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Instead it glances off and runs in sheets, rills, and rivulets, murky and bloodstained, to the sea. The blood is soil, the living plasma of the Earth, sloughed off at a rate of five to one hundred tons per acre per year-a massive heist. Some Palouse Prairie wheat fields in Washington, on the shameful side of that equation, have the potential to lose one inch of topsoil every 1.
In Iowa, up to six bushels of soil are washed out to sea for every bushel of corn produced. What's left behind is a little deader as well as a little thinner. Behind the rest stop on Highway 7, I trespass a ways into a Kansas wheat field and bring up a handful of the bladed, pulverized, chemically amended soil. It's not chocolate-pudding black like the soil under the first plowed prairies must have been.
It's beige and it doesn't smell as dank or fecund as it should-it doesn't smell like death and life commingled. The fungi that once wrapped their threads around rootlets to extend their reach, the brotherhoods of beneficial soil organisms, the bacteria that spun airborne nitrogen into foodthey're all down to a skeleton crew, a shadow of their former selves. With the links among them severed, there is less "bootstrapping," less of the power that comes from several species working in biotic conspiracy to lift up the whole community.
The wildly fertile "postage stamp" prairies still scattered throughout the Great Plains give fragmentary testament to what we once had. In his eloquent book The Grassland, Richard Manning describes these vestiges as "pedestals carved by the plow.
Such is what we have lost. In other places, the scalp of the Earth is so thin that our plows are already mixing it with subsoil, which doesn't have the organic history that topsoil has. The grand larceny of harvest removes even more organic matter from these fields. Even in places where the stubble is plowed back in before planting, the nutrients are often wasted, pried away by hard rains before any plants are even visible.
Over the years, these heists and the mistimed feedings add up to decreased fertility, a slow sterilization of our nation's real goose with the golden eggs. Author and Kentucky farmer Wendell Berry says Europeans came to this continent with vision but not with sight-we couldn't see the value of what was right before us.
We set to work removing the land's native dress and imposing a pattern of our own making. Exotic plants instead of indigenous ones, annuals instead of perennials, monocultures instead of polycultures.
This disruption of a natural pattern, says Wes Jackson, is the definition of hubris. Rather than looking to the land and its native peoples for instructions what grows here naturally and why? Wheat, for instance, was leveraged to help us win the First World War. The European continent was overoccupied with fighting, and in many places, crops were neither planted nor harvested. To fill that void, we boarded battalions of newly motorized tractors and plowed our home soil right up to the Rockies, uprooting massive amounts of virgin prairie in what would later be called the Great Plow-up.
This was the finale of a movement that had begun with the first sodbusters and their steel-laminated moldboard plows, the only tools strong enough to break the tangle of prairie roots, some as stout as a homesteader's arm. It was considered backbreaking but heroic work, at least by white settlers. A Sioux Indian watching a sodbuster turn prairie roots skyward was reported to have shaken his head and said, "Wrong side up.
Having broken the prairie, we were ripe for the s disaster of deep drought and relentless winds called the Dust Bowl. It got so bad our topsoil started showing up on the decks of ships a hundred miles off the Atlantic coast. One day in , as officials in Washington, D. A frightened Congress coughed, teared, and eventually created the Soil Conservation Service SCS , an agency that would cajole and even pay farmers to conserve their soil.
SCS agents were evangelical, and farmers were ready to repent, and together they were successful in getting our most erodible lands replanted to perennial, soil-holding grasses.
The institutional memory proved short, however, and when another world war had come and gone, we looked around and wondered why we weren't "using" every inch of the breadbasket. Earl Butz, the secretary of agriculture under Richard Nixon, reflected the nation's hubris by admonishing farmers to plow "fencerow to fencerow. We now had acres of new canvas on which to paint the next face of industrialized farming: the Green Revolution. In what was heralded as the answer to world starvation, breeders unveiled new hybrid strains of crops that promised phenomenal yields.
Because of their hybrid nature, however, these new plants couldn't pass their genetic traits on to the next generation. So farmers around the world abandoned the time-honored and ecologically prudent tradition of seed saving and added a new expense to their ledgers: purchasing hybrid seeds.
The homogenization of fields spread rapidly. Varieties of crops that had once been used because they did well on a south-facing slope or were able to prosper in the Banana Belt or the Little Arctic regions of a state were forgotten.
In places like India, where there were once thirty thousand landtailored varieties of rice, their replacement by one super variety swept away botanical knowledge and centuries of breeding in one fell swoop. Too late, farmers realized that touted yields were only promised, not guaranteed. In your part of the world, the fine print read, you may have to do a little goosing to get advertised yields-more water, more thorough tilling, more pest protection, more artificial fertilizer.
But once the farmer next door had taken the bait and started to grow high-yielding varieties, you had to as well, so as not to be left behind. Together, like a slow pour over a large falls, we switched to a system of farming that mimicked industry, not nature. Chasing economies of scale, experts advised farmers to get big or get out. Mechanization allowed them to "service" larger fields with less labor, but it meant steep capital investments: more land, bigger equipment, enormous debt.
For the small operator, there was suddenly no room to dance in the margin, or to take care of your land the way you'd like. To hold the debt at bay, and to qualify for government subsidies, you have to farm volume.
We quickly went from growing food to sustain ourselves to growing so much food it became a surplus-an export item and a political tool. The farm became just another factory producing another product that would keep the United States in the global catbird seat. The internal controllers, those farmers with their ears to the land, determined to pass on good fertile soil to their progeny, gave way to remote-distance controllers-agribusiness and public policy.
