What even is “farmland?”
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INTRODUCTION — The More Things Change
Sarah Mock: They say that fences make good neighbors, and as part of a generation eager for “healthy boundaries,” it seems like that idea still resonates.
When it comes to farmland, fences often communicate something just as important. Fences are a signal that on the agricultural side of the boundary, there are rules. Beyond the fence, the devil may care, but within the bounds, the seeds will be planted in rows, straight and even, at the right time, and with the requisite care and attention. Water, nutrients, plants, animals, and the soil itself will be looked after here, carefully monitored and controlled. On farmland there is thrift and intention and above all, order.
The antithesis of farmland, that place beyond the fence, is complex, chaotic, and unruly nature. Plants, animals, fungi, and the elements mingle and separate according only to chance and the forces of the universe. Life ebbs and flows with the seasons and the years, by turns explosively abundant and anemic, rarely orderly and often unpredictable. Wildland knows no straight lines or firm boundaries. Nature oozes, infiltrates, and evolves. Natural spaces change, and change, and change again.
Change is not a word we tend to associate with farmland. We celebrate century farms, fields and acres that have been in production for the span of multiple human generations. Postage stamps of the earth that yield a harvest again and again and again. After all, we want to– maybe need to believe that farmland will last forever, as long as we take care of it.
But then there are places like Providence Canyon, a little state park in Southeastern Georgia, that challenges the idea that it’s even possible to create a boundary between farmland and nature.
Paul Sutter: These canyons are probably 100,150 feet deep in places, hundreds of yards wide. And these were allegedly caused by poor farming practices in the 19th century. These canyons were effectively erosion gullies.
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SM: Farmland in America has a distinct mythology, as we’ve been talking about on this podcast for the last six episodes. But nature and American wilderness have mythologies too, and the place where the farmland and wildland stories collide has become one of the most controversial flashpoints in American politics, culture, and society.
Full disclosure: Agriculture and the environment is a big topic– too big for a single podcast episode, and potentially even a whole season. Given that, we’re focusing on two particular questions here, the first about the separation of farmland from natural systems, and the second about the impacts of human actions, and lack thereof, on the places and spaces we use. We’ll be covering these two topics in a two part episode. This is part I.
Today we’re going to poke around at the fence line between nature and farmland, looking more deeply at the shared histories of what are now farms and wild landscapes, and at the possibility that the boundary between these supposed “opposites” might be a lot more porous than we thought. We’re going to explore the relationships between managed and unmanaged landscapes, and better understand how natural systems shape farmland, and how farmland in turn shapes everything from national forests, grasslands, and monuments, to cancer rates in the Midwest and the annual dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico.
This is The Only Thing That Lasts. I’m Sarah Mock.
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PART 1: What Washes Away
SM: Whatever else might be true about Georgia’s Providence Canyon, it is beautiful. It looks a bit like the Grand Canyon, if not for all the trees. It’s a vista of cliff walls, colored shades from burgundy and bright orange to a crisp eggshell. The undulations in the rock faces are mesmerizing, and the place has the impressive feel of a landscape carved over millions of years.
Today, Providence Canyon receives about 300,000 visitors a year who come to marvel at the picturesque views and enjoy the woods, the wilderness, and the great outdoors. These visitors can hike around the thousand-acre park and read the occasional signpost about the history of the area, and how these canyons were formed.
Paul Sutter, the environmental historian and professor at the University of Colorado-Boulder that you just heard from a few minutes ago, stumbled upon Providence Canyon almost by accident. And when he first realized how the place came to be, he was flabbergasted.
Paul Sutter: My first reaction was, how ironic that the remnants of environmental mismanagement had been preserved as a park for its scenic qualities. I was amazed to find that the locals wanted to protect them initially even as a national park. They thought they were spectacular enough to warrant that designation.
SM: Paul is referring here to the fact that, beautiful as Providence Canyon may be, it is not a work of nature, but a work of man. Or, maybe not a work– an accident?
