota governmental agency seeking to exercise eminent domain over a property with a conservation easement was dropped when the agency realized how difficult it would be to undo the terms of the easement.
Conservation easements can be implemented in several ways. Whether donated to a group like the Minnesota Land Trust or established through a Purchase of Development Rights (PDR) or Transfer of Development Rights (TDR) program, easements provide lasting protection to help communities keep the landscapes they love.
—Michael Pressman
Director of Planning,
1000 Friends of Minnesota
St. Paul, Minn.
| WHAT'S ON YOUR MIND?
Got an opinion? Comments? Criticisms? We'd like to hear from you. Contact: Brian DeVore, Land Stewardship Letter, 2200 4th St., White Bear Lake, MN 55110; phone: 651-653-0618; fax: 651-653-0589; e-mail: bdevore@landstewardshipproject.org |
LSP NEWS:
Farmer-owned packing plant a go
After three years of wrestling with bureaucratic red tape, financing problems and a tough agricultural economy, an innovative pork processing initiative is finally getting off the ground in southwest Minnesota.
Construction will begin in November on the processing facility a mile outside of Dawson, says Dennis Timmerman, a Boyd, Minn., farmer and Land Stewardship Project member. Timmerman and more than 70 other hog farmers have invested in the $6 million facility, which is scheduled to go into operation in the spring. It will employ 45 people and have the ability to slaughter as many as 400 hogs a day. The group of farmers, called Prairie Farmers Co-op, plans on supplying hogs that are not fed growth-promoting antibiotics in their feed. As more studies raise alarm bells concerning antibiotic resistant bacteria developing in our food system, there is a growing market for meat not raised using subtherapeutic antibiotics.
The smallest members of Prairie Farmers Co-op produce 400 hogs a year for market; the largest, 2,000. Some use alternative methods such as hoop houses and deep straw bedding.
Timmerman says the small size of the processing plant (in comparison, corporate meat packers slaughter as many as 32,000 hogs a day) gives Prairie Farmers the flexibility to target niche markets.
"We'll be able to do some things the larger operators can't," he says. "We're pretty excited. We think it's going to be a good opportunity for people to know the source of the meat they're buying."
The co-op is in the process of developing it's own brand name label and has been in discussions with several retailers within Minnesota and elsewhere.
The plant's roots date to 1994, when Timmerman and other southwest Minnesota farmers started discussing ways of adding value to the hogs they raised. A few years later, it became clear a farmer-owned processing plant was needed, not just to add value, but to maintain market access for small- and medium-sized producers.
Despite rhetoric from politicians and government officials on the local, state and federal level about the need for farmers to take the initiative in adding value to their product, Prairie Farmers has run into a maze of bureaucratic barriers in accomplishing its goal. The U.S. Department of Agriculture finally helped out by providing loan guarantees for the building facilities and loans for farmers who are buying into the co-op. However, the Minnesota Legislature this year failed to provide $750,000 to help buy down the stock price so that more farmers could get involved in the co-op. This happened despite the fact that just a few months prior Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura awarded Prairie Farmers Co-op the Governor's Citizenship Award.
Timmerman says the facility would never have gotten as far as it did with lawmakers and government officials without the help of LSP and the Minnesota Farmers Union, and he'd like to see this be the first step in a small processing plant revolution.
"This process was much longer than we expected it would be," the farmer says. "But we'd like to see more of these."
For more information on Prairie Farmers Co-op, contact: Dennis Timmerman, RR-1, Box 69, Boyd, MN 56218; phone: 320-855-2311.
Getting factory pork out of local stores
Huge corporate hog factories like Premium Standard Farms and Murphy Farms are in the process of taking over meat case space in Twin Cities area grocery stores — sometimes under other names. An all out campaign to get factory-raised pork out of our grocery stores was launched by the Land Stewardship Project this summer. LSP's Policy Program circulated petitions calling for that pork to be replaced by environmentally sound, humanely raised alternatives, produced by local family farmers. The signed petitions will be presented to area retailers at meetings where we will ask them to take pork from factory operations out of their meat cases.
LSP is encouraging consumers to approach their local meat retailers and let them know that you want them to stock a more healthy, environmentally sound, locally produced alternative to factory pork. We are also looking for volunteers to help with this effort. Contact LSP's Policy office: 3203 Cedar Ave. S., Minneapolis, MN 55407; phone: 612-722-6377; e-mail: schul072@gold.tc.umn.edu
Farm produces milk on state park land
More than 140 people braved heavy summer showers on Aug. 21 to see what may be the only working modern dairy farm on state park land in the country.
Big Woods Dairy is 80 acres of grass on land that is part of Big Woods State Park, near Nerstrand, Minn. Phil and Dawn Brossard, along with their two children, Amber and Trent, use management intensive grazing on the operation to produce milk from a 50-cow herd. The land that the farm sits on was purchased by the Nature Conservancy in the early 1990s, which then turned it over to the state park (May/June 1996 LSL). The land will be turned into a oak savanna tract in 2006. But until then, the Brossards, who moved onto the place in 1997, are renting it. They are in the process of building up enough equity to purchase their own operation while showing how grass-based dairy farming can be environmentally and economically sound.