To serve these "distance princes," as Grassland author Richard Manning puts it, industrial farmers abandoned traditional ways of managing their lands, such as rotating crops, liming and fertilizing with animal manure, or producing a diversity of products in case one crop failed. Instead, they "focused" their farms-selling off their livestock and switching to one species grown in continuous cropping, which is, in effect, continuous robbing.
They propped up flagging soil fertility with artificial nitrogen fertilizer produced with natural gas. Weed competition was quelled with herbicides, another petroleum product, while oil-based chemicals were used as a prophylactic against pest outbreaks which by now were extreme, thanks to acres of identical plants with identical vulnerabilities.
Suddenly, for the first time in ten thousand years of agriculture, farmers were beholden to the protection ring of petroleum and chemical companies, and were said to be growing their crops not so much in soil as in oil. Once on that treadmill, the feedback loops began. Weeds and pests are wily by nature, and even if you spray them one year, not all of them will die.
Those that manage to hack an immunity explode the next year, requiring even heavier doses of biocides. In the escalating war of "crops and robbers," the more you spray, the more you have to spray. Who's winning? Since , pesticide use has risen 3, percent, but overall crop loss to pests has not gone down. In fact, despite our pounding the United States with 2. In the meantime, more than five hundred pests have developed resistance to our most powerful chemicals.
On top of that bad news, the last thing we want to hear is that our soils are also becoming less productive. Our answer has been to rocket-boost fertility with 20 million tons of anhydrous ammonium fertilizer a year-as many as pounds per person in this country alone. Evidently, this latest move has been in the offing for quite some time.
Good news, they say: Now that farmers don't have to worry about seedlings suffering from year-to-year herbicide carryover which used to limit herbicide use , they can use as much as they want. This is the kind of news that should worry all of us. At last count, leaching pesticide residues made agriculture the number-one polluting industry in this country. At stake is groundwater, which supplies half the U. Farm families already know about contamination.
Recent studies have shown that people living in rural parts of Iowa, Nebraska, and Illinois are likely to have pesticide residues in their wells, and to have higher than normal risks of developing leukemia, lymphoma, and other cancers. Nitrate levels from fertilizer in the drinking water of many farm communities also exceed federal standards, which may be why miscarriage rates in farm families are unusually high.
Nitrates are not the only thing draining from farmland. Money is, too. Today, even though we produce more food, our genetically pauperized, oilhungry crops cost more to grow. Moreover, because of the crops and robbers feedback effect, we will continue to need more and more inputs.
Already, Cornell University ecologist David Pimentel reckons that society spends ten kilocalories of hydrocarbons to produce one kilocalorie of food. That means each of us eats the equivalent of thirteen barrels of oil a year. Author Richard Manning cuts through these statistics to ask the important question: When you have a system that is one part farmer and nine parts oil, who do you think will have the ultimate power?
Not small farmers, and certainly not the landscape. According to data collected by Iowa State University in , most farm families now rely on off-farm revenues for one half of their income. Those who don't make it wind up selling to those with ready cash-corporations, syndicates, investors. This spiral leads to fewer family farms and a brain drain from the rural countryside, a tragedy that Wes Jackson calls "fewer eyes per acre.
These megafarms are hardly what Thomas Jefferson envisioned when he saw a nation of yeoman farmers tending their acres, beholden to no one. What's most dangerous about this dependency-the crops on us and us on petroleum-is that it keeps us too busy to think what the real problems might be.
Fertilizer, for instance, masks the real problem of soil erosion caused by a till agriculture of annuals. Pesticides mask a second real problem: the Green Lights For Boats Pdf inherent brittleness of genetically identical monocultures. Money borrowed to pay for the fossil-fuel inputs masks a third real problem: the fact that industrial agriculture not only destroys the soil and water, it strangles rural communities. Though we don't want to admit it, our farms have become factories owned by absentee interests.
With our help, they are liquidating the ecological capital that took the prairie five thousand years to accumulate. Every day, our soil, our crops, and our people grow a little more vulnerable.
What I want to know is, how long can our denial hold? Before I get too deep into despair, I remind myself that I am headed to meet the one group of researchers who have stepped from denial's shadow and made it their business to expose the crumbling foundations of this system.
The people at The Land Institute-fifteen staff members, nine interns, and three staff volunteers-are committed to devising an agriculture that is, in Director Wes Jackson's words, "more resilient to human folly. At core these researchers are farmers, and they think there is nothing more sacred than the pact between humans and the land that gives them their food.
But they are also realists, and it's made them revolutionaries. They're not afraid to acknowledge that it's not just a few problems in agriculture that need overhauling. It's the problem of agriculture itself. It comes from an insistence on decoupling ourselves from nature, from replacing natural systems with totally alien systems, and from waging war on, rather than allying ourselves with, natural processes. The result has been a steady loss of ecological capital-the erosion and salting of soil, the steady domesticating and weakening of our crops.
To find our way back, says Jackson, we have to remember what the ancestors of "our" crops were like in their own element. Once wild creatures, our agricultural charges were shaped by an ecological context that bears little resemblance to our farming. Their natural ecosystems ran on sunlight, sponsored their own fertility, fought their own pest battles, and held down, even built, soil. But long ago, plants were removed from the original relationships they had with their ecosystems and pressed into our service.
Now, writes Jackson, "Our interdependency has become so complete that, if proprietorship is the subject, we must acknowledge that in some respects they own us. It was his sixteenth summer and he was away from his family's Kansas farm, roping and riding on his cousin's cattle ranch in South Dakota. He was amazed that no one planted or tended it, yet the grass came up year after year, drought or no drought, through snow and blistering sun.
