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.

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Rodale's Organic Comes to Rappahannock

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What do the Environmentalists Want?

I am a devotee of most of the principles of organic farming especially what the organic farmers have to say about soil fertilizer. It is better to apply rock minerals, fish oil, kelp, and incorporate legumes in the soil rather than apply nitrogen made using natural gas. On the one hand this is better for the environment. On the other hand it is better for the soil. And in the long run—a very long run—it costs less than buying fertilizer every year.

But this word “environment” has lost all meaning. Activists have embraced this whimsical notion--conjuring up images of flora, fauna, and pastoral visages--and used it to bully those who dare oppose their point of view. They claim the moral high ground by virtue of their moniker. To say "I am an environmentalist" means "you are not".

America is a confederation of thousands of fiefdoms. It is a cornucopia of city governments, county councils, state assembles, neighborhood associations, tax districts, sewer and water districts, and the federal government each with their own vested and usually opposing interests. We are not, say, France where power emanates from Paris and radiates out to the provincials as fiat. There is no Hugo Chavez dictator here. In the USA every councilor, congressman, senator, mayor, lobbyist, and grass roots activist has a say in every decision over where to build a bridge, pave a road, place a homeless shelter, dig a mine, or erect a tower.

To push through an idea among so many clamoring voices is tough enough. But it is made even more difficult by the environmental activists whose goal is to, frankly, gum up the works. By virtue of their lobbying we have environmental impact statements, lawsuits, counter lawsuits, email campaigns, telephone banks, the clean air act, the Kyoto accord, the clean water act, special usage restrictions---all kinds of complications to make what should be simple, well, complex.

Further the environmentalists are for the most part the well-heeled—what George Bernard Shaw would call “MIRC”, “Members of the Idle Rich Class.” These are people with the time, money, and wherewithal to attend local hearings, write checks to the Sierra Club, fund the World Wildlife Fund, devote time to legal campaigns, and drive to Richmond to lobby the legislature. That they represent the interests of the upper-class opens themselves up to criticism by labeling them with the word that they hate the most: elitist.

Rush Limbaugh says on his radio show that the true goal of the environmental activists is to destroy capitalism and replace it with socialism. But socialism is passé. It went out of vogue when George Orwell and Stalin dashed the aspirations of the intellectuals of the fifty years ago.

Capitalism is not what the environmentalists wish to destroy because those of them who made it into the ranks of the well-to-do did so through the free exchange of commerce. So that suggestion cannot be true. So what do the environmentalists want? You would have to conclude that the goal of the environmental movement is the death of the combustion engine and the elimination of fossil fuel. But if that is the case then why is this lobby opposed to nuclear power and mining uranium in Virginia? Such contradictions in logic is part of what makes their means often clash with their aims. People are sheep--following the whims of their leaders--no one is really thinking.

The environmental debate which is currently raging is whether or not to drill for oil in places which heretofore have been off limits. When I first started writing for magazines and newspapers more than 20 years ago I wrote an essay which I pitched to the American Petroleum Institute about companies gearing up to drill for natural gas off the coast of North Carolina. In 1991 there had been plans to build a pipeline on the Outer Banks. That idea fizzled in part due to pressure from you know who.

Virginia is said to have oil off its coast line as does Florida, California, and of course Alaska. Fisherman would say that oil drilling rigs are good for fishing for they make structures to which barnacles can attached which then attracts somewhat larger marine creates which attracts even larger marine creatures until you have blue marlin, wahoo, and mackerel. My father owned a tugboat company for 30 years. He spent much time sinking ships at sea exactly for this purpose.

But predictably the environmentalists have lined up again this idea. As if they have studied rhetoric from Cicero, they pick the most compelling argument and they go to war with this dogmatic phrase. In the heated battles of political discourse no one is allowed to say what they really think. No moderate politician, for example, is going to say something to offend his constituents and by definition if one is “moderate” their constituents are of course both sides of the argument. And moderates tend to win because they appeal to the greater numbers of voters.

The other bit of subterfuge is the argument over whether to build a power line through Rappahannock and Fauquier Counties. The environmentalist sitting in his air conditioned office writing emails and sending faxes obviously needs electricity. But they cannot admit that because it would undermine their opposition to what is obvious to most which is that as the country grows so does the demand for power. So the strategists at the Piedmont Environmental Council have latched upon the idea that Dominion Power wants to build this power line simply to enhance its bottom line. This despite the fact that utilities are regulated monopolies whose profit is regulated by the state. In good times and in bad the power company always makes its regulated return.

