Darwin and Native American Agriculture

I have just published my sixth book, Forgotten Landscapes: How NativeAmericans Created Pre-Columbian North America and What We Can Learn from It (image). I am starting a series of essays and videos to promote portions of this book.

I have posted a video about Native American agriculture: https://youtu.be/cU5KeXESTMI which corresponds to chapter 4 of my book. This photo shows a reconstructed Cherokee field of maize, beans, and squash (watermelon), with gourd bird-houses for biological control of insect pests:

 

The first fact, which might surprise many people, is that there was such a thing as Native American agriculture. Not just a garden here or there, but large fields on which large Native populations depended for their food.

Many Native American tribes depended on agriculture, since their populations were too large to support by hunting and gathering. Their main crops were maize (corn), squash, and beans. Their European and white American conquerors wanted to depict Native Americans as savages who just gathered wild nuts and berries. But the English and American conquerors of the Cherokee tribe knew that this was not true. In order to subdue the Cherokees, English and then American generals had to go through the Cherokee farmlands and pull up the cornstalks one by one to starve out the villages: something that would have been unnecessary for hunter-gatherers.

Native tribes practiced polyculture, that is, different kinds of crops mixed together [image]. This differed from monoculture, such as is found in most modern American and European farms. Monoculture is huge fields of one kind of crop, while polyculture mixes them together. Each kind of crop depletes the soil a little differently, and in some cases (such as beans) enrich the soil. Native American style polyculture is superior to modern American monoculture.

Native tribes also practiced agroforestry, in which they grew their crops partially in the shade of trees. The trees helped to protect the soil and reduce the effects of heat and drought. Agroforestry is superior to modern American monocultures. Was this because the Natives were more scientifically advanced than we are today? Maybe not. Maybe it was just too much work to cut down the trees with stone tools before planting the field.

Native cultures were advanced societies based on agriculture, like ours only better. So much for the grossly unfair image of Natives as savages.

We've Heard This Before: Agriculture

Modern agriculture, at least the kind that is subsidized by agribusiness corporations, is based on large monocultural fields. This form of agriculture can be traced back, at least, to Jethro Tull. No, not the rock band, but the British agriculturalist of the eighteenth century. His dream was to see every field composed of perfect rows of crops, planted by the seed drill he invented. His dream has become worldwide reality.

 

But at the same time as Tull, there was a different vision, of crop rotation and strip cropping with pasture. This form of agriculture has prehistoric roots but was defended in the eighteenth century by the Scottish agriculturalist James Anderson of Hermiston. His dream lives on in the form of agrarianism, which is almost the opposite of agribusiness. Agrarianism is built on polyculture and soil health, and on food security for people rather than profits for corporations. As long as I have been bouncing around in the world of environmentalism and alternative agriculture, I never heard of James Anderson until I encountered a reference in an essay, “All Flesh Is Grass,” by Gene Logsdon, in The Essential Agrarian Reader, edited by Norman Wirzba.

Jethro Tull’s vision correctly focused on the health of the soil, but he was completely wrong about how to attain it. The agriculture he championed caused the soil to break down and erode. But Tull thought this was good, not bad. He thought that crop plants obtained all of their material from eating soil—literally, with little mouths on their roots ingesting what he called pabulum. One might call his vision the Gerber’s Baby Food theory of soil. Soil that degraded into paste would, the thought, be easier for the plants to eat. In all fairness, this was a long time before the process of photosynthesis was figured out.

Even though we know so much more today about how plants grow, and how to grow plants, we still have roughly the same dichotomy of viewpoints that Jethro Tull and James Anderson espoused.

War Against Farmers and the Land

Vandana Shiva, a prominent author in India, titled her essay “Globalization and the War against Farmers and the Land,” in The Essential Agrarian Reader edited by Norman Wirzba (2003).

At first this title seemed to be hyperbole. But she was serious that international agribusiness corporations were actually at war against farmers (that is, poor farmers) and the land. And the more I read, I became convinced that she was right. The corporations, of course, do not see themselves in this way. The essay is outdated only in the numbers that it cites; the basic situation is little changed since 2003.

