When you ask Harriet Behar if farmers can lead the fight against global warming, her optimism bubbles up like the seven freshwater springs on the 216 acres that she and her husband, Aaron Brin, tend in the rolling hills of central Wisconsin.
Of course, we can, Behar says, drawing on her considerable experience as evidence. For almost fifty years, Behar has worked just about every angle of organic farming—as a vegetable grower, farm co-op outreach liaison, agricultural educator, organic inspector, and even a stint as chair of the National Organic Standards Board. Now she is a beekeeper and commercial herb grower.
Harriet Behar and her husband farm 216 acres in the rolling hills of central Wisconsin. Behar is pictured at left in her high tunnel and below left in her solar greenhouse.
Behar has no doubt that diversified, Earth-friendly farms, if supported by an engaged public, can turn things around on the climate front. “We have to be optimistic,” she tells me. “Look at the monarch butterfly. It’s not like they’re fully back, but their numbers are rising. We know what to do to bring them back.” (Plant and protect milkweed from herbicides. Protect their overwintering sites in the oyamel fir forests of Mexico.)
“We’re not that stupid. We’re not that dense,” Behar says with a chuckle. “That’s why we should address climate change. We know how to deal with that.”
It’s a huge challenge, given that farming itself is a hellacious contributor to greenhouse gasses that produce higher temperatures. So what do you do when farming can be both an accelerant and a retardant to a warming Earth? Behar and other like-minded farmers see a way forward.
Their insights are important. As Chloe Maxmin and Canyon Woodward argue in their upcoming book, Dirt Road Revival, we need more voices shaping the climate-change response than just “Tesla-driving Silicon Valley technocrats and wealthy suburbanites.”
“We need,” they write, “the wisdom of rural folks in those discussions—the rooted wisdom of those who grow our food, who live every day in the natural world, who are profoundly more connected to the land.”
Well, yeah. Who knows the quirks and threats of weather and climate better than farmers? They always keep an eye out for distant storm clouds. A not-unfamiliar theme quickly emerged when I talked to a half-dozen or so farmers from around the country. Weather has become erratic. Disturbingly so.
“We’re not that dense. That’s why we should address climate change. We know how to deal with that.” — Harriet Behar
“In the Midwest, this past growing season was one of the best ever,” says Jim Goodman, a retired dairy farmer in central Wisconsin. “But you don’t have to go far in any direction, and it was tough. Really dry to the point that they couldn’t harvest their crops.”
Take his wife’s cousin, Pat Hennen, who grows corn and soybeans in southwest Minnesota. Up until a good rainfall came on August 20, 2021, his fields were dangerously parched, having gotten only four inches of rain the entire summer. In his nearly four decades of farming, Hennen says, only 1988 and 2012 compare for dryness.
Asked whether this might be evidence of a changing climate, Hennen replies, “I just don’t know what to believe, to be honest with you.” He is not alone. Farmers don’t speak with one voice about the reality of climate change, but you do hear a loud chorus about the crazy weather.
“Freakish” is how Jim Crawford, who co-founded a certified organic vegetable farm in Pennsylvania fifty years ago, describes the way-early and way-late frosts of recent years. “It’s the cold days that stick out,” he says. “These weather events can be extremely expensive for us.”
Jeff Endres, who milks 550 registered Holsteins on a dairy farm outside of Madison, Wisconsin, is seeing less snow in winter and more flash flooding. “Growing up, I remember killing frosts in mid-to-late September,” he says. “Now, we’re not seeing them until late October.”
Iowa dairy farmer Francis Thicke, who milks ninety organic-certified Guernsey cows for his own Radiance Dairy label, also attests to the weather extremes. “The pattern of rain seems to be changing,” he says. “We get intense rainfall for two or three weeks, then prolonged periods of no rain.”
Behar agrees: ”We cannot get a gentle one-inch rain anymore.”
In semi-arid northern Montana, where specialty grain farmers Doug Crabtree and Anna Jones-Crabtree established Vilicus Farms in 2009, there are no doubts. “Climate change is real. It’s here,” says Jones-Crabtree. Their farm averages just twelve inches of rain a year. “The timing when the moisture comes—that’s what’s changing.”
Last year, Vilicus’s crops got off to a great start, the best ever. But by early July, all the lentil plants had disintegrated in the unrelenting heat. “It was the hottest, driest June-through-October season on record in Havre, Montana,” Jones-Crabtree says. The farm’s 2021 production cratered to 37 percent of its historic annual average.
