This program is made possible in part by Strode, the brewery that passed down the art of fire
brewing from one generation to another for over 200 years.
Wildlife and farming, both are in crisis.
But on many farms, there's a new optimism and a new profit to be made from an approach
to farming that allows more room for nature.
This alternative agriculture saves the farmer money and preserves wildlife.
It's a story of common ground.
It's dawn in Chico, California.
The wildlife is getting ready for the day.
And so too is Dick Carter.
Because this isn't a wildlife refuge, it's a successful working farm.
I started farming in 1946 and expanded rapidly and went the conventional route with all the
big equipment and leveling land and using chemicals and increasing production and things
like this.
And after a few years, it just became a lifeless, kind of like a biological desert out there.
And it just seemed like it wasn't enjoyable like it used to be.
For Dick Carter, the wildlife is as important to his life as the organically grown rice
he produces.
Carter fits our traditional image of the organic farmer.
More concerned with nature than maximizing profit.
But today, the approach Carter takes to farming is getting more attention from conventional
farmers.
If I farm the way I farmed in the 1970s, up to maybe 1980, somewhere like that, if I was
still farming in that way, I would be broke right now.
I really feel that if we hadn't made those changes of making the turnaround that we would
probably be in bankruptcy because I had the disease of expansion as bad as anybody.
The only mistake was not starting that six or eight years sooner.
In this film, we'll find out how people concerned with growing the nation's food at a decent
profit have begun to join those concerned with conserving our natural resources of soil,
water, and wildlife.
How farmers and environmentalists are finding common ground.
For the last 50 years, farmers and environmentalists often found themselves at odds as the farmer
escalated his traditional battle with insects and weeds.
Chemicals have become a major weapon in this battle since World War II, the use of pesticides
and herbicides has soared.
Big fertilizers have squeezed more and more crops from the soil.
Farms grew bigger.
Huge machines worked fields planted to the horizon with single crops.
Wildlife, once so much a part of the farm environment, all but disappeared as its habitat
was destroyed and chemicals drenched the fields.
The fields themselves began to suffer as topsoil was lost to wind and water erosion.
The water table became polluted with farm chemicals.
The warnings of environmentalists were shrugged off as long as the farmer continued to make
a profit, as long as he got more money from his crops than he spent on all the chemicals
and fuel needed to grow them.
But in the 1970s, the cost of inputs rose steeply.
And by the end of the decade, farm prices began to fall.
Profit margins grew smaller, and for many farmers, disappeared altogether.
Auctions of bankrupt farms caught in the squeeze dramatized the problem.
With 40,000 farms going bankrupt in 1985 alone, the nation's farmers needed help.
Today many farmers are realizing that the rules of the game have changed and that they
may have to find a very different way to farm.
Boone, Iowa.
The heart of the farm belt.
The registration table for a field day in organic farming.
Most of those here are mainstream farmers looking for alternatives.
Among the visitors is Garth Youngberg, who left the US Department of Agriculture in 1982,
when a report he helped write on organic farming was pushed aside.
Today he heads the Maryland-based Institute for Alternative Agriculture.
I think if we go back, let's say, 10 years, 8 to 10 years ago, organic, biological, regenerative,
alternative agriculture had a pretty bad image in this country, and most people would agree
with that.
It had the image of being something that was fine for back-to-landers, for hippies or health
food fattest, and that was about it.
But the old images are true no longer.
These farmers aren't hippies, and they're gathering to listen to Dick Thompson, one
of America's best-known organic farmers.
Today it's his third annual field day.
The thrust of what we're trying to do is about in three areas.
The first one is to save the farmer by some cost-cutting techniques.
The other one is to save the soil through ridgetill and cover crops.
And the other one is to save the groundwater by not using pesticides, and if fertilizers
are used, they would be used in very small amounts.
When Thompson began his field days, most of his Iowa neighbors ignored them.
Today, farmers have come from throughout the Midwest to see if Thompson has some answers.
First stop, Thompson's cattle, a symbol of his 300-acre farm's diversity.
