Sustainable

Having grown up in the '50s and '60s,

in a world that was really divorcing itself

from the source of all of its food.

I got to Mexico and I discovered

that there was still a really strong bond between people

and where their food came from,

the people that produced the food.

I got back to the United States and I was buying produce

that came from, who knows where.

I kept asking myself, how am I going to make great food,

if I don't have any connection to the people that are growing that food?

We have gotten so distant

from the food that we start thinking about it

as a commodity.

For goodness sakes, it's our nourishment as human beings.

And I can have an opportunity

to have give and take with the people that are actually keeping me alive.

I'm Marty Travis,

and I'm a farmer in Central Illinois.

Each Friday night, I send an email to close to 200 shops,

it lists the product that we have available from Spence Farm

and then we deliver every Wednesday

to the restaurants, what they've ordered.

And, we do all the deliveries ourselves.

I usually make our first delivery at 9.30 in the morning.

Hit as many as 30 plus restaurants during the day.

Cover a pretty good sloth of the city.

We worked it out so that we're hitting

each restaurant when somebody's there to receive it

and somebody there to write a check.

But, it's more about the relationship than it is the rutabagas.

It's an important intricate piece in the marketing that we do.

But it's much more than just selling things to them,

they've really become our friends.

It's so funny that people talk about...

"Oh, I'm a small farmer and I'm providing food for restaurants,

and I sell some of my stuff at a CSA and I have a truck stand

and then I go to the farmer's market once a week."

That's what a small farmer typically these days would say.

Well, that was what everybody did, 50 years ago.

There weren't as many restaurants but restaurants got their food locally

and people got their food locally

and most of everything was seasonal.

You look at frozen food, you look at microwaves,

You look at super-highly processed food

you look at the ease at which these things can be transported.

Each of these steps, made it more and more possible to say,

if we grow a lot of the same crop in one area,

then we have the ability to process food,

freeze it, ship it from a central location to the rest of the country.

And you're not saying, "How do we want to feed ourselves?"

You're saying, "How can we make agriculture

into the most efficient profit making system that we can?"

To start with, how do we make the most possible money?

Rather than, how do we produce the most appropriate food

is asking the wrong question first.

It is at a crisis point.

But it's not a crisis you wake up and see every morning.

It's at a crisis point where we have a health care crisis,

where our land and water is being badly used,

and climate change.

Agriculture is the number two culprit in climate change.

The way that we produce food and the way we eat

affects almost everything.

Each aspect of that has big problems.

It appears that we have a food system but what we have

is a system of using agriculture, food marketing, food production

to make money for a number of corporations.

We do get to eat, but we don't get to eat food

that's green and nutritious, and fair and affordable.

And if those are our goals, then we need a food system that says,

these are our goals, how do we get there?

The winter season here at the farm,

is much different than the other seasons.

It can be an incredibly beautiful time.

It's about keeping warm.

And also, keeping our livestock warm,

and well fed.

Winter is a season

that, I think, here in the Midwest,

we just wanna get through it quickly.

I work on the farm with my wife, Kris and our son, Will.

My son, Will

must be at least a foot taller than I am now.

I look up to Will in many ways.

There's been a couple of times where we've asked him,

"So, what are you gonna to do on the farm, what part of this do you want to do?"

And one of the things he came up with when he was still in high school

was that he wanted to resurrect the maple syrup business.

The native Kickapoo shared how to make syrup

with my fourth great grandfather in 1830.

And from that time on,

syrup has been made each generation.

I wanted to do the maple syrup because I really enjoy being in the timber

the sounds and the smells.

It's just a very calming, relaxing environment to be in.

It's connecting back to a time that was very important to this farm.

So it's a sense of pride

to see the next generation

re-capture some of that.

This farm was settled

by my fourth great grandfather in October of 1830.

In 1981,

the farm had been in our family for a 151 years at that point.

My grandmother decided that she couldn't take care of the farm

in the way that she had for years.

And decided to sell the house yard and the farm buildings

to a conventional farm family.

And then, for the next 18 years,

the farm really, was farmed conventionally

corn and soybeans, and during that period of time

was when the fellow that farmed the acreage was so excited

that it was Roundup Ready soybeans.

So then, my grandmother bought the farm back,

and I moved back here in...

the spring of '99.

It was a very surreal kind of experience in many ways.

The buildings were in tough shape,

so they needed repair.

The house needed repairs

and the land needed to be repaired.

The soil just didn't seem the same.

A lot of corn stalks

were still there, two and three years later,

just weren't breaking down,

and the soil was hard to walk on.

It just didn't feel right.

The soil is one of those things that most people take for granted.

And yet, if you think about it as a resource,

it's sort of the most undervalued yet invaluable resource humanity has.

It's the foundation for terrestrial life, it's a foundation for agriculture.

And yet, we pretty much, for the modern era,

have been treating soil like dirt.

If you look back at the history of past civilizations,

you keep running into different versions of a very similar story.

You look at Mesopotamia,

to Greece, to Rome

to the Southeastern United States,

to the American Midwest and the Dust Bowl.

It's a whole progression of societies

that have damaged and degraded their soil, and then moved on to the next place.

It would be profoundly unwise

to not look back and try and learn the lessons of those societies.

Given that now, we don't really have anywhere else to go.

I've actually been very impressed and amazed

by how simple changes in practices

can greatly reduce the need for agricultural inputs.

Like fertilizers and herbicides and pesticides in particular,

and buy us some time

to essentially think about how to generate a truly sustainable agriculture.

In a typical Iowa cropping system,

in which corn and soy are grown in alternate years on the same land,

farmers are looking to have a high yield of corn,

by applying a sufficient amount of nitrogen

to the soil in the form of mineral fertilizer.

Weeds are everywhere in these fields

and farmers have relied more and more on chemicals

that are very effective in suppressing weeds.

If we wanted an agricultural system that was minimally dependent

on non renewable resources

and that was...

careful in its impacts on the environment.

What would that system look like?

We started working on this land in 2001

and what we found out is that we could reduce

our use of mineral nitrogen fertilizer

by 90 percent and reduce our use of herbicides by more than 95 percent

if we add oats with red clover, or oats with alfalfa

to that corn and soy rotation.

This oat crop has this companion of clover

which is taking nitrogen out of the atmosphere

and putting it into its roots, which allows us to back way off

on the amount of mineral fertilizer we use.

We've seen less erosion potential in the longer rotations.

So we've seen these indicators of improved environmental performers

and we've also been able to maintain profitability

because of lower input costs in the longer rotations.

The basic fact that impedes the adoption

of more diverse, less chemically dependent systems

is that we don't put a price tag on environmental damage.

Impairments of water quality or loss of soil due to erosion,

or drift of herbicides onto non-target crops.

The so called externalities,

are not factored into the production equation.

If the external cost were added, back into the cost of industrial farming,

then it would seem much more expensive.

It would seem as expensive as it really is.

The argument that sustainable foods are more expensive,

goes out the window, when you recognize that sustainable food

has far fewer externalities than industrially produced food.

Scientists who work for the Federal Government

have discovered a huge dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico

where fish cannot survive.

It is about the size of Connecticut covering nearly 6000 miles.

Surface runoff is a very serious problem.

The primary cause of the dead zone

is nitrogen-based fertilizers that are washed down the Mississippi River

by spring rains and into the Gulf.

Suppose that you're a farmer from Illinois,

and you get a letter from the governor or from Louisiana