Designing the transformation
Last Thursday, University of Wisconsin professor Dr. Randy Jackson told a Common Ground banquet in the town of Emmet that Midwest agriculture needed a “massive transformation” in order to minimize phosphorus pollution in lakes, rivers and streams.
Such a transformation would require, he said, planting half of what was ancient Midwest prairies back into perennial grasses. Cows will need to be spread out, he explained, not concentrated.
U.S. agriculture is slow to change, but this coming year might be different. Dr. Jackson may get his wish.
Inputs for conventional agriculture are through the roof. The farm papers report anhydrous ammonia selling for $1,430 a ton and urea at $913 a ton. Both are at all time highs. Potash (the “K” in NPK) is selling at $807 a ton and UAN 28, a liquid nitrogen fertilizer, is selling for $584 a ton. Red diesel for the tractor is sky high, as well. Last year, farmers paid $2.87 a gallon. The current listed price runs over $4 a gallon.
Faced with shake-your-head, crazy prices, farmers may follow the good professor’s advice to plant perennial grasses, perhaps for managed grazing, rather than stick with input-intensive cash crop grains. Farmers may, likewise, adopt reduced or no tillage cropping techniques with cover crops to keep topsoil in place. All of these choices will reduce tractor passes, cutting fuel bills.
The fish in the Big Eau Pleine Reservoir are all praying for this. A Wisconsin Valley Improvement Corporation isopleth documents a March 9 plume of barely oxygenated water running for miles across the reservoir’s murky bottom.
Of course, Midwest farmers, including those here in Marathon County, may zig at the same time Dr. Jackson wants them to zag.
While input costs are shooting past the moon, so are future prices for cash grains and other commodities. Last year in March, No. 2 yellow corn traded for around $5.35 a bushel. Now, a year later, the price sits at $7.45. Soybeans sold for $14.16 per bushel last year. The current price is $16.71 per bushel. The price for commodity milk has a rocket on it. The all milk price for 2021 was $18.65 per hundredweight. This year’s all milk price forecast has been recently adjusted to $22.60.
These high prices may inspire farmers to double down on last year’s most profitable year. They may plant corn and soybeans fence row to fence row. To maximize yield, they may stick with conventional tillage. They may shake the dice, hoping that great yields with high prices will pay fat dividends. The USDA is forecasting a drop in farm income this year. Farmers, however, may take that chance. They may chase high prices like a dog after a rabbit.
If farmers aggressively seek acres and yield with conventional tillage to raise row crops, Dr. Jackson will not get his way. There will be no “massive transformation” of agriculture. Instead, there will be more run-off into the Big Eau Pleine Reservoir. The fish, too, will have their prayers unanswered.
How it will all turn out, of course, is anybody’s guess. It’s hard to imagine that farmers will repeat last year’s cropping performance given the explosive increase in inputs, but you don’t know.
Dr. Jackson concluded his remarks at Common Ground saying that farmers, government agencies, environmentalists and government workers needed to design a new agriculture that both conserves soil and sequesters carbon.
This is a mission we generally support, but wonder about. Can anybody design a nation’s agriculture able to anticipate Russia’s invasion of Ukraine? And the impact on gasoline, diesel and nitrogen fertilizer prices? Or a global pandemic that disrupts supply chains? And disrupts meat packaging plants? Or a labor strike in Canada that threatens the supply of most of America’s potash? Or that all of these things could happen all at once in this crazy world of ours?
A greener design for agriculture would be great. Is there anyone smart enough to do the designing? Editorial by Peter Weinschenk, The Record-Review