When other farmers chose to specialize, typically raising only corn and soybeans, Thompson kept
his livestock, both cattle and hogs.
In an uncertain market, Thompson can sell both meat and grain, and livestock complements
grain in other ways.
Thompson shows off his cement-lined manure pit, a way of ensuring a supply of fertilizer
for his fields without polluting the groundwater.
Next stop, a field where Thompson is experimenting with ways of reducing weeds without using
herbicides.
Most of the questions Thompson gets asked are practical.
Some visitors are concerned with larger issues.
Thompson, the main geologist, has proved that chemicals are a determining factor on the
decrease of the health of the farm population, and guess what, people?
We put it on.
We're the first to drink it, and 70 percent of most of the wells here in the state of
Iowa are polluted with six of the main herbicides that's being used on the farm, and we're
all a part of it, and we're the only ones that can change it, the farming community.
Pesticides are now showing up in thousands of rural wells at levels that are alarming
the EPA.
Chemicals like alichlor, aldecarb, atrazine, more and more pesticides that farmers may
be going into debt to pay for are poisoning the water they and their neighbors drink.
But today, most of the concerns are with practicalities and costs.
How does Thompson make a living farming without chemicals?
One answer is by employing small, lightweight, low-cost farm equipment.
Dick Thompson's field days are part of a shift in priorities among American farmers.
Already, more than one in ten are beginning to change to a new approach to farming.
Here, we're talking about the development of sustainable agricultural systems, sustainable
in an economic sense and in an environmental sense.
That means that hard questions have to be asked about what's really going on out there
in those systems.
What do we need to know?
One such agricultural system is here in Pennsylvania's Susquehanna River Valley.
Some hard questions are already being asked here, and the answers show that a change to
a more environmentally sound agriculture can also lead to a more profitable agriculture.
This valley is one of the most intensively farmed in the nation.
It's 4.30 a.m. on this dairy farm as the cows are brought in for milking.
The farm is owned by Paul Clugston.
The dairy business here is labor-intensive, and profit margins, as in all farming these
days, can be razor thin.
Clugston grows most of his cattle feed himself, and the cost of growing it is a big part of
whether or not he'll make a profit on his milk.
With a lot of the money he once spent to grow feed grain, he almost literally threw down
the drain, not only endangering his own livelihood, but actually helping to destroy that of a
man he's never met.
A hundred miles downriver is the Chesapeake Bay and Bill Cummins.
Bill Cummins used to be a fisherman.
Today he still earns a living off the waters of the Chesapeake, but no longer by netting
striped bass.
In part because of agricultural runoff, the bass population has declined so much in the
last decade that bass netting is now banned.
What Bill Cummins now harvests from the bay are crabs, as he's the first to admit they're
better than nothing.
Bill Cummins.
Crabbing, it's all right.
I love to do it, but I miss the old way of fishing.
We used to pound that fish and drift net fish, and that was my occupation as a fisherman,
and now they got me reduced to a crabber.
There you go.
The link between Bill Cummins and Paul Clugston lies just below the surface of the Chesapeake's
waters, here in the spawning grounds of the striped bass where the plants that provide
shelter for the newly hatched fish are choked and dying.
One problem, a thick coating of algae caused by the runoff of excess nitrogen fertilizer
being spread on the fields of the Susquehanna Valley.
The irony is that the cows of the valley produce enough natural fertilizer to grow the food
they eat.
Yet for years, farmers like Paul Clugston had been buying inorganic fertilizer from
farm chemical companies.
They spread it on their fields along with the manure from their cows, mostly because
they didn't know how valuable the manure could be.
This mobile laboratory from Penn State University is visiting Paul Clugston's farm as a part
of an effort to help the farmers of the Susquehanna Valley spend much less money on inorganic
fertilizers.
Hi, Paul.
How you doing?
Pretty good.
For us?
This is Dale Baker, Penn State, this is Paul Clugston, Dr. Roshan, Marshall.
We're here today to do some soil testing and manure analysis for you, we're glad you
invited us here.
