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December 2008
When the Land is Your Life
Dear Friends,
In the midst of the 1980’s farm crisis, a movie called "Country," starring Sam Shepherd and Jessica Lange, about an Iowa farm family in financial trouble, struck a familiar chord with local families living on the land. I recall one of the promotions for the movie stated, "When the land is your life, you fight for your life."
I cut that line out of the newspaper and pinned it on a bulletin board in my bedroom, where it hung for many years. It was written, most likely, by some ad executive in a high-rise office building, but it perfectly described how many farmers feel about their land.
Maybe the land, and particularly land ownership, is so important to those of German descent, because there just wasn’t much farm land to inherit over in Germany when many decided to emigrate to America. One to three acres wasn’t enough to scrape together a living for a family. Ancestral lands had been divided and subdivided so many times, these farms were too small to be self-sufficient.
When the European settlers moved to the prairie land of the Great Plains, they couldn’t get over the vastness of it all, oceans of grass, with only the sunrise and sunset on the horizon. It seemed endless and magnificent. Owning their own parcel was more than a business move. It took on a sacred meaning. They were stewards over their own piece of God’s good earth.
Although agriculture has changed in ways those settlers could hardly imagine, that feeling of land ownership and stewardship has carried on for generations and is still alive and well in the prairie states.
Farmers, particularly those whose families live on the land that is their livelihood, continue to strive to build up the soil, protect groundwater and surface water sources, and to care gently for the land in their care.
In spite of record grain and hay prices, I continue to see farmers plant cereal grains, alfalfa and grass on their land, as ways to build up organic matter and fertility.
Straw is a hot commodity these days, yet several farmers with oats and wheat, unless they needed the straw for their livestock, still cut their grain high and left considerable stubble or spread the straw out to build up the soil.
No-till, conventional till and organic farmers alike have rediscovered cover crops as a way to build carbon in their soils. I’ve heard recently that cover crops are the big topic for no-till farmers, as they look to ways to enhance their cropping systems. The old-timers knew all about cover and pulse crops and what they did for the soil, so we are just now learning how smart those farmers were four or five decades ago.
Grass seems to be the newest, oldest innovation, because it is so good for the soil, offers so many options for grazing, haying and building organic matter and because it is so forgiving to the land, filtering water and nutrients, soaking up every drop of precipitation and providing a bounty for our livestock to eat.
Farmers have a balancing act. They have to make a profit in order to stay in business, but they have to protect their soil and land too. Immediate payoffs aren’t always best, as we all have learned. Sometimes, farmers look to the long-term, to benefits that the land will bring forth decades from now, for future generations. It is refreshing, in our throw-away society, that professionals like family farmers still think in this way.
Hope you have a good week.
W.K. Kellogg Foundation
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