As part of the project, the farmers and other participants in the Big Woods Farm project are using the Land Stewardship Project's Monitoring Tool Box to gauge the operation's impact on the site. The results of this monitoring should be particularly interesting, considering the farm's proximity to the wildlands of the rest of the park.
The Big Woods Farm is a testament not only to the advantages of grass-based livestock production, but to what can happen when government agencies, private organizations and interested individuals agree to work together. Besides the Nature Conservancy, the Minnesota Department of Agriculture and the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources have worked on the project. Todd Lein, a former LSP staff member, helped launch the idea of a farm at the park. He has worked closely with LSP board members Dan French and Jim Erkel on the project.
For more information on the farm, call Wayne Monsen (651-282-2261) or Wayne Edgerton (651-297-8341).
Farm Beginnings group of 1999-2000 begins classes
The Land Stewardship Project's southeast Minnesota office will begin its 1999-2000 Farm Beginnings class in November.
Farm Beginnings is an educational, training and support program designed to help launch a new generation of farmers in southeast Minnesota through mentorships and hands-on experience. Farm Beginnings participants apprentice and network with a variety of successful, innovative farmers, and receive help in developing thorough business plans. Through this experience, participants learn about goal-setting, planning, business management, alternative marketing and low-cost, environmentally-sound farming practices. During the past two years, 19 beginning farmers have participated in the year-long program.
Heifer Project loan
Recently added to Farm Beginnings is a zero interest livestock loan program, made possible by a generous $250,000 grant from Heifer Project International. Through this program, LSP will offer livestock to beginning farmers who have successfully completed the Farm Beginnings program, demonstrated financial need and are prepared to care for the livestock.
Heifer Project International is a 55-year-old, international nonprofit organization that works to fight hunger, alleviate poverty and restore the environment.
During the next two years, 27 qualified beginning farmers will receive either: dairy or beef heifers and bulls; gilts and a boar; ewe lambs and rams; dairy goat does and bucks; or chicks and feed and equipment for a pastured poultry operation. The participating farmers will pay back their loans within three to six years by "passing on" animals to other beginners. Within seven years, more than 80 beginners will receive high-quality animals through the living livestock pool.
Some of the beginning farmers will be personally and financially prepared to use the livestock in their own independent operations, while others will use their livestock in on-farm partnerships which LSP will help to arrange.
For more information on Farm Beginnings or the Heifer Project loan program, contact Karen Stettler, 507-523-3366; stettler@landstewardshipproject.org
NPPC tries to obtain private data
Judge rules released information could be used to harass farmers
Are hog farmers "people" or "business entities?" On Sept. 10, attorneys for the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the National Pork Producers Council (NPPC) argued for the latter definition during a hearing before a U.S. District Court judge. They were trying to convince the judge, John Tunheim, that when farmers signed a petition calling for a vote to end the mandatory pork checkoff, they were making a business decision, and thus were forfeiting certain privacy rights afforded to "individuals."
The judge disagreed with these and other arguments made by the NPPC and USDA and on Sept. 20 granted a preliminary injunction ordering the government not to release the names, addresses and telephone numbers of the petition signers. On Oct. 1, the NPPC appealed Tunheim's decision. No decision on the appeal had been handed down by the court at the time of this writing.
This was the latest shot in the battle over the future of the pork checkoff, which generates some $50-$60 million annually for the National Pork Board and the NPPC.
On May 24, the Campaign for Family Farms submitted more that 19,000 hog farmer signatures to the USDA on a petition demanding a vote to end the mandatory pork checkoff. This is 27 percent more signatures than is needed to trigger a vote on the checkoff. The Campaign for Family farms is a multi-state coalition of farm groups, of which the Land Stewardship Project is a founding member.
Shortly after the names were turned over to the USDA, the NPPC demanded the names of all the hog farmers who signed the petition. The NPPC has argued that they need to verify that every petition signer is a bona fide farmer. The Campaign, with the help of Farmers' Legal Action Group attorney Lynn Hayes, then filed a lawsuit to prevent the release of the names. The Campaign believes that disclosing the information is an invasion of hog farmers' privacy and would have a "chilling effect" on the election process.
If the NPPC is given the information, it will have to be made available to anyone else who wants it, including meat packing corporations. Because meat packers benefit from checkoff-funded promotion efforts, they would have good incentive to retaliate against farmers who signed the anti-checkoff petition, says Mark Schultz, LSP's Policy Program Director.
Judge Tunheim agreed with that assessment. In a nine-page ruling, he argued that the NPPC did not need to validate the names itself, and that releasing the information would be an invasion of privacy and could subject farmers to "retaliation and harassment." The judge also expressed concern about how the information would be used.
"It is not unreasonable to assume that those entities with a financial stake in the pork checkoff program will use the information to attempt to influence the referendum vote," wrote Tunheim.
These legal wranglings are delaying a vote on the checkoff at a time when the hog industry is in a crisis situation. On Sept. 13, several LSP farmer-members joined 60 other hog producers and converged on the NPPC's Washington, D.C., office. They confronted NPPC head Al Tank and demanded that his organization stop trying to delay the vote. The farmers later met with the USDA officials who are responsible for setting the date for the vote. Schultz says both the NPPC and the USDA seem determined to delay the referendum as long as possible.