Any particular fields you want to show us then, which ones you'd like us to go in and
do the sampling on?
We've got one out back here we can get started on right away.
The Penn State research is focused mainly on nitrogen fertilizer.
How much nitrogen does land like this rye field need and how much is it getting?
Like most of the farmers here, Clugston used to get advice only from fertilizer salesmen.
They argued that to make sure his crops get the nitrogen they require, he should spread
nitrogen fertilizers along with his manure.
But because of tests like this, Clugston now knows exactly how much nitrogen fertilizer
is needed.
This core sample will help show how much nitrogen is in his soil and available to the rye plants.
Not enough nitrogen and the plants suffer.
Too much and the nitrogen sinks down below the top eight inches where the plants can
use it.
And instead finds its way into the water table and maybe into the Chesapeake Bay.
The researchers also take samples from the farm's manure pit.
On Clugston's farm, the manure his cows produce provide just about a half of what his crops
need, enabling him to cut his use of inorganic fertilizer drastically.
Today, the manure in his pit all goes to feed his crops, with none wasted to fertilize instead
the algae in the Chesapeake.
Since we used our manure storage, which is in now for six years, we've cut our fertilizer
bill down by 55 percent.
The economics part of it is a real factor to us because of the slim margin of profit.
And if we can, any penny that we can save is a penny earned and we try to keep that
philosophy in every part of our operation that we do.
Since Paul Clugston began applying this philosophy to nitrogen fertilizer, he's saved a lot
of pennies, adding up to over $4,000 a year he no longer spends on inorganic nitrogen.
Before the research in soil testing and manure testing was developed, you relied a lot on
the chemical fertilizer manufacturers for information.
We were as much at fault as what they were because we weren't involved.
We left them do everything for us.
So by letting them do everything for us, we were gullible to what they had to offer.
No longer gullible, Clugston now spreads on his soil only what his crops can take from
it.
His farm, at least, shouldn't contribute now to the runoff of nitrogen that's been
damaging the fisheries of the Chesapeake Bay.
And there's hope that as other farmers follow Clugston's self-interested example, the
Bay will be able to recover.
Some of that hope comes from research being done here by a team from the University of
Maryland.
The scientists are measuring out underwater test plots for an experiment aimed at finding
out if the plants that have been killed can be replaced once runoff into the Bay has been
controlled.
These plants will be planted underwater here in the small cove of the Chesapeake.
The farms around the cove are owned by the University of Maryland.
This part of the Bay has been heavily in agriculture for a number of years and we've just stopped
all agriculture in this little cove here.
And one of the questions is to what extent plants can grow back and how quickly they
can do that.
The experiment is still in its early days, but already it's looking promising, suggesting
the Bay will be able to recover its natural underwater vegetation and its fish population
if other farmers follow Paul Clugston's example.
Bill Cummins is optimistic.
I would like to see the people see the Bay as I've seen it, as a young man, and really
appreciate it because it would really be something to look forward to.
And I hope every one of these days that will happen.
The Chesapeake Bay story shows how agriculture that conserves the resources of the land and
minimizes the use of chemicals can benefit not only the farmer, but his neighbors too.
The wider benefits of alternative agriculture are only now being appreciated.
For years, people like Dick Harder practiced organic farming simply because it felt right.
This is his 21st year growing organic rice.
The seed for his crop is dumped on a pile of compost and chicken manure.
The rice plants get their nutrients from this mixture of organic fertilizers and will be
grown without pesticides.
Harder relies on limited outside labor.
One hired hand helps with the planting of his 700 acres.
His equipment is simple, but functional.
For example, while most rice growers spread their seed from the air, Harder uses an old
truck.
Harder plants directly into a cover crop of native grasses and legumes that help hold
his soil in place.
Clover provides the rice with additional nitrogen.
Some of his fields will lie fallow this year, planted only with a cover crop of purple
vetch.
Its flowers provide a home for ladybugs, an insect that helps keep crops free of damaging
pests.
The western kingbird and the gopher snake are frequent visitors, along with the red-tailed
hawk, a web of nature missing on most conventional farms.
