We Don't Have to Starve

by LOUIS BROMFIELD

1

AFTER more than a hundred years the ghost of Thomas Robert Malthus is walking again. At the end of the eighteenth century, Malthus set forth the theory that while food supplies of the world increased by arithmetical progression, population increased by geometric progression, and that the day was certain to arrive when the population of the world would exceed its capacity to feed itself.

In Malthus’s time, vast areas of the colonial world were opening up and the prospect of a world shortage of food seemed preposterous to many of his contemporaries. But now we know that in most cases these areas filled up almost at once to the limits of their capacity to feed their populations under existing agricultural practices.

Some of the newly opened areas, instead of becoming treasure houses of food, turned out to be unsuited to productive agriculture because of the soils or climates; and some, because of excessive rainfall and its leaching effect, produced only food of an unbalanced and deficient nutritional value. Moreover, advances in medicine, sanitation, and nutrition have increased the average life span and kept alive millions of people who in Malthus’s time would have died at middle age, or earlier.

All in all, time and man’s progress — as well as his ignorance and greed have served to vindicate Malthus and have produced a world in which food shortages have become an increasing menace. A school of Neo-Malthusians has sprung up crying “woe” and “havoc,” and on the surface evidence they appear to be right. They see a world with steadily increasing populations in which productive agricultural land is constantly being destroyed by wind and water erosion and a wretched agriculture, and in which yields per acre have been constantly going downhill.

Opposed to the Neo-Malthusians is a less pessimistic group of experts which believes that the world can feed itself if it will change its ways and if peoples and governments will recognize the vital role that food plays in the question of world war or peace. Beyond these two groups there exists a school of so-called experts which, often through the medium of newspapers and national magazines, has been conducting a “ Pippa Passes ” campaign — “God’s in his heaven: All’s right with the world” and there is nothing for us to worry about. This silliness is inspired in some cases by ignorance and in others by bureaucratic and academic feuds and jealousies.

As a practical working farmer I am inclined to believe that the answer lies somewhere in between. The world is not feeding itself and actually is on the downgrade, but it could feed itself if it chose.

No nation has a worse record than ours in exploiting and destroying its natural resources, Yet, at the moment, we are beginning to provide what might be called an historically astonishing spectacle: that of a nation and a people doing something about a grave situation before it actually becomes a disaster.

Today it could be said, I think, that the world is turning more and more to this country for the answers to the problems of soil erosion, depletion, and waning food supplies. Perhaps 50 per cent of these answers have come out of the billions spent annually upon Federal and state agencies, and the remainder from the better farmers—those possessed of intelligence, imagination, curiosity, and the capacity to learn, and blessed with the powers of observetion.

The truth is that during the past generation a great revolution has been going on in American agricultures which until recently has passed almost, unnoticed. It is a revolution which involves many factors mechanization, technology, economics, plant breeding, and wholly new approaches to soil, nutrition, and disease-and which presents an amazingly complex pattern with its threads extending into the fields of chemistry, physics, medicine, nutrition, health, and almost every manifestation of science and human endeavor. It could have an immense effect upon the establishment of world peace, since food and raw materials and markets and purchasing power all lie at the very root of war in our shrunken modern world.

I suppose it could be said that modern agriculture began with Justus von Liebig and the invention of commercial or chemical fertilizers. Liebig’s creation of chemical fertilizers gave rise to a school of agriculturists who, with the oversimplification which sometimes handicaps specialists, looked upon these new fertilizers as the solution to the problem of producing great quantities of food and fiber continuously and at a comparatively low cost. The assumption proved to be disastrous. As a result of the use of chemical fertilizers alone, millions of acres of good farm lands declined rapidly in production and some millions were virtually destroyed — a costly example of the scientific error of concentration upon one factor to the exclusion of many others.

