the GoodEater Collaborative

Journeys with Josh and Dave Part 1:

Josh Dorf and I took a trip to Quincy Washington to visit Tom Grebb, a bean farmer who has been pioneering new methods of sustainable farming. Tom and the farmers he sources from grow about 4,000 acres of ten different varietals of beans, including pintos, black beans, garbanzos, etc….. here are excerpts from our discussion.

Josh Dorf and Central Bean's Tom Grebb

David Steuer (DS): Do you want to talk a little bit about Tom and the work he is doing at central bean?
Josh Dorf (JD): Well the big shift for them was around direct seeding or no-till farming which came to them as a method to avert soil erosion, which is a very significant issue in that region. They came to this method independently of any sustainability or certification initiative. They came to it as a way to conserve the soil.
DS: How did they trip upon no-till farming?
JD: The story as I understand it is they learned this from Karl Kupers, one of the founders of Shepherd Grain group. Many years ago, he was in the region farming grass seed. He had a sod field and came to Tom and said he wanted to cut his seed directly into the soil. Tom thought he was crazy, but they tried it and found out that sure enough you could. That helped them avoid the headaches of tilling and preparing the land in advance of planting. Tom took that idea and clearly advanced the method over the years and now almost 40% of the farmers of the region switched over.

Tom checking out his healthy soil

DS: Lets talk a little bit about no-till and what are the good and bad of no-till as a method of farming.

JD: Well at the high level, it is important to understand that these are very large farms. These are not small farmers producing for a farmers market. These are industrial scale agriculture so they need to be competitive with their conventional neighbor, which we saw is literally the field next door. It is very difficult with organic farming if you are not going to till. If you are not going to till that requires some method to handle the weeds. If you are not going to use any herbicide you are stuck with hand weeding which is simply not possible at this scale. They need the ability to grow product at scale, yield high enough in order to offset the costs so that they are competitive. The direct seeding concept meant literally that by not tilling the soil don’t expend the diesel costs for tilling equipment to pass over the land multiple times, but on the other hand, the one method of handling weeds to apply glyphosate, otherwise known as roundup. There certainly is a negative reality to using that kind of an input in the land. They would contend, and the research I’ve looked at does support that glyphosate does break down rapidly and is not something like a pesticide that can get carried back into the ground water. It still makes me cringe personally, but I have to trust the farmer who lives on that land who is dealing with this all the time. That’s certainly one of the biggest pro and con of this method.

DS: So the pro is they can do it at scale, they can yield at scale, I think they said something like 2,500 pounds of beans per acres, whereas with organic, they have to till with four to five passes over the land with diesel powered equipment and you increase the problem of soil erosion.
JD: Yes, it is a very sandy soil in this region with rolling hills and it blows, and it all ends up in the Columbia River. The big kahuna would be to investigate no-till organics which would use inputs that are certified okay on the organic side. There recently was just some monies given to Washington State University to develop this, but nobody today as far as i know in the Pacific Northwest is doing organic no-till with beans or wheat at scale.
DS: To wrap it up basically we’re asking whether there are alternatives to organic as a way to deal with conventional farming that can be sustainable but done at scale. I think what we learned visiting Tom Grebb at Central Bean was interesting to see the new attempts to create a new standard in conventional farming that deals with the biggest issues of their region.
JD: And we saw their intense focus on the soil.
DS: It was quite funny, to give you an image of one of things we did, we walked the fields with Tom trying to find some of the seeds that had just been planted and you actually can’t even see where they were planted where they applied glyphosate about five or six days prior…
JD: They had done a “chem fallow” to destroy the plant matter.

Tom searching for seeds

DS: Right so things were turning brown but they were still kind of green and this guy is digging into the soil for about five minutes and couldn’t find the seeds.
JD: That had just been planted with a direct seeder.
DS: So then we sat down and ate the soil (Josh laughs) just to prove that the glyphosate was nutritious and see if it was traceable. So whether that will have any long term impacts, well find out in our next chapter of “Journeys with Josh and Dave”.

http://centralbean.com/