The Wisconsin Magazine; Farmers going it alone; 1522[?]

Why if you're going to use cover ups. we'll not have cover crops put on them because they're going to oats next spring. [Speaker 2] We're not against all inputs, against all herbicides or the use of all fertilizers. But we want to make sure that we use them as wisely as possible only when needed to minimize [cuts off] [Reporter] No one's sure how many farmers are using sustainable practices, but the number seems to be growing. Hundreds come each summer to the farm of Dick Thompson in Boone, Iowa where the lessons of sustainability are taught farmer to farmer. Bernie Clabber got the message at Dick Thompson's farm. Dick Thompson says he got the message 20 years ago when his conventional farming practices just weren't working. [Dick Thompson] The cattle were sick, the hogs were sick, we were plowing and all that fall plowing had to be done. A lot of stress and surely there had to be a bit better way than this. [Reporter] Thompson says that was when he learned the lesson. [Thompson] Friend that knew nothing of this situation took me to a

meeting on natural farming, that was that was kind of like the two before experience another farmer said that if you're raising continuous corn with atrazene and diazenine, you're going down a blind alley and so that was the end of that. I didn't sleep that night. [Reporter] Sustainable farming is billed as a means to an end, that end being a world where farmers farm, people eat, and the government gets out of managing who grows how much of what. And everybody goes home happy. [Thompson] We've got to do something where instead of getting larger farms, we've got to figure out a way that we can take the farms that we have or become smaller even and make it work financially. This fits that whole picture of getting to getting those things done. [Rick Klemme] So if you are going to be a medium size operator, you're going to have to focus on that efficiency aspect. [Reporter] Rick Klemme, an agricultural economist was recently appointed to coordinate sustainable

farming research at the University of Wisconsin. Klemme says sustainable farmers are headed in the right direction. Farming more cheaply so that even if they don't grow as much, they'll still make money. [Klemme] The underlying components are there. A concern for environmental quality, a remaining concern about the structure of the agricultural industry in terms of small farms vs. medium vs. large farms, the revitalization of rural economies. So what sustainable agriculture is is it gives a point, a focal point to these issues,and in that respect if society is concerned about these problems I just listed, sustainable agriculture is an important movement. [Reporter] Sustainable Agriculture means developing a sense of pride in what may seem to be unusual things. Witness Pete Edstrom posing for pictures atop a windrow of composted manure. But that is what the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture is paying him to study and

demonstrate how best to turn a farm waste into an asset. [Pete Edstrom] It's more important to incorporate as much as we can into demonstrating what's possible, what's really not quite so possible or what are the problems in making transitions or are we most concerned about doing this scientific approach to the problem of coming up with absolute measures of yield differences etc.? [Reporter] To Edstrom the answer is clear. [Edstrom] But the most important thing to me obviously is to come up with a visible demonstration that my neighbors can come over and take a look at say "hey this works I'd like to go home and try it myself." [Edstrom] I was hoping I could'a showed you good respectable 80 bushel of corn that was clean up here, and 140 bushel of corn down there. 1988 don't let you do that. [Reporter] 1988 was the driest year in decades.

The corn plants in some of Edstrom's fields didn't even form ears. But on this field the corn yielded one hundred thirty four bushels to the acre. The average in his area was only 91. And more important it didn't cost him as much to raise the corn as it would have if he had used conventional chemical weed controls. But as Edstrom told the farmers who came to his field day, as attractive as sustainable farming might seem, it is not something a farmer can shift to overnight. [Edstrom] I don't want to warn anybody that things are going to back off herbicides and you're going to control weeds mechanically when you didn't do your homework. Anything with killage, you got a problem with dry springs. [Thompson] I say

Everybody should be trying to move in this direction, go as far as they possibly can. As we get this idea that we're going to-- we're using all this herbicides and then overnight we're going to not use any and the Gulf is too wide and the people just-- And so they give up, they quit trying. And that's a mistake. [Reporter] And Thompson contends there has to be a philosophical change first. [Thompson] Problem has to be solved in the inside, there has to be regeneration on the inside that we're concerned about the land, the community, and the people. And when that gets solved then we'll take care of the land right and we'll get out of the greed and the ease syndromes. [Reporter] The greed and the ease? [Thompson] Yeah [Reporter] I know what greed is, what's the ease? [Thompson] Well, always the easy way. Usually the easy way, 99 percent of the time it's probably wrong. [Reporter] Sustainable Agriculture is the search for a lesson. A lesson that the

energy that drives a farm is ultimately not in the farmers' hands, nor in the farmer's tractor, nor in the fertilizer spread with the seed. The energy is in the land itself. [music]