Because it is a monopoly the power company does not care what it costs to fend off the Piedmont Environmental Council. And because the environmentalists are Members of the Idle Rich Class they do not care what it costs to take depositions, make motions, conduct public hearings, send a zillion letters, emails, and faxes. Those who inevitably pay are the working poor and the middle class whose power bills rises in correlation with the costs of environmental activism. The only time the environmental lobby would be bothered by $8 per gallon gasoline or a power grid that is strained to capacity is when the lights go out and the pumps run dry. Then they are sitting in the dark, unable to drive to their soiree because commerce has ground to a halt. Is this the goal to which they aspire? Perhaps Rush Limbaugh is correct.

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What do the Environmentalists Want?

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Rachel Carson: Silent Spring, Noisy Summer

Certain people have a standing in the world that is almost saint like. So it is for Mother Teresa who is fact a Saint. Another is Rachel Carson a biologist and former editor and writer for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife service. Writing in the 1960s this demure spinster with no agricultural experience rocked the agricultural status quo with her intelligent and eminently readable book-length essay on the damages done by application of the pesticide DDT to birds, animals, fish, and people.

What made Carson’s book different from other books on the same topic was it was written by a writer who was not purely a scientist. Thus it was readable for a wide audience. Writing the introduction to the 40th anniversary edition Linda Lear says:

“Headlines in The New York Times in July 1962 captured the national sentiment: ‘Silent Spring is now noisy summer.”…When Carson died barely eighteen months later in the spring of 1964, at the age of fifty-six, she had set in motion a course of events that would result in a ban on the domestic production of DDT and the creation of a grass-roots movement demanding protection of the environment through state and federal regulation.” In other words Rachel Carson launched the Environmental Protection Agency.

Carson’s book was serialized in “The New Yorker” magazine, a general interest magazine that mixes original reporting with literature. Even today articles that appear in “The New Yorker” often make headlines on television and in the newspapers—this is made more difficult for a magazine which has a deadline of months or weeks. For one hundred years “The New Yorker” has been the home to the best writing in America. J.D. Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye” first appeared here as did Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood”. The publisher of a competing magazine, the 150 year old “Atlantic”, said in speech in Rappahannock County that “The New Yorker” is the best magazine in America. So it was from this forum that Carson wrote the story of the destruction wrought by DDT in a book-length essay where she was given enough pages to turn this otherwise technical discussion into a non fiction narrative that stirred the emotions of many. She introduced her story by writing:

“Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change. Some evil spell had settled on the community: mysterious maladies swept the flocks of chickens; the cattle and sheep sickened and died. Everywhere there was a shadow of death. The farmers spoke of much illness among their families.”

But then she added:

“This town does not actually exist, but it might easily have a thousand counterparts in America or elsewhere in the world.”

Carson might have been the first writer to make widespread the notion that pesticides were not widely used before World War II but became popular after the war as chemical weapons manufacturers stumbled upon their effectiveness against insects. Now practically every book you read today on organic farming repeats this statement. Carson levied her ire against DDT, a chlorinated hydrocarbon and Parathion, an organic phosphate, saying that the Germans had turned it into nerve gas and that it had become a favorite for suicide in Finland. She railed against arsenic, a naturally occurring compound that was once widely used as a pesticide. It is still fed to chickens to increase their appetite. Rachel Carson says it ends up in their manure.

Another target is malathion, also an organophosphate. Carson says it is rendered safe by the human liver but quite dangerous when mixed with other organic phosphates that interfere with this ability of the liver.

In Georgetown, South Carolina when I was a boy, the county used to drive around our neighborhood spraying a cloud of malathion to control mosquitoes. We had a farm in nearby McClellanville that my stepfather had converted into a duck hunting club. All those ponds and canals were ideal breeding ground for mosquitoes. The mosquitoes there were worse than any I have ever encountered anywhere. They were so fierce that at certain times of the year you literally could not go outside for more than a minute. So we mixed kerosene and malathion into a sprayer that was attached to our lawnmower and marched around the yard belching a cloud of gas into the azalea, myrtle and camellia bushes and into the live oak trees and Spanish moss.

Alex deToqueville wrote in “Democracy in America” that there is a certain “tyranny of the majority” in the USA. Here we are not as free as we are led to believe. If you hold a point of view which runs counter to conventional wisdom you will be excoriated, hounded from your position, run out of town on a rail. Once an idea has achieved critical mass proponents of that idea claim the moral high ground and use this position to bully the opposition. So it is with pesticides. Conventional wisdom—at least among people who are not farmers—holds that all chemical pesticides are bad. This is why the idea of organic farming has take such a grip on the nation’s conscience where for a few dollars more you can buy peaches and pears, parsnip and parsley that is chemical free and protect you kids and the environment from the evils of agribusiness and pesticide poison. But farm chemicals have done some good and a the risk of invoking the ire of the mob let me offer some example.