The most straightforward version of how this landscape was formed goes like this. The gullies started to appear in the middle of the 19th century, not long after farmers first arrived in this part of Georgia, cutting down the trees and plowing up soil. In doing so, they destabilized the land, and when it rained ,the force of the water hitting and then running off the ground would slice into the Earth, often quite spectacularly, swallowing up hundreds of acres of land, cemeteries, and buildings in a single storm. Providence Church, from which the Canyon gets its name, had to be moved in the late 1850s, to save it from falling into the gully’s now gaping maw.
I think it would have been easy for Paulto learn this ecological history and then wash his hands of Providence Canyon. After all, it’s a familiar story– enterprising landowners barge into a place they know too little about, launch into their work with too little awareness for the local ecological realities, and their self-interested efficiency leads to needless destruction. It share’s important similarities with the story of the Dust Bowl and other manmade ecological disasters both modern and ancient.
But Paul was suspicious that in the case of Providence Canyon, that convenient narrative wasn’t the full story. This suspicion arose out of a local legend that suggested the origin of the gullies was a little more fantastical than you might think.
Paul Sutter: The most common story was that it was started by a dripping barn roof. Or a woman who would throw out her washing water in the same place every day or cattle, walking downhill in this region. But the more I learned about this landscape, the more I recognized that whether these were actually true or not, they could have been.
SM: The science here gets a little tricky, but it’s true– these gullies weren’t caused exclusively by the destabilizing action of farmers. It was also caused by the nature of the place itself.
See, this region sits atop the beach of an ancient ocean. The beach was covered in sand dunes that were hundreds of feet high. Over time, with the help of upstream erosion, the sand dunes were completely covered with clay. And this covering resulted in the rolling, tree-covered hills common in this part of the country. To explain what happens next, Paul compares the landscape to a dipped ice cream cone. The clay is the chocolate, a hard, seemingly stable shell, and those ancient sand dunes underneath are the ice cream.
For a while, the clay holds the sand in place, and it doesn’t seem like anything has changed, but when you break through the outer shell, as farmers did when they plowed deeper and deeper into the soil, things start to go sideways, literally.
Paul Sutter: They breached that clay layer, and then water would start percolating down into that unconsolidated sand. And then at a certain point the land would just slump and slide downhill.
SM: Once this sliding starts, it doesn’t stop until the soil runs out. And the impacts can be unimaginably massive. In Stewart County, Georgia alone, erosion gullies have effectively obliterated 70,000 acres of former farmland, nearly a quarter of the whole county. And this was despite efforts by Georgia farmers to halt the carnage.
Paul Sutter: At least a subset of Southern farmers, were quite attentive to these problems and did try to solve them with what we would today recognize as conservation practices, sometimes successfully, sometimes unsuccessfully. And again, ironically, sometimes those very practices ended up creating the worst gullies by diverting terrace ditches off level fields into sloping land that concentrated water flow that actually created gullying.
SM: After World War II, farmers in the region had much greater success in reducing erosion, in part by recognizing that it wasn’t the farming practices alone that were causing the devastation. It was the combination of geography, soil, and farming that was to blame. So the remedy in the 20th century then, was not some newfangled farming practice, but the much simpler solution of moving farming elsewhere, to more stable soils, and allowing land in this area to return to forest.
Another reason farming largely came to an end in this area was because the existing gullies were basically impossible to repair, both because the damage was so extreme, and because the land simply wasn’t suited to recovery. In that way, retiring the land from agricultural production altogether was the only option.
In many cases, arranging this land retirement wasn’t very difficult, because the land had been abandoned already, or was effectively worth so little that the government was able to buy it from impoverished farmers as both a poverty alleviation mechanism and an environmental protection measure.
Paul Sutter: If you are to go through the South today and look at the conservation areas that exist, and here I’m mostly thinking about a suite of national forests that forest lands along the Piedmont, the former plantation belt in the South, a lot of state parks, refuges, a lot of these lands are lands that had been severely eroded.
SM: The fact that many of America’s most damaged agricultural lands have been reborn as conservation land is not just a phenomenon of the agricultural South. There are many national forests that sit atop former ranchland, many Dust Bowl-era wheat fields that are now part of protected national grasslands, and many state parks and recreation eras that had previous lives as unsuccessful farms.
