No-fail recipe failing | Industry will have to adapt to failures of modern agriculture when methods are no longer effective
In terms of convenience, it is appealing and tasty technology. Pour a cake mix into a bowl, add water and voila — a moist chocolate cake appears like magic.
While it’s fantastic that a six-year-old can make a cake in less than five minutes, it’s expensive to bake that way and the end result is mediocre, said Gary Martens, a University of Manitoba plant scientist who normally doesn’t comment on instant cake technology.
Nonetheless, Martens said the Betty Crocker analogy is appropriate for modern agriculture because too many farmers are following a simplistic recipe to produce crops.
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“It’s using a recipe that someone else has designed, and following the recipe without doing a lot of thinking,” said Martens, a sustainable agriculture advocate.
“As Rene Van Acker (University of Guelph plant science professor) … put it, as long as you can get it in the right order — seed, spray and harvest — you’re in business. That’s the recipe.”
Jill Clapperton, a former Agriculture Canada rhizosphere expert who now runs a consulting company in Montana, described Betty Crocker farming in a slightly different way.
“You buy seed, you buy all the chemicals that go with it, you buy the full fertility package and then you go home, put it in the ground and stand back.”
Martens conceded that he might offend some producers by using terms such as Betty Crocker farming or easy agriculture, but he said he feels compelled to talk about it because he fears crop production is headed down a perilous path.
He wants more farmers to adopt systems that preserve soil and water quality over the long run.
“Everybody wants to do things easy. Easy is not necessarily bad because easy means innovation. We do something the hard way, we innovate and we make it easier,” he said.
“Easy is OK as long as there are no unintended consequences of easy.”
Clapperton said the trend to-ward an instant oatmeal society isn’t restricted to farming. Everyone is guilty of making easy choices, she added, including where they shop.
“When it comes to seed and seed companies nowadays, it’s one stop shopping,” said Clapperton, who farms near Florence, Mont.
“I guess I can’t fault anybody for that because we have big box stores, we have one stop shopping. You can buy food, you can buy clothes … it’s convenient.”
Adam Davis, a University of Illinois crop science associate professor, said the consequences of easy agriculture are obvious in the U.S. Midwest, where corn and soybeans are ubiquitous.
“When the entire landscape is dominated by that particular crop phenology, what you end up with is a weed community that is very comfortable,” said Davis, who studies alternative methods to control weeds.
Over the last several years, Davis has participated in a research project in Iowa comparing the dogmatic soybean-corn rotation to more complex rotations that include winter cereals and forage crops.
The results, published in PLOS ONE, show that more complex systems can be just as profitable as simple rotations and weeds can be suppressed with fewer herbicide applications.
Regardless, Midwest farmers aren’t going to switch away from their soybean-corn rotations unless they have to, Davis said.
“It is because it is incredibly lucrative,” he said.
“The market drives it. If growing tomatoes here (in Illinois) was super lucrative … then we’d see more tomatoes on the landscape.”
Despite the market drivers, Davis said herbicide resistant weeds might force Midwest farmers to forgo the corn-soybean rotation.
“We’re at kind of an inflection point in crop production, in the upper Midwest,” he said.
“We’ve had it pretty good. We had tools that provided relatively easy weed control. (But) that time is changing. We’re running out of modes of action that can do the job effectively.”
With that in mind, Davis and others are developing cropping systems that could replace the corn-bean rotation in 10 to 15 years.
“If growers don’t make decisions to diversify their systems based on commodity market signals, they may make it because the old way of doing things is no longer effective.”
Martens isn’t convinced the current system of easy agriculture will disintegrate rapidly. Soil health will continue to degrade and resistant weeds will present challenges, but the devolution of modern agriculture will progress at a tortoise pace.
“It’s slow enough that we can adapt and we’re already adapting to the failure of the system, (for instance) by stacking herbicide resistant traits,” he said.
“We will continue to adapt to the change and the failure of the system. And we will continue to use Betty Crocker methods as long as it works…. We, as a human species, will continue to do what works until it doesn’t work anymore…. That’s just the way we operate.”
Martens said flax is one crop that is already suffering from the fixation on easy cropping systems.
Short rotations and simplistic agronomic practices hinder the formation of healthy mycorrhiza communities in the soil. Flax needs those fungi to access phosphorus, he added.
“I think flax is one of the canaries in our agricultural coal mine. One of the reasons we’re not getting very good flax yields and nobody is growing flax anymore is because flax doesn’t respond well to applied phosphorus.”
