The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food (6 page)

In 1837, an Illinois blacksmith named John Deere solved the problem by inventing a cast-steel plow that could cut through the deep roots and rip up the grass for planting. Like the roller mill, the steel plow arrived at a fortuitous moment—just at the time when thousands of “sodbusters” were crashing deep into the Plains. President Abraham Lincoln sweetened the deal in 1862 by signing the Homestead Act, which promised 160 acres of free land to anyone who could claim and cultivate it for five years.

Biologist Janine Benyus, in her book
Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature
, describes the misplaced heroism of the settlers who worked to replace perennial prairie grass with annual wheat: “A Sioux Indian watching a sodbuster turn the roots skyward was reported to have shaken his head and said,
‘Wrong side up.’
Mistaking wisdom for backwardness, the settlers laughed as they retold the story, ignoring the warning shots that fired with each popping root.” The more you learn about the destruction of the prairie, the more difficult it becomes to see a modern wheat field as a thing of beauty, in the same way it is hard to see beauty in a clear-cut forest.

The new wheat didn’t exactly thrive on the Great Plains at first. Varieties grown in the East did poorly with less rain and extreme variations in temperature. Disease was common. So were low yields and outright failures. It wasn’t until the 1870s, when hard winter wheat, the drought-resistant “Turkey Red” introduced by Mennonite immigrants, replaced the traditional soft wheat, that it took hold. Hard wheat suited the new steel roller mills as well, making the now assembly-line-like refining process even more efficient.

Wes’s banner in the hallway blocked a couple on the way to their room. “Good evening, folks,” Wes said cheerfully. “We’re making an analysis of our nation’s depleted capital. Care to join us?” The couple smiled uncomfortably and shuffled alongside the two root systems.

Wes pointed to the annual wheat. “Of course, this wheat won out. Sixty million acres of puny roots that we need to fertilize because it can’t feed itself. Puny roots that leak nitrogen, that cause erosion and dead zones the size of New Jersey.” Wes smiled beatifically, gums and all. “This wheat won out, but what you’re looking at is
the failure of success.”

By the early 1900s, westward expansion amounted to a twenty-million-acre experiment.

And the wheat kept growing. When Europe ran out of wheat during World War I, the American government stepped in, guaranteeing wheat prices. The Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909 followed, doubling the amount of free land to 320 acres per settler, and the
wave of settlement became a tsunami. In 1917, a record forty-five million acres of wheat was harvested; by
1919, it was seventy-five million acres. Much of the gain came from plowing marginal land—areas of North Dakota and the southern Plains where soils were thinner and there was less water for irrigation—but for the time being, it didn’t matter.

Historian Donald Worster argues that by the time the war effort ended, the Midwest’s grain economy had become inseparable from the industrial economy. “
The War integrated the plains farmers more thoroughly than ever before into the national economy—into its networks of banks, railroads, mills, implement manufacturers, energy companies—and, moreover, integrated them into an international market system.” The grasslands were remade. There was no turning back.

So the plows kept plowing until the rain suddenly stopped.
The soil, naked, anchorless, and now dry, turned to dust and, in 1930, started to blow. Dust coated everything, consuming surfaces, bed linens, and attic floors (which routinely collapsed under the accumulation). It buried fence posts, cars, and tractors in enormous drifts. And this was only the light stuff. The heavier soil clumps ripped fences apart and whacked down telephone poles as they blew across the landscape. During the worst of these storms, visibility was zero, and vegetables and fruits died from the storms’ electrical charge. The drought ushered in a biblical infestation of insects, which devoured any wheat that survived, and a plague of jackrabbits emerging from their habitats in search of food.

Klaas remembers his aunts telling him about the Dust Bowl. The storms were so severe that the family would set the dinner table with the plates upside down. By the time they served dinner, the table linen would be imprinted with rings of dust. The family lived with the hardship until the farm itself went under.

Over the course of the next decade, our country’s midsection heaved hundreds of thousands of years’ worth of incomparably rich soil into the air.
Some regions lost more than 75 percent of their topsoil. The decade came to be known as the Dirty Thirties, and it marks one of the worst environmental disasters in our history. In his book
The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl
,
Timothy Egan describes one of the dust storms:

A cloud ten thousand feet high from ground to top appeared. . . . The sky lost its customary white, and it turned brownish then gray. . . . Nobody knew what to call it. It was not a rain cloud. . . . It was not a twister. It was thick like coarse animal hair; it was alive. People close to it described a feeling of being in a blizzard—a black blizzard, they called it—with an edge like steel wool.

One of the largest of the storms hit in the spring of 1935—Black Sunday. It didn’t die in the prairie but moved east, gathering strength as it went.

The following Friday, a scientist named Hugh Bennett stood on the floor of the U.S. Senate, arguing for the creation of a permanent Soil Conservation Service. Even though photos of Black Sunday had appeared in newspapers around the country the same morning, most senators believed they had already done enough for the people of the prairie. Just as Bennett was wrapping up his plea, an aide appeared at the podium and whispered in his ear. “
Keep it up,”
he said. “
It’s coming
.” Bennett kept talking. A few minutes later, he stopped talking. The chamber turned dark. A giant copper dust cloud blew through Washington for an hour.