In the rare cases where parks and protected areas do not have settler-agriculture roots, think the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, or Glacier National Park, these places were often given over for conservation not for their natural beauty, but in large part because they lacked promise as productive agricultural spaces for settlers.
In fact, Paul explains, the whole concept of preserving scenic places is a relatively new one that came into fashion right around the turn of the 20th century. Prior to that, the Grand Canyon, for example, wasn’t necessarily admired as a wonder so much as it was begrudged as a desert badland, a waste of cliff faces that hid in its depths the only valuable thing about it– the Colorado River. A river that could and would lend itself to irrigation.
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SM: Life is a cyclical thing, and so is land. The story of Providence Canyon may, at first blush, be one of disaster and destruction, but Paul pressed me to look deeper– not to think of “the end of farming” as the end of the story.
Paul Sutter: As I’ve returned to Providence Canyon, the gullies are healing. And what’s really happening is as trees are growing up, they’re trapping more soil. It’s just harder to see Providence Canyon now. When you walk up to the edge, it’s in the middle of a forest. And I would really love the park to be able to tell this complicated environmental story.
SM: Part of the complicated story of Providence Canyon is that, despite our desire to make a sharp distinction between nature and agriculture– between the things we control and are responsible for and the things we don’t and aren’t, the reality is, that distinction is only in our minds. Providence Canyon provides undeniable evidence that human and natural processes can co-create spaces and places, and often entangle to create unexpected outcomes, and our desire to label those outcomes, to assign values like “good” and “bad” to certain actions and people,
Might be natural, but they’re not particularly helpful. Not least because the outcomes, these gullies, are hardly final. After all, Providence Canyon, like every square inch of land on Planet Earth, is still evolving.
Paul Sutter: One of the most fascinating parts of Providence Canyon, if you go for a hike there, you come back out of the canyon and you’re hiking through the forest, and there’s actually an old automobile junkyard there, and these old rusted chassis of automobiles from early- to mid-century have trees growing up through them. And I’ve come to think of that as a really powerful metaphor for the place as well. That there is a kind of lesson about environmental resilience. When we talk about the damage done, the destruction, I use a phrase like environmental disaster. What exactly was the disaster? In the simplest sense, there was a lot of land that might’ve been in agriculture that was destroyed for agriculture.
SM: I’ve been thinking about the last part a lot lately, because land that is “destroyed for agriculture” is, of course, not necessarily destroyed at all. Land is not a thing that is very easily made, but it is not easily unmade either. Land transforms, expands and contracts, sometimes with human help, and sometimes without it. Often these changes are deadly and wonderful, beautiful and devastating. And more importantly, as time passes, triumphs and disasters both fade away.
The forests have come back to Providence Canyon, a younger version of the very kind that American farmers would have cleared away 200 years ago. And time, and the land, goes on.
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SM: Providence Canyon and the severest of the Southeastern gullies may seem, today, like a somewhat quaint environmental disaster of yore. The result of too little knowledge, science, and technology colliding with a hell of a lot of gumption. Surely not a mistake we’d ever find ourselves making again…
Today, we have plenty of knowledge and know-how, and no shortage of gumption either. What’s more, we have wealth– wealth we’ve used to fundamentally reshape American farmland, especially in the Midwest. This time, our efforts are no accident, and we’ve taken some precautions, and put in some guardrails to prevent against calamity, and yet, there is always a price to pay for farming, and making farming more efficient, and the bill is already coming due.
How, exactly, are we paying for is the installation of tens of millions of acres of plastic gullies, or the large-scale adoption of field tile in American crop farming.
That’s after the break.
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Intro:
This podcast is made possible by Ambrook. Ambrook builds financial management software for farms, ranches, and businesses across the American supply chain. It’s an all-in-one platform that simplifies accounting, record-keeping, and payments workflows while empowering operators with visibility into the health of their business. Here’s Tom, the engineering lead at Ambrook, on how the company keeps the people who make their software as close to farmers as possible.
[NEW AD]
Outro:
That was Tom and his team help turn empathy into great products at Ambrook. Tune in to the rest of the season to hear from other members of the Ambrook team on why they chose to join and what motivates them to build the financial layer powering American farms.