“It wasn’t just our crops dying. There were fires to the west of us,” Jones-Crabtree adds. “The skies were smoky for days, and there were millions of grasshoppers. It felt apocalyptic.”
When many of us think of farming, we picture red barns, green John Deere tractors, quizzical cows chewing their cud, and energetic farm families living the agrarian dream. But this tableau is more fantasy than reality. Farming today is built on an industrial model, and critics blame that system for the environmental degradation that is raising the global thermometer.
“It wasn’t just our crops dying. There were fires to the west of us. The skies were smoky for days, and there were millions of grasshoppers. It felt apocalyptic.” —Anna Jones-Crabtree
Jim VandenBrook and James Matson, two retired Wisconsin agriculture officials, recently published “Toward a Sustainable Food System,” a footnote-rich paper detailing both the failings of factory-style farming and the case for bolstering a regenerative and self-sustaining agriculture.
They note that farming uses more water and land than any other human activity. Farming is also one of the biggest water polluters and produces more than 10 percent of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, including carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide. All three intensify global warming.
Corn is the problematic linchpin of factory farming. It is the nation’s biggest cash crop, and it dominates the richest farmland in the Midwest. Heavily dependent on synthetic nitrogen fertilizer, corn poses a major water pollution problem. Researchers blame nutrient-rich runoff, draining through the Mississippi River from the Upper Midwest, for a vast “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico.
The Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit research organization, did the accounting and found that the federal subsidies for corn production totaled an astonishing $116.6 billion between 1995 and 2020. This is a testament to the powerful agribusiness lobby to which both Democrats and Republicans pledge fealty.
Only 10 percent of the annual corn crop actually becomes human food; even then, it’s mostly sweeteners and refined oils used in making highly processed items. About another 40 percent feeds cars and trucks in the form of federally mandated corn-blended ethanol—a “renewable” fuel whose purportedly favorable environmental impact is fiercely disputed.
The rest of the corn becomes livestock feed and is mostly consumed in huge factory-style farms called CAFOs, or concentrated animal feeding operations. This is how most of our beef, pork, and milk is produced, and these industries cause huge environmental problems of their own.
U.S. agriculture, it’s true, is amazingly productive. As VandenBrook and Matson recount, the United States produces five times more corn per acre and three times more milk per cow than it did in 1950. These and other high-yield crops translate to cheap prices at the supermarket. In 1900, the average U.S. family spent 40 percent of its household income on food. Today, it’s just over 10 percent.
A combine harvests a drought-depleted crop under skies made smoky by wildfires.
But this bounty, VandenBrook and Matson warn, comes with “massive hidden costs.” This includes the economic victimization of farmers who, on average, are paid only 15 cents of every retail food dollar, as well as the failure of our political system to hold industrial farming responsible for its environmental damages. (Economists say those costs have been “externalized” to society rather than “internalized” by the farm operation generating them.)
These problems are connected. Farming is a deeply monopolized industry, bordering on the predatory. Farmers must sell (and buy) from a handful of giant processors and vendors. Just four pork processors control 66 percent of all hog slaughtering. For beef slaughtering, the top four control 82 percent of the industry. Most dairy farmers have only a single regional processor to contract with. It’s no surprise that the agribusiness titans like the economies of scale that factory farming provides the bottom line. And it’s also no surprise that environmental concerns don’t weigh heavily in how these industries operate.
“The farmer isn’t the problem,” says John Peck, executive director of the advocacy group Family Farm Defenders. “Agribusiness is the problem. And farmers are part of that machine. They’ve become pretty much serfs to agribusiness.”
What should be done, besides the obvious of unchaining the antitrust litigators?
Forty years ago, the writer and farmer Wendell Berry wrote a prescient essay that identified the root failings of the industrial agriculture system that had taken hold of U.S. farming. The piece, “Solving for Pattern,” remains a touchstone for rethinking U.S. agriculture.
It’s built around a simple but profound idea: “A good solution solves more than one problem, and it does not make new problems.” Berry’s perfect example was manure handling in a traditional farm. In a virtuous cycle, the farm crops feed the animals whose manure fertilizes the soil in which the crops grow. More than one writer has described this as an elegant solution because it resolves so many needs with resources at hand.
Industrial farming upsets that elegance by its reliance on outside inputs—synthetic fertilizers, chemical treatments for pests and blights, and the preventative antibiotic dosing of stressed farm animals. The glory of increased productivity has produced a host of new problems, as Berry had warned. Put 1,000 cows, steers, or hogs—or 10,000 of them—in a tightly confined space, and you have not just health and sanitation problems that didn’t exist before, but you’ve created a carbon footprint that poses a threat to life as we know it.
