On his farm, Kirschenmann tries to take his living from nature by outthinking its predictable cycles. Through trial and error, he has learned to produce healthy, rich soil that retains moisture and resists drought, so that high yields follow. Not that he wouldn’t like to know more. If the new knowledge of plant genomes could be used to better understand natural systems so that farmers could develop smarter strategies for manipulating pests and predators, then, he says, he would be in favor of using the science. But using it to fight natural systems, he says, merely creates more problems.
Kirschenmann has spent a lot of time thinking about systems and ideas. “Rural kids are raised to believe that if you don’t get out, you’re a failure,” he says. His father attended school only through the sixth grade, his mother through the third, and they pushed him to study. He stayed in the Dakotas for college but then left, forever he thought, to get a doctorate in philosophy and religion at the University of Chicago. He married, had two children, and became dean of Curry College, in Boston. But he never felt totally at home. “My theory is that everybody is basically acclimated to an ecology,” he says. “I’m a prairie boy. The whole time I was in Boston, I felt claustrophobic.”
So when his father had a heart attack in the mid-1970s and told his son he was going to sell the farm, Kirschenmann volunteered to return, on one condition: that he could turn the family farm into an organic one. His father readily agreed. He had seen how chemicals had damaged the soil and was ready for a change. “My Boston friends thought I was abandoning a good life and a good career,” says Kirschenmann. “They didn’t see agriculture as having much of a future.”
on a piece of the farm, he built a house, nestling it into a hillside—with some rooms underground, lit by skylights—to protect it against tornadoes and to save on heat. I went to visit him and Raffensperger there because I had read a speech in which he argued, simply and persuasively, that the new technology might initially benefit farmers but would eventually make them less independent. In most discussions of biotechnology, the farmer’s perspective is missing. When their voices are present, they are usually just sound bites, created by partisans. Kirschenmann, however, has become a recognized philosopher-farmer. Following his testimony at a congressional hearing on sustainable agriculture some years ago, he became a much-sought-after speaker.
But he still feels most at home on the prairie, on a tractor. One day, I rode with him as he planted the rye seed that would settle in for the winter and grow in the spring. For him, it meant three very long days of work. There were heavy clouds in the sky one moment and only blue the next. The temperature here, he says, can change as much as 60 degrees in a day.
Wearing a light-blue cap and navy overalls, with a cell phone in one pocket, he maneuvered the tractor up and down the field, answering questions when asked but clearly enjoying the silence and the smell of the earth as the machine tore through the top inches of soil and dug in the seeds. “Being out on a tractor is time to think,” he says. “I call it tractor therapy. In fact, I didn’t get a cell phone until about a month ago. One of the reasons for being on the tractor is to get away from the phone.”
For Kirschenmann, successful organic farming in this climate means outwitting the wild mustard plant, a troubling weed that threatens to choke his crops before they can put down strong roots. By planting rye before winter, he will steal the moment that the mustard needs to get a start. Pests, too, must be outmaneuvered. Last year, he planted wheat here, and next it will probably be sunflower. “You keep changing the environment so a specific pest doesn’t establish itself.”
Unlike organic farmers, who can use natural wastes for fertilizers and have no chemical costs, he says, many farmers who are dependent on chemical additives, and now on genetically modified seeds, have an incredibly slim profit margin. The evidence of their suffering is all around. When Raffensperger drives me to another section of their farm, which is spread out over 22 miles, we pass some lovely old farmhouses, empty now. The surrounding farmland has been bought by bigger and stronger farms, leaving abandoned houses that, she says, can be had for $500 or so.
On the tractor, we also pass some land where farmers are growing genetically modified seeds, mainly Roundup Ready soy, which, unlike other soy, has a gene bred into it that allows the plant to survive the application of Roundup, an herbicide. While its developer, Monsanto, says genetically engineered seeds will lessen the need for chemicals, Kirschenmann has seen the opposite consequence. They are simply using more Roundup, he says, even as a desiccator to burn down the crop so that it dries out uniformly for easier harvesting. He also worries about genetic drift, and the pesticide drift that has been documented in his wife’s garden.
“We raised soybeans last year, and they tested negative for genetically modified organisms,” he says. But another farmer who intentionally did not plant the altered seeds found that his tested positive. Because of the risk of pollen drift, Kirschenmann is not planting anything that has a genetically modified relative that has been insect- or wind-pollinated, which for now means no canola.
The hardest part of organic farming, he says, is marketing, not growing—no one, he adds, has ever proved that organic farming cannot feed the world. That’s why he is particularly annoyed by the suggestion that genetic modification of seeds is the only way to fight hunger in the developing world. “In many famines, hunger was not caused by lack of food availability,” he says, “but by lack of food and distribution entitlement. It’s a social problem, one of economics, not a production problem.”
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