The history of earth abuse through agriculture has been horrendous.
Essentially all of nature's ecosystems are perennial polycultures.
Agriculture reversed that.
Consequently, soil erosion became a problem.
The wilderness has to become a standard against which we judge our agricultural and cultural practices.
Mother nature is very drought resilient.
She's very flood resilient.
She can take cold and heat, we can't.
She's very complex.
What's very not complex is tillet and plant one crop.
The all-hall moment for me came during a flood in 1993.
We lost eight inches of topsoil off of this field that we're standing in right now, where
we had tilled, and that's when the decision was made to quit tillage cold turkey.
I don't want my farm to blow away, I mean, and it's, you know, that's going to be the
challenge in the dust bowl in western Kansas.
The dust bowl happened because there were ten arid years, and it was caused in part
by farming practices.
Back then, the way we tilled the ground, we used what we call the moldboard plow.
And because the soil erosion due to wind, I remember when the dust was blowing so heavily
that the chickens went to roost during the middle of the day because they thought it
was dark.
I experienced it fifteen, twenty years ago.
I mean, it wasn't to dust bowl proportions, but, and you still see it every now and then,
and I've driven through it coming back from Colorado, where you drive into a dust storm
and you can't see in front of you.
We've been told that we cannot repeat the dust bowl.
We have since had several major dust storms in Kansas and Nebraska, Colorado.
In Kansas, about five and a half tons of soil per acre per year was eroded.
We can repeat the dust bowl if we don't change our ways.
Soil conservation is a huge issue to everyone.
This is not a debate here.
It's nationwide.
We need to educate our children, and we also need to educate ourselves.
To be honest, it wasn't totally the producer's fault.
They had no clue what they were doing was wrong, and they had helped from the government
and universities telling them that it was the right thing to do.
You know, just sorting through all the truth.
All production agriculture before World War I was done under organic methods, and it was
not sustainable.
So it's not just organic.
It's not just no-till.
All these things have a place.
It's just finding that place and understanding how it all fits in together.
There's a lot of bright people out there on the farm.
The best ideas are often out there.
They're not in the office buildings.
They're out there with people that are working with them.
I think we can make our landing softer by acting.
By not acting, it's going to be a hard landing.
If we don't get sustainability and agriculture first, it's not going to happen.
I wouldn't say I'm optimistic.
I'm hopeful.
And I think it's important for a lot of people to be painting visions of the future.
Everyone needs to be in the conversation.
The other environmentalists, consumers, politicians, industry, and producers.
And the conversation needs to revolve around the soil.
