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 Essay - nov/dec 2007
Changes in the Agricultural Landscape
James C. Delouche
Professor Emeritus Mississippi State University
In mid-August of this year we drove northwesterly for two and a half days from our home in Mississippi to the small city of Watertown in the northeast part of the state of South Dakota, about 2400km, to attend a family reunion and visit friends. The route of our travel took us through a variety of important agricultural landscapes. We began in Northwest Mississippi where commercial forests, pastures and livestock operations dominate the agricultural landscape, traversed the fertile and productive alluvial floodplains of the Mississippi River (termed the Mississippi Delta) through three states, Mississippi, Arkansas and Missouri, where cotton, soybeans and rice are the traditional crops, then thorough the pasture and livestock agriculture of Missouri and finally moved into the maize, soybean and wheat landscapes of the Iowa and South Dakota prairie lands, the heartland of U.S. agriculture. I had driven through these areas many time from many directions and thought I knew and understood the various agricultural landscapes and enterprises very well.
Wife Shirley did most of the driving as she always does because she feels that I do more daydreaming than driving. So, I usually listen to music on the radio, read a magazine or book and do a bit of thinking with only infrequent observations of the area through which we are traveling. When we entered the alluvial floodplains of the Mississippi River, however, some remarkable changes in the agricultural landscape aroused my interest and occupied most of my attention for the remainder of our journey.
Aquaculture The first change I observed was not really new but seemed new because I had not given much attention to it. The landscape was filled with thousands of hectares of aquaculture ponds devoted to the culture of a very tasty freshwater fish called catfish because of its whiskers. I thought about the risks the first catfish farmers took because catfish was considered a trash fish by most people outside of the most southern part of the country, and their great success in persuading the general populace of catfish's excellent cooking qualities and taste. I also recalled the periodic and current trade disputes with Vietnam and Brazil over importations of similar fish from the Amazon and Mekong Rivers. Since it was August and very hot, most of the ponds were being aerated with giant mechanical agitators. The soils in this area are rather heavy and excellent for soybeans which in some cases are rotated with the aquaculture. It is interesting that several years ago the Mississippi Seed Certification Agency became involved in certifying the "seed" fish, i.e., baby fish sold to catfish farmers for production, of an improved variety of catfish that require an analysis of protein profiles from the "whiskers" of baby fish sampled for the certification process.
Maize, Other Grains and Ethanol
The second change I observed was much more recent and rather startling. A lot of maize and some sorghum were being grown in areas where cotton and/or soybeans had long been the traditional crops. I could not recall any significant plantings of maize and/or sorghum in these areas since before tractors replaced animal power in the late 1940s when maize was cultivated on most farms to feed the work animals. Some of the maize was being harvested and a lot of it was in the dry-down stage and approaching harvest maturity. I wondered briefly why maize was replacing the traditional crops of cotton and soybeans before recalling that ethanol, investments in ethanol plants, rising commodity prices for maize and political debates about alternatives to fossil petroleum fuels were very much in the news and had attracted the attention of many farmers as well as politicians. As I considered the economic and political reasons for the abundance of maize, however, I began to wonder how all of the maize and sorghum were going to be harvested and stored. I hoped that the cotton farmers who had taken up maize and/or sorghum realized that the harvesting machinery and storage units used for cotton are not suitable for grains. It turned out that the maize yields were excellent, much higher than expected, and that the good storage available was sufficient for only a portion of the crop. The storage problem is being solved as possible through conversions of silage silos, barns, equipment sheds for grain storage and, interestingly, a large plastic bag grain storage system manufactured in Argentina.
Then I begin some intense thinking about the current priority emphasis on ethanol and other biofuels, the allocation of large portions of our croplands to maize and similar grain crops, and the diversion of an increasing portion of grain production to the distillation of ethanol and its effects on the other uses and users of grains. According to an article in a recent agricultural magazine the expansion of the grain based ethanol industry is a win-win situation, but I wonder if there are not some losers. The owners of crop lands, grain farmers, distillers, agricultural input suppliers, and investors will certainly benefit. These winners, however, will be balanced by an equal or greater number of losers: cotton and rice farmers whose production is not suitable for ethanol; livestock and poultry producers dependent on grains for feed; we the consumers of essential foods derived from feed grains, e.g., bread, meat, dairy products, cooking oils, who will face higher prices and possibly even supply shortages; and we the taxpayers who provide the funds for the subsidies on ethanol. There are already ideas, inventions and investments directed at improving the efficiency and yield of crops dedicated to ethanol production. The 8-10 mt/ha of residues left behind a good maize crop could greatly augment the yield of ethanol if economical ways are developed to handle cellulosic carbohydrates, but the effects of this "mining" of crops and crop residues on fertility and productivity of the soil are seldom mentioned.
The perspective for these observations and comments on biofuels is, of course, the conditions and current circumstances in the United States but I recognize that Brazil was and remains a leader in biofuels and uses a large portion of its sugarcane crop for ethanol production. I also have read that more sugarcane is being planted and there are plans to exploit other plants and plant products for ethanol production. Sugarcane is, of course, a superior source of ethanol than grains because of its high sugar content and tonnage per hectare. Its energy yield is about 8X the energy input required for production compared to only 1.3X for maize. Other countries will surely follow these leaders in biofuel production, many of which can hardly afford to divert even a small portion of their crop production from the food supply to produce biofuels.
Genetic Engineering
The most impressive change in the agricultural landscape was in the appearance of fields of cotton, maize and soybeans. Most of the fields had been planted with transgenic varieties with herbicide resistance and insect protection traits. The fields were very uniform and remarkably free of the weeds that were always present before varieties were engineered to resist broad spectrum herbicides and protect the plants from certain kinds of insects. The contrast of the super clean transgenic fields with the few that were obviously planted with conventional varieties was dramatic. The transgenic fields were very neat and even beautiful while those planted with conventional varieties appeared rough and in need of much work. There was also much less field activity in August than I remembered before the advent of the transgenic varieties. I noticed only an occasional airplane engaged in aerial spraying in the cotton area when in the past the sky would have been filled with aerial sprayers in August. The most common activity was irrigation. As I marveled at these changes in the agricultural landscape, I thought that surely agricultural biotechnology is one of the grandest and most portentous scientific discoveries. It needs to be more widely welcomed, accepted and cautiously used to advance the human condition.
Mixed Cropping
The agricultural landscape in central western Iowa as presented an unusual mixed cropping of maize and wind turbines for generating electric power. A farmer fiend confided that it was not only unusual but also very, very profitable. This mixture echoed a much earlier mixture of oil wells and livestock or wheat in Texas and Oklahoma which was also very, very profitable but different in a critical aspect: oil is a non-renewable resource and was soon depleted while the wind appears to be non-exhaustible.
We returned home from South Dakota via a somewhat different route with equally interesting landscapes.
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