One of the most serious problems in conservation agriculture is the profound ignorance of those in advocacy and leadership positions. This article from Conservation in Practice by Brian DeVore, though not the worst example of this problem, demonstrates a number ways that conservation is harmed by this ignorance.

The article begins with a sneering account of advances in precision agriculture to set the stage for dismissing it.

“We think this is the first step toward totally automatic farm implements,” crowed a Stanford researcher while the tape was rolling. Indeed, while thumbing through a farm magazine four years later, I spied a photo of a John Deere tractor pulling a sprayer. It caught my attention because there was no seat or steering wheel on the tractor—it was a prototype of a GPS-guided driverless field implement.

Such technology proves that the importance of knowing the land intimately has not been lost on the boosters of industrial agriculture. Their response has been the development of technologies that break the land down into electronic bits and bytes. The farmer can then use that information to apply more (or less) fertilizer here or to justify the cost of draining a piece of soggy ground there.

Precision agriculture uses satellite imaging and locating to provide a wealth of information about surface conditions with increasing accuracy. Contrary to Devore's simple minded account, such data yields information about soil, moisture and crop conditions at a very fine grained level. It even provides information about the health and species composition of rangelands. As useful as it is satellite data isn't the only data source used. Small, cheap distributed sensors and actuators are linked together and with central controllers using wireless technologies to provide even finer grained, real time, data and allow action to be taken.

These technologies are still in their infancy and not widely available yet but progress has been rapid and will continue at the blistering pace of general advances in processing speeds, communications improvements, miniaturization, detection systems and sophisticated software analysis. Like everything else associated with information systems the cost drops as fast as capability increases.

What Devore reveals is his cultivated ignorance and intellectual poverty. He doesn't know what is happening and doesn't want to know since it conflicts with his prejudices and those of his fellow travelers.

After watching the video of the satellite-guided tractor, I telephoned David Podoll, a farmer in southeastern North Dakota. By closely observing ecological relationships on his land, Podoll has developed, among other things, a natural weed control system. I asked him if he thought such “precision farming” could ever bring about a more environmentally benign form of agriculture. To him, the question was a no-brainer. For one thing, the data being fed into those high-powered computers was pretty superficial from a farmer’s point of view. A satellite couldn’t provide insights into the intricate ecological relationships between a weed, a fungus, and an insect. Being aware of the corn yield and maybe even the amount of fertility contained in a square meter of soil is not the same as knowing the amount of healthy bacterial activity that’s taking place.

This is false. The combination of satellite data and distributed sensor networks provides more information about ecological relationships than a farmer is capable of providing. The detection equipment is as good as anything a human can carry into the field, including his owns senses, and it can cover more area much more quickly.

DeVore's article goes on to rhapsodize about associations of farmers working with the inevitable "nonprofit sustainable agriculture organization" to monitor their lands for health using a number of indicators such as bird population and diversity. He also sneers at USDA efforts to develop portable testing equipment for farmers to use to do direct tests of their lands.

Their enthusiasm for birds is infectious, and it’s easy to see why birding became one of the team’s most popular monitoring tools. It’s user-friendly and can put the development of sustainable management techniques in the hands of the farmers themselves. Because it can be worked into livestock chores like moving cattle and fixing fences, birding is a handy way for gauging some of the impacts a farmer is having on the land. It’s also more pleasant than grubbing up soil samples.

How certain monitoring activities rate on the “fun scale” while fitting into daily farm activities is not trivial. During the mid-1990s, John Doran, a U.S. Department of Agriculture soil scientist based at the University of Nebraska, tried to develop a comprehensive soil quality testing kit for farmers. The kit contained resources for testing, among other things, soil respiration, infiltration capacity, bulk density, acidity levels, nitrate levels, electric conductivity, and compaction. Taken together, all of these indicators should give farmers an excellent idea of how their farming practices are affecting the biological health of the soil. But when, as a dry run, Doran sent the kit out to a few innovative farmers who were trying various sustainable practices, he was disappointed in how they used it. The farmers reported back that they simply didn’t have time to fit the kit into their routine, Doran told me.

A more insightful analysis of the time consuming work of hand testing and monitoring is that this is why remote and distributed sensing are so superior. The sensors don't get tired and complain that their work is no fun. They break down but not easily and not without notification. Attempts to develop laboratory kits such as academics and consultants use for spot checks as field deployed units for farmers fail not because they don't work but because it requires the farmer to do the work of a faux academic. Farmers are already busy. They need labor saving technologies rather than labor increasing technologies.