By the persistent and sole use of chemical fertilizers the textures of soils were destroyed, erosion and the attacks of diseases and insects were promoted, and adequate moisture was eliminated, together with the bacteria, fungi, molds, earthworms, and countless other organisms — some of them as yet undiscovered — which we know now are indispensable to a real and maintained agriculture and a sound soil capable of optimum production.

At one time the advertisements of chemical fertilizer producers read as if one needed only to sprinkle a little chemical fertilizer on an asphalt pavement, sow the seeds, and eventually harvest bumper crops. But all this has changed. Today the manufacturers of chemical fertilizers are among the greatest advocates of organic material in soils, for they have come to recognize that their product is beneficial or destructive in exact ratio to the amount of organic materials in the soil. They realize that a good and permanent customer is a satisfied customer, and that a farmer who understands soil and good agricultural practices must be satisfied with the resells of chemical fertilizers if he is to purchase them persistently and in quantities profitable to the manufacturer.

The chemical fertilizer error which began the agricultural revolution has been almost entirely corrected in good agricultural practice and teaching, and much of the correction has come from the chain of new discoveries which have brought the agricultural picture back into balance.

Productive soil is not simply an accumulation of inert minerals: it contains within its limits the whole process of birth, growth, death, decay, and rebirth which is the inexorable law of all continuing organic life. To produce the optimum in quantity and quality a cubic foot of soil must contain an intricate series of balances: a balance between minerals and organic material, a balance among the major elements — nitrogen, potash, phosphorus, and calcium — and finally a balance between all these things and the whole range of the trace elements such as manganese, boron, magnesium, cobalt, sulphur, and many others which need exist only in minute quantities, but the absence of which can create sicknesses and low yields in plants, and sicknesses and even deformities, both physical and mental, in animals and people feeding from the deficient or unbalanced soils.

It is very likely that the laws governing perfect soils of high production both in quantity and quality are as exact as those governing chemistry, physics, or astronomy. Beyond these purely mineral and organic balances there exist also other elements and perhaps balances, still unexplored, having to do with the molds, fungi, hormones, enzymes, antibiotics, vitamins, and other factors. Both this field and that of the trace elements (of which we know almost as little) open up fabulous possibilities, in relation not only to quantity but to quality nutritional factors in agriculture, in animal husbandry, and in human life, vigor, and character.

The point is that if every cubic foot of the world’s soil now under cultivation could be made into a perfect, balanced soil, not only could we raise many times the amount of food the world is now producing but we could improve its nutritional quality to such a degree that, save for inherited organic deficiencies or weaknesses, we could alter the physique, character, and intelligence of millions of the world’s population for the better. In other words, instead of coolies or poor whites, living perpetually on the borders of malnutrition and even starvation, we should be developing well-fed, intelligent physical specimens capable of producing and enjoying economic wealth and of making continuous contributions to civilization.

The task of converting the agricultural soils of the earth to this degree of organic and mineral perfection would be a colossal task but not an impossible one. The means are known and available to every government and every people if they choose to use them.

2

ONE is accustomed to hearing the expression “worn-out farm” applied to farms which have reached a low stage of production or been abandoned altogether. I am inclined to believe that there is no such thing as a “worn-out farm” except in the case where erosion by wind or water may have carried olf all topsoil down to the level of unproductive hardpan or actual rock. All soils were originally nothing but accumulations of minerals and rocks in broken-down form. As life progressed and developed on ibis planet, and the process of organic birth, growth, death, decay, and rebirth advanced with increasing rapidity, these inorganic mineral accumulations became overlaid with deposits of minerals in the organic form of dead and decaying or decayed animals and vegetation. In this organic form the minerals were highly available for the nutrition of succeeding animals and vegetation.

When man began the first agriculture, he began destroying this thin organic residue in two ways: (1) by encouraging it to wash away down the streams and back into the ocean: (2) by burning it up rapidly through cultivation. Not only did he gradually destroy all the living qualities of the soil (the moisture, bacteria, fungi, molds, and other factors dependent upon decaying organic materials for their existence) but he also destroyed the process by which these organisms operated to break down chemical combinations of inorganic minerals, unlocking them and making them available to plants and consequently to animals and people. In other words, he interrupted a natural chain reaction together with the balance by which soils are created and re-created and by which they can constantly restore themselves.