We have a food chain or something that we're starting here on this ranch and we see just
a lot of things happening that don't happen around and where most conventional farming
is still going on.
Harder's way of farming may be motivated more by his love of nature than by economics,
but harnessing the resources of nature to grow food without chemicals is now making
economic sense to farmers all across the country.
Much of the knowledge that started this movement about ten years ago has come from this 300
acre privately run farm in Moxotawney, Pennsylvania, the Rodale Research Center.
Only a few years ago, Rodale was known mainly to the organic farming traditionalists, but
in recent years it's focused its research on mainstream farmers.
The goal?
To help them change the way they farm.
Bob Rodale.
Hi, Bob.
How are you?
Pretty good.
How are you?
Pretty good.
Oh my gosh, looks like we have some sort of disease in here.
The kind of agriculture which is based in very large equipment, extremely large fields,
which used to be the model of efficiency so-called in America, is now being seen as an expression
of degeneration, not efficient, not economic, very bad for the environment.
So I think the time is limited for that kind of agriculture.
Rodale's alternative is called regenerative agriculture.
Not a hard line, no chemicals at any price approach, but a way of regenerating the land,
not exhausting it.
The regenerative approach is a very cost-effective, environmentally sound, self-renewing, healing
agriculture which doesn't really need government subsidy.
It uses nature's subsidy, the internal resources of nature.
There's just tremendous wealth in the air and the sun and the land that can be continually
regenerated, and that's what we're working on.
Joining the Rodale research is Bill Liebhardt, his major goal, introducing better crop rotation
into American agriculture.
This is fairly typical of the rotation that is presently used in a lot of the Midwest.
This is corn and soybeans year after year, pretty much of a monoculture.
And as you can see, there are weed problems here.
We have used three herbicides here, however, there are still weeds which escape through
that herbicide net.
Over here on this side we have a rotation which is largely based on changing the different
crops at different times of the year.
Soybeans were drilled into barley this year.
After the soybeans start to mature this fall, we will put in wheat again, and then next
spring we will seed red clover and alfalfa.
Again with the soybeans are a few barley plants from last year.
By varying the crop season to season, the farmer gains several advantages.
Each crop exchanges different nutrients with the soil.
This clover will leave behind nitrogen as free fertilizer for next year's corn.
Rotation also breaks the cycle of weeds.
The different environments each year never allow a buildup of a dominant weed variety.
The same is true of the insects.
Changing the crop year to year disrupts the insect's food supply.
Of course a cover crop like clover may not bring in much cash, but it does do something
just as important, especially in a time of falling farm prices.
It reduces costs.
The difference between the two systems is basically one of how much is going to be spent
for the various herbicides.
Here you've probably got an expenditure of $20 to $25 an acre, here none.
But for the farmer who's used to year after year of soybeans, year after year of corn,
there's the obvious $64,000 question.
How can they make the conversion?
How do they go through the transition from high inputs of fertilizers and insecticides
and herbicides to a system that does not rely on these inputs?
I think the thing we have to remember is that we are talking about a biological process.
It's not like switching the light on and off, and that it does take two or three years,
but if you choose the correct sequence of crops, there is no reason for any economic
loss as a result of going through that process.
One farmer who's recently gone through the process is Don Clore.
With his wife Susan, he farmed 650 acres in Buffalo, Illinois.
They're one of a thousand farm families the Rodale Research Center has been following
as they attempt to change the way they farm.
But Clore's decision to change came because the old ways just weren't working anymore.
We went through the frustrations where we were beginning to see so many less dollars
at the end of the year.
And when the two of us would work 80 or 90 hours a week each during pressure seasons,
and you'd wonder why, you'd come in at night and you'd run through maybe 500 gallon diesel
fuel in a week, and you'd have a repair bill, maybe two or three thousand dollars on something,
and you think by the hours and the money going out and the prices are going down.
We got to the place where we really almost wondered if it would be better to farm in
the evenings and go to work during the day, you know, cut back, because I mean the bottom
line at the end of the year is what made the difference on whether to go ahead and put
forth the effort and do it or not.