DeVore's ignorance of farming seems as great as his ignorance of technology. His obsession with birds as the only meaningful measure of ecological health masks important aspects of both agriculture and ecology.

As they became more aware of the bird life on their farms (and began enjoying the birds more), the farmers took the next step: they started wondering what impacts their livelihoods were having on the life cycles of their feathered neighbors. At team meetings, the farmers began discussing with Hawkins concerns they had about nesting disruptions caused by haying, pasture clipping (a method for keeping the grass more palatable for livestock), and even grazing. Although several of the farmers observed that cattle were sometimes able to graze a paddock with an active nest in it without destroying the nest eggs or nestlings, the results weren’t always as positive when it came to mechanical forage harvesting...

It became clear that the hay fields and managed pastures were in danger of becoming avian “population sinks,” or booby traps, rather than “population sources.” As a result, several farmers reduced or delayed pasture clipping to allow fledglings to achieve some level of mobility before the mower disrupted the nests. Beef producer Mike Rupprecht did not clip any of his paddocks one year. It didn’t appear to have any negative effect on the productivity of the pastures or beef cow herd, and he and his wife Jennifer observed a number of male dickcissels using taller plants in their pastures as singing perches.

Pastures aren't clipped just to make the forage palatable. It provides several positive benefits to agricultural productivity, ecological diversity and control of invasive species.

To understand pastures begin with the conditions of a natural sward, the evolutionary environment of grasslands including the grasses and their predators that graze them. This is a necessary beginning since they co-evolved. In a sense they created one another. In those evolutionary conditions swards had a flush of rapid growth in the spring when soil temperatures were still cool and there was abundant moisture, followed by brief but intense episodes of grazing as herds of migrating ruminants passed through to eat, trample and foul the sward with their dung and urine and then move on to fresh pastures. This might happen several times during the growing season, alternating brief periods of intense predation with recovery periods. Then in the fall the prairie dried out and burned. It didn't burn every year in every place but no place went long without the healing lick of fire.

It is no longer possible to manage swards in this way but that's what they require for health. We must simulate this to the best of our ability if we want healthy land. We have to do this whether we want the economic benefits of pastoral agriculture or not. Fortunately, the effort and expense of managing the land to simulate its evolutionary needs can be at least partly compensated for by the value of the meat and/or milk produced by the ruminants. Enlightened pastoralists use a number of techniques and technologies to simulate natural systems and in doing so increase the health of their land as well as being more productive.

A key technique is the simulation of migrating grazers to achieve what is know as the "herd effect". A comparatively small herd of grazers is confined to an area that provides only one or two days forage by lightweight, cheap electric fences. Often they are battery powered and portable so that paddock size can be varied with the season to match the productivity of the sward. Confining them in this way induces them to eat all the forage, not just cherry pick the sweet parts, and the concentrated action of the hooves breaks up surface litter. By not allowing them to move to loafing areas for cud chewing and sleep their dung and urine is evenly spread. Then they move to a new paddock, the one most in need of grazing, and this cycle is repeated at intervals during the season.

Periodic clipping of the pastures simulates what fire used to do. Not all of the plants in a sward are healthful to eat. Over time, with neither fire nor clipping, these plants will become ever more populous in the sward. Failure to either clip or burn provides a competitive advantage for plant species that are bitter or toxic and so are not grazed. Invasive species alien to such environments, often lacking natural predators, come to dominate such neglected swards.

The grazers also benefit from these techniques. Grasses and forbes are more nutritious when they are young. More of their mass is digestible since less has become woody and stiff to support greater height. When they are grazed they remain youthful. They simply regrow from energy reserves stored in their roots. Well managed pastures are always grazed when the sward is at peak nutrition. (UPDATE: more accurately, the sward manager balances volume with nutrition density. As volume goes up nutriitional value per unit goes down. There is a crossing point where volume and nutrition density are optimal and waiting longer results in less net benefit.)

