Rodale's Organic Comes to Rappahannock

Dr. Timothy LaSalle, CEO of the Rodale Institute, is a frustrated man.  He is frustrated that his organization, focusing on organic farming, is outspent by Monsanto, that evil agribusiness whose Roundup glysophate herbicide, he says, is poisoning the soil and whose genetically engineered, patented seeds cannot be reused.  He is frustrated that while small and local farmers have embraced the organic movement the vast majority of commodity corn and soybean row crop farmers and the vast majority of acreage have not and probably will not.  For they have no incentive to change as they are propped up by a system of subsidies that encourage what he calls a monoculture of agriculture that fattens our children with sugar they do not need while delivering food which is low in nutrition—the ideal here being what organic producers call “nutrient dense” food.  He is frustrated that the price of gasoline is “only $4 per gallon” thus delaying the great upheaval in the culture that would cause policy makers to finally embrace his idea of paying farmers not by the number of acres they plant but by the tons of carbon they return to the soil.  This idea is called “carbon sequestration” and was the topic upon which he spoke at the RCCA (Rappahannock County Conversation Alliance) annual meeting at the Link yesterday.

Perhaps one reason he cannot sell his ideas to the great unwashed masses is Dr. LaSalle runs with an elite crowd.  Instead of delivering his stump speech at county fairs and agriculture conventions to people who actually farm for a living, this PhD arm-chair agronomist puts forth his ideas to people who with visions of Wendell Berry hold up farming as some kind of ideal way to slow development and preserve open space without having actually to make a living trying to do so.  In front of a well-heeled crowd in Rappahannock County—the whole county of course can be called that---he spoke yesterday of sharing his ideas with fellow elitists Al Gore, a part-time farmer who made his fortune with Google stock and Leon Paneta, Bill Clinton’s chief of staff.  Dr. LaSalle zips around in his rented Toyota Prius from one model farm owned by a Carnegie to that of a Rockefeller.  This is farming not as a livelihood but as prototype where profits do not matter and where produce is held up as some kind of artifact to be photographed for the magazines.  Dr. LaSalle knows this and for this reason he is frustrated.

The Rodale Institute for many years been researching and writing about organic farming to conventional farmers who mock them as a bunch of granola crunching hippies.  As if to make that point exactly at the end of Dr. LaSalle’s speech a woman who in her youth probably was a granola crunching hippy stood up and delivered a 5 minute impassioned, somewhat awkward diatribe of her definition of “organic”.  Dr. Salle addresses that head on when he said that, “This is not a bunch of granola crunching hippies. It is science.”

Rodale is trying to cast wider its net of influence by speaking of organic farming as a way to reduce green house gases and return carbon to the soil.  His timing is good because global warming of course is in the news and that crisis which he longs for is perhaps upon us.  The Kyoto accord (which he would like to see renegotiated) is affecting policy in Europe and Japan.  But it’s difficult to see Iowa corn farmers or California growers, who of course farm everything, stop using fertilizers simply because Dr. LaSalle wants them too.

Dr. LaSalle laid out his ideas in a presentation and in his paper “Regenerative Organic Farming: A Solution to Global Warming”.   At the Robert Rodale Reserve in Pennsylvania 29 years ago they laid out side by side test plots of conventional chemical farming plots next to those that were organically farmed.  The chemically farmed plots are no-till drilled with corn and soybeans using paraquat, glysophate, atrazine, and presumably some cultivation to burn down, rip out, or suppress weeds before sowing seeds in the soil.  The conventionally farmed fields are then treated with postemergence herbicides to control weeds.  In the organic fields there is no tillage nor chemicals.  Instead a roller crimper is used to kill the cover crop of rye or the legume hairy vetch.  Vetch adds nitrogen to the soil and rye and vetch both create a dense matt through which weeds cannot easily grow.  Corn or soybeans are then drilled into the mulch and grow relatively weed free. 

A byproduct of all of this 29 years of research, much to Dr. LaSalle’s satisfaction, is that the organically farmed soils over time have seen their organic matter increase.  “Organic matter” is of course carbon.  This is the carbon sequestration of which he talks so passionately.  Soils that are high in organic matter are better able to tolerate both drought and flood because the humus--which acts as a sink to soak up all of this carbon dioxide which is causing global warming--also soaks up and retain water.  If only he could convince the US Army Corp of Engineers, he says, there would be no more Mississippi River floods.

Rodale’s idea is that farmers can forgo fertilizer if they build up the soil using no-till organic practices.  Row crop farmers in Virginia would tell you they already use no-till practices and have been doing so for a generation.  Deep tillage of course is the culprit that destroys organic matter in the soil and releases it into the air in the form of carbon dioxide.  But they still use too much nitrogen.  When they grow corn they inject liquid nitrogen right into the soil.  It would be better to plant legumes like clover which naturally add nitrogen to the soil.  Manufactured nitrogen is problematic in two ways.  It takes lots of natural gas to extract nitrogen from the air.  (Chemically air + natural gas = anhydrous ammonia.  Ammonia is basically nitrogen.  You then take this ammonia and add carbon dioxide to create urea which is another form of nitrogen).  And nitrogen destroys soil microbes and burns roots.  These soil microbes help break down compost thus adding carbon to the soil.  But it is unfair of Dr. LaSalle to characterize all fertilizers as “chemical fertilizers”.  Plants need large amounts of phosphorous and potassium too.   Those are made without petroleum.  Phosphorous is made by using strong acids to release phosphates from rock phosphate which is mined from the soil.  Potassium is also made from mined materials using acid to release them.  Nitrogen is just one component of the fertilizer troika “N,P,K” which is respectively nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium.

Dr. LaSalle says that much of his research is not relevant for the rolling pastures that dominate Rappahannock County for we don’t grow corn here except for those few farmers who feed it to their own cattle.  Here our cover crop, grass, is basically our only crop so it would not make too much sense to kill it with a roller crimper and try to drill seeds into the resulting mulch matt.  Those seeds would not even germinate since they require soil contact not to mention that is would be cost prohibitive to tear up your pastures every year.  Instead Dr. LaSalle says the way for Rappahannock farmers to return carbon to the soil is loosen up the compacted soils—compacted by the heavy hoof of the cow--with a yeoman’s plow and practice rotational high density grazing.  This is a practice where cows are shepherded from one plot to the next for often only hours at a time where their manure drops onto the soil in high enough quantities to form a layer of compost which improves the soil by adding organic matter and of course sequestering carbon.  Lots of farmers here read about and believe in such practices but maybe only Cliff Miller is actually doing this since it requires lots of fences and lots of time spent moving the herd.

As for logging Dr. LaSalle simply says we cannot have any of that.  He says the forest holds twice the amount of carbon below the soil as above it and felling a tree releases much CO2 into the air.  Anyone who owns timber land in Virginia knows if you simply forget about your forest eventually your trees will fall over dead.  Not all of us are so rich with university grants that we can simply let our most valuable agriculture product just lie there for others to marvel at.  All of what Dr. LaSalle says makes sense.  He just needs to find a way to communicate his ideas to those who wear overalls instead of pullover sweaters.

Rodale's Organic Comes to Rappahannock

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