On the whole this destructive process has been called agriculture for thousands of years. Only here and there in very limited regions and among a few farmers throughout history have there existed exceptions to the general pattern.

It is one of the common assumptions of the layman that crops consume great quantities of minerals out of the soil, thus depleting it rapidly. Actually no such thing occurs. No plant, even greedy corn or cotton, takes as much as 5 per cent of its weight or growth from the soil. Many plants take much less than that. The rest comes out of sunlight, air, and water through the miraculous process of photosynthesis, which ends by providing us with the proteins and oils necessary to our existence. A small amount of minerals, however, is necessary in order for the process of photosynthesis to take place, and the capacity for production of fiber and seed is in turn largely determined by the quality of balance or imbalance existing among the minerals in the soils.

In many cases, it is not actual mineral depletion which reduces crop yields to the point where a farm becomes “worn out,” so much as poor agricultural practices which make the minerals unavailable. The same minerals are still in existence but they have been reduced virtually to the same condition in which they existed at the time that organic life began on this planet.

In the hands of a truly modern, intelligent farmer these “worn-out” farms can be restored rapidly, and at an economically possible cost, to the level of their original production; and sometimes-through the addition of fertilizers to correct poor mineral balances and by new hybrid and more productive plants — they may be raised above the level of the original virgin soil production in terms of quality as well as quantity.

This is an operation which I have observed as taking place or having already been achieved on a great number of so-called “worn-out” farms through the South, the Atlantic seaboard, and the Middle West. It is exactly the process we have employed on our own worn-out land at Malabar Farm, where today we are growing more of most crops per acre than has ever been grown before on this land. In the process we have spent less money on fertilizer than is spent annually on many farms providing much lower yields. The process is neither expensive in terms of money nor is it in any sense a short cut. We work with Nature rather than against her, following the very method by which Nature built up some of our richest soils, and speeding up the process immeasurably through technology and mechanization. In an area of once eroded land, no more erosion occurs today with the land under intensive cultivation than occurred when the same land was covered by hardwood forest. Possibly there is even less erosion.

It is to these low-production or “worn-out” farms that we must turn in this country for further increases in agricultural production since we have no more rich virgin land. To a great extent this is also true of the rest of the world.

Nature, to be sure, laid down her accumulations of minerals in a haphazard way and in combinations of great variety so that, contrary to the belief of the average person, not all virgin soils are good or productive soils. Indeed some virgin soils are miserably unbalanced and deficient in many elements. The point is that today, for the first time in the history of agriculture, we know pretty well what does make a productive soil and we have the means, within economic reason, of eventually making all soils of any potentiality whatever into balanced and very nearly perfect soils.

If our agriculture in this country were operating 100 per cent on this kind of soil, we could without question feed three to four times our present population at the nutritional levels to which we are accustomed. Moreover, our food would cost much less and the farmer would he making a greater profit since the rule which has made American industry supreme in the world applies equally to agriculture — the rule that the more you produce per unit, per man-hour, per dollar invested, the cheaper is the cost and the greater the profit.

3

IN laying down minerals and in the process of translating these from inorganic to organic form, Nature has created a few soils which were originally very nearly perfect. Among these, perhaps at the very top, are the Black Belt soils of Alabama, Texas, and the Ukraine. In Alabama these soils, first depleted of organic materials and converted into “dead" soils, have been allowed to erode away until in the greater part of the area the soils are no longer black, but gray. In Texas the same soils, put under the plow from seventy-five to one hundred years later, have also suffered from erosion, though to a lesser degree. But while they remain black, the yields per acre have fallen off as much as 50 per cent or more during the past few years. This is not because of mineral depletion, but because the destruction of organic materials and the failure to replenish them has made the Black Belt soil a dead soil in which the natural mineral fertility has become largely unavailable.

