Musings: From the Farm Belt

The past few days have found me in the Midwest — Springfield, Ill., to be specific, land of Lincoln. It's the place where my best friend lives in a 175-year-old brick farmhouse, once a stop on the underground railroad, surrounded by hundreds of acres that her family has farmed for generations.

With its flat, wide open spaces, its snow, morning frost and biting winds, it's about as different from Kauai as a place could be. But it's closely related, because many farmers here plant the seeds that were grown on the westside of our island. Yes, despite what you may have heard, the chem companies do indeed ship hundreds of pounds seeds from Kauai — seeds that are then sown in the deep, black loamy soil of midwest fields just now awakening from winter.

Ironically, it is that seed export, all done by air, that helps subsidize our airfreight costs, giving planes that arrive in Hawaii laden with the goods we import something to carry on the return flight to the mainland.

She picked me up at the St. Louis airport, and once we crossed the mighty Mississippi we were in what some have termed a giant garden — the fertile prairie soil fed by countless streams and rivers that grows much of the food consumed in this country.

Yet it is also, as my friend called it, “a commodities wasteland” — the land impacted by industrial agriculture that relies on intensive mechanization, chemical fertilizers and pesticides to meet the relentless consumer demand for cheap abundant food.

We've talked a lot about how to turn that juggernaut around now that farmers have invested in expensive equipment, become set in their ways of doing things, had some of their options narrowed by the consolidation of seed companies, constantly rising costs. It won't be easy, we agreed, and ultimately, it will be driven primarily by economics and its constant companion, politics.

Still, some changes are already under way.

We've seen fields planted in cover crops — an old-new approach that farmers are finding increases yield, while decreasing inputs. Conservation programs are strong here, with farmers given financial incentives to heal their land, re-plant the field-bordering windrows that prevent soil erosion and provide habitat for the deer, coyotes, racoons, opossums, eagles, owls, fish, migrating monarchs, birds and other animals that still travel through here. 

Farmers that have more capital are experimenting with grass-fed beef, pasture rotation, different techniques for tilling the soil, organic certification, though even that, in reality of practice, isn't a panacea, either.

Meanwhile, though, the farmers are getting older, and many of their children have abandoned rural life for more comfortable jobs in the cities — livelihoods that aren't dependent on the vagaries of rain, sun, wind, drought, disease, pest infestations; jobs that don't require them to gamble everything year after year after year.

And just like on Kauai, the “gentleman farmers” — folks who want acreage for lawns, but don't want to look at cows, horses, barns, crops — are encroaching into the farmlands, building ugly McMansions on hillsides and in former corn and soybean fields.

Many of these estates look out upon the remnants of a rural life that they are helping to imperil — with the cooperation of farm families that are selling off their land because the kids see more value in growing fancy houses than food.

For the first time, gates are being erected that have no purpose other than to distinguish the owners as people who have no intention of mingling with their neighbors, being part of the community.

As we drove and walked through this landscape, I had the overriding sense that we are at a crossroads, and nothing less than our food supply is at stake.

We saw evidence of the ingenuity, frugality, tenaciousness and sheer pluckiness that characterized the people who settled these vast prairies, digging wells by hand, hewing trees with axes, making bricks for homes that still stand, raising every speck of their own food, supplying all their own needs.

But how many among us today possess even the most basic survival skills? My friend has seen the vast gardens of her parent's youth, the baking, the handicrafts, the home-cooking, largely disappear. Everything can be lost in just one generation.

My friend, who returned to her family lands a decade ago after being away for two decades, including a stint on Kauai, where we met, has faith in the ability of wildlife to adapt, the land's ability to recover — given a chance, a bit of a boost from the humans who exploit it.

Will that happen? Or will we just keep pushing, until it collapses under our weight, our greed, our short-sighted quest for quick profits over longterm sustainability, our demand for the cheapest possible food and at the core of it, our quest for more, always and ever more, more, more?

Looking at these vast farmlands, talking with my friend, I understood the incredible complexity of the agricultural issue. Try as we might on Kauai to simplify it down to pro- or anti-GMO, there are no easy answers. And despite the self-righteousness that has accompanied the debate, there are none among us who are not complicit, at some level, in what's going down.

As with everything on this planet, we're all in this together.