The kind of agriculture that is promoted by big agribusiness around the world is the kind that requires farmers to buy patented seeds and to use expensive inputs, such as irrigation water, pesticides, and fertilizers. The fields are monocultures, which consist of only one type of crop (the cash crop). There are many poor farmers (especially in India, about which Shiva knows a lot) who cannot afford these purchases or, if they do, they go into debt; and each round of harvest makes them fall deeper and deeper in debt. (I cannot help but think of Sixteen Tons, the song about American coal miners who worked hard only to find themselves deeper in debt every year.) As a direct result of being overwhelmed with debt, Shiva indicates, many farmers in India have committed suicide, often by drinking pesticides. Farmers who are not quite so desperate just sell their kidneys. Agribusiness may provide cheap food for you, American consumer, but brings unspeakable misery to poor farmers who raise it. The situation is little different in Mexico, according to Angus Wright’s book The Death of Ramón González, where farm workers endure (or don’t live to endure) pesticide poisoning so that Americans can have cheap fresh vegetables in winter.

Of course, agribusiness corporations will not say “We make huge profits off of human suffering.” Instead, they have to come up with a justification, and to do so they use creative numbers. Here are some examples.

First, the corporations need to convince people that monocultures (one type of crop) have superior yields to polycultures (different crops mixed together). According to their published figures, monocultures always outproduce polycultures. But the way they calculate these yields is on an area basis: tonnes of yield per hectare. They are hoping that we will not notice their mathematical sleight-of-hand. Of course a hectare of just wheat will have higher wheat yields than a hectare of wheat mixed with beans. All other things being equal, a hectare of monoculture wheat will yield exactly twice as much wheat as a hectare that is only half wheat. That is like saying that nobody lives in your house because, at this moment, your bedroom has no one in it. But if you calculate crop yields over the whole countryside of wheat and beans, polycultures almost always outproduce monocultures. This, according to Shiva, is the correct way to calculate the yields. She calls this the land equivalent ratio (LER). In India, the overall LER is 1.62. That is, polycultures yield 62 percent more than monocultures. Or, if you calculate a polyculture’s yield just on the basis of the actual area used by a particular crop, the yield is 62 percent higher. A cassava/maize/groundnut polyculture outproduces monocultures of these three crops by a factor of 2.51.

Sometimes, polycultures (that is, traditional native gardens) can outproduce monocultures by an even greater factor. Shiva gives an example of terraced fields in the Himalayas, which produce jhangora, marsha, tur, urad, gahat, soybean, bhat, rayans, swanta, and kodo. (You’ve probably never heard of any of these, except soybean, but the people eat them.) Shiva notes that the polycultures produce six times more yield than monoculture rice even during dry years. I would have said, especially during dry years, because different crops have different water requirements, and a drought is unlikely to kill all the different kinds of crops, thus leaving some food—and income—for the poor farmers.

The biodiversity in traditional polycultures can be breathtaking. Shiva notes that in sub-Saharan Africa, farmers (mostly women) cultivate 120 different kinds of food plants in the spaces alongside the cash crops. Of course, this reduces the yield of the cash crops a little, but not as much as you might expect, since the food crops compete only partially for light and moisture with the cash crops.

To top it all off, the monocultures are for cash crops intended for other people, not the farmers, to eat. Would a monoculture of kodo out-yield the kodo grown in polycultures? Nobody knows, since the agribusiness corporations do not sell kodo seeds, and nobody knows whether or how much kodo yield would increase with fertilizer and pesticides.

Clearly, agribusiness monoculture would not survive long if its success depended on feeding local people. Then why does it persist? One reason is that agribusiness has convinced international lending agencies that the only profitable kind of agriculture is based on irrigation, fertilizer, and pesticide. The loans, therefore, are for groundwater pumps and chemicals. If you just want to raise food for your village, it is hard to get a loan, and even harder to pay it back. Recently, mostly since Shiva wrote this piece, microcredit has become available to many small farmers, craftspeople, etc. These are very small loans that can be paid back when a farmer, using whatever methods she prefers, earns profits from extra crops or from crafts. The developers of the idea of microcredit (Muhammad Yunus and the leaders of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh) won the Nobel Prize for it in 2006. Despite the success of microcredit, there is still a long way to go.

Polyculture on small farms is more profitable, though not to the agribusiness corporations that sell the inputs. In India, according to Shiva, farms up to five acres earned 735 rupees per acre, while farms 35 acres and over earned 346 rupees per acre. These numbers are different now, but the difference is probably even greater today.

Polycultures feed local people, but the very purpose of monocultures is to export food from countries that have a lot of poor people to industrialized countries such as the United States. China is now appropriating land in poor countries to get food and raw materials from them.

Shiva also considers agribusiness to be at war with the land because high-input monocultures often require irrigation, which contributes to salt buildup; pesticides and fertilizers poison the runoff water.

One possible problem is that, as fewer people each year want to farm, the remaining farmers must cultivate more acres. In doing so, they may need more inputs and will be unable to give as much attention to each acre.