You really get a little desperate, and about that time is when you, somehow on the inside
you say you've got to do something different, you just can't give up.
You just can't throw the towel in yet.
The Clore's turning point came a few years ago when their old farm equipment needed replacement.
Instead of going further into debt buying several large and expensive machines, they
bought this buffalo planter.
It can be modified to do several jobs.
These wings are one of its most important features because they allow the machine to
perform ridge-till agriculture.
Central to the Clore's new approach, ridge-tilling saves money on fuel and labor and cuts chemical
use dramatically.
Here's how ridge-tilling works.
These soybeans are six weeks old.
This is the last trip Don and Susan will make over them till harvest.
Susan's tractor is pulling a cultivator.
Its prongs dig up weeds between the soybeans.
The wings on Don's tractor are building up the ridges the beans are growing on.
This is the key step to their new way of planting and part of a year-long cycle that has rewards
for both the environment and their pocketbook.
Don contrasts sharply with conventional row crop cultivation where the crops are planted
on flat ground.
After harvest, the conventional approach is to plow under the stalks leaving the soil
bare over winter.
Empty fields like this are a major reason why over three billion tons of valuable topsoil
are lost to erosion each year.
In the spring, the ground will be plowed and tilled up to six times to break up the hard
surface caused by winter's weathering.
Heavy tilling consumes fuel and labor.
It also stirs up the weed seeds increasing the need for large doses of herbicide.
By contrast, in ridge-till agriculture, the crops are grown on six-inch high ridges.
At harvest, the clores will cut the crop and leave the stubble on the ridges.
Next spring, on just one trip over the rows, the stubble is sheared off just below the
roots.
The unweathered soil is already soft enough for planting and the seeds are dropped in
on the same pass.
In 1985, thousands of corn belt farmers switched to ridge tilling.
But when Don and Susan began four years ago, they were almost alone.
It was just the beginning of something completely new in the area.
We didn't have anyone we could run to and say, hey, how do you really do this?
It was stressful.
There's no doubt it was stressful.
The first year, you don't know whether it'll work.
You don't know whether you're even going to have a decent crop at the end of the year
because of something being different.
But it worked.
And the second year, then you wonder if the first year was a fluke.
And the second year works.
And then you begin to see, begin to see some of the benefits.
You're starting to save a lot of time.
You're starting to save a lot of fuel.
We put a whole crop in on 500-gallon days of fuel now.
We used to run that out in a week, just getting the ground ready.
What's good for the clores' budget is also good for their farm's future.
They still lose soil to wind erosion, but it's only half the old amount.
And ridge tilling has led the clores to contemplate other changes in the way they farm.
Now we're going on to reducing the herbicide, the pesticide, and the fertilizer.
So environmentally, I guess you might call us, I guess I could be called a closet environmentalist.
And it just seems to make a lot of sense if you don't need to use it and it's not good
for your health, then rely on rescue if you need it.
A catfish fry in Arkansas.
And farmers who are cutting their use of chemicals is a big topic of conversation, because this
picnic is sponsored by a group of farm chemical salesmen.
A controversial guest is Ford Baldwin, an agricultural extension service weed scientist.
Arkansas farmers have always had weed problems.
Today, they have money problems too.
If you go back in history, chemical costs were relatively cheap, and crop prices were
very good.
And so a farmer could just afford to spend more money on herbicides.
I mean, there has been a day in farming that a farmer could basically do about whatever
he wanted to, and at the end of the year when it was all said and done, he had more money
than he started with.
And those days are long gone.
At the picnic, as he has for the last two years, Baldwin is touting a plan that would
save Arkansas farmers money, but would cost the chemical company representatives' sales.
We found that we can cut herbicide rates down to about one-fourth of those on the label
if they're applied properly under the conditions which we specify and get results equivalent
to a full rate with no difference in yield at the end of the year.
Baldwin's program requires greater care by the farmers, a problem raised by chemical
salesmen like Don Kelly.