There were rattlesnakes coiled right in the middle of it, and burrowing owls standing sentry outside their holes. Another good rain fell while Jackson was working toward his Ph.
His adviser, Ben Smith, popped his head in the door one evening and declared: "We need wilderness as a standard against which to judge our agricultural practices. When Jackson was thirty-seven, on the fast track to tenure after writing a successful text called Man and the Environment, he got uneasy.
Though he had an enviable post as creator of the Environmental Studies Department at California State University in Sacramento, he felt he wasn't where he was meant to be. To the astonishment of his colleagues, he and his wife, Dana, packed up their three kids and returned home to Kansas.
They moved into a partially earth-sheltered house that they had built along the Smoky Hill River, and in , they began a school that focused on sustainable living practices. That school would become The Land Institute, a nonprofit research organization devoted to "an agriculture that will save soil from being lost or unconsciously bending and turning the heads of the plants as he talks, like a teacher touching the heads of students as they work.
Though never planted by human hands, the prairie is choked with blossoms, grasses gently pouring over, seeds setting, new shoots growing, runners crisscrossing the earth in a web of decay, growth, and new life.
There is no hint of hail damage or drought wilt, no such thing as weeds. Every plant species in this patch alone-has a role and cooperates with linked arms with the plants nearby.
I see diversity of form-grasses splaying upward to different heights and widths, a sunflower's bold expanse, a legume's dark leaflets, fernlike in their repetition.
Piper talks about the plants as if they are neighbors in a community-the nitrogen fixers, the deep-rooted ones that dig for water, the shallow-rooted ones that make the most of a gentle rain, the ones that grow quickly in the spring to shade out weeds, the ones that resist pests or harbor heroes such as beneficial insects. He also points out the butterflies and bees, the pollinators with wagging tongues, spreading rumors from one plant to another. Beneath this unruly mob lies 70 percent of the living weight of the prairie -a thick weave of roots, rootlets, and runners that captures water and pumps nutrients up from the depths.
A single big bluestem will have twenty-five miles of this fibrous plumbing, eight miles of which will die and be reborn each year. These root remains, together with the leaves shed from above, will fall into the welcoming jaws of a miniature zoo-ants, springtails, centipedes, sowbugs, worms, bacteria, and molds.
There are thousands of species in a single teaspoon, all tunneling, eating, and excreting, conditioning the soil crumb by crumb. Through their magic, dissolved nutrients are released to thirsty roots or stored in humus-the tilth that transforms the prairie into a living sponge. The character of this belowground world is an expression of the bedrock, organic matter, rainfall, temperature, light conditions, and most important, the plant and animal community above. Pluck or plant something new and you change the microecology slightly.
Plow, spray, and harvest every year, and you change it plenty. Some of the organisms you lose might be those that sponsor fertility, or help stave off insect and disease attacks, or produce hormones that tell a flower to unfurl or a root to push its snout deeper into the soil. It takes years to tune such an orchestra of microhelpers, but just moments to silence it. The secret of the prairie is its ability to maintain both above-ground and belowground assemblies in a dynamic steady state. It's not the fact that nothing changes on the prairie patches are always pulsing with change , but that the changes are never catastrophic.
A prairie keeps pest populations in check, rebounds gracefully from disturbance, and resists becoming what it is not-a forest or a weed garden. To illustrate, he heads downslope from The Wauhob to stand in the zone between the prairie and wheat field I saw earlier. Up where you are, we have a sustainable ideal, but it won't feed us.
Conceptually, we'd like to be somewhere in here, between the controlled rigidity of the wheat field and the wildness of the prairie. There exists a sweet spot between chaos and order, gas and crystal, wild and tame. In that spot lies the powerfully creative force of self-organization, which complexity researcher Stuart Kaufmann calls "order for free. Is there a rule of thumb about which categories of plants consistently show up on a prairie roster, and what ratios they are in?
Does it matter where Tubes For Boats Sams Club 50 they grow in relation to one another? In search of answers, Piper read everything he could about prairie ecology, and then spent seven glorious summers up to his eyebrows in wild pastures. He and his interns actually took scissors and clipped and bagged all the vegetation in certain plots. They identified each and every plant, separated them out into piles, and then dried and weighed them to find out what grew there.
Through wet years and dry years, in rich soil and poor, Piper found that prairies do have a pattern that repeats itself, an order in the seeming chaos. They cover the ground throughout the year, holding the soil against wind and breaking the force of raindrops. Hard rain hits this canopy of plants and it either runs gently down the stems or it turns into a mist.
By contrast, when rain hits row crops, it strikes exposed soil, packs it, then runs off, taking precious topsoil with it.
Thirty percent of their roots die and decay each year, adding organic matter to the soil. The remaining two thirds of the roots overwinter, allowing perennials to pop open their umbrella of vegetation first thing in the spring, long before weeds can struggle up from seed.
As we walk through a particularly dense patch of prairie, Piper crows, "See? You wouldn't have a chance in there if you were a weed. Not just one nitrogen-fixing legume, but twenty or thirty. That means that there will always be some species or some variety of a species that can do well in our highly variable Great Plains climate. I've been out here in dry years when the grasses barely reach your knee and there's yucca everywhere. Other years, after plenty of rain, you and I could stand three feet apart and not be able to see each other through the big bluestem.
