Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
ping, and elementary ecology suggests that one should be surprised when
agrochemicals are not needed to control them, rather than when they
are. In a conventional farming system, these organisms are attacked with
additional chemicals, most of which drift from the targeted pests. Indeed,
one study found that less than 2 percent of sprayed insecticide actually
contacts insect pests.
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This amounts to treating a symptom with medicine
that creates additional problems, requiring additional medicine. All
monocrop agroecosystems are leaky, and heavily tilled fields are partic-
ularly vulnerable to nutrients leaking into air and water. Continuous
cover and rotational cropping do a better job of retaining moisture and
nutrients because they mimic natural ecosystem functions. They require
higher rates of herbicides, but these farmers believe conservation tillage
advances them substantively toward sustainability.
One of the farmers working with Dwayne Beck described the concep-
tual shift associated with his approach to farming as “a brain-transplant
way of thinking.” Weeds are no longer a problem, something one needs
to kill. Instead they are a symptom of imbalance in the cropping system.
If weeds are finding the conditions to establish (sufficient light, moisture,
nutrients), they work to fine-tune the crop rotation and intensity to pre-
vent them in the future. This kind of farming requires farmers to learn
how to farm with nature, how to re-think the industrial logic of conven-
tional farming.
Kupers recognized the potential for adapting what Beck and the
Dakota Lakes farmers had learned to his local conditions, but he was not
free to make this decision by himself. He had to negotiate with the ten
people who owned the land, descendants of the man who originally
homesteaded this area. He had to convince them that his approach was
agronomically and economically sound. He presented a multi-year plan
for transitioning the entire 5,000-acre operation to no-till, including an
alternative economic strategy, no longer based on federal crop subsidies,
with a 10 percent cushion. The land owners accepted this, and he con-
verted his entire operation to no-till.
Kupers knew he could learn a lot more if some neighbors conducted
their own on-farm experiments, like the South Dakota network. Kupers
brought six farmer friends and Diana Roberts, a Washington State
University (WSU) agronomist, back to Dakota Lakes the following year.
Roberts was part of the Ag Horizons team at WSU, an interdisciplinary,
