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Prairie Prophet
| Article
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20077 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
12 / 1992 |
3,236 Words |
| Author
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Vince Magers
Vince Magers is a free-lance science writer based in
Greenwood, Missouri. |
In the office of the Land Institute hangs a photograph of Wes Jackson standing at the edge of an experimental crop plot watching several young men work the soil with hoes. He is wearing bib overalls and, as farmers are wont to do, he has his left thumb hooked in the bib. A hat shades his face from the piercing Kansas sun. In any auction barn or small-town café Jackson could easily pass for one of the legions of hard-featured Plains farmers.
Jackson, however, is anything but a typical farmer. This son of the Kansas prairie wants nothing less than to remake American agriculture, to make it less abusive to the land. Jackson's has been a leading voice calling for sustainable agriculture for 15 years now. A plant geneticist, Jackson, along with his colleagues, is engaged in research looking for ways to make possible a kind of farming that is less dependent on chemicals and is less mechanized. As he puts it, he wants agriculture to rely "less on human cleverness and more on the wisdom of nature."
Jackson founded the Land Institute on 28 acres near Salina, Kansas, in 1986. He assembled a small staff of researchers and set out seeking a practical alternative to till agriculture, which has taken a heavy environmental toll. Among the ills of till farming, he says, are destructive soil erosion, herbicide and pesticide runoff, groundwater depletion, and a heavy reliance for energy and fertilizer on fossil fuels that will some day be exhausted. In addition, Jackson says modern-day agriculture has driven many small farmers from their land, destroyed rural communities, and turned farmers into consumers of equipment and chemicals rather than producers.
As a cure for some of these ills, Jackson proposes to tap the prairie's centuries-old secrets for water use, converting nitrogen in the soil, and fending off pests, weeds, and diseases. Under his scheme, fields would be plowed only every three to five years, not every year, greatly reducing soil erosion, which he views as the biggest threat. Much of the topsoil now being lost would remain intact. Instead of a single crop, fields would be filled with a mixed polyculture of perennials. In short, Jackson is attempting to mimic the prairie and replace with perennial plants the conventional annual crops such as corn and wheat that are grown on sloping and erodible land. A key question he and his researchers must first answer is whether a perennial polyculture can produce yields on par with conventional farming.
Jackson has been called a revolutionary, a radical, and a prophet who has looked into
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