The species composition remains the same, but different species excel in different years. Even if they manage to touch down somewhere in the field, the attack troops don't get very far. Disease spores may blow onto the wrong plant, or insect young may crawl into the wrong bud. With a diverse offering, attacks die down before they become epidemics. Cool-season grasses come up early, set seed, and then bow out of the way, allowing warmseason grasses such as big bluestem to rule the rest of the season.
Legumes such as cat's-claw, sensitive brier, and leadplant fix their own nitrogen, fertilizing the prairie with their bodies. Composites, such as goldenrod, asters, and compass plants, can flower anytime throughout the season. Although these four "suits" may vary in proportion from place to place, Piper found them in every prairie he waded through. We knew we needed perennial grains grown in a polyculture, with the four suits of the prairie represented.
The only question was how many different species in each group will we have to plant? Since it's impractical to have an agriculture with two hundred species, how much diversity will we need to get functional stability?
Our intuition told us that we would probably have to plant many more species than we need and let the assemblage shake down over a few years to the handful that would provide human food. Just about then, 'community assembly' studies started to show up in the literature, and they suggested that you could get persistent communities containing as few as eight species. That was encouraging to us. Today, most of the food eaten around the world comes from only about twenty species, and none of them are perennials!
Some began as perennials, but over the tenthousand-year odyssey of plant breeding, we systematically removed their hardy perennial traits, marching right by the sweet spot between wild and tame, and domesticating them until they were annual by nature. A story is told about the moment Wes Jackson realized the full extent of this unhappy extreme in agriculture.
Shortly after starting his school, Jackson took his students on a field trip to the eight-thousand-acre Konsa Prairie near Manhattan, Kansas. One of them asked the innocent question, "Are there any perennial grains? It was a revelation in black-and-white.
They were disturbed to find that no one, save some folks looking at animal forage, had studied seedyielding perennial grasses or legumes or composites. The reason? If they were to yield more seeds, the thinking went, there would be a trade-off belowground, and they'd lose their ability to overwinter. The first question The Land Institute assigned itself was the one everyone else had skipped:Can a perennial produce as much seed as an annual crop? After two more years of library safaris and actual planting experience, The Land Institute staff was convinced that perennials could be bred to yield plentiful seeds without losing their perennial traits.
Illinois bundleflower and wild senna, for example, were two wild perennials that, with absolutely no breeding, already approached the benchmark yield the floor range for wheat in Kansas: eight hundred pounds per acre. Considering that the wild relatives of some of our crops have undergone four-, five-, even twentyfold seed-yield increases at the hands of talented breeders, the chances of upping yields for these new crops were good.
The trick this time around would be to increase seed yield without stripping the plant of its wild hardiness. Curious to see what artificially increased seed yield would do to plant vigor, Jackson's daughter, Laura Jackson, a researcher at the University of Northern Iowa, conducted an experiment that showed that a plant need not sacrifice photosynthate-the ability to feed itself-when it puts out lots of seeds.
In short, the trade-offs were not as strict as everyone imagined, and it seemed that the chimera The Land Institute wanted to create was well within the realm of the possible. In , the staff embarked on the painstaking process of breeding crops for the domestic prairie. They would have to possess not only hardiness but also "crop character"-qualities like good taste and ease of threshing. Since the breeding of most of the crops we eat today was fairly well wrapped up by Abraham's time, crop domestication of this sort was a brave new venture.
The precedent for this work completely disappears when you consider that Jackson and crew were shooting for crops that were dependable, but not dependent on us. There were two ways they could wind up with a perennial grain-one, they could start with a wild perennial and boost its seed yield and crop character, or two, they could start with an annual that already had good crop character and cross it with a perennial wild relative to refresh its memory about how to survive the winter.
Now all they needed were candidates. Going on catalog descriptions of native perennials in each of the groups, they ordered nearly five thousand different types of seed from governmental seed collections and planted them in the undulating fields by the Smoky Hill River. Those that survived well in Kansas weather and had a whiff of a hope for high seed yield became candidates in their breeding program.
They planted the seeds and waited anxiously, as farmers do, to see how the plants matured. Besides seed yield, they were also looking for agronomic characteristics important to a farmer: reduced seed shattering so seed heads don't break open and spill their grain before harvest , uniform time of maturity, ease of threshing, and large seed size.
The four most promising candidates for perennial domestication turned out to be eastern gamagrass Tripsacum dactyloides , a sprawling warmseason grass that is a relative of corn; Illinois bundleflower Desmanthus ittinoensis , a legume that grows tall and produces a baby rattle of seed pods; mammoth wildrye Leymus racemosus , a stout cool-season relative of wheat that the Mongols used to feast on when drought claimed their annuals; and Maximilian sunflower Helianthus maximilianii , a composite that yields oilrich seeds, which could be pressed to create vegetable oil diesel fuel for tractors.
The second approach-starting with an annual and hybridizing it with a perennial-led to the mix of milo grain sorghum, which is already used as a crop, and perennial Johnsongrass. Now that The Land has its lineup, the breeding has begun in earnest. The very best individuals from each species are grown together in one plot so that they can cross-pollinate.
When two promising strains "mate," the hope is that even more bodacious offspring will follow. The seeds from each trial are planted out in various kinds of soil to make sure the differences are truly genetic, or inheritable, and not just environmental , and the best individuals are selected to cross-pollinate once again. This process is repeated until the improvements due to crossing show signs of diminishing returns. Only then will the breeders call them good and begin the fine-tuning process to bring out each strain's best features.
So far, optimism at The Land is high, which means a slightly deeper nod from the incredibly modest Jon Piper when I ask whether he's pleased with their progress. He walks me among the monoculture and polyculture plots where the best of the best are showing their stuff. Some collections of eastern gamagrass are bravely resisting various leaf diseases, and certain collections of bundleflower and gamagrass are yielding well despite some drought.