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PART 2: Field Tile — The Plastic Gully
SM: To teach us what we need to know about field tile, meet Larry Weber. Larry grew up on a small family farm in Northeast Iowa.
Larry Weber: Had a four-crop rotation. We had 400 chickens. We fed out a couple thousand feeder pigs each year and we had a small dairy herd that pastured in an area that had a little creek that ran through it. And I was drawn to the creek as a child, as many people are. And I think that influenced me.
SM: Today, Larry is a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Iowa, and a founder of both the Iowa Flood Center and the Iowa Nutrient Research Center. Larry is still a self-professed “water guy”and he’s dedicated his life to understanding the interplay between soil, water, and the ecosystems they underpin.
And Larry’s been busy over the last two decades or so. It started in 2008, when Iowa experienced an unprecedented and devastating flood. It involved most of the rivers in Eastern Iowa, and lasted essentially the whole month of June. Tens of thousands of homes and businesses were damaged or destroyed, whole communities essentially washed away.
Not unexpectedly, there were a lot of questions in the wake of this disaster, and Larry’s Iowa Flood Center was funded by the state legislature to understand why these floods were so severe.
The most direct answer was simple– Iowa is experiencing more severe rain events though overall annual precipitation hasn’t changed very much. But more rain is coming in short periods of time, which is the recipe for flooding.
But another place where blame accumulated was with Iowa’s farmers. See, farmers have also been impacted by this changing precipitation regime and they’ve struck on a solution.
Larry Weber: Those episodic rains that make the soil very wet for a short period of time lead farmers to do land improvement activities. One of those primary activities is to install subsurface tile drainage pipes to take that excess soil moisture out of the water column, and to dry that land out or those soils out because, as they say, corn doesn’t like wet feet.
SM: To keep corn roots dry, Iowan farmers have gone to great lengths, installing more than 9 million acres of field tile in recent decades.
Tile is an odd name for these drainage systems, because it doesn’t involve any kind of flat, ceramic object. Field tile is a series of interconnected and evenly spaced pipes, which are buried in a grid pattern in farm fields to move water quickly out of the soil. To install them requires significant earth-moving, as field tile is usually buried at a depth of three to six feet.
It can be hard to imagine that installing these pipes on 9 million acres could be worth the expense, but it often is, not least because the pipes last for a long time, and the year on year yield improvement, especially in a field with good soils but that can be wet, is often substantial, and more than compensates for the marginal cost of installation.
In the flooding years since 2008, however, farmers started to get flack about the impact of field tile on downstream flood conditions. After all, the logic goes, water that use to sit on farm fields is now being flushed away into the river as soon as it falls. Doesn’t that make farmers at least somewhat responsible for high water levels downstream?
Despite that logic, Larry’s research indicates that field tile is probably not worsening flood conditions in Iowa, mainly because water has to penetrate the soil to get into the tile system, and when 18 inches fall in a day, as it did recently about 16 inches will run right off the surface, never getting into the soil at all, and all that water is what causes the flooding.
But that doesn’t mean that field tile is not causing problems. To the contrary, Larry is very concerned about the impact of field tile on communities, land, and water downstream. But it’s not the water itself that’s the problem. It’s what the water is carrying that we should be worried about. Namely, Larry is worried about ag nutrient runoff.
There are two major sources of ag nutrients in Iowa. The first is applied chemical fertilizers, mainly nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium mixes, N-P-K for short. The second is animal manure, most of it coming out of confined hog facilities. Both animal waste and organic sources of N, P, and K exist naturally in the landscape, and all these nutrients feed plants and help them grow. But plants can only use so much.
Larry Weber: As they are applied in excess or as they run off in excess into our streams, they become a pollutant. And so they’re a pollutant in our rivers and streams that can result in levels that exceed the maximum allowable levels for drinking water.
SM: Nitrate, a form of nitrogen, is probably the most common excess nutrient found in Iowa’s waters.The EPA sets the maximum allowable level of nitrates in drinking water at 10 parts per million, above which the risk of severe impacts like blue baby syndrome, which can lead to death in children under six months of age, rises substantially. In some rivers in Iowa, nitrate loads are regularly above this level.
