Walt Davis Interview, Part 2 of 2

WD: Actually I'm kind of glad to see him. Our snake population is low. This manure is not; I was having to hold cattle on this pasture to use as some old forage. Fiber content is quite high in this manure. And that's why the beetles aren't working it. This is not, this is not the way you want to see manure behind a set of cattle.

DT: [inaudible]

WD: Any time that manure stacks over two inches high, the fiber content in that forage is so high and...

DT: We could try going back to that other one. There was one there, that was the only one that looked good?

WD: That's the one...

WD: Talking about the decay cycle as being one of the natural processes that we have to work with in nature, if were going to be sustainable. Uh, the dung beetle that has buried part of this manure pile and brought the dirt up through it incidentally I should they've been enough farmers and ranchers in your audience to say, "That old boy is a very poor manager" simply because this manure is very fibrous.

And they're absolutely correct. I was holding cattle on this particular area to utilize some old grass, simply because we had to. We didn't have a choice with the with the drought. But can you see the life in that manure? Can you see the little grub worms working it? See 'em? Are you getting them right there, the little worms? This is a part of the normal natural decay cycle.

It is what has to happen. Everything from the little fly larva right here to this little worm over here, whatever he is, to the dung beetle. Later on the earthworm will come up under it. The pill bugs will begin to utilize it. They will convert this waste product back into nutrients, nutrients for soil organisms and later on nutrients for higher plants, which will in turn be converted into nutrients for animals. Life, death, decay.

It's a never-ending cycle. And when you interrupt that cycle with something like the chemicals that sterilize this dung pat in order to keep horn flies from hatching in it. Then we kill all of the life forms in that dung pat; we interrupt that cycle. Therefore we waste these nutrients that are tied up in this manure instead of going back into the soil immediately become food for microorganisms, later food for higher plants, later food for animals.

It's a waste product. This is one of the things that we've lost touch with in modern agriculture. We have to work within nature's framework. We can push on nature occasionally. We can violate the rules occasionally. But sooner or later it catches up with us. The factory hog farm is on the high plains of Texas or Kansas, we are importing nutrients in the multi-tons and concentrating waste. It's no longer nutrients.

The waste from those hog farms is being stored in open pits. Anything they can think of, they're trying to figure out whether is to burn it. That's the nutrient. That's the lifeblood of our soils.

If we don't do a good job of managing the resources that we have, our civilization will fail. If you go back in history, every major civilization has failed, if you follow it back, failed because they lost their watershed. They lost their soil base. You say, "Oh no, Vandals invaded Rome."

Yeah, but by the time Rome fell to the barbarians, they had been importing corn from North Africa for two generations. The Egyptian society failed because they destroyed their soil. The Anasazi in southwestern of North America failed because they destroyed their watershed. Every society that has failed that I'm aware of has failed because they have not taken care of their resources.

Now it's bad enough that our society demands that we have cities. And all in the world a city is, is a cesspool. Resources come in. Waste comes out from a resource standpoint. But now we're doing the same thing with animal agriculture. We're creating hog farms. We're creating confinement dairy. We're creating confinement chicken houses that completely overwhelm the area around them's ability to utilize those waste materials as fertility products. They become waste products.

The fertility that is mined from the soil in growing plants, transported to these factory farms, comes out as waste, it's, it's, it is now a liability rather than an asset. If the manure stays on the land, it is an asset. It is the source of new life in the microorganisms, in the plants and the animals. We had best rethink out methods of agriculture if we don't want to follow the Anasazai.

That sounds maybe a little farfetched. But I can take you to places that, as a boy, I knew as virgin prairie that today I can't bury the blade of this pocketknife in the soil, even though the soil is ten feet deep. Because it is so devoid of life that its just like concrete. We have lost the life in that soil and therefore we've lost the productivity in that soil in 40 years.

DT: Given challenges like that, what sort of advice would you give to young people coming up who are concerned about this same problem?

WD: Agriculture is an extremely hard way to make a living today. It's one of the most rewarding careers that I can imagine. If it's, but it's almost like the priesthood now, you'd better have a calling if you're going to do it. Because it, it's, it's not simple. And I would not even advise anyone, any young person to take up a career in conventional agriculture.

If, if you want to go back and farm like in the manner that is conventional today, I'd say go get a job selling shoes. If you want to make the complete shift to sustainable agriculture, then I would encourage you to get with people who are trying to develop the knowledge base that's being developed at this time. And it is being developed. There are people who are working very hard in the field.

A lot of good work is being done. A lot of knowledge is being discovered. But we don't have all the answers yet. Part of the reason we don't have all the answers is that a lot of the knowledge that was common 70 and 80 and 100 years ago has been lost. Some of the best information that I find is in books that were published literally 80 and 100 years ago, when we didn't have the option to give a quick fix chemical.

We didn't have the opportunity to get a bigger plow, a more potent herbicide. We had to work within nature's cycles. When you don't have the, when you don't have the option, and this, this is the thing that to me that is, that is truly insidious about what I call toxic agriculture. Sure, it, it's these materials are bad. These materials are poisonous. They're, they're deleterious in any way that you want to look at them.

