In Praise of Wes Jackson
This is part of an intermittent series on people who have been strong intellectual influences on me in some memorable way. I’ve done one on AD Gordon https://earthbasedjudaism.org/philosophical-reflections/a-disciple-of-ad-gordon and one of Wendell Berry https://earthbasedjudaism.org/philosophical-reflections/reflections-on-wendell-berry
I take three crucial lessons from Jackson’s work that I carry with me. One lesson is to take nature as our guide in how we work with the land. The second is to find the right scale. The third is the importance of economics and the question of the desirability of economic growth. Jackson isn’t Jewish and is only well known in the world of alternative agriculture.
Jackson’s thinking begins with his deep appreciation of his native Flint Hills Tallgrass Prairie in Kansas. He co-founded something called the Land Institute in Salina KS in 1976. The Land Institute is dedicated to the breeding of perennial grains. All of the grains we eat are annuals, that is plants that are planted and die all in the same year. There’s a really good reason our ancestors domesticated annual plants for our grain crops. All perennial plants spend energy storing energy in roots so they can survive the winter and come back next year. Annuals can put all their efforts into seed production. This means higher yields for annuals than perennials.
But because they are annuals, this means that we have to plant every year, which means disturbing the soil every year and either plowing or in our day and age, using herbicides to control weeds. This is what Jackson calls the problem of agriculture, as opposed to problems in agriculture—that is this problem is at the basis of agriculture.
Jackson contrasts this annual cycle of plowing and/or herbicides with what happens in the prairie which is his native ecosystem. He coined the wonderful phrase “farming in Nature’s image” and taking the prairie as an example of what our agriculture should look like.
Look towards nature, he says, for how we should farm. This means don’t disturb the soil by tillage. It means finding ways to have perennial polycultures (multiple kinds of plants that come back year after year) that holds the soil and allows for some plants to always be prospering depending upon the different conditions in a given year—wetter, dryer, hotter, colder, windier. And he marries this with the human interest in grains as the foundation of our diets. Grains get bad press sometimes for health reasons, but they are the most concentrated source of calories that are readily available. The challenge for most of our ancestors was the lack of available calories at certain parts of the year, unlike our modern challenge of too many calories and too much inactivity—this wasn’t possible for our ancestors.
The don’t disturb the soil and keep a cover on it absolutely influenced my choice of rotational grazing and 100% grassfed beef. As a gardener, it influences my idea of using cover crops and keeping something planted on the soil.
Jackson is also highly interested in finding the right scale. He has this wonderful phrase “eyeballs to acres” arguing that farms in the west have become so big with the advent of more and more powerful machines that they are simply too big for the farmer to know the land intimately and therefore farm it with care. Right scale for a farm really depends upon what is being farmed and what can be made to work economically. For traditional rice farms in Asia, the right sized farm was 1-2 acres. If you are growing market vegetables, that’s probably the vicinity. If you are raising cattle as I did, maybe 80 acres works because you can know that this part of that field gets really wet and you need to keep the cows off of it after a heavy rain or in the early spring. That’s something you can’t know if you are attempting to manage 500 acres, for instance. So I ask myself how much can I do right by? The answer these days is not much, so I don’t have some kind of huge garden done badly.
Jackson is also highly interested in economics. He gets at a deep level that we humans have to live and that means producing and consuming things—economics. But he is interested in what is sustainable and is a radical critic of Western thought that calls for an ever expanding economic pie. One really interesting point he makes is that the area in Kansas in which he lives actually supported more people under Native American land management in the 1700’s then it does today after European colonizers put the prairie to the plough and planted wheat instead of working with the prairie. Jackson argues for an economics that is resilient, that can handle different growing conditions. This is particularly relevant in an age of climate change.
I carry Jackson with me as an important teacher. He writes well, and I’d urge you to consider reading him.