In 2015, the issue led the Des Moines Water Works board to sue several counties in Iowa for their nitrate discharge levels. The lawsuit specifically claimed that tile drainage lines moved nitrate more quickly and efficiently from farm soils into rivers which then feed into the public drinking water system. The nutrient loads required the utility to spend more than half a million dollars on nitrate removal in a single season to make the water safe for consumption.
But contaminated drinking water is really just the tip of the iceberg of nutrient-related problems, in Iowa and beyond.
Larry Weber: Too many nutrients into the Gulf of Mexico, result in small algal blooms that happen, the algal die and then consume the oxygen and the water creates a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. That dead zone target is 5,000 square kilometers as the acceptable size. That’s been as high as well over three times that, if not larger once that dead zone is created, of course, and all the oxygen is taken out of the water, then the aquatic species, both the fish that swim through the area as well as the macroinvertebrates and other, benthic and beneath forms of aquatic life all die. And obviously that’s not good for the health of that system.
SM: Not least of the dead zone’s impacts are on Gulf fisheries, both recreational and commercial. But we don’t have to wait for the nutrients to get all the way to the Gulf to see impacts. Algal blooms are common in lakes, reservoirs, and other water bodies throughout Iowa and the midwest, not only leading to an appealing green film, but also leading to fish deaths. An even more unpleasant consequence is high bacteria loads, in particular cyanobacteria, which can not only lead to rashes, pink eye, and terrible stomach aches, it can also get into drinking water supplies, where it is particularly hard to remove. And when cyanobacteria blooms die, they emit airborne toxins that can be extremely harmful to our respiratory systems.
High nutrient loads fuel cyanobacteria growth, and have led to countless closures of public recreation areas from beaches to rivers to lakes. And these increasingly high nutrient loads, Larry says, are directly linked not only to agricultural production, but to the installation of field tile.
Larry Weber: Historically, that nitrogen would have had to travel a great distance laterally through this soil matrix to find its way back to the stream. Now we have a buried pipe that’s installed on a regular pattern, widespread across Iowa. And so that nitrogen absorbed to that water doesn’t have to travel many thousands of feet to get to a stream. It has to travel tens of feet to get to a tile.
SM: One result of this very efficient removal of water from farm fields is a big yield boost, a boon for the bottom lines of individual farms. But another is a devastating quantity of pollution flowing downstream, killing fish, growing algae, closing public spaces, and threatening public health as it goes.
A big part of Larry’s work is not just understanding the relationship between ag production and water quantity and quality in Iowa, it’s also working on solutions that lead to a more stable future for the state.
He and his team have supported the development and adoption of hundreds of practices and tools that have been rolled out on farms all over the region. Though he’s proud of this work, he also understands that the incentives are stacked against them. He points to a 6-year period in which his team rolled out 84 solutions in a single small watershed aimed at holding back heavy rainfall and improving nutrient retention. Over that same period, 8,400 miles of new tile drainage was installed in that same watershed.
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SM: Our technologies have advanced, and today we’re not losing buildings and towns to gullies we don’t understand. But we’re still causing damage, to the environment and to ourselves, through our actions to reshape the landscape for ag production and the corresponding reactions of natural systems, which move in ways we’re notoriously bad at predicting to keep things in balance. After all, water carrying nutrients downstream is not a “flaw” of nature, it’s by definition how nature works. It’s how soils are built, how nutrients get cycled, how life evolves and expands.
To my mind, there’s at least two ways to think about what might come of field tile in the future.
We can think about it as the straightforward reality, where those with the will and the resources to install field tile benefit the most, and the cost of quickly drying out fields is paid downstream, on nearby properties that depend on well water, by city water drinkers and recreationalists, by distant communities and industries. And perhaps most of all, the cost is paid by wild plants, animals, and ecosystems all along the way.
