Illustrated Daily; 15; Library Footage, Interview: Hal Rhodes with Wes Jackson

Oh, that's one of you would have been, oh, I wish I had that thing, that's the damn thing I've seen in my entire existence, we went to the Texas feedlot, the Texas feedlot cattle growers association. For an interview with Dave, it was a disaster, I'm technically using the show. Okay, not bars, it's just a money bar here. Millions animals, they can hand, per year capacity, slaughter, you know, it's, it's not what. Okay, continue non -importation. And another, another argument, the advocates of importation invariably make is that we need the food and fiber production presently being evidenced in the region, watered by the oval aquifer. And therefore, when it goes, the need will remain constant and water will have to be imported to satisfy that need. Yeah. That's what they say.

And again, they should start paying attention to the fact that money is an item that is, is a finite quantity in the household budget. And you see, it's a kind of wishful thinking. It all, I suppose, gets back to that thing we talked about earlier, the gift of denial, that there can be any change, that there will ever be any change ultimately in the way we live. I think that it's foolish for people to not make contingency plans. And if they just assume that it's going to be business as usual, when that water is gone, because we will be able to pull it in from somewhere else, then they're not reading the track record of humanity. And the track record of humanity has numerous examples of people running low on their resources and having to quit an

area. The Babylonians quit the area. There are one six as many people there now as there were at one time. And if we don't pay attention to that history, and if we assume that we're immune to it, simply because we're on a young continent, which we're aging more rapidly than any continent in the history of the earth, then we're just going to go the way of the rest. And it's another way of saying that education makes no difference. So I think we've got to do something to get people to get over this idea of denial, that it can happen to them. I also encounter the tendency to prove the politics of this problem, namely water importation. Somebody told me the other day. Well, we're hearing hard line opposition from the folks in Nebraska. I mean, pardon me, in Missouri and Arkansas right now. But they're really just taking out negotiating positions when the time comes, they'll cut a deal. Well, what they need to do is a nose count

of the people in Missouri, and compare it to the nose count of the people in Kansas, or a nose count on the people in Oklahoma or Nebraska, that where there are people, there is where political power is, where there is money, there is where political power is, and those are two almost immutable realities. And again, it's just unrealistic. It seems to me to expect that a bunch of people downstream on the Missouri that have their enterprise directed to an abundance of water are going to roll over and play dead and say, oh, yes, you boys just take whatever water you need. And we'll find something else to do. It's not quite that simple. All right. Yeah, I'll finish shut down just a second from it. Marty Strange told you that. Well, was somebody in there? Don, I know who

you mean. Yeah, I can't think. So then I called. And I called you about two days running and you're out picking... All right. A lot of people have placed a great deal of hope in dry land farming. That indeed dry land farming can, first of all, take up much of the slack that will be created in production by police to the Ovalala, the managed irrigation. What is the future dry land farming in the high plains without the Ovalala? Well, it'll probably be about what it was before they really got into it in a big way. Could you put the dry land for me? I suspect that if we return to dry land farming in the high plains, there will be similar to what it was before we began to really open up the Ovalala. In other words, what it was before 1946 or even

1950 or even later. It's been an awful lot of withdrawal during the 60s and 70s. So we could return to dry land farming. Although we're stubble mulching is now with us. And so it's summer saying that we will never have a dust bowl again. I'm not entirely convinced of that. But I do think that there's still going to be some problems about soil blowing and that we ought to be thinking about a sustainable agriculture. The one that I'm of course promoting is one based on perennials, so that you don't have the pre -planning and the planning and the cultivation that we audit the United States Department of Agriculture and land -grant institutions out of getting cracking on the development of perennial grain crops. It's the kind of research we're doing here. If we could do that, then there would be harvest and the occasional replanting. But that's down the road. That may be 50

to 100 years. But I would like to see the area become a permanent area a place where lots of people can live. And it's going to depend on the development of a sustainable agriculture, which is not a fossil fuel powered agriculture. That's what we've got to start looking hard at right away. If it weren't for the ogolala water problem right now, why we could be concentrating our mind on how to move to a sustainable agriculture for the great plains. How does the ogolala problem keep us from doing this? Well, the ogolala problem has us ringing our hands about what's going to happen when the water's gone. If the water weren't there in the first place, we would not be plowing the sand hills. We would not be plowing the sand sage prairie. We would be practicing some dry land farming and we would be saying how much longer will dry land farming last if we don't have the fossil fuel. And there will be all sorts of considerations about

whether we're going to do it with horses, or we're going to think about an agriculture that is based on perennials so that we minimize the fossil fuel input into the whole thing. Then we could really get a lively and interesting discussion going. But here we are having to cope with Iowa beef that's been bought out by Occidental Petroleum Company and all of the clout that that has and what the implications are for that being on the landscape. And Pepsi Cola that has no business owned and land up there in Nebraska and all of these other companies that I'm hearing aren't wanting to buy in and suck the water out, like Exxon and so on. I mean those corporations have no business in agriculture and it's not at all what Jefferson had in mind for this country and I resent it. Tell me about Pepsi Cola, Exxon and the other. What are they doing? Well they're just putting their money, you know, the good old businessmen, putting

their money into buying land and irrigating it. Now I know with Pepsi Cola now with, or at least I get this from the people at the Small Farm Energy Project and there's a rumor about Exxon wanting to buy a lot of land in the sand hills and put in center pivot and so on. And I used to be I couldn't believe that all this would be happening but now that Occidental Petroleum Company has, I guess it's purchased Iowa beef, you know, 40 % of all the feedlot cattle are grown over the Ogallala now. Now that an oil company is into the beef business, why, you know, you're not surprised at anything anymore. But agriculture as a way of life, where the farm is a hearth, a place to have your family, a place to have your baseball, a place to have your schools and your