The most vigorous crosses between Johnsongrass and grain sorghum are showing both high seed yield and good rhizome production. Rhizomes are the underground runners that allow plants to store starch for winter, and thereby survive. In terms of seed yield, there are already some superstars. Even though its food value has yet to be explored, says Piper, Illinois bundleflower is yielding seed quantities that approximate the typical yield of nonirrigated soybeans in Kansas.
For eastern gamagrass, which can be ground into a cornmeal and baked into a palatable bread, the potential to improve seed yields is great, thanks to a variety that was discovered along a Kansas roadside.
The collector noticed that instead of the normal flower stalk, which is composed of about one inch of female flowers topped by four inches of male flowers, this sport had all female parts which turn into seeds except at the very tip.
If all yielded, the sport could produce up to four times the normal amount of seeds. As Piper shows me one of the stalks, I notice that the female organs are green. That's what we'll be trying to show. The only plant in their lineup that isn't native is mammoth wildrye. Though native stock seems an obvious choice, it hasn't been to other breeders. Most of our crops are exotics, brought over in our traveling bundles from Mexico and Europe. The only native plants that we have ever domesticated in this country are sunflowers, cranberries, blueberries, pecans, Concord grapes, and Jerusalem artichokes.
The Land Institute is trying to lengthen this short list, knowing that natives are tuned through evolution to sing in harmony with the melody of local conditions. While coaxing agronomic manners from these plants will be a Pygmalion task, growing them in monocultures at least gives breeders a chance to compare apples with apples.
Unfortunately, says Jackson, we can't stay with monocultures. The real Holy Grail is to grow them in polyculture-mixed species plots-since, as nature has shown us, only poly cultures are able to pay their own bills. When you are working in a polyculture, you take all the difficulties that you encounter in monoculture breeding and multiply them.
You are not only selecting for high yields, large seed size, uniform maturation time, easily threshed seeds, low shattering, winter hardiness, disease and pest resistance, and climate tolerance, but also for compatibility-a plant's ability to perform well or even exceed performance when grown next to other plants.
The Land Institute staff was essentially faced with designing an agricultural dinner party, deciding who should be seated next to whom to maximize the beneficial interactions and minimize the detrimental ones. Nature arranges these kinds of matchups all the time through the slow culling of natural selection. Could The Land somehow mimic and speed up this process? Just as Piper and his colleagues started questioning this reductionist approach, they began to read about recent developments in the field of community assembly.
James Drake and Stuart Pimm of the University of Tennessee study what it takes to arrive at an assembly of species that remain in equilibrium, a condition farmers would obvously want for their domestic prairie. Unlike The Land staff, they do their experiments with ecosystems in a computer artificial life and with aquatic organisms in glass tanks real life.
They begin by adding species in various combinations and then letting them work out who will survive and in what ratio. Eventually, without intervention, the community shakes down into something that is both complex and persistentorder for free.
In his famous "Humpty Dumpty" hypothesis, Pimm maintains that once you destroy a finished product of community assembly, such as a prairie, you can't just plant those same species and expect to put it Fishing Boats For Sale In My Area Pdf back together again. There's no such thing as an instant prairie. A prairie restorationist must give the prairie a successional history, that is, actually grow the prairie over a trajectory of years. Some plants will blow in and others will drop out, but as those facilitating species change the soil and the fauna and flora around them, they make it possible for the final assembly to be there.
They warm up the crowd for the real act. We're not in the business of creating prairies over a thousand years. What we want to do is build complex, persistent systems that shake down within a very few years. What Piper and company have decided to try, in addition to their more reductionist experiments, is a "shakedown" like those that occur in Pimm's and Drake's experiments. First, they laid out sixteen plots sixteen meters by sixteen meters , then randomly broadcast seeds that represented the prairie's four "suits": warm-season grasses, cool-season grasses, legumes, and composites.
In some plots they sowed only four species, in others eight, twelve, and sixteen. There are four replicates of each treatment. Half of the plots are being left alone to develop as they will, and the other half are called "replacement" plots. After two years, any species in the replacement plots that have dropped out or failed to germinate will be replaced. All the while they will be tracking changes in the communities and looking for rules and patterns about how stable communities assemble.
Within a few growing seasons, they want their target perennial grains to be well represented, and to yield abundantly year after year without weeding or seeding. If a few other noncrop species are present in the mix, so be it.
Eventually, the "recipe" or trajectory the researchers discover will be something they can offer to farmers. Though they don't know all the particulars, Piper thinks a typical recipe may work like this: You throw in the recommended mix of species more than you need , making sure that all important plant groups are represented.
Then you sit back and watch the trajectory unfold. The trajectory might take five years, say, but you would be rewarded with a complex, persistent system. The fields look awful at first, like a total failure, but the perennial seeds are in there and by the second or third year, they just go whoosh and come into their own.
Somehow, the environment filters out what works from what doesn't work, so you are left with the most stable combination. We're studying how this happens, and what steps we might take to help it to happen. The resultant recipe might include a recommendation to burn in year two, mow in year three, or graze livestock in year four. They'll also be thinking about the equipment that will be needed to harvest the different crops at different times of year.
Also as with forestry, you can't just start over each year. You can't decide to grow another crop because pests are bad or the weather doesn't cooperate. Instead, you'll have to plan up front for multiyear conditions-weather, markets, et cetera. Your best hedge against disaster is going to be variety, just as the prairie teaches-lots of paints in your palette so that no matter what the conditions, some species will still flourish. It has to compete reasonably well with what farmers are now growing.