"Delaying a vote that 20 percent of American hog farmers have demanded is an outrage," he says. "We need the vote by mid-November."
MPCA chief visits sustainable farm
Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) Commissioner Karen Studders and other MPCA officials visited the Mike and Jennifer Rupprecht farm in August while touring several livestock operations in rural Minnesota. The Rupprecht farm was one of the only operations Studders visited that is not using large-scale confinement systems that require multi-million gallon manure storage systems. The Rupprechts, who are Land Stewardship Project members, use management intensive grazing on about half of their 250-acre farm to prevent soil erosion, reduce costs, cut antibiotic use and spread manure evenly across the land.
Studders' visit comes at a key time. Despite the proven environmental benefits of management intensive grazing, some state environmental officials are less than enthusiastic about this system of livestock production. In fact, some graziers have reported being threatened with regulatory action by MPCA staffers who know little about grass-based livestock production.
A few hours after leaving the Rupprecht farm, MPCA officials visited a large-scale confinement dairy operation that is in the process of expanding to 1,400 cows. Four large liquid manure lagoons were examined on that farm, and officials from the MPCA and Natural Resources Conservation Service explained how they helped the owners of the dairy set up this "state-of-the-art" waste handling system.
Margaret Grilley joins LSP staff
Margaret Grilley has joined the Land Stewardship Project as a database and web page administrator. Grilley has a bachelor's degree in sociology from the University of Minnesota and a master's degree in library and information studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Grilley has worked as a librarian for Robert S. Banks Associates, Allina Health Systems and SciMed Life Systems, Inc. She lives with her family in Mahtomedi, Minn., and is based in LSP's Twin Cities office.
LAND STEWARDSHIP LETTER FOLLOW-UP:
A periodic update of articles that have appeared in the Land Stewardship Letter
o August/September 1994: The Unsustainability of Factory Hogs
Premium Standard Farms, once the darling of Wall Street investors hoping to get rich on factory hogs, has agreed to pay $25 million to settle a lawsuit accusing it of violating Missouri's Clean Water Act. The agreement is the largest environmental settlement with any hog producer in the nation, according to the Aug. 16 New York Times.
Since it started operation in six Missouri counties in the early 1990s, Premium Standard has repeatedly been cited for contaminating local waterways with liquid manure.
o July/August 1995: Sustainable Agriculture's Dow Jones Index; January/February/March 1998: 1948-1998: Leopold's Legacy
Are we beating our soil erosion problem? That issue was raised when the Aug. 20 issue of the prestigious journal Science reported that since the 1930s erosion rates have dropped significantly in the Cook Creek Basin in southwestern Wisconsin. Coon Creek is one of the most studied watersheds in the country, and is where pioneering land conservationist Aldo Leopold did some of his initial work with farmers.
Stanley Trimble, who is a researcher with the Department of Geography and Institute of the Environment at the University of California, reported in Science that the rate of sediment making its way into waterways in the basin is about 5 percent of what it was 60 years ago.
In addition, the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that nationwide, soil erosion caused $29.7 billion in damage during 1997. Just a few years before, that figure was $44 billion.
However, some soil experts have pointed out two important points to keep in mind, First, just because there is less soil erosion than there was before doesn't mean we are at sustainable levels yet. And more soil conservation work has been done for a longer time on Coon Creek than just about any other basin in the country. Soil erosion rates there may not be typical for other watersheds. In addition, small- and medium-sized farms with diverse cropping systems — the cornerstone of long-term soil conservation — are starting to disappear from the Coon Creek basin.
o January/February 1996: Holding Urban Sprawl Accountable
The 13 counties that make up the Twin Cities metro are losing 36 square miles of farmland a year, according to a new analysis done by the University of Minnesota. That's equivalent to about 300 Mall of Americas annually, and the rate of farmland loss appears to have accelerated significantly within the past five years. The researchers who did the analysis, Thomas Wegner and Steven Taff, are currently trying to determine how much of that loss is due directly to urban sprawl.
o June/July 1997: Hog Farming's Real Revolution
Confined hogs don't taste as good as those that are allowed to run free, according to a comparison conducted at Texas Tech University. The study involved 1,765 free-range hogs and 1,053 confined animals. According to the July 26 issue of Feedstuffs, loins from non-confined hogs were rated better by taste panels for tenderness, juiciness, flavor intensity and "mouthfeel." No significant differences were found for percentage fat or moisture present in the two groups of hogs, says John McGlone, an animal behavior specialist who directed the study.
o August/September 1997: Anatomy of a Manure Spill
Catastrophic spill events aren't the only way factory farm manure lagoons can trash the environment. Recently, Iowa State University researchers found that approximately 70 percent of the 29 earthen waste structures studied in that state were leaking manure through their compacted earthen liners in excess of state standards. More than 40 percent of the studied lagoons were leaking at twice the acceptable rate. Researchers found the average lagoon depth to be 15 feet, and more than 30 percent were at least 20-feet deep. That's deep enough to intersect water tables in some areas.
And when that manure makes it into the groundwater, it carries with it more than excess nutrients, according to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. Researchers working with the federal agency sampled the manure being stored in several large-scale hog lagoons in Iowa. They found, among things, antibiotics and bacteria that were resistant to antibiotics. Antibiotics are routinely added to swine feed to promote growth in confinement systems.
