The destructive logic of short-term thinking

“On a bright weekend in mid-October I put myself into the care of Timothy Taylor, agronomist and authority on grasslands at the University of Kentucky, and Bill Martin, partisan of plant communities and ecologist of Eastern Kentucky University. Our project was a tour of the fugitive survivals and remnants of the native tallgrass prairie that, before the invasion of white people, flourished in the so-called ‘barrens’ of western Kentucky, in the meadows of the region now called the ‘Bluegrass,’ and in scattered clearings and savannahs on, probably, to the eastern sea-board. . . .

“When we destroyed the native prairie, what did we destroy? Was it merely a curiosity, a ‘natural wonder’ of some sort? Hardly. Tim Taylor’s work very forcibly suggests the practical significance of the loss. The grasses of the tallgrass prairie, to begin with, are warm-season grasses. That is, they make their most vigorous growth during the hot summer months when the cool-season grasses such as fescue and bluegrass are semi-dormant. And the notorious weakness of our pasture economy, as it now stands, is that we have few grasses of high quality in current use that grow well in the hot months.

“The prairie grasses, moreover, are extremely efficient users of light — almost twice as efficient as, say, fescue. This means that their productivity — of pasture, hay, or humus — is spectacularly greater than that of the cool-season grasses. On Tim’s test plots switchgrass without added nitrogen produced 5,600 pounds of dry matter per acre; with 69 pounds of supplemental nitrogen per acre, the production was increased to 9,600 pounds. Tall fescue, by comparison, produced 2,400 pounds without nitrogen, and with 100 pounds of added nitrogen per acre, it yielded 5,400 pounds. Yearling steers tested in North Dakota gained two pounds per day on switchgrass, and almost as much on bluestem.

“And so these grasses may be said to be highly promising sources of pasture and hay. They are, in addition, excellent soil builders, and they provide excellent cover. But to use them properly, to preserve the stands in use, and to integrate them satisfactorily into farm pasture programs, Tim says, will require highly skillful and careful management.

“And how capable is our agriculture, in its present state, of highly skillful and careful management? Not very, I am afraid. What I saw on this trip through western Kentucky confirms what I have been constrained to conclude from agricultural travels in many other states: that this country is now poorly farmed, the land used less skillfully and carefully than ever before. In general, the better the land, the neater the farms look, but this is the monotonous, sterile neatness of monoculture. The corn rows are long and straight, oblivious of the contour of the land and of the paths of drainage. Often the fences are gone, which means that the livestock is gone, which means that to produce an income the fields must now be continuously cropped.

“The rougher the land, the worse it is neglected and the harder it is used. We saw many usable pastures gone to bushes or overgrazed. We took a close look at a soybean field on rolling land that ought to have been in permanent pasture. The soybean plant is hard on sloping ground because it loosens the soil and makes it easy to wash. In this field the rows ran straight downhill to the waterways, which had been plowed and planted like the rest. There were washes up to six inches deep between the rows. The waterways were wide gulleys twelve to sixteen inches deep. This sort of thing may be attributed to the use of large, high-speed equipment. But it has an antecedent cause: a mind willing to accept permanent loss as a tolerable charge against annual gain.”

— from Wendell Berry, “The Native Grasses and What They Mean,” in The Gift of Good Land (North Point Press, 1981)