The final three questions that occupy Piper and company have to do with the polyculture performance from that pragmatic point of view. Can the polyculture yields stay even with or actually overyield those of monocultures?
Overyielding is the phenomenon by which a crop yields more per unit acre when it's growing in a polyculture than when it's in a monoculture. Turns out that plants grown next to different but complementary neighbors don't have to compete the way they do when grown next to an identical plant.
They're not jostling root elbows for the water in a particular level, for instance. Nor are they competing for the same plane of sunshine. As a result, the members of a diverse community are actually capturing more resources and yielding more than they would under constant same-species competition.
The literature is replete with examples of overyielding when complementary annuals such as maize, beans, and squash are planted together. Piper's charge was to show that overyielding could happen with perennials as well. When compared with their performances in monoculture, plants in mixtures have consistently overyielded. Studies at The Land are showing that when plants are grown in bicultures and tricultures, they're better able to fight off insects and diseases than when they're grown in monocultures.
It makes sense if you think about it. Plants defend themselves against insects with chemical "locks," and at most, an insect carries only one or two "keys" to the plants it is adapted to eat.
An insect that finds itself in a field of nothing but its target plant is like a burglar with the key to every house in the neighborhood. In a polyculture, where all the locks are different, finding food is more of a chore. A mixed neighborhood is equally frustrating for diseases that specialize in one plant. A fungus may fester on an individual, but when it releases its spores, the leaves of invulnerable plants act as a flypaper, bringing the fungal rampage to a halt.
That's why, although pests exist in prairie polycultures, you don't see the runaway decimation that you see in monocultures. Invasions are contained. Just as with overyielding, most of the experimental evidence for resistance comes from studies on annual plants in polycultures. In , Cornell biologists Steve Risch, Dave Andow, and Miguel Altieri reviewed such studies and found that 53 percent of the insect pest species were less abundant in annual polycultures than in annual monocultures.
Similarly, Australian ecologist Jeremy Burdon summarized studies of twocomponent mixtures and found that there were always fewer diseased plants in the polyculture. So far, the same seems to hold true for the perennial polycultures planted at The Land. But only in the monocultures. The bundleflower that was grown with gamagrass was fine. Polycultures also seem to reduce or delay the onset of maize dwarf mosaic virus, which can be a problem on eastern gamagrass.
With the thought of pesticides gone, Piper and his colleagues began fantasizing about eliminating another petroleum-based crutch: nitrogen fertilizer. Can the polyculture sponsor its own nitrogen fertility?
The question of how much nitrogen fertilizer a domestic prairie would need has not been definitively answered as of this writing. So far, though, signs are pointing to little or none. In experiments conducted with annuals, soil fertility always looks stronger in a polyculture, especially when legumes are in the plot.
Tiny balls on the roots of a legume such as Illinois bundleflower are home to bacteria that have the ability to turn atmospheric nitrogen into plant food. As a result, legumes find a niche in nitrogen-poor soils, thriving where other plants falter. Plants growing near the self-sufficient legumes may also benefit from stored nitrates that return to the soil when the legume sheds a leaf, turns over a portion of its roots, or lays down its last.
In initial investigations of polycultures that include Illinois bundleflower, Piper found that, as predicted, bundleflower can grow beautifully and yield well even in poor soil, leaving the soil character actually improved. As Piper relates in scientific papers, "The soil nitrate concentration in four-year-old Illinois bundleflower stands at the poorer soil site was nearly identical to that on the better soil site despite very different initial nitrogen conditions.
Which is why, of course, no prairie would be without them. Despite the promise of The Land Institute's work, we're a long day away from finding gamagrass bread in our local supermarkets-twenty-five to fifty years, if these researchers are the only ones working.
In Eugene, Oregon, I saw Wes Jackson give an audience goosebumps with this statement: "After seventeen years of scientific research in pursuit of answers to four basic biological questions, The Land Institute is ready to formally state that our country can build an agriculture based on a fundamentally different paradigm than the one humans have featured for the last eight to ten thousand years.
If the eroding Breadbasket is to be transformed by the work at The Land Institute, it will have sweeping repercussions. But our Breadbasket is only one small part of the world's agricultural land. What Piper and Jackson and the rest would never dream of doing is importing prairie agriculture everywhere. The natural systems farm, designed in nature's image, would not look the same in all corners of the world, because ecosystems differ so drastically across the globe.
In the droughty plains, you want water hoarders. What can be imported from The Land Institute, Jackson says, is its methodology-its approach to learning a native system, intuiting its "rules," and then slowly trying to raise a stable community of crops that mimics the structure and performs the functions of the wild one. As the following stories will show, the investigation is already under way. As he strolled along a rural road, he spotted a rice plant in a ditch, a volunteer growing not Wow Tubes For Boats 700 from a clean slate of soil but from a tangle of fallen rice stalks.
Fukuoka was impressed by the plant's vigor and by the fact that it was up earlier than those in all the surrounding cultivated fields. He took it to be the whisper of a secret revealed to him. Over the years, Fukuoka would turn this secret into a system he calls "do nothing" farming because it requires almost no labor on his part, and yet his yields are among the highest in Japan. His recipe, fine-tuned through trial and error, mimics nature's trick of succession and soil covering.