We agree that the reduced rates will work.
They do need to be applied on a timely basis, and in many instances, growers are just not
capable of covering the acreages that they need to cover in a very timely manner.
That is of a primary concern, because if the product fails, where does the grower go?
He can't come back to us because it is off-label, and he can't go to the extension service to
replace the material or do whatever.
So that is our biggest concern.
Glenn Brown is one of many Arkansas farmers who are taking the risk.
A lot of people have gone out of business, and there's a lot of people going to go out
of business this year because we have $5 soybeans.
I'm doing everything I can possibly do to survive.
What I'm doing on my farm is strictly survival.
We've used reduced rate programs.
We're trying to manage our crops as efficiently as we possibly can, and it's very difficult
to raise $5 soybeans.
Today Glenn Brown is getting some help on alternative approaches from Ford Baldwin's
employer, the Agricultural Extension Service.
An agent has come to inspect Brown's 900 acres of soybeans.
The agent is Al Beierman, and his job is to count weeds.
He randomly chooses a section of the field, then marks off a standard length of the row.
Within that section, he'll count and identify the weeds.
He's trained to know when the weeds threaten to compete seriously with the crop for water,
sunlight, and soil.
And when that time comes, he'll recommend a dose of herbicide.
This sort of monitoring contrasts with the way most farmers use herbicides, which is
to keep weeds at bay by spraying on a regular schedule.
Cocklebur, Johnson grass, and morning glory are reaching damaging levels in Brown's soybean
field, and it's time to spray.
If Glenn Brown left his weeds untreated, his soybean yields would decline by over 50 percent.
The crop wouldn't be worth what it cost to plant, but if he used herbicides in the way
recommended on the label, his costs would threaten his profit.
One of the first to try the reduced rate program, Brown has cut his herbicide use in half in
his first year and saved $8,000.
It was costing me about $16 an acre for one application of a particular chemical, and
with a reduced rate, we went down to $8 an acre.
And with these new chemicals now coming out, we're going down even below that.
But the problem is timing.
If you don't hit the right time and the right weather conditions, you're going to have to
go back to that full right.
It's a gamble Glenn Brown feels he must take.
So far, it's paid off, not only for him, but for many of his neighbors.
Last year, the state watched closely as over 1,000 farmers switched to Ford Baldwin's reduced
rate program.
Total savings, over $2 million.
And while less herbicide was sprayed into the environment, soybean yields on most of
the farms being monitored remained unchanged.
Glenn Brown's farm was no exception.
His yields even increased slightly.
Glenn Brown's new attitude to farming is going further than cutting chemical costs.
With his neighbor, he's planting cantaloupe melons to diversify his farm and help him
through hard economic times.
And he's just planted a blueberry patch.
While his daughter Sarah waits for the first sprouts, she learns to pull weeds by hand.
I am going to fight.
I'm going to give it my best shot.
And I'm going to use every tool available to me.
And I'm going to win.
And when you go out to a farm and you see a skeleton hanging on an old hoe out there,
that's going to be me, because I'm going to be the last one to give up.
Let's go on up here.
Let's get, yeah.
A pheasant hunt in an Illinois farm field.
There are pheasants here, but fewer than 5% of the number that only 20 years ago brought
these fields to life.
Dick Warner is a wildlife biologist who believes the steady decline in pheasant populations
is because of farming.
This pheasant hen is one he captured several months ago and fitted with a radio collar.
He's tracking her now to find out how many young she has.
Research like this shows that each hen is hatching as many chicks as ever.
The problem seems to come later.
When we look at pheasant populations in the last 20 to 40 years, rates of reproduction
have maintained themselves pretty well.
It's in the survival area that we are seeing problems, and our long-term data sets going
back to World War II have allowed us to detect the fact that the survival of pheasant chicks
from hatch to about six or eight weeks of age has declined severely, and that is one
of the major reasons for the long-term decline in the numbers of pheasants in this area.
It's food that affects survival, and these chicks are lucky.
They live near a field of grass.