Here’s where Harriet Behar’s optimism comes in. She sees a way forward. “We should be looking at farm practices that have multiple benefits,” she says, echoing Berry as she rattles off examples:
- After harvesting a field, plant a cover crop on the exposed soil using alfalfa and sweet clover to prevent erosion, restore fertility, and sequester carbon.
- Compost manure for storable fertilizer instead of spreading it raw on fields or holding it in special manure lagoons. There are serious pollution risks with both.
- Adopt rotational grazing for beef cattle and cows, and other farm animals, so they move from paddock to paddock. As Behar points out, this mimics how large herbivores like bison and deer move as they graze in the wild.
- Plant conservation strips of perennial native flowers amidst the farm fields to support pollinators and other wildlife.
The good news is that the federal government already funds important conservation programs like these. But the really bad news is that it also spends a lot more money subsidizing programs that do damage to these very efforts. Because the financial incentives are not aligned, farmers will often sign up for both sorts of programs, which can yield head-shakingly dysfunctional results.
Behar argues that it’s time to harmonize those policies around a common goal. “For those farmers who are not currently doing many of these good practices, we want to encourage them to start,” she says. “For those farmers who are already going the extra mile, they should get a higher payment.”
Vilicus Farms
Doug Crabtree and Anna Jones-Crabtree founded Vilicus Farms in northern Montana in 2009.
That thinking is taking hold. You see it at work in Yahara Pride Farms, a farmer-run group outside of Madison, Wisconsin. The nonprofit tests and promotes progressive farming techniques to protect water quality in a vulnerable watershed overloaded with nutrient runoff.
“Everything starts with the cover crop,” says board chair Jeff Endres of Endres Berryridge Farms. “Our goal is keeping that living root in the soil as long as possible.” The tiered subsidy that Yahara Pride pays is a page out of Behar’s playbook: Farmers who keep their cover crop in the ground over winter into spring are paid more per acre than farmers who plow it under the previous fall.
Endres, a fourth generation dairy farmer, understands that successful farming has always included measures to protect the land. Among Berryridge’s artifacts is his Grandpa Ludwig’s 1941 conservation plan, including that year’s crop rotation and his plowing strategy to avoid runoff into streams and creeks.
It’s a truism, as the Yahara Pride experience shows, that the best farmers always learn from one another, and regularly tap into the latest university research. But will this be enough to bend the arc of climate change? Behar’s optimism notwithstanding, it seems a stretch.
Out West, where the drought is extreme and Vilicus Farms took a huge financial hit last year, Anna Jones-Crabtree thinks more radical action is needed. She advocates for organic farming to be a transformative cultural movement. “For us, it’s more than just building soil,” she says. “It’s also about building community.”
The northern hill country of Montana, where she and Doug farm 13,000 acres, has fewer than five people per square mile, she says. The average age of farmers is close to sixty. “If we want agriculture to be part of the solution to climate change, we need more people farming,” Jones-Crabtree says. “We need more people on the land.” To this end, they run an apprenticeship program to train the next generation of farmers.
Yahara Pride Farms
At Yahara Pride Farms outside of Madison, Wisconsin, the nonprofit tests and promotes progressive farming techniques including planting cover crops to prevent erosion.
She and Doug started Vilicus Farms in 2009. The naming was purposeful. Vilicus is Latin for “steward of the land.” They take that mission seriously. More than 2,000 acres are kept as a conservation and habitat preserve. Their business is cultivating twenty different varieties of small-grain, legume, and oilseed plants. They are grown on 240-foot-wide strips of land, separated by conservation buffers of wildflowers and tall grasses.
Last summer’s drought cost Vilicus dearly, as the operation’s revenue dropped by almost two-thirds. That prompts Jones-Crabtree to question an economic system that pumps billions of dollars of venture capital into plant-based drinks and proteins, yet turns a blind eye to hard-pressed farmers.
This makes no sense to her. It’s like the supply chain crisis that has driven up inflation in recent months. Supply chains are a mechanism of one-sided extraction. Why is that a good dynamic?
“I want supply circles,” Jones-Crabtree explains. “Mother Nature cycles nutrients. She cycles carbon. She cycles water. Where is the cycling of the financial resources we need to actually come back to the farm?”
It’s a good and urgent question.