From the kitchen, where his wife is making dinner, you can hear Fred Kirschenmann coming into the house and taking off his dusty overalls and mud-caked boots. As farmers have for generations, he is getting ready to sit down to a meal of food grown almost entirely on his own land. An act that was once commonplace, it is now remarkable, because only 2 percent of the American population still farms, and just a fraction of those farmers grow their own food. It is even more remarkable in North Dakota, where limited rain and long winters make farming so tough that the first settlers here needed twice the acreage granted to pioneers in balmier places ... like Iowa. Still, it isn’t hard to understand why some people have decided that putting down roots here is worth the trouble. The land in North Dakota gets into your bones, becomes part of you. At night, the wind moves so powerfully through fields of sunflower and wheat that it sounds like the ocean surf. There are so few people, and the peace is so profound, that it’s possible to stand undisturbed in the middle of nearly any road at noontime, and, on a fine day, you can feel the sun on your face, the northerly light complex and constantly shifting.
Here, in Windsor, midway between Fargo and Bismarck, Kirschenmann’s father began farming in 1930, during the Depression and the Dust Bowl, and continued for 60 years, for much of that time eagerly adopting the technologies that came along, including pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides. Now, neighboring farmers are turning to the latest offering from the agriculture companies: genetically altered seeds, which promise to reduce chemical usage by producing plants that have built-in resources for fending off pests and resisting weeds.
But Kirschenmann, who is 66 years old, not only rejects the promise of those seeds, he refuses to use any chemicals or pesticides at all. He farms organically, raising 110 brood cows and tilling 3,500 acres with seven or eight crops that he varies each year, selling his food to companies such as Eden Foods, which uses his durum wheat and rye in its pasta. That’s what his wife, Carolyn Raffensperger, is serving tonight, with caramelized onions, red kale, and bacon.
Raffensperger met Kirsch-enmann seven years ago, when she was working for the Sierra Club and they were both speaking at the same symposium. When she moved to the prairie to be with him, she began working from home as the executive director of the Science and Environmental Health Network, a think tank for the environmental movement. They have a shared passion for farming, but very different styles.
Raffensperger is fierce, a nonstop advocate for her point of view. But farming isn’t a part of her history; she grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, where her father was a doctor. Her husband is something else altogether, a near-mythic creature in that not only is he smart, a man who speaks out authoritatively on the policies that affect sustainable agriculture, he’s a working farmer who has known the land from birth, who repaired his first tractor when he was seven, who has the knowledge of agricultural cycles that only accumulates after decades in a place. These days, that makes him a rare breed.
When Raffensperger arrived in North Dakota, she thought it odd that Kirschenmann grew food for others yet drove 20 miles to the nearest store for groceries. Now, she raises nearly everything they eat in a large garden. Tonight, drinking organic wine and sharing the pasta, along with bread made from local wheat, she and her husband talk with me about the country’s shift toward using genetically altered seeds, and how it pushes farmers even deeper into a system the two consider uneconomical and unworkable.
They realize, of course, that much of the world might consider their own way of life uneconomical and unworkable, but they insist that it does work—and can work anywhere. “People say, ‘You can’t eat from North Dakota. What about oranges and bananas?’ ” says Raffensperger, who relies instead on carrots and apples, sweet, fresh-tasting foods that keep for months. She freezes bags of cantaloupes, watermelons, raspberries, rhubarb, rainbow chard, rosemary and cilantro, of green pepper and corn and zucchini and tomatoes. “With ingredients like that,” she says, “you don’t start thinking, Where’s the iceberg lettuce?
“We’ve lost the sense that you wait for food to develop,” she says. “We don’t have a cultural sense of when foods are ready, that that old cooked carrot has a lot of vitamin A.” As a child, she says, she ate the typical American diet, things like hamburgers and steak. Now she eats the whole animal, butchered from their farm, wasting nothing—the liver, the brains, and gallons of stock made from pieces that might otherwise be thrown away.
The same philosophy is applied to the workings of the farm itself. The manure from Kirschenmann’s cattle feeds the fields, and the waste from his crops that is edible but not salable feeds his cows.
During dinner, Kirschenmann says that he doesn’t consider the new technologies a radical break with the past. Unfortunately, he adds, they merely perpetuate a style of agriculture that has ruled for 50 years. Like the use of a pesticide or herbicide, the technology of transferring a gene from one plant to another, he says, is being considered in isolation from the environment in which it will be applied. Take the cow: “We’ve been effectively breeding cows to produce more milk for decades. But for every additional quart of milk produced, an additional 300 to 500 quarts of blood has to flow through the udder of the animal. The stress and high temperature in the udder increases the incidence of mastitis, requiring the use of antibiotics. If you do one thing with genetics, you have to do another thing. Some people just don’t see that far ahead.”
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.”
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.”