The sward prospers from being periodically cropped short, either by grazing or clipping, in less obvious ways. Since the organic matter sequestered by the plants remains on site either as dung or clippings, there is a banquet provided for soil life. Bacteria and fungi flourish, flying and burrowing insects both have blooms, and birds have a feast of insects. The grasses and forbs also prosper in subtle ways. The sward thickens as more individual plants are able to get enough light to grow. The total amount of biomass produced by the sward increases. There is less bare soil to erode or provide a foothold for invasive aliens. More vegetation, more microbes, more insects, more birds and more ruminants result from good management. Soil depth and organic matter content increases. This allows soils to hold moisture better as well as drain away excess water to the subsoil and aquifers. Well managed pastures get better every year and have measurable increases in soil depth and productivity for decades. Consistency and persistence pays continuing dividends.

It is trivially easy for pasture managers to provide variable treatment of areas, to leave some areas fallow to provide habitat for other animals, even if only for brief periods during the season when needed for the life cycles of those creatures. Wise managers also use variable treatment to enable bio-control. For example, deferring grazing on an area causes an increase in rodent populations. Subsequent grazing of those areas forces the rodents to seek other foods such as the roots of woody invasive species.

It isn't that DeVore has an excuse for being so ignorant of grassland ecology. He writes about one aspect of it in stream management.

In fact, what Gates saw at the Lentz farm fit with observations he was beginning to gather in other parts of southern Minnesota at that time: sometimes, controlled grazing of a stream-bank helped, not hindered, its stability. It’s based on the idea that cattle hooves can be used to create a disturbance in an area for a short period of time—no more than a few days. The ground may look like it was hit by a mud-filled Mack truck immediately after the cattle leave, but it also creates a nutrient-rich environment for new growth to take place.

All that intense impact can also break down the edges of a sharp streambank, creating a gentler slope for plants to establish themselves. Using short-term livestock disturbance to rehabilitate an area works nicely with the management-intensive rotational grazing system Lentz has been using to produce beef since the late 1980s. Lentz reasons that since the animals only stay in the same paddock for a few days at the most, why not make part of a streambank in need of disturbance one of those grazed paddocks?

DeVore has been exposed to management intensive grazing practices without understanding what is happening since he doesn't look closely or for long enough periods to notice succession. He see only the large surface issues, birds and stream banks, without seeing the ecosystem as a whole or understanding the ecological issues that make one management system better than another. This cultivated ignorance results from a childish attitude towards science and technology, a rejection of knowledge and wisdom and in the end an anti-humanist ethical stance. What makes this so bizarre is that agriculture and ecological management are the founding sciences and technologies of civilization. No activity has a longer or more distinguished record of technological progress except weapon making..

As agricultural technologies become more sophisticated less land is used, and used more gently, to produce more food and fiber. Agriculture has become ever less ecologically damaging while being more productive. These are linked issues since healthy land is more productive. As world population reaches its peak in the next few decades the challenge to produce food without ecological consequences is greater than ever. The Luddite prescriptions of DeVore are the least appropriate to the situation. We need to increase our skill and productivity by using our minds to develop techniques and technologies that allow us to do ever more precise management.

I suspect that DeVore's animating motive is an old movie he plays in his mind of early modernist industrial agriculture with ungainly machinery belching smokes and stinks while ripping the earth and spraying it with chemicals. He combines steam age ideology with industrial age technology to manufacture a horror film to live by. It's a mad world and he wants to get off, to live in the past since the future is frightening.

It's just a bad movie from a hack producer. Agriculture is getting better not worse, as it always has. The state of practice 80 years ago, at the dawn of the industrial era when horses still pulled many plows, produced ecological devastation on a grand scale, dust bowls and shattered lands. This is the story of agriculture though all of history. Critias complained of this when writing was still a novel skill. We don't do that any more and every year new, less intrusive methods are developed. Our current state of practice is flawed and the solution, as ever, is to use newer and better methods. We need this to produce the food needed, preserve the health and productive capacity of the land, and to provide livelihoods for the farmers of tomorrow. They are kids today but they are tech savvy modern humans who will in a short time take over from the current generation that averages 55 years of age and is thinking of retirement.

We need to become able to do what some call "long now" thinking. We need to think of at least the past fifty years and the next fifty years as being the duration of "now" so that we can see where we have been, where we are and make good decisions about where we can feasibly go. It is suicidal to make grand but empty gestures that fail to consider feasibility determined in part by external pressures and in part by only partly foreseeable developments. The combination of ever more precise metrics of ecological conditions and ever more subtle comprehension of ecological imperatives is our best hope of conserving our environment while using it. Until we get those Star Trek food synthesizers we'll have to grow our own.