Soil specialists in the area do not recommend the use of chemical ferilizers, because the natural mineral fertility of these soils and the quality of their mineral balance are still so superior that chemical fertilizers would add nothing to the potential fertility. But organic material of any kind mixed into these soils produces miraculous results. A crop of hubam or annual sweet clover plowed into a field can raise production in one year 30 per cent or more, merely by reintroducing into the soil the natural process of birth, growth, death, decay, and rebirth which maintains moisture and makes the native minerals available to plants and consequently to animals and people. This is only one of the many instances in which, simply by proper agricultural methods, the yields of soils can be increased enormously — in some areas, similar to our own in Ohio, even increased many hundred per cent.

The great wheat area of the Southwest offers another striking example of the effect upon production of applying knowledge and common sense to agriculture. In the past the rule for three years was on an average one total crop failure, one fair year, and one good year. There has been no failure in the wheat crop since 1939, and in nearly every year the crops have been of bumper proportions. It could be said that the dust storms (and this was the great Dust Bowl area) have virtually ceased, or at least become almost wholly localized.

This change was not brought about through altered climatic conditions, but by a simple change in methods of agriculture. The old-fashioned moldboard plow has been abandoned and a “ripping” plow, which tears up the soil without turning it over and burying all rubbish and organic material, has been substituted. No longer do the farmers who know on which side their bread is buttered burn over the residue of straw, leaving the ground bare. Instead they chop it or work it into the surface, sometimes to a depth of four to five inches. Some farmers are using subsoilers or great chisels which rip up the soil to a depth as great as twenty inches or more, breaking up the hardpan and admitting to the mineral reserve, deep down, both the air and the moisture which help to make it available to the crops growing on the surface.

The rubbish left on the surface or chopped into it has the power of reducing the velocity of a sixty miles an hour gale to about eight miles an hour on the surface of the fields. Thoroughly worked ground, full of surface rubbish, entraps virtually all the rainfall which on the clean worked fields of the past largely ran off the hard and sometimes caked surface, creating soil erosion and downstream floods.

Today, under the new agriculture, all of this rainfall, eccentric and undependable and generally in the form of heavy downfalls in this area, is trapped and carried deep into the ground as a reserve for crops during the dry season that follows, Moreover, it is protected from subsequent evaporation by wind and water by the insulating layer of rubbish and straw mixed into the surface of the earth above. The result is an immense conservation of the moisture so vital to all crops, and a noticeable check upon erosion by wind and water.

In the past the success or failure of a wheat crop was virtually determined by the amount and timing of rainfall. Today this element of chance has been nearly eliminated through a purely technological change in agriculture. Although rainfall has been below normal in the area during the past three years and not too well distributed, there has been no crop failure. The answer is, of course, that through intelligent methods backed by modern machinery a twelve-inch total rainfall is as valuable as a sixteen-inch rainfall under the old pattern of agriculture, since nearly all rainfall is trapped and insulated. At least one great source of the world’s most valuable food, wheat, has been largely insured against the caprices of weather.

4

ON the horizon, there exist countless other factors contributing to the world’s potential ability to feed itself well. Germany has led the way in producing high-protein foods and feed for cattle out of sawdust and the wastes of the forestry industry.

The manipulations of yeast and the use of algae to produce high proteins and even fats is already in an advanced stage and is completely practical as a means of increasing supplies both of high proteins, by which we live, and fats and oils which are indispensable to our health and eventually to our existence. The government station at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, is experimenting with the planting of clams to be harvested its a crop. An acre of the waters of Chesapeake Bay produces more highprotein food than any acre of land under cultivation anywhere in the world, and this production can be increased still further by the program of management being worked out by the Federal government and the states adjoining the Bay area. The control of soil erosion and of industrial and city pollution alone in this region would doubtless add an increase of 25 per cent or more to the yields.