In early October, Fukuoka hand-sows clover seeds into his standing rice crop. Shortly after that, he sows seeds of rye and barley into the rice. He coats the seeds with clay so they won't be eaten by birds. When the rice is ready for harvest, he cuts it, threshes it, and then throws the straw back over the field. By this time, clover is already well established, helping to smother weeds and fix nitrogen in the soil.
Through the tangle of clover and straw, rye and barley burst up and begin their climb toward the sun. Just before he harvests the rye and barley, he starts the cycle again, tossing in rice seeds to start their protected ascent. On and on the cycle goes, self-fertilizing and self-cultivating. In this way rice and winter grains can be grown in the same field for many years without diminishing soil fertility. The neighboring farmers are curious. Whereas they spend their days cultivating, weeding, and fertilizing, Fukuoka lets the straw and clover do the work.
Instead of flooding his fields throughout the season, Fukuoka uses only a brief dousing of water to head off weed germination. After that he drains the fields and then worries about nothing, except an occasional mowing of the paths between fields. On a quarter acre, he will reap twenty-two bushels of rice and twenty-two bushels of winter grains. That's enough to feed five to ten people, yet it takes only one or two people a few days of work to hand-sow and harvest the crop.
Natural farming has spread throughout Japan and is being used on about 1 million acres in China. People from around the world now visit Fukuoka's farm to learn both farming techniques and philosophies. The allure of this system is that the same piece of ground can be used without being used up, and yields can be consistently good.
Instead of pouring money and energy into the farm in the form of petroleum-based inputs, most of the investment is made up front-in the farm's design.
Instead of working harder, he whittled away unnecessary agricultural practices one by one, asking what he could stop doing rather than what he could do. Forsaking reliance on human cleverness, he joined in alliance with nature's wisdom. As he says in his book, One Straw Revolution, "This method completely contradicts modern agricultural techniques.
It throws scientific and traditional farming know-how right out the window. With this kind of farming, which uses no machines, no prepared fertilizer, and no chemicals, it is possible to attain a harvest equal to or greater than that of the average Japanese farm.
The proof is ripening right before your eyes. Australian ecologist Bill Mollison, like Wes Jackson, advocates keeping some crops on the land for many years, to bring farming as close as it can come to nature's efficiency.
For years, Mollison has worked on perfecting a system whereby small-scale farmers would set up a low-maintenance garden, a woodland, and an animal and fish farm and then become self-sufficient-fed, clothed, and powered by local resources that are literally right at hand.
Designing with nature's wisdom is at the core of this farming philosophy, which is called permaculture, for permanent agriculture. In permaculture, you ask not what you can wring from the land, but what the land has to offer.
You roll with the weaknesses and the strengths of your acreage, and in this spirit of cooperation, says Mollison, the land yields generously without depletion and without inordinate amounts of body work from you. The most laborious part of permaculture is designing the system to be self-supporting. The idea is to lay out crops so that those you visit most frequently are close by your dwelling Mollison calls it edible landscaping and those that require less vigilance are set out in concentric circles farther from the house.
Everywhere, there are plants in two-or three-canopy schemes, that is, shrubs shaded by small trees, which are shaded by larger trees. Animals graze beneath all three canopies. Dips and furrows in the land are used to cache rainwater and to irrigate automatically. Wherever possible, permaculturists invite external forces such as wind or flooding to actually help do the work.
They build windmills, for instance, or plant crops on floodplains, where they can enjoy a yearly pulse of alluvial sediment. Choosing synergistic planting arrangements-using "companion plants" to complement and bring out the best in one another-is key to a successful agriscape. To maximize these beneficial unions, the permaculturist creates a lot of edge-transition zones between two habitats that are notoriously full of life and interaction.
Mollison is also fond of using interactions between animals in place of high-energy inputs or machinery. The chickens roost on the benches at night, enjoying the warmth left over from the day's solar radiation. They add to the heat with their own bodies, helping the plants survive the frosty dawns. In the morning, when the greenhouse becomes too hot, the chickens move into the forest for grazing.
As they search for nuts and acorns shed by the planted trees, they comb the ground like rakes, aerating and manuring the soil while snatching up tree pests. Humans eat the eggs and eventually the flesh of these chickens, but in the meantime, they enjoy their services as cultivators, pest controllers, greenhouse heaters, and self-fed fertilizers.
Mollison learned this ballet of efficiency firsthand when he worked in the forests of Australia in the late sixties. As a researcher, he was trained to describe the biological world and leave it at that. But Mollison took the next step that is crucial in biomimicry: He saw lessons for streamlined living emerging from the forest and vowed to apply them to a new kind of agriculture.
Today in Australia many farms are now working according to the permaculture principles he has popularized, and an international permaculture institute, with branches throughout the world, is training people to disseminate the technique. By mirroring nature's most stable and productive communities, and then living right in the middle of them, Mollison believes, human communities can begin to participate in their beauty, harmony, and Earth-sheltering productivity.
New Alchemy Farm on Cape CodAnother example of ecoculture sprouting in place of agriculture can be found on Cape Cod, at the offices of two of the country's most innovative bioneers, John and Nancy Todd. They formed the New Alchemy Institute in to design living spaces and food producing systems that would use nature as a model.
The forest-in-succession was the conceptual guide for their totally self-sustained farm. It then rises through the shrub layer to the canopy formed by the trees that produce fruit, nuts, timber, and fodder crops. Following this plan we are hoping to maintain the farm in a dynamic state of ongoing productivity while it continues to evolve ecologically in the direction of a forest," Todd writes in his book, From Ecocities to Living Machines.
