Saving Seeds, Soil, and Souls

THE PLOW. Today it is a nostalgic symbol of a nearly forgotten agrarian past. This farm tool evokes scenes of wholesome farmers who, by the sweat of their brow, churn under dark, rich soil with help from a friendly beast of burden. After scattering seeds of wheat and the blessing of good rain, those fields will become amber waves of grain. The family will celebrate another good harvest. The bread will sustain them through another winter until fields can be planted again.

Scraaatch. Wait a minute! Wes Jackson, geneticist, farmer, and author, wants to interrupt this pastoral vision. In fact, he would interpret it quite differently. He might describe a scene of environmental carnage in which an unwitting population slowly sows the seeds of our own destruction by slipping the plow blade under the living skin of a quickly failing planet. “The plow has destroyed more options for future generations than the sword,” Jackson states bluntly.

Nearly half of the world’s soil suitable for growing crops has disappeared since humans started tilling and planting. Today, up to 70 percent of our caloric intake comes from staple cereal crops planted in large-scale annual monocultures. A study by the National Academy of Sciences estimates that we are losing soil 10 times faster than we can replace it. While Jackson acknowledges that over-reliance on fossil fuels is a crucial issue, he argues that “soil is more important than oil and just as nonrenewable.”

In addition to the danger of soil loss, agricultural production “provides the lion’s share of greenhouse-gas emissions from the food system, releasing up to 86 percent of all food-related anthropogenic greenhouse-gas emissions.” The global food production system—from planting to packaging—contributes about one-third of all greenhouse-gas emissions, though this topic was not part of the recent climate negotiations in Paris.

While practices of low-till and no-till annual crops help reduce erosion and increase the availability of arable land as a carbon sink, these half-measures aren’t effective enough, according to Jackson. What he proposes is nothing less than a wholescale rethinking of the fundamental tenets of agriculture.

The way for farmers to get out of this cycle of destruction is not by relying on new technologies but by exercising our ability to pay attention to the answers already present in the world around us.

Jackson’s opening bid for this revolution is Kernza, a perennial wheatgrass seed slowly developed by Jackson and teams of others for increased yields, water and nutrient-retention, and ease of harvest using existing mechanization. He hopes it will replace annual wheat. Researchers estimate that by 2050, “climate change could cause irrigated wheat yields in developing countries to drop by 13 percent, and irrigated rice could fall by 15 percent. In Africa, maize yields could drop by 10 to 20 percent.”

As Jackson says, we should farm like a prairie, not like an army. His project is based on how nature has been saving and producing dirt all along: complex ecosystems of polyculture and perennial plants. Perennials grow year after year, putting down deep roots that decrease the need for irrigation. Polycultures reduce the risks of disease associated with monoculture cropping and can form mutually supportive systems between plants above ground and microorganisms and fungi beneath.

For millions of years before humans invented the plow, the rate of soil growth far outpaced the rate of its depletion. Jackson understands “nature as measure,” capable of teaching us how to better live in a world we all share—he studies the processes that have worked for the planet in the past and determines ways humans can mimic nature in our agricultural work now. He imagines a world in which our ability to feed ourselves today does not depend on removing the capacity of future generations to do the same.

This approach is part scientific method and part theological design. Jackson says that the Judeo-Christian creation story in Genesis “described a bimodal creation: God created everything except humans, paused a while, and then went on to create us.” That pause, says Jackson, has been fundamentally important to Christianity (as well as Islam), emphasizing that humans are categorically different from other forms of life. A different reading can acknowledge a unique aspect of this story: Humans were not created first. Rather, we were an outgrowth of a creation that had already been declared good. In fact, the story tells us, we come from that very stuff Jackson is now so focused on saving—dirt.