Graze Anatomy

(Page 3 of 4)

FLAT AND FLOODED

Pouring rain notwithstanding, Francis Thicke wants to show me his herd of 80 Jersey dairy cows grazing a paddock on a summer day in 2008. Iowa farmers like Thicke became accustomed to rain last year. In June, floods worked their way down the Mississippi River Basin beginning in southern Minnesota, eventually inundating vast areas throughout the Corn Belt. The floods killed 24 people and caused damages running into the tens of billions of dollars.

It's not considered Minnesota-nice to say so, but this expensive inundation is simply another cost of corn and soybean agriculture. Iowa, with the best and flattest prairie topsoils in the nation, has the most altered landscape of any state. Sixty-five percent of its land is planted to corn and soybeans. The state has less than 1 percent of its native habitat left, almost all of which was tallgrass prairie and oak savannah before European settlement. That earlier system included sinuous streams and riparian areas full of wetlands and flood-catching vegetation, but the thirsty prairie has been flattened and plowed into fields that shed rainwater almost as fast as parking lots do. Many of the fields have been underlain with drainage tiles that speed up the flow of surface water into rivers, exacerbating flooding. A stretch of pure prairie will absorb five to seven inches of rain an hour, meaning that 12 feet of rain in a 24-hour stretch yields no runoff. Normal absorption on corn and soybean land ranges from 0.5 inch to 1.5 inches an hour, meaning that comparable rainfall yields catastrophic floods like those of 2008.

Thicke and I shed our drenched raingear and adjourn to his study, where he points to a framed black-and-white photograph. It shows a hill contoured with alternating strips of tilled and untilled land, with a pond at its base. The photo was featured in the 1957 U.S. Department of Agriculture's Yearbook of Agriculture, at a time when the department was touting this method of farming as the best way to prevent runoff and erosion. In fact, Thicke tells me, the pond in the photo flooded just about every time it rained hard. He knows this because it was his family's farm.

Thicke earned a Ph.D. in soil science and held an executive job at the Department of Agriculture, but he quit to buy a worn-out, eroded, and marginal farm near Fairfield, Iowa, in 1996. He allowed the tilled fields to revert to grass and started an organic dairy. Erosion stopped almost immediately. In the meantime, Thicke's brother kept the family farm and turned the neat strip plots into permanent pasture for beef and dairy. The pond no longer floods. Converting a significant share of corn and soybean lands to perennial pastures, as the Thickes have done, could go a long way toward eliminating flooding, especially if those pastures are strategically located in areas prone to flooding and erosion.

The traditional argument against farms like the Thickes' is that they cannot match the "efficiency" of industrial-scale grain production. But this argument does not take into account the productivity of managed rotational grazing. Todd Churchill says one reason he can make more money than a subsidized corn farmer is that he can produce about two steers per acre. It takes roughly the same acreage to grow the 3,000 pounds of grain used to finish a single steer in a feedlot.But can enough land be converted to pasture to make any real difference to the landscape? The swath of destruction that is corn agriculture occupies about 80 million acres, mostly in the Midwest, an area only slightly smaller than California. At least half of that acreage is used to grow corn for livestock. Is it really possible to imagine something so radical as the transformation of 40 million acres of land?

In fact, it's been done before. In the 1970s and 1980s, and at the urging of the federal government, farmers greatly increased the acreage under cultivation, plowing up land that had been idle since the Dust Bowl. This triggered a huge increase in erosion, which in turn triggered the federal Conservation Reserve Program. At present farmers receive about $1.8 billion a year and have converted a total of 34.7 million acres from row crops to grass. But high grain prices have spurred farmers to begin pulling those acres out of the program at an alarming pace, about two million acres in the last two years. The grass-fed beef and dairy market offers an opportunity to reverse that flow and at the same time insulate the land from plows driven by high grain prices. Moreover, the $1.8 billion subsidy that farmers receive from taxpayers nets them an average of $51 an acre. Grass farmers can net as much as eight times that amount on converted corn and soybean land.

Continued...