That same study found similar contaminants in water flowing in the areas of the sample lagoons. The scientists involved with the study do not believe the contamination poses an immediate human health threat, but they're concerned just the same.
The samples were taken from drainage ditches, agricultural drainage wells, tile line inlets, earthen lagoons monitoring wells and a river. They "suggest the possibility of the movement of both chemical pollutants and microbial pathogens through soil and away from the ... animal manure lagoons, and by overland flow away from the site of manure application," concluded the researchers in a special report to the Iowa Department of Health.
o August/September 1997: Local Control of Mega-livestock Factories Wins in Court
A landmark court decision related to control of factory livestock facilities was reinforced on May 25. The Minnesota Court of Appeals ruled that the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) failed to do its job when it didn't require an environmental study for a proposed hog operation expansion. In September 1998, the Pope County District Court came to the same conclusion.
At issue was whether an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) study was required before Hancock Pro-Pork, Inc., was allowed to undertake a multi-site feedlot construction/expansion project in Pope and Stevens counties. In February 1998, a group called Pope County Mothers and Others Concerned for Health challenged the issuing of the permits.
The proposed expansion will concentrate tens of thousands of hogs in confinement facilities. In Minnesota, the state is supposed to prepare an EIS whenever a proposed project has the potential for having significant environmental impacts. However, this will be one of the first times a livestock facility has been required to do such a study.
Ironically, the MPCA's own research has shown that several individual manure lagoons in a region can add up to a larger air emissions problem. The courts ruled that the agency failed to consider such factors when issuing the permit.
"We conclude that these permit decisions went beyond mere administrative error to indicate that the MPCA was exercising its will, rather than its judgment in determining the project could go forward without an EIS," wrote the appeals court.
o April/May/June 1998: Sending the Land Grants to School
Veterinarians recently learned how to fight local governments trying to regulate factory hog operations, thanks to the University of Minnesota. On Sept. 18, a workshop called "Politics of Pork Production" was held as part of the College of Veterinary Medicine's Allen D. Leman Swine Conference. The workshop was targeted at veterinarians who work with large hog producers trying to build mega-facilities, but are running into opposition on the township, county or state level.
The chairman of the Leman Swine Conference organizing committee, Robert Morrison, certainly knows what opposition to mega-operations is all about. Last year, Morrison resigned as director of the University of Minnesota Swine Center after it was revealed he failed to report financial ties he had with the hog industry. In fact, at the time Morrison was a partner in Canadian Connection, a hog operation that was involved in a lawsuit with New Prairie Township, in western Minnesota.
Although university officials found that Morrison did not violate the institution's conflict of interest rules, they conceded that some of his actions fell through the cracks of what was considered appropriate.
o July/August 1998: Getting Sucker-Punched by Pesticides
When agricultural chemicals blend together, they can form a toxic cocktail, according to a five-year study, the results of which were published in the Jan/Feb/March issue of Toxicology and Industrial Health. The study, which was conducted by University of Wisconsin toxicology expert Warren Porter, involved exposing mice to mixtures of three commonly used farm chemicals: aldicarb, an insecticide; atrazine, a herbicide; and nitrogen-nitrate, a chemical fertilizer. The levels of chemical exposures used in the experiments were similar to those found in groundwater.
The exposed mice exhibited negatively altered immune, endocrine and nervous system functions. The effects were the most noticeable when a single pesticide was combined with nitrate fertilizer.
A 1993 National Academy of Sciences report concluded that fetuses, infants and children are more susceptible than adults to toxic pesticides.
A study published by the University of Minnesota's Vincent Garry in the March issue of Environmental Health Perspectives, found that between 1980 and 1989, men in 11 counties of northwestern Minnesota were three times more likely to die from thyroid cancer and twice as likely to die of bone cancer than their counterparts in non-ag areas of the state.
o January/February/March 1999: The Thing That Ate Agriculture
Merger mania continues unabated. In July, Cargill Inc. was given the go-ahead to buy Continental Grain Co., its largest competitor. According to the St. Paul Pioneer Press newspaper, the two companies control about 35 percent of the total U.S. grain sales, including 42 percent of the corn market.
In addition, Smithfield Foods, the world's largest pork producer and processor, announced in September that it was buying Murphy Family Farms, the nation's second largest pork producer. But Smithfield isn't done by a long shot. Tyson Foods' hog production operations will become a part of Smithfield as of Jan. 2. Smithfield's brands include, among others, Smithfield Premium, Gwaltney, Schneiders, Esskay and Ember Farms.
By the way, Rural Advancement Foundation International has created a new chart called, "Seed Industry Consolidation: Who Owns Whom?" It can be viewed on the group's web site: http://www.rafi.org
OFFICE UPDATES
POLICY UPDATE:
A productive summer for policy
By Mark Schultz
During the summer, the Land Stewardship Project's two committees that set the course for the Policy Program each initiated new efforts while deepening our work in priorities set last year. Here's a brief summary.
