An excellent documentary about a pioneering Midwest organic farmer
Dreaming of a Vetter World, directed by Bonnie Hawthorne (Rent at dreamingofavetterworld.com)
“When did agrarian culture turn its back on nature?”
This is a question director Bonnie Hawthorne explores in Dreaming of a Vetter World — a film that examines the hard and depressing realities of modern agriculture but also delivers a story of legitimate hope through the person of organic pioneer David Vetter. It’s one of the better farm documentaries out there, and I heartily recommend it.
Much of the film walks through David Vetter’s “forty-year journey from weirdo to award winner.” Don Vetter, David’s father, came back from WWII to farm the family’s 280 acres and quickly realized that miracle chemicals like 2,4-D were destroying the soil; he quit spraying in 1953. David grew up going to a one-room schoolhouse and was probably the only junior higher in Nebraska who regularly read the Bio-dynamics Quarterly. He came back to the farm in the 1970s with a degree in agriculture and set up a cropping system that included a diverse, nine-year rotation, including several years in pasture. The Vetters view their farm as a living organism, with all parts supporting each other — crops, livestock, bees, etc. It’s a closed-loop fertility system, and diversity eliminates the requirement for toxic chemicals.
As wonderful as that sounds — and as the Vetters’ farm is a beautiful place — the road to ecological health was paved with numerous obstacles. In the early years, one particularly noxious weed, shattercane (which is similar to sorghum) grew profusely due to the previous renter’s corn-on-corn, beans-on-beans plantings; it took 10 years to eradicate it. As the farm grew, David was laughed at in the coffee shop and the kids got teased at school. One year David became a particular object of scorn when he planted an entire field into amaranth to sell as a specialty grain; his neighbors were not at all happy to have what they knew as pigweed growing — intentionally — across the road.
In the ’90s, the Vetters’ bees were devastated by a new insecticide, Penncap-M, that neighbors were starting to use; they complained to the state but with little result. Ironically, the honeybee is the state insect of Nebraska. And while the Vetters had no desire to use these synthetics chemicals, they didn’t have access to “rescue chemistry” — any mistake they made, or adverse weather event, led to loss of revenue and a step back in their progress.
Some of their other struggles are those common to many farmers. These included the challenging reality of agricultural economics. For many of the early years, all farm earnings went back into the operation; the Vetters lived on wife and mother Jeannie’s paycheck, without which they wouldn’t have been able to keep farming.
A major theme in the film is the issue of crops being grown as food, as opposed to other uses. There was even a story written about David Vetter in a newspaper in the ’80s entitled, “Growing Food for Humans Puts Challenge in Farming.” As one grower in the documentary comments, “Corn and soy are the most efficient money makers — not the most efficient food makers.”
The statistics in regard to this topic are familiar to many ecologically minded farmers: of the 1.6 billion bushels of corn grown each year in the Vetters’ native Nebraska alone, 22 percent is fed to livestock (who should be eating mostly grass), 18 percent is exported (mostly to be fed to livestock), 19 percent goes into industrial products like packaging materials, and 35 percent is turned into ethanol. Only about 6 percent becomes food for humans.
But the U.S. imports about 50 percent of the organic grain that is demanded by consumers. Part of the reason for this may be the sheer difficulty of producing non-GMO and certified-organic crops, since the majority of farms rely heavily on genetically engineered traits in their seeds.
Of particular concern to David Vetter is cross-pollination from Enogen corn, which is genetically engineered specifically for ethanol production. Enogen corn starts converting its starch into sugar directly in the field. This is ideal for ethanol, but it results in mushier ears of corn. When Enogen pollinates with corn grown for food, it produces corn with less starch, which means mushy tortillas. Enogen also has to be separated from conventional corn that is grown for seed production, and cross-contamination can be a concern even after harvest.
Contamination is a huge — and hugely expensive — concern. This is especially so for the Vetters, because in 1980 they decided to start Grain Place Foods, a seed cleaning and distribution business that supports their own farm and other organic operations in Nebraska. They didn’t have to worry about trademarked genetic traits in 1980; today, though, growers can work hard to produce an organic or non-GMO crop and then, due to cross-contamination, see all their work be for naught. And Grain Place Foods has to be the bearer of that bad news, because they’re the ones who run the tests. Vetter spoke about the lessons he’s learned through operating Grain Place Foods at the 2016 Acres U.S.A. Eco-Ag Conference.
As he says, “This is a technology introduced into agriculture for which we get none of the benefits, and we have to bear a significant piece of the cost.” And as he discusses later in the film, we’ve introduced a lot of new technologies into ag that we don’t know how to manage, and which are proving to be problematic — “If we don’t know how to manage it, we have no right owning it.”
Over the years, though, the Vetters have managed to overcome many of these obstacles. A newspaper headline a few years ago read, “Successful Organic Farmer No Longer Considered ‘Crazy.’”
Perhaps the most inciteful line in the documentary comes when David is asked why everyone doesn’t farm the way he does. “Uh … I think most people don’t do it because it’s more work, and it takes more thought.” Local farmer Paul Huenefeld agrees: “Conventional farming really is an easier way. You can farm with your phone. You can call somebody up — a custom operator — to plant your crop, and hire it sprayed, and hire it harvested, and market it then. It takes courage to kinda go against the trends of the day.”
These sentiments — and this film as a whole — are utterly in line with Acres U.S.A.’s vision. Dreaming of a Vetter World a great introduction to ecological agriculture.
Paul Meyer is the editor of Acres U.S.A. magazine.