Perhaps in the longer term, we can also think of it like Providence Canyon, where the combined force of farming and nature reshaped the land of Southeast Georgia, destroying it for agriculture, and in many ways changing it beyond our recognition.Similarly, the intersecting qualities of farming and nature are reshaping the rivers and waters of the Midwest, perhaps destroying them for human consumption and recreation, but I think it would be wrong to say that it’s destroying the Mississippi Basin writ large. It’s not. Plants, animals, and ecosystems will adapt and survive. Whether or not we humans will, that’s another question altogether.
Our agricultural ways, in many senses, are about control, but they also exist at the confluence of forces we don’t control. Legally, we can say things like, “I can do what I want on my own property.” But the reality is, the effects of farming on the land are not contained by fences or property lines, nor are the impacts of nature and wilderness excluded by them. Farmland is at the mercy of natural systems, just as wilderness is at the mercy of farmland. The two are not separate or separable.
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But what does that mean for us, as we sit at this critical juncture both for the future of farmland and Nature, in America and beyond? I asked this question of Larry, a man, I’ll remind you, who is not an environmentalist by training. He’s an engineer, and an engineer raised on an Iowa farm. He’s not advocating for the end to agricultural production in the state, not by a long shot.
But he does spend a lot of his time talking to farm and non-farm stakeholders alike, trying to communicate what’s at stake if the state can’t figure out how to manage its water problems.
Larry Weber: If we want to continue to intensify agriculture and we do it in a way that’s unchecked, that will become one of our biggest weaknesses. And I think one example of that is the impact of those agricultural pollutants on public health, on the water that we drink, and the air that we breathe. The state of Iowa has seen in the recent cancer registry that we are the second highest rate of cancer incidents in the nation and the state with the largest increase in rate of cancer. In the country. And so at the current status, we will likely overtake the number one position. Most certainly there are many competing elements to that cancer incidence. But it would be hard not to look at the water that we drink and the air that we breathe.
SM: Protecting our land, air, and water has long been a priority of the environmental protection movements, and it still is today. But though the outcomes we want, and the destruction we’re trying to avoid, might seem obvious, there are, in fact, a lot of disagreements about how to actually achieve them. And at a moment when environmental regulations– especially on the federal level– are weakening how we solve those disagreements and decide to take action feels more high-stakes than ever.
So now that we’ve gotten a taste of how we’ve transformed the land for agriculture, we’re going to take a closer look at these movements that are trying to conserve, preserve, and even regenerate healthy landscapes instead, sometimes in collaboration with agriculture, and sometimes– as was also true with 20th century Georgians did– by choosing to abandon agriculture altogether.
We won’t spend much time on the glossy websites and polished talking points of the organizations you’re likely already familiar with, but instead will dig into the sticky and unsexy debates about the role of domestic animals in landscape restoration, our obligation to manage damaged ecosystems or leave them alone, and who really benefits from existing environmental actions.
Levi Van Sant: Republican lawmakers in South Carolina were the ones who challenged the sort of conventions around conservation easements and said, ‘Hey, if we’re funding conservation, my constituents want to be able to deer hunt there. Right? If we’re funding the protection of lands, why can’t we provide public access?’
SM: Who are we really protecting farmland for, and who’s making a killing on the public dime— next time, on The Only Thing That Lasts.
SIGN OFF
SM: Before we sign off, I talked through information from a number of sources and experts today, so if you want to dig into it yourself, check out the shownotes, or our website for links.
While you’re there, make sure you head over to ambrook.com SLASH research to stay up on the latest reporting from the Ambrook team on agriculture, land, and environmental issues like the ones we talk about here on the show. After you subscribe to the podcast, don’t forget to sign up for the newsletter, and follow @AmbrookAg on socials for news about upcoming projects and stories. And we can’t wait to hear what you think! If you like what we’re doing, let us know, and don’t forget to share.
The Only Thing That Lasts is an Ambrook Research production. This podcast is written, produced, and mixed by me, Sarah Mock. Our editor is Jesse Hirsch, with support by Ali Aas and Bijan Stephen. Technical support by Dan Schlosser, and general support by Mackenzie Burnett and the whole team at Ambrook.
A final note, Ambrook Research, the media outlet that produced this podcast, is 100% editorially independent from Ambrook, the fintech company that funds it.