Livestock concentration As LSP members are aware, our organization scored an impressive victory when LSP and other members of the Campaign for Family Farms and the Environment submitted to USDA more than 19,000 signatures of hog farmers on the petition to end the mandatory pork checkoff. This should force a vote on the checkoff late this year or in early 2000. LSP's Livestock Concentration Committee decided that one of our two top priorities will be to follow through on the checkoff campaign through the referendum vote. We see the importance of ending the mandatory checkoff and reducing the power of the National Pork Producers Council (NPPC) as a major proponent of factory farms. But the checkoff campaign is also having impacts on other livestock agriculture issues.
For example, the NPPC recently reversed a strongly-held position opposing mandatory price reporting, paving the way for the current consideration of federal legislation. Mandatory price reporting, by requiring accurate public reporting of market and contract prices paid by packers on a daily basis, would be an important first step in exposing and reining in the kind of preferential premiums that everyone acknowledges are now being given to factory farms under contract to major packers.
Premiums based on volume paid to factory farms result in more factory farm expansion and environmental damage. By exposing and then decreasing the price preferences given livestock factories by packers, we will further cut into their economic viability.
LSP could have used the same staff and financial resources to put a lobbyist in Washington to work for price reporting, and would have gotten nowhere. But by organizing powerful, sustained actions by hog farmers as well as other rural and urban citizens, we have had a major impact.
The Livestock Concentration Committee also chose as a strategic focus a retail strategy to replace factory farm pork on supermarket shelves with pork raised on sustainable Minnesota family farms. Deb Munson, the policy program's summer intern, helped us kick off the effort, working with LSP volunteers to gather the signatures of 1,567 people on an open letter to area retailers.
We have identified stores that are stocking primarily factory farm pork (e.g., Smithfield, Premium Standard Farms, etc.), and will mount a campaign for store managers to meet with representatives of firms offering exclusively sustainable family farm pork products such as Niman Ranch and Prairie Farm Co-op, with a goal of providing shelf space for these sustainable and superior products.
We see this effort, which is similar to what LSP did in 1996 to get Erickson's grocery stores to drop Premium Standard Farms' products, as a win-win situation. It creates a market for the right kind of environmentally sound and humane production as well as delivers a blow to factory farms and corporate meat packers where it hurts them the most: the pocketbook. It is also a great way to engage and educate urban consumers about farm and food issues, and about corporate accountability and citizen action.
Federal farm policy LSP's Federal Farm Policy Committee is similarly doing some heavy lifting.
Having developed LSP's first-ever internally-generated farm policy options this spring, this committee has set out to actively engage other farmers and farm organizations in advancing proactive farm policy (see Jan/Feb/March 1999 LSL). The basic idea is that farming can either produce many of the "goods" that we want in our society — good jobs, clean air and water, wholesome food, healthy soils, wildlife habitat, egalitarian communities, farm safety, independence within a sense of community — or farming systems can degrade and destroy those same "goods." We believe federal farm policy ought to be based on a Farming Results Index (FRI) that allocates public investment in agriculture based on multiple goods that are produced by a farm. Public investment should not be allocated when the agriculture being practiced does not produce the goods. Look for more on this in future issues of the Land Stewardship Letter.
Antibiotics & livestock But the Committee is not confining itself to rewriting farm policy. Another major issue on which LSP is moving ahead has to do with the rising evidence of increasing numbers of bacterial species which are resistant to antibiotics used in human medicine. About half of the antibiotics used in the U.S. are used in animal agriculture. They are usually used at low, "subtherapeutic" doses which aren't strong enough to wipe out a bacterium. This practice is widely used in intensive confinement operations because the antibiotic acts as a growth promoter while decreasing the impact of diseases that are next to impossible to keep out of crowded factory farms.
But industrial agriculture's excessive use of antibiotics is also extremely dangerous, as it escalates a bacterial strain's rate of resistance to the drug, and thus its likelihood to pose a threat to human health. Many sustainable farmers are using humane and cost-effective practices, and don't need to use antibiotics in this way. So, while industrial agriculture pushes the drugs for their investors' profit, public health across the entire world is jeopardized. Just the kind of stuff that won't let sustainable farmers and socially conscious citizens (a.k.a. LSP members) sit still.
Give us a call at 612-722-6377 if you have any questions or would like to volunteer.
Mark Schultz is LSP's Policy Program Director.
WESTERN MINNESOTA UPDATE:
Western Minnesota office: Where have all the interns gone?
By Audrey Arner
We just sent another LSP intern back out into the world. Kira Pascoe is going back to her senior year at Macalester College enriched by a summer spent monitoring pastures, doing water infiltration tests, promoting field days, and learning effective team dynamics and small town living skills. Notably, this food activist came to understand the role of animals in sustainable agriculture and the broad dimensions of what it means to create a sustainable food system.
As we mark our fifteenth year working in western Minnesota, we cannot help but reflect on the interns that have spent anywhere from six weeks to a year with us. Most of these fervent and ambitious individuals have kept in touch, so fortunately we can share what we know about where life's paths have taken them.
Tonia Kittelson, an area native and farmer's daughter, assisted in early organizing of the Sustainable Farming Association. Since graduating from the University of Minnesota, she has traveled extensively, been working at Voyageur Outward Bound with kids at risk "up north" and is now heading to her latest "adventure education" stint in Michigan. Her recent postcard from Mexico says, "You helped me form my earliest ideas about the people I want to surround myself with: people with good hearts and meaningful passion."
