Farmers, researchers agree: COVID-19, climate change revealed holes in agriculture system
To preserve the environment, mitigate climate change and stabilize the U.S. food system, Midwest farmers should diversify their crops and move away from raising corn and soybeans, researchers say.
The current crop system, which was founded after the 1930s Dust Bowl, is causing environmental and economic problems, according to Dr. Linda Prokopy, professor of forestry and natural resources at Purdue University, and a group of more than two dozen Midwest agricultural researchers.
Even before COVID-19 made its way to our shores, the agri-food system in the United States was struggling with increasing farm bankruptcies and farmer suicide rates, rising negative environmental impacts and declining rural populations. Last year, Kansas tied with two other states for having the highest number of farmers file for bankruptcy, according to the American Farm Bureau.
COVID-19 disrupted the U.S. Agriculture system and shrunk food sales, as workers in meat packing plants, such as the Tyson Foods meatpacking plant in Garden City, contracted the illness and businesses, schools and restaurants closed. Unable to get their food to market, farmers had to dump millions of gallons of milk and other dairy products, slaughter millions of chickens and pigs and destroy millions of pounds of vegetables, beans and other crops.
While farmers and experts agree that changes must be made, there is no clear path, very little governmental and social support for the trailblazers and many questions remain.
Why not corn and soybeans?
Corn and soybeans have long been a part of Kansas and the Midwest’s “farmscape,” so why, after so many years, are some experts saying they should be phased out?
To put it simply: the crops aren’t good for the environment and the market is already saturated with them.
“The Midwest Corn Belt is a pot of gold with a bunch of holes in the bottom of the pot,” said Elizabeth Reaves, senior agriculture program director at the Sustainable Food Lab, a nonprofit launched in 2004. “The present day cropping system is really weak. ... It’s primarily due to the region’s dominant landscape of a two-year crop rotation, and the focus on the two crops; corn and soybeans.”
Since corn and soybeans only grow for five months out of the year, that leaves seven months where the soil is susceptible to erosion or loss of soil nutrients, Reaves said. To make up for the loss, farmers must use synthetic fertilizer and manure applications, which cost money and contribute to greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere.
Corn, soybeans still popular
Corn and soybeans plants have been studied and researched for years to improve the crop’s heartiness and ability to grow.
“There’s a reason why farmers plant corn and soybean every year even though they’re losing money doing it,” said Scott Brainard, a tree crop analyst at the Savanna Institute, a nonprofit organization focused on Midwest agroforestry. “A big part of that is a question of subsidies and how subsidies are allocated in the farm bill, but these are good crops and thinking about alternatives is not easy.”
Ryan Speer, a farmer at Jacob Farms north of Wichita has been focused on doing regenerative agriculture, which means trying to have a living root in the ground 365 days a year to capture the moisture when it comes and reduce evaporation and erosion of the soil.
“If we grew more things we wouldn’t have such a glut of corn and soybeans and our prices wouldn’t be low, but in certain areas those are the crops that thrive in their climate,” Speer said.
“You just can’t shift 10 million acres to a different crop without having a home for it or market already built. In the real world when you are spending $1 million a year putting crops out, you are not going to do that without having a home for them. This is a very expensive — almost hobby because we don’t make much money anymore — investment. You put out a lot of money and you have to have a plan of what you can get for your crops and whether you can even get close to breaking even.”
Are other crops better?
Instead of focusing on improving the production system to limit the environmental effects of growing corn and soybeans, Brainard and other researchers say looking for other crops that could grow instead might help mitigate the effects of climate change instead of advancing it.
The Midwest growing landscape used to be more diversified, according to Reaves. For example, farmers used to grow small grains like oat, barley or wheat and if it didn’t make food grade, they would feed it to their animals.
“As animals moved off their landscape, so did those small grains and we ended up with the system that we have today,” Reaves said. “When thinking about then what it would take to bring those small grains back onto the landscape there’s a little bit to it about supporting farmers with the knowledge and the technical assistance to reintegrate it into their system, but there’s also no longer a market in the Midwest for small grains.”
There’s a lot of agricultural breeding and research that is left to be done on the potential replacement crops, Brainard said.
“It’s quite a challenge to think about what could we grow that actually would satisfy all of the things that corn and soybean does for us and it’s not easy, but there’s a lot of people working on those problems and there’s a lot of ways of addressing that,” Brainard said.
What Comes First
A concern of researchers is developing these markets by simultaneously convincing farmers they should grow new crops and consumers and companies to use these markets.
“The problem is complicated,” said Dr. Charles Rice, a K-State soil microbiologist who wrote a similar opinion about COVID-19 and food markets. “Local farmers and producers are at the mercy of the market. You can grow a crop but you have to have a market and infrastructure must be developed for this market.”