The wholesale advance of grass farming by which hilly or marginal land unadapted to other agricultural uses can be developed for growing high-quality grass forage for cattle, sheep, poultry, and to some extent hogs, thus releasing grain supplies for direct consumption by people, offers further possibilities of augmenting the supply of such high-protein foods as meat and the whole range of poultry and dairy products. All of this is involved in a program of proper land use, of understanding soils and their fundamental inexhaustibility, and of getting optimum production off each kind.

In all these advances technology, and in particular mechanization, cannot be overlooked. Today if a farmer has a few bright days he can — through the proper use of mechanization-plant, cultivate, or harvest a crop and save it all, where in the past he might have lost part or all of it. Mechanization has introduced as well a great number of tools such as the subsoiler, the field tiller, the Graham-Hoehme “ripping” plow now in use throughout the Great Plains area, and many other implements adapted to the new agriculture and designed to achieve optimum production. Moreover mechanization, together with all the other factors dealt with above, can bring down the cost of food, increase profits to the farmer, and expand the purchasing power of the dollars of all of us.

Agricultural scientists are now making valuable new discoveries through the use of the spectograph, which had hitherto been used to determine the mineral contents of distant planets. Today this instrument can be used not only to determine the mineral composition of soils, down to the smallest trace elements, but also to determine the mineral content of vegetables and so fix their nutritional value. These values are not all the same in the same vegetable, as many housewives assume. Two heads of lettuce can vary as much as 75 per cent in their nutrition content, according to mineral content and balance of the soils on which they were grown.

In a half-dozen places agricultural research workers are using radioactive isotopes of various minerals to trace the part each mineral plays in the growth and productivity of any plant. It is highly probable that in the near future these workers will be able to understand and explain one of the miracles of the universe — how a plant is able, by the process of photosynthesis, to turn sunlight, air, and water into proteins and oils, and to provide us and the whole animal kingdom with the basic means of existence upon earth. The prospects opened by such a discovery are almost endless.

At Freeport, Texas, the Dow Chemical Company, pushing further and further the processes by which magnesium was extracted during the war from sea water, is succeeding in the recovery of many other valuable elements. The sea, to be sure, is the source from which all of us came when the first fish went ashore to live, and all the elements of the sea are still necessary in the production of human beings who are intelligent and healthy. The sea is the repository of all the minerals and elements which have been washed down inlo it since the beginning of time, and if they can be recovered at a reasonable economic cost in great quanties, they can make agricultural land highly productive. The supply, of course, is inexhaustible. In the past the process of recovering elements directly from the sea for use in agriculture has been economically prohibitive, but today the prospect of recovering an incredible amount of potential fertility at a reasonable cost is within sight.

If what we already know were simply applied to all the agricultural land of the world and the problem of proper distribution were given consideration, the world could feed itself well. The means are at hand and available. The solution is up to man and his governments — whether he chooses to go on raising less and less and increasing his numbers meanwhile, or whether he and his governments choose to settle down and produce those great quantities of food which it is potentially possible to produce.

It is an apparently valid law of biology that, as diet and living standards move upward, the increases in population coming from the lower economic levels tend to stabilize themselves somewhere within the limits of reasonable potential food supplies. The poorer the diet and living conditions, the faster the population tends to breed, apparently in agreement with the Darwinian theory that plants and animals under adverse conditions reproduce frantically in order that someol the species may survive. It is not impossible that once we begin to feed the world properly, particularly the more starved areas, the population problem in relation to the food supply will tend to correct itself.

The truth is that, man, since agriculture began with the first cave man who burned over a little plot of grass or forest and worked it until it would no longer produce, has been living off the countryside like an invading army destroying everything as it moved. Largely speaking, he has fought Nature instead of working with her, and now finds himself face to face with perhaps the most formidable problem of bis existence.

We know today how to produce food and to produce it in great and increasing quantities. We know how to create soils that are better and more productive than all but a very few of those created by Nature in her haphazard way. We don’t have to starve.