Andrea Myhre came to LSP right after graduating from high school here in Montevideo. She demonstrated such ardor and organizing capability that she plugged right into the early work of Clean Up our River Environment (CURE) and acted as the point person for organizing the second annual Minnesota River Revival. Andrea graduated from Hamline where she researched Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farms in the Twin Cities area and immersed herself in the 1000 Friends of Frogs project. She and her husband Tag presently serve as Peace Corps volunteers in Mongolia where she is working on river quality projects and environmental education. She is looking for ideas to design a solar chicken house. In her last message Andrea reported, "Every day I feel more and more strongly that the most important educational experience I got was from hanging out with you guys."
And then there is the intern who, fortunately, is still with LSP. Lynn Lokken brought local groundedness and a love of the wild to her work as an intern organizing Lac qui Parle Prairie Preservation, and is now serving as the CURE organizer. We are lucky the skills she so quickly developed have continued to nurture the family of organizations that our work here in the west has spawned.
Amy Bacigalupo and Paul Weimer first came to our office recently married and inquiring if they could split the internship. We got more than double the return on our investment while they also benefited as part of the graduate minor program in sustainable agriculture at the University of Minnesota. Amy used the Monitoring Tool Box in our first efforts to monitor quality of life with farmers in the Chippewa River watershed. Paul was instrumental in pulling together the diverse participants of the Chippewa River Stewardship Partnership, which has now evolved into the Chippewa River Watershed Project. Together Amy and Paul helped to develop forage monitoring techniques we still use today. They are serving as Peace Corps volunteers in Paraguay, having learned not only Spanish but also Guarani, while working in agroforestry and helping to develop a rose-growing cooperative. Upon their return in December they plan to wind up their graduate work. We are coaxing them to settle here on the prairie.
Nell Hanssen came to us after graduating from Oberlin College. We will always remember that it was her connection that prompted us to bring Amish farmer-writer David Kline from his home in Ohio to the Chippewa watershed in 1998. During his visit, he shared the values that drive his remarkable decision-making and observation skills. After working here with the Whole Farm Planning and Monitoring Team, Nell has moved on to co-manage a CSA farm operated by the Audubon Society on the Chesapeake Bay. She is involved with agroecological education, pasturing chickens, and building relationships with shareholders.
Silas Patlove also held the "Oberlin Chair" in Montevideo. He monitored frogs and forages, prairies and percolations with the Whole Farm Planning Team as well as acted as the "market steward" of the Montevideo Farmers' Market. At this writing we understand Silas is still working on a CSA farm near Champaign-Urbana in central Illinois. We still look forward to a clarinet concert upon his return.
Where have all the interns gone? Gone to good works. Every one.
LSP organizer Audrey Arner has hosted many an intern on her farm near Montevideo, Minn.
BOOK REVIEW:
You Can Go Home Again: Adventures of a Contrary Life
By Gene Logsdon
1998
224 pages
$22.95
Indiana University Press
601 N. Morton St.
Bloomington, IN 47404-3797
Reviewed by Beth Slocum
In his recently published memoir You Can Go Home Again, Gene Logsdon welcomes us into his life as easily as inviting us into his kitchen to swap stories over a cup of coffee. The stories he tells are those of his family and himself, growing up, leaving and ultimately returning to the Ohio farming landscape where he could make the physical and spiritual home he sought.
Like farm families and rural communities threatened with extinction then and now, Logsdon hoped to find what he needed for the survival of his heart and mind on the farmland of his boyhood. His determination to thrive in farming, whether doing it or writing about it, affirms in any of us the desire to survive the crisis that faces American farmers today. Logsdon gives us, no matter where we come from or want to go, a strong nudge to think for ourselves, think smart, and keep a vision of "home" that embraces the values and sentiments of the farmers and small-townspeople that have been the core of American society for generations.
Reflecting on his journey home, Logsdon says, "I grew up accepting our tiny neighborhood hamlets as a part of the rural landscape. Just as I could learn fully the wonderful value of a family farm only by leaving it for a while and comparing it to other modes of life, so too I had to go away and come back to realize what fascinating artifacts of the passing agrarian society these little villages were, and how in an electronic age, they were becoming the almost perfect place to live."
Logsdon does not want to rewrite farming history or return nostalgically to "the good old days." Instead he is a practicing advocate for making a life on the land now, a life rich in relationships, economical in scale and cost — a way of living that could be translated by any of us into our own "contrary to the world" design.
It’s with his great storytelling ability that he persuades us to pay attention to our desires, even as he shares his own. Logsdon’s stories are rich in details and personalities, tension and drama — like the one that opens the book with seminary boys desperate to steal cherry pies baked for their teacher-priests. Laced with boyish pleasure and fear, the story vibrates between the wish to heed God’s call (which he already questioned) and the worldly temptation of cherry pies (his first definitive step toward rule-breaking), a tension that continues until 10 years later when he finally leaves the seminary. Logsdon uses the cherry pie narrative to frame another storytelling mode, a memory chain of farm stories that sustain him through sleepless nights and long chapel meditations, stories that also capture the reader’s imagination, as Logsdon conjures horse-farming scenes from family letters he saved or remembers stories attached to each foot of "The Crick" that meandered through the home farm.