Like Mollison's permaculture, New Alchemy's farm is designed so that every living component has a multiple functionshading and fertilizing, for instance, as well as yielding an edible harvest. Wherever possible, the work of machines and, by extension, humans is replaced by the work of biological organisms or systems.
One of the Todds' inspirations was Javan farms in Indonesia, where unconventional to us, anyway agriculture has thrived for centuries. The Javanese farm is nature in miniature, and it shows the restorative processes of planned succession.
In early phases, annual crops and fish ponds might dominate the landscape, but as the landscape grows and matures, a third dimension develops as tree crops and livestock come into their own.
The key is to mirror the natural tendency of succession which, over time, creates ecosystems that are effective and stable utilizers of space, energy, and biotic elements. The tropical forests here are paradises-cornucopias of irrepressible vegetation and edible foods ripening under a natural heat lamp and mister.
It's therefore all the more ironic, and perhaps telling, that jungles like this have made such poor sites for growing conventional crops. It makes sense if you realize that the same force that creates the jungle-deluges of rain-can also leach nutrients from unprotected jungle soil after clearing, when there are no plants around to soak up water.
Crop harvests also remove even more nutrients from the site. After a few years of this nutrient extortion, the soil quickly tires. Natural clearings in the jungle meet an entirely different fate. They are quickly revegetated by a parade of species that take over one after another, sinking roots, spreading canopies, shedding leaves, and restoring fertility to the site. Nutrients in the system are kept in play in the green growing biomass -nutrients "on the stump.
Ewel, a botany professor at the University of Florida, Gainesville, hypothesized that if you could simulate a natural regrowth of jungle using domestic crops as stand-ins for the wild species, you could achieve the same fertility-building phenomenon and actually improve the system rather than deplete it.
The trick is to start with crops that mimic the first successional stage grasses and legumes , and then add crops that mimic the next stage perennial shrubs , all the way up to the larger trees-nut crops, for instance.
To test their hypothesis, Jack Ewel and colleague Corey Berish cleared two plots in Costa Rica, letting them naturally reseed to jungle. In one of the plots, every time a jungle plant sprouted, they would dig it up and replace it with a human food crop that had the same physical form.
Annual for annual, herbaceous perennial for herbaceous perennial, tree for tree, vine for vine-it was as if nature were guiding the hands of the agronomists. The parade of volunteers to the natural system Heliconia species, cucurbitaceous vines, Ipomoea species, legume vines, shrubs, grasses, and small trees were replaced by plantain, squash varieties, yam, and by the second or third year fast-growing nut, fruit, and timber trees such as Brazil nuts, peach, palm, and rosewood. Failed uprisings and revolutions that took place included the Boxer Rebellion , the Bailundo revolt , the Ilinden�Preobrazhenie Uprising , the Sasun uprising , the Uruguayan Revolution of , an uprising in French Madagascar , the Russian Revolution of , the Argentine Revolution of , the Persian Constitutional Revolution , the Maji Maji Rebellion , and the Romanian Peasants' revolt.
A more successful revolution took place in the Ottoman Empire, where the Young Turks movement restored the Ottoman constitution of , establishing the Second Constitutional Era. Major disasters in this decade included the Chinese famine of , the Messina earthquake , the San Francisco earthquake and fire and the Great Baltimore Fire. The first huge success of American cinema, as well as the largest experimental achievement to this point, was the film The Great Train Robbery , directed by Edwin S.
Porter , while the world's first feature film, The Story of the Kelly Gang , was released on 26 December in Melbourne , Australia. Popular books of this decade included Anne of Green Gables and The Tale of Peter Rabbit , which sold 50 million and 45 million copies respectively. There are several main varieties of how individual years of the decade are pronounced. Using as an example, they are "nineteen-oh-six", "nineteen-six", and "nineteen-aught-six".
Which variety is most prominent depends somewhat on global region and generation. In American English , "nineteen-aught-six" is also recognized but not much used. The cost of an American postage stamp was worth 1 cent. The best selling books of the decade were Anne of Green Gables and The Tale of Peter Rabbit , which sold 50 million [89] and 45 million [90] copies respectively. Serbian writers used the Belgrade literary style, an Ekavian writing form which set basis for the later standardization of the Serbian language.
Below are the best-selling books in the United States of each year, as determined by Publishers Weekly. The Tour de France starts for the first time in The following articles contain brief timelines which list the most prominent events of the decade:. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Decade of the Gregorian calendar Births Deaths By country By topic. Establishments Disestablishments. This section needs expansion.
You can help by adding to it. July See also: s in film. January See also: s in fashion. See also: History of baseball in the United States. See also: International Boxing Hall of Fame. Hale, Williams Bayard January XXI : � Retrieved Hutchinson, Woods January Keys, C. Page, Walter Hines January Mahan, Alfred T.
Sloss, Robert January Cosmic Matter and the Earth in Russian. Novosibirsk: Nauka. The Observatory. Bibcode : Obs Archived from the original on April 17, Indianapolis, IN: Howard W. Much of the technocentric focus of literature on the phonograph a focus Kenney's cultural history finally shifts may derive from the interests of collectors, for whom I have the utmost respect.
In the interest of simplicity, I am going to use the eventual American generic, "phonograph," for the graphophone and gramophone as well as the phonograph. Of course in Britain and much of the postcolonial world, the generic is "gramophone. Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World.
Osceola: Zenith. Archived from the original on 23 January International Conference on Years of Radio � 5�7 September New York Magazine. Richard Pearse: Pioneer Aviator. ISBN Flight over Waitohi. ISBN X. The Riddle of Richard Pearse. The Americans in Panama. New York: Statler Publishing Company.
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