Beckham is a farmer who writes from Winnipeg.
I am old enough to remember what it is like to break up land that has never grown a crop, and to see the burgeoning vigour of new land, the clear disease-free straw, the weedless stubble, the bulging heads of grain.
From 1949, when my brother and I broke land by pulling out oak trees with an old 22-36 McCormick-Deering steel wheeled tractor, and then breaking the approximately 10 acres we had cleared with a 24-inch breaking plow, which one man walked behind, to 1967 when my cousin broke 45 acres with a D-7 Cat bulldozer and Rome plow, I have known the delight of new land.
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I remember still, in the evening, the smell of diesel smoke, leaf mould and fresh earth.
I regard that as a privilege that not many of my generation enjoyed.
We were among the last stragglers of a great mass of humanity that first broke the land of the fertile crescent and from there spread across the face of the earth.
I still farm that land I broke and must ruefully admit that my record in maintaining the fertility of that land is not much better than the rest of the world’s farmers.
Driving through farmland in much of North America in the growing season, a person not familiar with farming could be forgiven for thinking that our farmland has retained its fertility.
Here in the Red River Valley, massively heavy crops are routine.
But the men and women that farm that land know that if it were not for large and increasing amounts of chemical fertilizer, it would be a very different scene, even in the Red River Valley.
Given that the end of cheap fertilizer is upon us and that the time is coming when it may not be available at any price, how are we going to maintain and even increase production to help feed a growing world population?
I have recently come into possession of a most interesting book. Published this year, it is written by a professor at the University of Washington, David R. Montgomery.
The book is called Dirt, The Erosion of Civilizations.
In it, Montgomery explores how from the beginning of recorded agriculture in Mesopotamia, mankind has, on every continent as well as the islands of the sea, cleared wilderness and forests, from the cedars of Lebanon to the Amazon rainforest.
In North America, they did it from the forests of the eastern seaboard, through the Great Plains to mountain valleys until they reached the Pacific Ocean.
Whatever the continent, whoever the people, almost all were ultimately the degraders and despoilers of the land they farmed.
And it was almost invariably because they did not see the land as a living thing, a precious resource that took untold millennia to form, but that could be, and often was, lost of meaningful production in a few decades.
In his book, Montgomery discusses Egypt, which until the building of the Aswan Dam on the Nile, had been self sufficient in food for thousands of years, but now is almost totally dependent on other countries for its food supply.
He talks of the Amazon rainforest, where slash and burn clearing of land is happening as we speak. Under the massive green canopy of that forest is poor thin soil, which, when the forest is removed, is prone to rapid erosion and degradation.
And he talks of the Great Plains of North America, one of three preeminent agricultural areas of the world.
Our land, all of it, is but a pale shadow of what it once was. It is like a person on life support.
Take away the artificial, and there is not much left to maintain life.
Zero till and minimum till are good measures, but it will take more than how we work the land to increase organic matter and fertility in our soils.
Montgomery makes the argument far better than I can.
So for those short, dark winter days when the coffee shop in town is the place for stories of the pulling power of tractors, the capacity of combines and the yields obtained, the stuff of wild exaggeration and sometimes noisy quarrels, read this book instead.
It will make you have a different attitude to the precious stuff we call dirt.
