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Shared Visions, Two Paths
| Article
# : |
20079 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
12 / 1992 |
1,826 Words |
| Author
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John Haberern
John Haberern is president of the non-profit Rodale
Institute, an agricultural research and publishing
organization in Emmaus, Pennsylvania. |
While the world awaits Wes Jackson's perennial polycultures, soil continues to erode. Agricultural chemicals poison farmers and farmworkers, and contaminate food and groundwater. Worldwide, farmers find it increasingly difficult to make a living off the land, and flock to cities.
Bob Rodale didn't think the world could afford to wait for solutions to these problems. Until his untimely death in 1990, he worked tirelessly to show that these trends can be reversed using crops and farming practices already in hand.
Like Jackson, Rodale was an outspoken critic of conventional agriculture. His father, J.I. Rodale, began questioning the industrialization of farming in the 1940s, at the very dawn of the chemical-farming era. Bob carried the torch through the 1970s and 1980s as president of the nonprofit Rodale Institute and of Rodale Press, publishers of books and magazines such as The New Farm and Organic Gardening.
Bob and Wes shared a similar and often lonely vision during those decades. Both recognized that current ways of farming were not sustainable. Both knew that sustainable farming was possible only if farmers stopped treating soil like dirt. Both proposed that nature is the standard by which farming practices should be judged, and that diversity is essential to sustainable farming systems.
Where the two parted ways was on tactics. Jackson directed his research to re-create a prairie that would also yield grain. He started at the end and worked backward, knowing it would take decades for his work to bear fruit. Rodale recognized this work was important. He supported Jackson's research financially in its early years and set up a parallel perennial-grain project at his own research facility.
But Rodale focused his own efforts on current farming practices that rely on annual crops and started nudging them toward sustainability. While Jackson was figuring out what Z would look like, Rodale was leading agriculture through the sustainable-farming alphabet.
Rodale placed his faith in farmers. He believed that most of the solutions to agriculture's problems would spring from practitioners. They would not come from research centers--not even Jackson's or his own. Rodale was convinced that with a clear vision and the right information, farmers could create regenerative farming systems that are practical, profitable, and sustainable. His vision
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