Agribusiness says, we are just trying to feed the world. Defenders of small farms say, we are just trying to feed the world, and we can do it better than agribusiness.

How We Can Know Them

One of the greatest threats to the future of the planet is the industrial agriculture. Practically every aspect of it is dangerous to the planet. But it feeds the planet? Actually, its main effect is to make corporations like Monsanto rich; feeding the planet is an incidental side-effect. Most agricultural produce, at least in America, goes to feeding livestock rather than feeding people.

Many farmers claim that they actually care about the future of the planet but they are trapped into industrial agriculture—they cannot afford to do it any other way. They would like to convert to responsible agriculture: to interplant their crops (polyculture), to use natural pest control, control soil erosion, etc. But, they claim, they are trapped by the economics of industrial ag.

But let me tell you why I do not believe them. It may indeed be economic suicide for farmers to convert suddenly and completely over to ecologically responsible agriculture. But surely they could do it at least a little bit? They could at least do a scaled-down form of polyculture, by planting wide strips—still wide enough for their equipment to handle—of different kinds of crops rather than huge fields of each. They could reduce their pesticide and fertilizer use a little by precision application. They could choose crops that are better suited for their regions; for example, to grow maize in eastern Colorado or the panhandle of Oklahoma takes a prodigious amount of water, which they pump out of the already-depleted Ogalalla Aquifer. Couldn’t they at least do one or two of these things?

And many farmers do. As I drove in the summer of 2014 many miles through the Midwest, I mostly saw huge monoculture fields with wasteful irrigation, on which crop dusters poured pesticides. Once in a while I would see strips of crops. I saw this just often enough to show me it could be done.

The land is unhealthy. If a person is unhealthy, it might be too much to expect for him or her to suddenly convert to a completely healthy lifestyle: to exercise a lot and eat less fat and sugar and prepare more foods themselves. But at least the unhealthy person could do a little bit of one of them. And many do, to their benefit and (as many of my students have found) their pleasant surprise.

A farmer may not be able to heal an unhealthy land in all possible ways, but at least they can do a little bit of something. And a small percentage of them do. The fact that most of them do not indicates to me that most of them really do not care about the future of the planet—the world that their children (whom they claim to love so much) will inherit.

As Jesus said, by their fruits you shall know them. Not by what they say, but by what they do. Conservative farmers can talk all they want to about how precious are the lives of their children (and all children) but I do not believe them until they start farming in such a way that does not destroy the world those children are supposed to live in.

And for farmers that do what they can, thanks! And try to do more—you can probably figure out how. But the Monsanto sales rep won’t help you to do this.

Blast 'Em

In politics, agriculture, and the economy, we want quick, decisive results. We like quick military action rather than slow diplomacy (although there was strong disapproval of military intervention in Syria). We want the Fed to do something to kick-start the economy.

And this is our approach in agriculture as well. On nearly all of the agricultural acreage in America, we use the blast-‘em approach. We plow the soil so that we can plant exactly what we want where we want it, then we blast the fields with herbicides and pesticides to kill everything that we consider unwelcome.

We use this approach even in some of our “sustainable” or “ecological” practices. For example, crop rotation. If a farmer plants beans or alfalfa (which are legumes) one year and corn (a grain) the next, the residual nitrogen from the legumes will fertilize the soil, which means you don’t have to use as much fertilizer on the corn. This is a good idea. But this is still a blast-‘em approach, because we impose a plowing and planting schedule upon the soil.

Scientists at the Land Institute are developing perennial polyculture—that is, an agriculture based upon species of perennials (which therefore need no plowing) grown in polyculture—that is, different species mixed together. Perennial polyculture is much harder to do than conventional crop rotation, because the grains and the legumes are perennials and are neighbors of one another for year after year. At the Land Institute, they have plots with rows of perennial kernza grain, in between which grows perennial alfalfa, a legume. They have to get the right spacing and timing, in order to assure that the grains do not crowd out the legumes, or the other way around. If you plow every year and plant corn and soybeans, you don’t need to worry about that. But if you allow perennial grains and legumes to grow together for a long time, it is a scientific challenge to get them in balance. This is because we are allowing the perennial crops the freedom to grow as they see fit, and we try to coax them into growing the way we want them to.

The blast-‘em approach does not require much intelligence, and it has clear results. The perennial polyculture approach requires a lot of research, and the plants do not always grow exactly where and how much you want them to. Sustainable and therefore intelligent approaches are our only hope for the future of agriculture. Sustainable approaches may be less satisfying to some people than blasting the soil with our willpower, but it is more satisfying to the rest of us because we intelligently fit ourselves into the processes of nature.