Here there's an abundance of insects to chicks' main diet for the first six to eight weeks
of life.
Pheasant chicks born in this field aren't so lucky.
There's not much food to be found among soybeans when all the insect-harboring weeds have been
killed by herbicides.
For a bird too young to fly, it's a dangerous journey to a good source of food.
He makes it, this time, and Dick Warner hopes that as farmers change their thinking, pheasant
chicks may have an easier time finding food.
I think that there is a general shift in the mentality of farming.
There are a variety of farmers who are saying, perhaps we've been too successful in applying
this chemical and mechanical intensive technology.
Perhaps we need to diversify again in terms of our farm commodities, and perhaps we have
gone too far in terms of minimizing wildlife populations on our areas.
Dick Warner is hopeful that more fields left fallow in crop rotations will allow the pheasant
to again become part of the farming landscape.
A landscape where wildlife and farming are now struggling to live together is the beautiful
Laguna Atascosa Wildlife Refuge on the Texas Delta.
An important winter home for migrating waterfowl, Laguna Atascosa is on a list of refuges under
potential threat from the runoff of agricultural chemicals.
Keeping an anxious eye on the refuge's wildlife is manager Ray Rausch.
I would personally not like to see chemicals or pesticides used anywhere, but here in South
Texas it's a very long growing season.
When we have a long growing season you have more weed problems, you have more insect problems,
and down here the farmers are almost stuck with using pesticides in order to break even
or make a profit.
The rich delta soil and long growing season are ideal for farming, especially for cotton.
But what's good for cotton is also good for the boll weevil.
The cotton industry has traditionally been one of the heaviest users of pesticides in
the country.
Today alternative methods are cutting pesticide use, but this is one of the places where growing
row crops with no chemicals at all may be impossible.
And because the farms surround the Laguna Atascosa Wildlife Refuge, some chemicals inevitably
find their way into its lakes and pools.
The refuge managers know first hand the problems of farming here, because this organic farm
is on the refuge itself, and the sorghum it raises helps feed the visiting water fowl.
The refuge has a deal with a local farmer.
Part of the deal is that he grows the sorghum without the help of chemicals.
A local farmer provides the tractor and the seed and the labor, and we provide the land,
and we take a share of the crop.
In this case he gets two-thirds of the crop and we get one-third, and he still makes a
profit with this.
He makes a profit, but his inputs are almost zero.
His only costs are seed, fuel, and labor.
Plants are not involved, and the land itself is free.
His yields are low, as insects eat the crop and weeds choke the emerging plants.
On this farm, the weeds themselves help feed the visiting birds.
But on any other farm, where the crop is what matters and the cost of land real, this attempt
to farm organically would be very hard.
If he tried this on his own land, he'd have to buy the land or pay the taxes or have a
lot higher overhead, and the profit margin is so small on some of the organic farming
in this area that he wouldn't break even and probably lose money.
So there may be places in the country where the common ground between agriculture and
wildlife is still being explored.
The wildlife of Laguna Atascosa is being carefully monitored for any effects of the chemicals
from the surrounding farms.
And there's hope that as farmers continue to seek alternatives to pesticide-intensive
farming, the needs of the local farmers won't conflict with the needs of the visitors passing
through.
This is central Arizona.
We're in the middle of one of the biggest and most commercially successful vineyards
in the country.
The grapes it produces are bountiful and nutritious.
They are also organic.
Vineyard owner Stephen Padage.
We started organic farming about 15 years ago, and it came out of the frustration that
we had in the usage of chemicals.
None of the chemicals were working, and we knew that there was an alternative to what
we were doing out there.
Practically everything in the growing technique of grapes presented some difficulties, but
they weren't insurmountable.
They were things that we just had to spend a little more time on and change our philosophy
and our thinking towards the direction of natural farming techniques.
In the Padage operation, the change to natural farming has been strikingly successful.
This is now one of the largest organic farms in the United States, producing more than
7,000 tons of grapes a year, grapes that are shipped throughout the country.
We've got a big crop in here, don't we?
