When Kirschenmann comes in for a quick lunch and heads back alone to the field, his wife laments the deep ignorance in this country about farms and farming. “Children know a thousand logos, and fewer than ten plants,” she says. While she is looking out at her garden, a butterfly goes by. I see a beautiful creature; she sees an integral part of successful agriculture. “I see a pollinator,” she says.
This is a pivotal moment in shaping opinion, says Kirschenmann. “Look how quickly consumers in Europe came to be a global force against genetic engineering,” he says. People are a wild card. And so, despite his love for the day-to-day of managing his farm, Kirschenmann recently accepted the directorship of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University, nine hours away by car. This acceptance also came with a condition: that he will be able to return to the farm whenever he is needed. (He has hired people to run it in his absence.)
“If we are to have a new vision for agriculture that’s compelling to suburbanites, agriculture has to do more than produce food,” he says. It has to have a philosophy and function that is accepted by the majority. For the early Indians, he says, the purpose of agriculture was to feed people while disturbing nature as little as possible; the Puritans wanted to tame the wilderness and build a kingdom of God; Thomas Jefferson aimed for an agrarian democracy of landowners with a stake in the system. Industrialization changed that, and nothing has replaced it. In Kirschenmann’s vision, agriculture is about ministering to the soil, about creating a great earth. “We know farmers can produce clean water, clean air, and a quality soil,” he says. Perhaps then they would be seen as valuable, as healthmakers, as physicians.
I ask him, finally, where he thinks this national and international debate over genetic engineering will end up, and whether he believes he will be able to reach the public during what he calls this “teachable moment.”
He is not a man who makes grandiose claims, nor is he a user of jargon who makes ears grow numb. Maybe it’s their intimate engagement with nature that makes farmers understand that there are no winners or losers, and that to remain flexible is the only way to proceed.
“Check with me in a few years,” he says. “I’ll let you know whether we’re making any progress.”
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