From the start, Logsdon is "homesick," questioning his commitment to seminary training in the face of his unassuageable hunger for farming, and his chance discovery of Martin Luther’s "errors" — errors that to Logsdon seemed pretty common-sense rational, though clearly heretical. It’s this mind-set that leads Logsdon to leave the seminary and set his course back to the land. And like the farm creek he describes in such rich detail, his path takes many meanders before he, his wife and two children are home again on land only two miles from the farm where he was raised.
Memory and desire sustain Logsdon on his lengthy pilgrimage home. And those same elements carry the reader through this memoir, because Logsdon focuses on what made the life he sought so desirable that he would "risk the wrath of God" to retrieve it. A stint in Minnesota on a seminary farm near Chanhassen gave Logsdon an interlude in which he could keep his seminary responsibilities fulfilled by nearly full-time work on the farm and quite a bit less time in "required" study and contemplation — and it confirmed his decision to seek his own spiritual home on the land. In his description of a communal threshing, not uncommon in Minnesota in the 1950s, Logsdon lingers, reminding us of a time when the community of farmers and the community of monasteries had more in common, when both were connected to the land, to self-sufficiency, to contemplation and cooperation, a time that he knew even then was passing.
As a writer, Logsdon skillfully weaves narrative and dramatic elements into the story-essays he shares with us, a storytelling ability equal to the writing he admired most in The New Yorker magazine. Inspired by Andrew Wyeth and Wendell Berry, both of whom he sought out, Logsdon saw the success of their lives and their art was that they "stayed at home,…knowing a place deeply to draw art from it,…needing to live deeply the thing that nourished you." This affirmation of Logsdon’s desire buoyed him for years until he was well-settled back on the land of Ohio which had fed his boyhood.
And that deep sense of home produced the artistry of this book, which avoids any predictable year-by-year chronology and never becomes a "how-to" handbook. Instead, Logsdon creates with his storytelling warmth and humor a pastiche of the quality of life he desired, established and lived, a design that shows the reader what made this return to the land worth it, what potential drew him back. Whether it was learning from "The Crick" to cooperate with nature or from the everyday work of farming how to use solitude for nourishment, Logsdon walks with us through his life to the heart of the story: a commitment not just to an "ecological food-production system," but to the joys and struggles of a farm life sustainable in design and relationships, much like that of his Amish neighbors.
Logsdon has witnessed the major changes in farming technology, economics and politics, growing up as he did with horse farming in the 1930s and 1940s and continuing to farm into the 1990s. Thus he marks in his lifetime the demise of the horse and the transformation of farm equipment, the conversion from sustainable family farming to agribusiness for maximum profit, and the decline of farming families and small towns. In spite of such dramatic changes, Logsdon’s long view of American farm life provides hope that an independent life, on the land, in community, is still possible.
The day after I finished reading You Can Go Home Again, I picked up the Minnesota Agri News newspaper to read another editorial page full of the struggles of farmers, farm equipment dealers, bankers and politicians who are fighting to keep possible the way of life that Gene Logsdon worked hard to "afford." His stories remind us that when we seek a home contrary to the public advice of "get big or get out," or "make more money so you can buy more stuff," we have a chance to live a life that maintains our relationship to place and people, not to material goods.
What about those of us who have no farming roots to go back to? How can we read Logsdon’s book without envy for his certainty in returning to the land where he grew up? In many ways, Logsdon’s journey back to farming can give city and town dwellers ideas for an increasingly self-sustained life-style. Whether it’s a yard full of vegetables and berries rather than grass, or a community garden created in a neighborhood, or a connection with farmers who practice sustainable agriculture — any of us can take greater charge of how we nourish ourselves and our families.
Land Stewardship Project member Beth Slocum raises sheep in Vasa, Minn., teaches English at Mounds Park Academy and writes in her spare time.
MEMBERSHIP UPDATE:
Celebrating good food, good people
By Cathy Eberhart
On October 16, Land Stewardship Project members and friends gathered together in the Twin Cities to enjoy good food and celebrate the farmers who raised it.
At the Local Foods Banquet, we honored the land and the growers of the food by the ordinary act of eating. It is both a simple and profound action to share food with each other. In doing so, we are reminded of our connections to each other and to the land.
We hope that many of you were able to participate in the dinner on the 16th, but even if you didn't, I would encourage you to "celebrate good food" in some other way.
For example:
o Invite family or friends to your house for a meal of food produced by LSP farmer-members.
o Encourage your congregation, community group or employer to serve local food from sustainable producers at their next event.
o Take the Stewardship Food Network list (as found in the June/July/August Land Stewardship Letter) to your favorite restaurant or local grocery store and encourage them to consider purchasing environmentally sound alternatives from local farmers.
We'd love to hear about your local food celebrations. Give us a call or, better yet, send us pictures.
An informational column for LSP members who want to get more involved. New LSP T-shirt design Community events LSL distribution |
OPPORTUNITIES/RESOURCES:
Help LSP through workplace giving
Does your workplace have a campaign to encourage workers to donate to community organizations through payroll deductions? If the Minnesota Environmental Fund (MEF) is an option, you can designate your gift to the Land Stewardship Project, or to any or all of the 16 other environmental groups that are part of MEF.