Yeah, that's what I see, and there's strong fruit that gets crunched to them.
To produce his grapes, Stephen Padage uses traditional organic farming methods, beginning
with a cover crop.
We grow a summer cover crop for many reasons.
One being to increase the organic matter of our soil, to increase the water holding capacity
of our soil, and also to lessen the scorching heat that the desert does to us.
In this soil here, you can see several different layers of organic matter and soil below it.
These roots demineralize the soil and make minerals available to the grapevines.
This is one of the reasons that we employ this.
We never till in here, and as you can see in this layer here that there is a tremendous
amount of organic matter and also a seedbed for beneficial insects.
The beneficial insects, insects that eat or parasitize crop pests, play a central role
in the success of Padage's operation, and their work extends beyond the grapevines to
the surrounding vegetable fields.
This is Michael Lindsay, a scout whose job it is to keep an eye on the levels of insect
infestation in this field of tomatillas.
The little bit of bad fellows that we have in here are the Heliothis, but they don't
seem to be in a very large population, and the big-eyed bugs, the assassin bugs are keeping
them in check.
Every good guy and bad guy out here has their own niche, and they do their own thing.
And in doing so, we can produce food crops without pesticides.
Another part of Stephen Padage's business is raising organic melons.
On these, as on all his crops, he rarely uses pesticides.
We feel as farmers that the more that we can put into the system, the more we can give
back to the consumer.
Part of the problem that we have is that we can't sell the wholesaler specifically on
that idea of nutrition and flavor.
He is still looking for price.
Price is a very important aspect in the marketplace, and that's something that we're trying to
get across to him to give the consumer the option, give the consumer the option of having
something that is better and that they don't mind paying a few cents more a pound for.
Large melons do command premium prices in places like this organic food market in Boston.
Bread and Circus opened 11 years ago with one small store and four employees.
Today Bread and Circus operates four stores and employs over 400 people.
It's a sign of the times that people have become much more aware of chemical contamination
of their food and are willing to pay a few cents extra to avoid it.
Bread and Circus sales now top $20 million annually.
Nationally, sales of natural foods now total over $3 billion.
Just as organic supermarkets are now entering the mainstream, so is organic farming.
A decade ago, the U.S. Department of Agriculture was hostile to any alternative to conventional
farming, including its own report on organic farming, co-authored by then USDA employee
Garth Youngberg.
When I think back to seven years ago when the USDA report on organic farming was published
and how controversial that was at that time and compare that with the attitudes and the
perceptions and the openness with which this kind of topic is being accepted now, one has
to take heart.
We're no longer talking to the already converted.
The conventional producer and the conventional scientist and the conventional policymaker
are now the ones that are asking questions about these alternative systems.
And I think as we, both sides of this continuum, the conventional side and the alternative
side begin to talk more to each other, we're finding out that we have a lot in common,
a lot of common interests and a lot of common concerns.
It's now harvest time on Dick Harder's Organic Rice Farm.
It's been six months since Harder planted this field with seed mixed with compost and
chicken manure.
The yields he's getting aren't quite as good as his neighbors who use airplanes and chemicals,
but his costs are much lower.
And in these days when farming is plagued by oversupply and falling prices, controlling
production costs can be essential to staying in business, just as important as yield.
And as research in organic farming continues, yields are increasing to levels that compare
with high input, high cost agriculture.
But to Harder, economic arguments are secondary because this is farming the way he believes
it should be.
I kind of like to think that I'm making the world a better place and I know I've done
enough conventional farming and I just don't have that feeling about it.
It's just something that I see the environment deteriorate and I see the wild creatures deteriorate
and I just can't have the same feeling about it like I do this organic farming.
There's a wonderful irony here.
Life and farming, nature and agriculture have been thought by conventional economic wisdom
to be at odds.
It was only the idealists like Dick Harder who could farm in harmony with nature.
But today, it's hard economic reality that is forcing farmers across the nation to take
another look at their land and wonder whether there might not be a better way, whether in
fact the only way to make a profit in the farming business is to include nature in the
partnership.