Agriculture is in trouble — for two complicated reasons. Both farmland and the farm economy are in distress.
“It is the only occupation that I know of where you can be the very best at it and not make a living,” said U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, speaking to a group of farmers a few months ago about what they’re up against.
Due to climate change, American farmers are facing increasingly severe weather. High winds, droughts, floods, and extreme heat threaten the agricultural landscape and farmers’ livelihoods.
For decades modern agriculture emphasized high yields.
“Farmers were encouraged in the 1970s to plant fence row to fence row,” Vilsack said. “American farmers have done an incredible job … a four fold increase in productivity without a significant increase in inputs.”
The farm practices that come with that, though, have contributed to climate change and left soils exposed and farmland vulnerable.
Vilsack said that productivity came at a cost to the environment and the economic viability of small farms.
“We've lost 544,000 farms in this country,” he said.
As those farms go out of business, the community and environment feel the ripple effects.
“So a couple years ago, we decided that there needed to be a different strategy,” Vilsack said. “There needed to be something more than get big or get out — and we started with climate smart agriculture."
Climate smart agriculture is another name for environmentally-friendly farming. Regenerative agriculture, sustainable farming, and organic production fall in that category. Despite their differences, they all are methods that aim to farm in harmony with nature.
Regenerative agriculture aims to revive the health of the soil and by extension the landscape — and the small farm economy.
The idea is that by changing how farms operate, the farm itself becomes resilient to climate change and can better weather economic storms.
In the last few years, this type of agriculture has gotten a lot of funding, research, and attention. Popular documentaries claim regenerative agriculture can even reverse decades of environmental damage.
The U.S. government has put $3 billion towards research and implementation of sustainable farming practices.
This series asks the question: If regenerative agriculture has the power to revive farmland, the environment, and the rural economy — what will it take to scale this model?
The Next Harvest explores what needs to change to sustain agriculture and examines whether the industry can adapt to the climate and economic challenges it faces.
We’ll hear from researchers trying to understand what agriculture is up against in the era of climate change and what changes farms must endure to survive.
“If we're going to have these droughts and then these mega intense rainstorm events, we have to figure out ways to be more resilient,” said Kansas State University soil scientist Charles Rice.
“Our food systems are also one of the systems most impacted by climate change,” added Sonya Hoo, managing director with the Boston Consulting Group. “And it often affects those that are most vulnerable.”
The regenerative agriculture movement is rooted in … roots. Keeping living plants, forage, and crops in the ground year round revives the soil, stores carbon, fosters habitat, and improves the overall health of the ecosystem.
A lot of Midwestern agriculture is annual, which means after harvest, fields are bare the rest of the year.
“Annuals require the termination of all vegetation on the landscape for them to have a chance,” said Tim Crews, chief scientist at the Land Institute. “If you do that on massive landscapes year after year after year, you get soil degradation.”
The Next Harvest will feature folks rooted in rural America, who see the health of the land and farmers as inextricably linked.
“Traditional family farming is regenerative by definition,” said Tim Gibbons, communications director at the Missouri Rural Crisis Center.
Gibbons and other advocates share how laws, markets, and regulations have contributed to the agriculture status quo.
“There's no silver bullet to save family farmers. There's a lot of policies that have got us where we are and there's a lot of policies we need to get us out,” he said.
We’ll learn from those who are out in the field providing farmers education and support to make difficult and complex changes, like Kelly Wilson with the University of Missouri Center for Regenerative Agriculture.
“It takes more than just the will to do it. You need the resources, you need the knowledge, you need the science based evidence to do it,” she said.
Wilson said the investments and changes farmers are being asked to make for the environmental health of the land likely won’t pay dividends immediately, but rather long term.
“It's not like a one-time fix. It's not like you do them one year, and then you never have to do them again,” she said.
We’ll learn about peer support networks — like Practical Farmers of Iowa — created to help farmers try new things without feeling ostracized and to teach each other.
“We're fostering this curious learning environment where people feel like they can speak up,” said Sally Worley, the organization’s executive director.
The Next Harvest will explore how, in many ways, the new farming practices being promoted are a return to a previous era.
“As we are going to these super modern methods, they also have a lot of resemblance to old methods,” said Cody Jolliff, CEO of Powell Gardens Midwest Center for Regenerative Agriculture.
We’ll explore how doing things differently requires a different market, and farmers such as Liz Graznak are working to find local customers.
“You're not going to just sit there and hope that somebody buys your tomatoes,” she said. “You have to sell the tomatoes.”
We’ll head out into the field and hear directly from farmers who are experiencing first hand the challenge of changing a multi-generational family farm.
“He spent his entire life building this thing, and here we are saying, ‘No, we got to do this completely different,'” said Josh Payne, who works with his grandfather on their farm in Concordia, Missouri.
We’ll learn from farmers who aim to do the opposite of large specialized agriculture and instead have embraced the self-described “chaotic” lifestyle of a constantly evolving, small, diversified production system.
“One of the reasons that farming is really attractive and engaging for me is the learning curve never drops off,” said Emily Wright of Three Creeks Farm and Forest. “As soon as we get the hang of things and it gets even the tiniest bit boring, we add something.”
So can an industry as large and diverse as agriculture come together and make changes for the benefit of the environment and the economy?
“That's the phase that we are in the middle of right now,” said Zack Miller of The Nature Conservancy.
“We've farmed one way for the last 100 and something years in this country. What does the next 100 years look like?”
Listen for The Next Harvest on Wednesdays this fall on KBIA.