“
This, gentlemen, is what I’m talking about.” Bennett said, pointing to the windows. “There goes Oklahoma.” Eight days later, Congress signed the Soil Conservation Act into law. Some call the incident the beginning of the environmental movement in America.

The white mushroom cloud, the one that billowed up from the flour bin in the restaurant’s kitchen and slowly drifted toward my office window, could be thought of as the modern manifestation of the Dust Bowl, with all-purpose flour now playing the part of prairie topsoil. Which is to say the degradation
of the prairie is still reaching us like it reached Hugh Bennett a century ago, as vital a topic now as it was the day he stood in front of the Senate and argued for reform.

Writers have spared no ink in making the case that the Dust Bowl era is a parable of man’s hubris. In his essay “The Native Grasses and What They Mean,” Wendell Berry writes, “As we felled and burned the forests, so we burned, plowed, and overgrazed the prairies.
We came with visions, but not with sight. We did not see or understand where we were or what was there, but destroyed what was there for the sake of what we desired.”

This blindness began with our nation’s earliest European settlers, many of whom weren’t themselves landowners in Europe and had little experience farming. If you have a hankering, as I do, for the old days of our young republic, when farming was what farming should be—small, family-owned, well managed and manicured, a platonic paradigm of sustainable agriculture—think again. Today’s industrial food chain might denude landscapes and impoverish soils, but our forefathers did much of the same. They just had a lot less horsepower.

Even George Washington criticized the exploitative methods of “slovenly” farmers who, spoiled by the abundance of fertile land and natural resources, “
have disregarded every means of
improving our opened grounds.”

Colonial farmland was quickly run down. Forests were cleared for coveted virgin land. In his book
Larding the Lean Earth
, historian
Steven Stoll identifies the detrimental precedent that came to define American farming:

In a common pattern, farmers who had occupied land for only 20 or 30 years reduced the fertile nutrients in their soils until they could no more than subsist. Either that, or they saw yields fall below what
they expected from a good settlers’ country and decided to seek fresh acres elsewhere. Forests cut and exported as potash, wheat cropped year after year, topsoils washed—arable land in the old states of the Union had
presented the scares of fierce extraction by 1820.

This attitude only intensified as we pursued Western expansion. As Alexis de Tocqueville noted in his famous study of the country, farmers approached farming with the attitude of capitalists rather than conservationists. “Almost all the farmers of the United States combine some trade with agriculture; most of them make agriculture itself a trade,” he wrote in
Democracy in America
. “It seldom happens that an American farmer settles for good upon the land which he occupies.” Americans arrived on the prairie to settle the West on their own terms. We set out to conquer rather than to adapt—unable, or just unwilling, to adjust our sight to the needs of the new ecology. There was so much abundant and enormously productive land available that vigilant soil management became an Old World idea.

I had understood this, to some degree, for years, but what I hadn’t understood until that evening when Wes and I studied root systems in a hotel hallway was what that blindness had wrought. We didn’t just replace the deep root system of perennials with puny annuals. We replaced the prairie’s ecosystem, one of the most diverse in the world, with 56 million acres of monoculture. Today, almost all the hard wheat grown in the prairie comes from just two varieties, which, in the words of writer Richard Manning, is “
a spanning of the scale of genetic possibilities from A to B.”

Look out on a field in the middle of Kansas or North Dakota and what you see are grain fields so uniform they look like tabletops, the prairie manifestation of a desecrated grave. Wheat, as Klaas describes it—as a social crop, as a community builder, as the story of who we are—no longer really exists. At least not in the way we’re farming it. Or eating it.

Not long after my evening with Wes, I consulted a map of the United
States. I was looking for the breadbasket states—the “Wheat Belt,” as I’d heard it called countless times before, without knowing the coordinates. On the map, it appeared as a thick strip, a belt of land running from North Dakota all the way down to Texas, passing through South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma. Wheat is the primary crop of these six states.

By chance, I came across another map in my search, a census of population changes in the first decade of the twenty-first century. I put it next to the map of the Wheat Belt, and the comparison was as stark and alarming as Wes’s banner. The census map showed how the same stretch of six states has become shockingly depopulated. The
Wheat Belt is emptying out, even as the rest of America grows denser. It is a relentless decline in numbers that began in the Dust Bowl years ago and has never really ended. What makes this population drop so remarkable is that the phenomenon seems almost wholly confined to these Wheat Belt states, indeed that while much of America continues to grow, the former heart of the country’s grain production is today in demographic free fall. In Kansas alone, six thousand towns have vanished in the past eighty years. In many parts, the population is like those wispy annual roots—sparser today than at the end of the nineteenth century, when the census deemed them “frontier.”

One explanation for the population declines can be traced back to advances in farming technology and the subsequent consolidation of farmland. New tractors and other farm machinery did more work in less time. Take, for example, the combine, introduced in the 1830s. Until then, farmers spent hours harvesting, threshing (separating the edible part of the grain from the surrounding chaff), and cleaning their grain to prepare it for milling. True to its name, the combine consolidated these functions into a single machine, mechanizing the harvest and, in keeping with the Mennonites’ predictions,
enabling fewer farmers to farm even more land. Between 1950 and 1975, the number of farms in the country declined by half, as did the number of people on farms. And the average size of farms nearly doubled, from 216 acres in 1950 to 416 acres in 1974. Nowhere were these trends more apparent than in the Wheat Belt.