This morning when I woke up I read two articles. First in the “Washington Post” was a piece on atrazine saying that this widely used preemergence herbicide has shown up in streams. But the EPA still allows its use because they have not been able to quantify the damage it does to frogs and other aquatic creatures. Farmers like it because it is cheap and effective keeping weeds out of corn and sorghum by blocking their ability to photosynthesis.

The second article I read was in the aforementioned “New Yorker”. An aphid-sized imported exotic Asian insect called “adelgid” has laid waste to most of the hemlocks found in the Eastern USA. This includes the few patches of forest in the Great Smoky Mountains that have never been logged, ever. So the forest rangers—a group of people who by their nature would not be considered pro-chemical agribusiness pawns—have been trying to raise private and public funds to buy and apply a chemical manufactured by the German mega company called “imidacloprid” which is similar to nicotine. This chemical does not persist in the environment like DDT—it breaks down when exposed to light. While this pesticide is broad spectrum--meaning it kills both the good pests and the bad ones--Bayer has invented a technique whereby imidacloprid can be injected in to the roots of the tree thus not harming the surrounding forest were it to be sprayed from an airplane. As America’s greatest trees east of California fall over dead the forest rangers fret that more money has been spent to build a new highway through that national park than has been dedicated to stopping this pest. There is hope that a predatory beetle imported from Asia can stop this pest but they are difficult to mass produce and currently cost $2.50 apiece. Foresters in North Carolina do not want their hemlock trees to go the way of the American Chestnut which is practically disappeared from America because of a similar problem that appeared in the 1990s.

Today we have the billionaire Bill Gates whose philanthropy makes news but before Gates there was the Rockefeller foundation. With the billions that J.D. Rockefeller made driving gasoline dealers into insolvency his family spent money on among other projects including mosquito eradication in of all places Italy. Swamps were drained and DDT sprayed to rid the Italian peninsula of the mosquitoes that spread malaria. Of course Rockefeller could not do that today as wetlands have been given legal protection but there are those that would say that DDT is certainly better than dying a horrible death with the fever and chills brought on my the mosquito which vectors malaria.

The fear of pesticides has blocked efforts by farmers to protect their most valuable crops. Winemakers in Sonoma County, California have reason to fear the sharpshooter insect because it spreads the deadly virus Pierce’s Disease. Once this shows up in your vineyard grape vines fall over dead and grapes cannot be planted in that vineyard again, ever. So in an area where farmland goes for the eye popping $100,000 per acre the citizens of Sonoma blocked efforts by the farmers to spray the whole county against the insect. The farmers sit and fret.


PANA uses hyperbole and vitriol to bully public policy. They cannot entirely be faulted for this, however, as grass roots activists quickly learn that in order to affect public policy you must adopt a few dogmatic phrases and make that your mantra. So it is, for example, with the anti-illegal-immigration movement. Rather than state their obvious concerns—that the mass migration of Mexicans to Manassas and beyond will change this country into a Spanish speaking feudal society like Mexico to the South—they say stop illegal immigration because terrorists are coming over the boarder. The actual number of terrorists who have walked from Mexico to the USA could be counted on one hand but it’s effective sloganeering. So it is with PANA as they embrace the same sort of illogical logic—not because they believe it, rather it’s an effective tactic for lobbying.

Consider the position of PANA on the use of DDT. Because of Rachel Carson and her book “Silent Spring” the words “DDT” conjured up images as horrific as Agent Orange. So when the World Health Organization (WHO)—a conservative, slow moving worldwide bureaucracy that is as nimble as a glacier—decided recently to advocate DDT to control malaria they invoked the ire of PANA.

Malaria is a killer that ravages Africans living in mud huts. The WHO said DDT is safe for humans so these mud huts should be painted inside with a mix of DDT and a paste to make it cling to the walls. Of course DDT is toxic to wildlife and fish but it’s also deadly to mosquitoes. The WHO said we don’t want to feed mosquitoes something they enjoy---we want to kill them. And their approach did not use spraying so there would be no runoff into streams. So it’s safe and reasonable, yes?

DDT is not the only target of ire for the PANA. Another is a whole class of pesticides called “organophosphates”. There is no doubt that this is dangerous stuff, yet it is widely used in agriculture. These are dangerous because they are what are called “cholinesterase inhibitors” which means they interferes with nerve functions—of course this is what causes insects to roll over and die. People are safe unless they use it day in and day out without proper protective clothing and mask.

Any substance taken to excess can be toxic. You can drink enough water to drown yourself and with not much effort you can drink enough alcohol to kill you. But when is a substance toxic such that its benefit to agriculture is less than its danger? If the EPA and the Food and Drug Administration have said it is O.K. to spray a certain chemical on fruit and vegetables then what is all the fuss about?

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Rachel Carson: Silent Spring, Noisy Summer

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