The Sustainable Food Lab in Vermont works to support farmers by partnering with small and large businesses to create secondary markets for them to sell some of the small grains, Reaves said.
“The entire infrastructure in the food system has been optimized for producing corn and soybeans,” Reaves said. “It’s like the chicken and egg problem. Farmers will grow it if there’s a market for it. The infrastructure will come to the farmer and be able to aggregate it if there’s enough of it, but someone has to go first.”
Speer grows a multitude of crops at his farm north of Wichita, including corn and soybeans, but also wheat, cotton, milo and cover crops for cattle to graze.
“I would like to do more, but the problem is having a market,” Speer said. “There’s other crops we can grow. Hemp has been pushed around a little bit, but there’s no infrastructure. There’s nowhere to take it. There’s logistic problems. and there’s lots of different markets but that doesn’t mean we have access to them in Kansas.”
Farmers can develop the markets for other crops and livestock, but it can be an extremely difficult field to break into.
Craig Good, a farmer in Olsburg, Kansas, developed a market for his pig farm, selling purebred, antibiotic-free pork to a company in Brooklyn, New York after a wake up call in the late 1990s.
“We had hogs at depression level prices,” Good said. “The simple fact was overproduction and the supply exceeded the capacity for the harvest. Prices got down to around 10 cents a pound. We were forced to either try to get out, because we lost probably between 70% and 80% of our customers in a matter of about two years, or adapting.”
While Good found his niche market of selling pork directly to consumers who care about quality and knowing where their food is coming from, there are a finite number of opportunities like that, researchers say.
“But that’s part of the problem with agriculture,” Good said. “We’ve lost that connection between the consumer and the producer. Many consumers don’t have a clue how their food is grown, where it comes from, and likewise the producers don’t have interaction with their consumers.”
If they are to succeed in changing the food landscape, farmers will need financial support, and some of this may need to come in the form of help through state and federal agencies.
“A lot of the farm programs are built around our monoculture set up of corn and soybeans, so I hate to say this but a lot of our government policies are not great for innovation and change,” Speer said. “It’s just a real issue of having the markets in certain areas that you can be profitable with and that’s something that takes time.”
Current federal government resources are focused on supporting the current agricultural system, Brainard says. But, this can change.
“If we decide that our rural communities and landscapes shouldn’t be poisoned by agricultural runoff, that agriculture needs, as its absolute moral imperative, to become part of the solution on climate change and not a huge driver...then I think we can put our resources in places where we can make that happen,” Brainard said. “I don’t think it’s a pipe dream at all, but it’ll take a lot of work. In no way is it easy.”
What Can Be Done Now?
Some farmers in Kansas have already diversified their crops, growing things like canola, winter peas and millet, according to Rice. Other mitigation tactics like growing cover crops, no till practices and growing small grains are also in the works in the state.
Growing cover crops or small grains can help return nutrients to the soil without expensive fertilizers and can reduce greenhouse gasses, according to Reaves. But markets must be developed for these small grains to encourage farmers to plant them.
“Normally if you’re just growing corn and soybeans on the landscape, farmers can’t grow a nitrogen fixing crop like a red clover and that’s because they need a longer growing period during the warm months and there’s just no room for them to be integrated in the soybean and corn system,” Reaves said. “When you bring the small grain into the system, the farmer can also grow a red clover or an alfalfa to compliment that small grain. That gives them the opportunity to grow some organic fertilizer.”
Hazelnuts in Kansas?
While experts don’t know what the future markets will look like or have an answer yet on what crops could replace corn and soybeans, Brainard is working with a group of researchers who would like to see a wider acceptance of Midwest farmers growing hazelnuts.
“The idea of growing hazelnuts in the Midwest isn’t new. It’s something that people have been proposing for awhile,” Brainard said. “People originally got the idea in the early to mid 20th century when they noticed that there’s a native species that grows particularly in the upper Midwest.”
They have many uses and the demand for ethically sourced hazelnuts is high, according to Brainard, especially for confectionary use, where they can be used for their oil, snack mixes, cereal or, most notably, chocolate.
“You can get higher oil yields from hazelnuts than you can from soybeans,” Brainard said.
Plus, as a perennial crop, hazelnuts could answer many of the environmental concerns that a monoculture of corn and soybeans has left behind.
“It has its permanent root system, which has a myriad of benefits in terms of reducing fertilizer runoff, preventing soil erosion and diversifying agricultural landscapes,” Brainard said. “All perennial woody species capture a lot of carbon and hold it in both the soil and in their above ground biomass.”
This story was originally published July 19, 2020 at 5:01 AM.
