Jim Lutter, Brule County, South Dakota
There is a pastoral tradition to American agriculture that finds expression in the small family farms of New England, Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, and the Corn Belt that slides west of Ohio through Indiana and Illinois to the deep soils of Iowa. This is the tradition of Wendell Berry and Barbara Kingsolver and Michael Pollan. Farming is gardening writ large. Farming is about growing food, and being a steward of the land. Farmers talk about soil and fertility and community. Farming is a human-scale enterprise.
But west of Iowa, farming takes a hard turn to the extreme. On the Great Plains there is nothing pastoral about farming. There is no harmony here. Farming has the feel of war and chaos, with Mother Nature and the international commodity markets providing the “shock and awe.” Farmers talk about rain and blizzard and hail … and wind, the kind that can suck two inches of rain out of the soil in a week and turn it bone dry. Oil is the single most important raw material in modern industrial farming, and the price of petrochemical fertilizer and chemical treatments has doubled in a year, following the arc of oil prices. Fertilizer alone has jumped from about $100 a ton in 2007 to more than $400 a ton this year.
On June 6, Jim Lutter sits at the head of a cluttered table and stares out his picture window. His mustache droops wildly, giving him the air of a mad scientist. Smart, but just a little off. His neighbors are fond of saying that he “bumped his head,” which is a friendly way of saying that he didn’t plant corn in a record corn market.
The sun is shining on his 3,000-acre farm, just east of the Missouri River in central South Dakota, but the wind is blowing hard. His spray plane is grounded, and every few minutes he picks up his cell phone and calls the National Weather Service for an update.
“If I could get in the air, I’m scheduled to spray 7,000 acres today,” he says. But with the winds blowing 35 miles an hour, he’ll sit here instead. Thunderstorms are building on the western horizon. A fifth of the county is under water. Ground sprayers can’t get in the fields, and weeds are growing two inches a day.
In the week that follows, Jim Lutter flies from sunrise to sunset, an hour here, an hour there, dodging hail and thunderstorms and high winds. On June 18, hail the size of softballs falls on Gregory County, about 100 miles south. Local newspapers show huge ice balls in the palm of a farmer’s hand, but it’s the smaller hail, the size of peas, with razor-like jagged edges, that shreds a crop like a lawnmower. The County Farm Services administrator says losses are 100 percent. Lutter describes hailstorms so strong that they tear holes in roofs and break windows. “We’ve got dents in a coffee pot that got left on the kitchen counter during a hailstorm.”
On the parched plains of the infamous 100th meridian, rain is a blessing ... but not this much rain, not all at once. It has turned the commodity market into a roller coaster. Lutter is philosophical. “Every day is a record day for corn prices. Today is the first day in history that you can lock in a contract at six dollars a bushel.” So why aren’t all the farmers standing around kicking dirt in Lutter’s front yard jumping up and down with joy? “Because the price of oil rose over $10 a barrel today, to $138.”
Despite the risks, the high price of corn has everyone around Jim Lutter plowing up native pasture, canceling longterm Conservation Reserve contracts, and planting corn “wall to wall.” Not Lutter. Over the last two years he has converted 400 acres of cornfield to grass. Yes, grass. Intermediate wheatgrass, a Russian cousin of western wheat—not the hybridized wheat grown as a food crop, but rather the dominant native grass forage of the ancient buffalo herds. “I’m going to sell the seed, and then bale the hay and feed it to the buffalo.” Lutter figures he’ll make less than half as much an acre as his neighbors who planted corn and wheat, but he uses his cell-phone calculator to start adding up his neighbors’ “input costs.” He estimates it will cost them more than $400 an acre just to plant corn, harvest it, and get it to the grain elevator in October. That’s up from $125 an acre just five years ago.
Lutter may be making less gross profit, but he doesn’t need to plant every year. The grass is a perennial. He doesn’t need to fertilize. And he doesn’t have to pay big diesel bills to transport his hay one mile down the road to the small feedlot he operates next to Crow Creek. Intermediate wheatgrass is drought resistant, which, looking out the window, seems beside the point. But drought hovers around the edge of Plains farming every year, like a ghost. Lutter says, “If this turns out like last year, I think we may have seen the last of the rain.”
It’s not easy trying to diversify and unhook from the industrial-farm economy. In addition to making part of his income as a spray pilot, Lutter offers pheasant hunts in the fall at $300 a day. He usually grows corn and soybeans in rotation. He feeds his grass to buffalo that he “finishes” in his feedlot. And he grazes one of the only genetically pure herds of buffalo in the country on sprawling pastures of native western wheat, buffalo grass, and green needle. Jim Lutter is, by modern standards, exactly the kind of farmer John Wesley Powell had in mind when he warned the nation over a century ago that the Great Plains could not sustain the small family farms of the East, and demanded a new model of farming more attuned to the extreme conditions of the West.
Because most of Iowa is under water, much of the first planting of that state’s seed corn is rotting in the mud and corn contracts jumped to $7.20 a bushel on Monday, June 16—up $1.20 from a week prior. But by Friday, news arrived from Iowa that the flooding hadn’t been as bad as first believed. Western Iowa was bouncing back, and corn contracts dropped to $6.65, a 55-cent drop in 4 days. On Monday Lutter’s soybean field was under water, by Wednesday it had dried out enough to plant. By Friday, the soybean seeds had already germinated and sprouted, but on the surface “drift corn”—here, corn seed from the previous season—was also sprouting. “I’ve got to get in and spray. Fast.” Every day is a race against the clock, the growing season, first frost, and the global commodity market.
On Tuesday, June 17, Lutter’s intermediate wheatgrass experiment was growing like gangbusters. On Thursday, tan spot fungus hit the grass. In all his efforts to catch up, it was the one field he hadn’t sprayed.