If your employer does not include the MEF as part of its donation program, ask that it be added. For more information, call Dana Jackson at LSP's White Bear Lake office (651-653-0618), or Eleanor Kittleson at MEF (612-379-3850).
Direct marketing law
The Legal Guide for Direct Farm Marketing is exactly what its name implies: A practical, how-to manual for avoiding legal problems, whether you're selling a pound of ground beef to a neighbor or a value-added product grown in your vegetable patch to a supermarket chain.
Written by agricultural law expert Neil Hamilton of Drake University, this 235-page guide is full of plain talk on how laws affect all aspects of direct marketing. Sprinkled throughout the text are real-life examples of how the courts and government agencies have ruled on everything from farmers' market liability insurance to roadside stands to the selling of organic beef. The guide also includes a state-by-state listing of direct marketing resources.
Chapter titles include: "Farmers' Markets;" "Contracts, Food Stamps, and Getting Paid;" and "Marketing Meat, Poultry, Eggs and Dairy Products."
For a copy, send $20 to: Agricultural Law Center, Drake University Law School, 2507 University Ave., Des Moines, IA 50311. That price includes shipping and handling; make checks payable to the Agricultural Law Center. Call 515-271-2065 for information on bulk discounts.
And in Minnesota...
Farm to Market: Legal Issues for Minnesota Farmers Starting a Processing or Marketing Business is a new series of booklets discussing some of the most important legal issues that arise for Minnesota farmers seeking to develop an agricultural processing or marketing business. Booklet titles are: Introductory Issues, Choice of Business Entity, Cooperatives, Corporations, Partnerships, Limited Liability Companies, Owner Agreements, Employment, Direct Marketing, and Minnesota Financial and Technical Resources.
The prices of these booklets had not been determined at press time. For information, contact: Farmers' Legal Action Group; phone: 651-223-5400; web site: http://www.Flaginc.org
The business of food
Starting a Food Business in Minnesota is designed to help those who are interested in starting a food service establishment, retail food business or a food manufacturing business.
Chapter titles include: "Preliminary Considerations," "Food & Beverage Service Establishment Regulations," "Retail Food Business Regulations," "Food Manufacturing Regulations," "Related Issues for Businesses" and "Resources."
For a free copy, contact: Minnesota Department of Agriculture, Agriculture Marketing and Development, 90 West Plato Blvd., St. Paul MN 55107; phone: 651- 297-2301. The report can also be downloaded from the Department of Agriculture's web site: http://www.mda.state.mn.us/DOCS/MKTG/preface.htm
Conservation land
The Minnesota Land Trust's Conservation Buyer/Seller Program helps match landowners wishing to sell their property with buyers interested in carrying on the tradition of protecting the natural beauty and/or rural character of these properties.
For more information, contact: Ann Haines, Land Protection Specialist, Minnesota Land Trust, 2356 University Ave. West, Suite 400, St. Paul, MN 55114; phone: 651-647-9590.
Sustainable timber
The Hiawatha Sustainable Woods Cooperative is a new group dedicated to managing local, private stands of timber for long-term economic and environmental benefits. Based in southwest Wisconsin, this cooperative hopes to provide members with education, professionally trained foresters and loggers, value-added locally-based manufacturing of wood products, and third-party certification of sustainable practices by the Forest Stewardship Council.
For more information, contact: HSWC, P.O. Box 248, Fountain City, WI 54629; phone: 608-687-8193.
On-farm research
Greenbook '99 is the Minnesota Department of Agriculture's latest report on innovative, on-farm sustainable agriculture research being conducted throughout the state. It provides contact information if you are interested in talking to the sustainable farmers profiled in the report.
For a free copy, call the Minnesota Department of Agriculture's Energy and Sustainable Agriculture Program at 651-296-7673.
Preserves need volunteers
The Nature Conservancy of Minnesota is looking to expand its volunteer network in rural parts of the state. The organization is particularly interested in having people perform tasks on its preserves such as weed control, seed gathering, transplanting and cleanup.
For more information, contact: Jim Steitz, Assistant Volunteer Program Coordinator, Nature Conservancy of Minnesota, 612-331-0702.
Land essay contest
The Voices for the Land essay contest offers people a chance to write about their most treasured Minnesota places at a time when one of the fastest growing states in the country is destroying its natural areas, farms and communities at a record pace.
Winning essays will be published in Milkweed Editions, a national literary nonprofit press. Winners will also appear at readings around the state and the essays will be published in the Minneapolis Star Tribune and other newspapers.
The contest is open to youth and adults and the length limit is 400 words. The deadline for submissions is Nov. 15.
Send your typed, double-spaced essays to: VFL Editor, Milkweed Editions, 430 First Avenue North, Suite 668, Minneapolis, MN 55401. Include your name, address, telephone number and age if you are under 18. Winners will be announced on Feb. 1.
Voices for the Land is a project of the St. Croix Valley Community Foundation, with additional funding from the Northwest Minnesota Foundation, Duluth-Superior Area Community Foundation and the Initiative Foundation. For more information, call Debbie Meister, 651-647-6816.
Check the Calendar for the latest on upcoming LSP events.
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