Back to the farm
An hour and a half southeast of Myer’s One Farm, in the small town of Red Oak, Iowa, sits Ogden Farm. Here, Clay Ogden, a fifth-generation farmer on this land, farms 1,500 corn and soy acres with his father. “Pretty standard Iowa farm, I guess,” Ogden says.
Very standard: more than two square miles of alternating corn and soy.
Like Myer, Ogden left the farm young. “I left here running when I was 18,” he says. “Went to Colorado. Loved it.” But he came back at age 39. That was four years ago. “Basically, I’m the only one left,” he says. “My dad is 70, and my sister lives in Montana.”
Ogden’s and Myer’s move off the farm is also pretty standard. The number of U.S. farmers is shrinking as fewer young farmers stick around. As a result, the average age of the U.S. farmer is 58.3, up eight years over the past three decades. Small and medium farms, too, are disappearing because they can’t compete with giant producers. They are being subsumed into larger ones or sold to real estate developers. The midpoint U.S. cornfield size tripled between 1987 and 2007, according to U.S. Public Interest Research Group (U.S. PIRG). Loss of diversity, it seems, is not just a crop phenomenon. It’s increasingly true of the farmers themselves. Earl Butz’ dictum, “get big or get out,” is playing out with unintended consequences.
Unintended consequences become a theme throughout industrial agriculture. In February, U.S. PIRG released the report “Reaping What We Sow,” detailing the impacts of large specialized farms, including environmental threats like loss of topsoil, aquifer depletion, water pollution and global warming, and human health concerns like antibiotic resistance, obesity, cancer, autism and lower IQs resulting from pesticide contamination.
The “pretty standard” farm is not a pretty standard.
But Ogden, like Myer, presents an uncommon trajectory, beginning with the return to the farm. For Ogden, it continues with growing non-GMO versions of the corn and soy his farm has hosted for decades. So far, a third of Ogden’s farm—roughly 500 acres—is non-GMO. He’s also gotten 30 acres certified for organic production.
This is all experimentation for Ogden. It requires new techniques in the field and seeking new markets for his produce. In the case of non-GMO soybeans, he’s collecting a premium, but with a bit more effort at harvest time. “We have to keep all that non-GMO soybean segregated. We store it on the farm and deliver it about a half an hour away.”
His corner of Iowa (“we’re kinda in ethanol country here,” he says) doesn’t provide a premium for non-GMO corn. Still, he’s sticking with it and selling it in the same commodity market as his GMO corn. “We found really great yield responses to [non-GMO], so we’ve kept doing the corn”—an in-field result that flies in the face of genetic engineering’s central “feeding more people” promise. When a premium comes around, which Ogden says is only a matter of time, it will be a bonus.
Over the next couple of years, Ogden hopes to convert all the farm’s corn and soy crops to non-GMO. He also plans to convert more land to organic, “even if that’s only 20 acres at a time.” Ogden likes the organic and dislikes the chemicals on the conventional acreage. “But it’s a steep learning curve and definitely requires a little more labor.”
A big part of that learning curve will entail the three C’s of organics: crop rotation, cover crops and compost. The rotation of corn and soy already practiced across the state employs a micro-symbiosis in which the soy adds nitrogen to the soil, reducing the need for synthetic nitrogen inputs. Organic production, however, calls for more diverse crop rotations. “We’ll probably do soybeans, corn, wheat and oats; that would kind of be our rotation,” says Ogden. “Perhaps rye grass and leave it fallow: Plant rye in the fall and just leave it out there, and maybe mow it and bale it.” There’s the second C: cover cropping. Organic principles dictate keeping something in the soil year-round, and not always for harvest. Cover crops pump nutrients into the soil.
Compost helps with that, too, and all three C’s reduce the need for chemical inputs, like fertilizers and pesticides, while increasing the amount of carbon pulled from the atmosphere—where it’s a liability—to the soil, where it boosts crops and increases the soil’s water retention, and in turn, its water efficiency and drought and flood tolerance.
“Of course, we’re going to have to figure out how to make money for those three years while it’s transitioning,” Ogden says, referring to the USDA Organic program requirement that land must be cultivated with organic methods for three years before its produce can be labeled organic.
Ogden’s father is receptive to these changes, but he’s not pushing them. “That’s all me,” Ogden says. “It’s kind of hard to teach an old dog new tricks out here.”
Ogden does see organics gaining some traction, however. “We’ve shifted gears a little bit from focusing so much on the actual crop to just getting the land certified so there’s more opportunities to diversify.
“I don’t think there’s very many other eople around here that are doing that,” Ogden says. “But with the younger generation coming up, I bet it gains a little popularity.”
