Our family recently visited the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. While many exhibits were big hits — the antique bicycles, the demonstrations of physics concepts from lightning to avalanches, the display of eggs and chicks in various states of hatching — others were pretty brazen displays of corporate sponsorship dressed up as objective science. Among these is the modern farming exhibit that features a John Deere combine (which is actually pretty neat, since it has clear sides that allow visitors to see how it works) and that extolls the virtues of soybeans and everything we can produce from them.
But the most interesting exhibit along these lines is a continuously looping video from the seventies of comedian Marshal Efron pretending to bake a pie with all the chemicals found in the ingredients of an actual supermarket frozen pie. It’s clearly satire — everyone intuitively knows how ridiculous it is to eat things made mostly of ingredients we can’t pronounce — and for this reason it’s interesting that it’s included in a museum that takes itself so seriously in praising scientific progress. It’s as if the curators know deep down that there are, in fact, limits to how far they can (or should) take technology.
“Better living through chemistry” epitomized the spirit of much of the post-war years. Agriculture was of course no exception. Synthetic fertilizers and pesticides/herbicides dramatically increased yields over a number of decades and made some aspects of farming easier — at least for a while. The soil in most places had enough nutrient and biological reserves to be able to respond positively to large applications.
Many growers, agronomists and researchers are now realizing that we’ve come to the end of that borrowed capital, though. To heal our soils, and to protect the crops we grow, we have to start focusing not just on chemistry, but also on biology and physics.
This issue of Acres U.S.A. provides several articles that do just that — particularly in regard to soil and plant biology. John Kempf shares how vital quick and vigorous seedling growth is. He explains how the plants from which we get much of our commercial seed are often grown under poor conditions, and the seeds are often treated to remove the microbes that live on that seed, resulting (unsurprisingly) in seed that is less productive than it could be. Gina Colfer provides a helpful overview of alternative weed control technologies that can help reduce the herbicide applications that often harm soil and plant microbes. Dr. James White, in an interview with John Kempf, describes how endophytic bacteria (bacteria that enter into plant tissue) not only provide nutrients to the plant but can also turn disease-causing fungi into beneficial allies.
And our interview with Lance Gunderson of Regen Ag Labs digs into the different methods of soil biology testing — from microscope-centric methods to molecular techniques to genomic testing — and how growers can understand the benefits and challenges of these tests to improve their soils and, ultimately, their operations.
While the past decades have seen incredible “progress” (depending on your perspective) in all realms of technology, it seems increasingly likely that the future of agriculture will be more dependent on biology than on chemistry.
And that’s the view from the country.