churches and so on, is changing. The whole social, political, economic structure is changing as we allow the corporate takeover of the countryside and convert our farms into food factories instead of horse. Now that's an immoral. But people that look at the bottom line of dollars and cents, of course, see nothing wrong with it. Good. Well, let's try one now. Okay. Better battery. Okay. Are we all right? We're getting ready. All right. Give me your... Whoops. Okay. The magic here on the Ogallala aquifer is 2020. That's the one the experts are

using as a kind of watershed in the fall over. Between now and then, give me your scenario of what likely is going to happen. Well, 2020, I didn't realize that was the watershed year. That's what, 40 years from now. 40 years, in the next 40 years, what happens with Ogallala water will be very tightly tied to what happens with energy. As Rocky Mountain coal comes online, there will probably be a movement... As we move away from portable liquid fuels and move toward the use of the coal, a lot of the Ogallala will get pumped with electricity. And that's going

to be expensive electricity. It's not going to be probably anything close to the price that we've paid historically for electricity. Probably in certain parts of Kansas, there will be a use of natural gas, although with the deregulation of the price of natural gas, that could go out of sight. So as they go deeper for water, the lifting cost is going to go up. And they might be able to... The price of food might increase enough in order to accommodate that. If we continue to export corn at an increasing rate, and it looks like those are the trends now. Europeans are buying more corn because they're wanting to eat more beef, more meat.

Then that's going to mean that that'll keep us pumping more. In other words, we'll be able to afford more expensive egg products. But that'll all be from water that's down there. I still don't foresee bringing in the huge canals. So it'll probably be some business as usual in that area. There will be Iowa beef, which I guess has a slaughter capacity of... 1 .1 or 1 .2 million animals a year were at Dodd City, and then there's another plant on out west around Garden City. It's around a million animals a year capacity. There will probably be even more centralization of beef production than there has been. So the scenario that I see if we were to have a trajectory based on the past

and just carry it on into the future, it's going to probably be more of the same, more centralization. And of course what that will then mean is more control over the price. In other words, the consumer will probably experience prices that are the result of price fixing, that the competitive market will begin to disappear. So you will have those huge feedlot folks that are large enough then that they can start dictating to the farmer. And I think the farmers will be squeezed more and more and more and more and more and more land will be bought up by the corporations. Now look that one way, that's not an unhappy circumstance because it will be a lot easier to take away, take land away from an oil company when the oil is gone, then it will be to take land away from some individual landowner. I mean I wouldn't

want to take the land away from an individual landowner. But as there is more and more centralization and more and more of an exploitation of the water and the land resources, the resentment will grow among the people. And there will be, there will be, there will just be removal. I predict that by the year 2020 that the oil companies will not be held in very high favor and a lot of the major corporations will have cut their own throats. And I think that it's instructive for us to read the history of the French Revolution or the revolt against the church in Latin America. That those are the kinds of lessons that we ought to be, we ought to be learning from those lessons now. In the meantime a lot of people face hard times. Who do you think, who's the first, who first will be, who first is going to be heard with this changing

situation, irrigated agriculture? Well the first ones to get hurt will be the farmers that have paid a thousand to fifteen hundred dollars an acre for land and are paying high interest on the money that have over -capitalized also on equipment. So the older farmers that have been around who bought that land or whose families bought that land, maybe a fifty cents to a dollar an acre, going way back. Well those families won't be hurt, but it'll be the many of the younger farmers that have stuck their neck out on that expensive land have paid the fifty five to sixty five thousand dollars per center pivot arm. Including land leveling, they're going to lose their shirts. Unless there's a government bailout.

Would you expect that to happen? I don't know, it's hard to predict right now the our government doesn't seem to be inclined for bailing out projects. I expect them to try to bail out nuclear power, but I doubt if they'll bail out farming the farmer. They will, I wouldn't be surprised if that is then down the line as I will beef begins to get in trouble. It would just be an agricultural lockheed and they'll be clamoring to be bailed out too. There are all sorts of big organizations that were built on the capitalistic model and now they're wanting socialism. There's a point of view that we're witnessing the end of a certain way of life, the attachment to the land, the ability of people to make a living off of the land. Is that a part of the future? Well, I think that that one's a hard one to call.

We're in an era that I call... Well, it's the end of the expanding pie economics. And we're in what I call the age of the recognition of limits. Now, as we are unable to solve problems in the future by throwing money at them, we've tried that with civil rights, so money at the problem. And we've tried it in numerous ways to solve problems through the expanding pie approach. But as that era is gone and as we have to really start thinking hard about the problems, it might be that we will come to our senses and recognize that the most viable economic unit is the family farm for agriculture.

That it is only the farmer that is watching over rather small acreage that can be an appropriate husband of the land. The corporations that read the printouts can't tell about what's happening on the land because you have to put data in and a lot of the things escape definition. I think we can say, as my friend Windelberry has pointed out, that what is wrong with agriculture can usually be described because it involves some thought. What works well escapes definition. And as the resource base begins to dwindle, then it's going to require people being on the land that can deal with subtleties, that can handle nuances, that can look at the vagaries of the weather, and that pay attention

in the sale barn as well as in the fields. And the corporate agriculture will just, the agribusiness effort will essentially be a thing of the past. So that's my best hope that we will come to our senses at the end of the period of expanding pie economics.