But perhaps the most insidious thing about them, it comes back to the mindset that I can solve this problem by spraying. I can solve this problem by using this quick fix. There are no quick fixes in agriculture. There are no quick fixes when you're dealing with a biological system. You're dealing with an extremely complex system.

And when you impose an economic system on top of a complex biological system and on top of that a sociological system, then the complexity reaches points of you can't conceive of complexity. And every time we try to make a quick fix, we wind up creating more problems than we've solved. So, answer your question, understand that it's, it's not going to be easy. It's not going to be lucrative in the short-run.

But I am convinced that the work that's going to save American agriculture is not being done in the labs now with genetic modification of organisms, or with new chemistry techniques. It's being done on family farms and ranches all over the country where we are rediscovering the techniques that allowed our grandfathers and great grandfathers to produce year after year on the same land without tremendous inputs.

It is possible. It can be done. But not with the mindset of today. You asked earlier about the principles. It all comes back to managing the water cycle of the land, the nutrient cycle of the land, the energy flow of the land. If we manage these three ecological blocks: water cycle, nutrient cycle, mineral flow. We will impact biological succession.

And this is what allows us to shift the environment we are working with into the direction that we want it to go. If we have a good functioning water cycle, if we have a good functioning mineral cycle, and we have strong energy flow, biological succession with advance. The whole system will become more productive and more stable. If we short any one of those, then biological succession will either stop or regress. We can have good energy flow; we can have a good mineral cycle.

But if our water cycle goes bad, then succession is going to gre, regress and go backwards. All three have to be managed at the same time and all three have to be going forward. What we're trying to do, and when I say we, I'm speaking primarily of holistic resource management and the sustainable agriculture movement, is to manage our resources in such a way that we achieve the goals that we have laid out. And in such a way that the people that follow us will also have those same resources. And perhaps a better condition to work with than we did.

DT: Well said. I guess I had one closing question. We've been lucky to see your place here in Oklahoma. And I'm wondering if you could describe a part of your place here that, that you've found especially rewarding or pleasant to visit. Perhaps there's another place in the outdoors that you enjoy and that gives you some respite?

WD: We're standing in one place that I farmed this piece of ground for 12 or 15 years in row crops. And putting this piece of ground back to grass I think has given me as much pleasure as anything I ever did in my life. And aside, I, I'm, I'm constantly bombarded with, "That's fine, you can do that. But I've got to pay the mortgage."

This is where we make our living on this land. So if it doesn't pay we can't do it. It has to be profitable for us to do it. We've been on this, my family has been on this piece of ground since 1950. We were never consistently profitable until we began to make the changes toward what we're doing now. We would be extremely profitable one year and go in the hole the next depending upon the multitude of factors, but primarily the problem was we had no stability in our program, in our production plan.

We couldn't count on anything. As we have moved away from the high input type agriculture, possibly the most valuable thing we have gained is stability. This drought that we've just come through, it's been hideous. In 1988, we're in a 40-inch rainfall belt. In 1988, 1998, we had 18 inches of rain on this place. In 1999, we had a 19.7, something like that. And six inches of it fell in December.

We've been through a hideous drought. And our country is in bad shape. We've had to de-stock. But we came through in better shape than, by far than some of our neighbors who were still practicing what I would call conventional agriculture. We did not have to totally de-stock. We had to cut our numbers back. We cut our numbers back in 1998 for the first time since I've been on this place. And we've been practicing this type management basic, well, we started trying to practice this type of management about 1974.

It was in the middle 80's when we really began to hit our stride and I would say we were practicing something akin to holistic management by the mid 80's. During that time, we've had some extremely bad times. We had a hideous drought, hot spell in 1980 and another one in 1988. In 1990, 85 percent of this ranch went under water in a flood. Now, did we have problems? Certainly, we had problems.

When 85 percent of your land goes under water. But one of the things that we saw as a result of that flood was the land that had been under what we consider good management the longest was the land that recovered the fastest. One piece of ground over on Blue River that in 1990 had been under high stock density grazing for about 10 or 12 years, as the water receded, the water was over that particular piece of ground for 21 days.

As the water receded, earthworms were opening their burrows at the waters edge. The land was still alive. Right over this ridge right here where the land had been in cultivation until just shortly prior to that flood, the water stayed on th, that about two weeks. And nothing grew on that piece of ground for the rest of the year except a few annual weeds. The soil was dead.

The rapidity with which the land recovers, and when I say land I'm talking of the whole soil, plant, animal complex as being the land, the land and everything that's on it. The ability of the land to recover from adversity, whether it's flood, fire, drought, whatever it is, is in direct proportion to the amount of biological capital that's built up in that land, the amount of biodiversity in that land. That's all in the world biological capital is, is biodiversity plus the long-term effects of having biodiversity.

It's the healthy populations of healthy organisms, whether they're plant, microorganism, animal. It's the organic matter that's in that soil. It is the stored solar energy in that system. That's the biological capital. The higher that biological capital, the higher the product potential productivity of that soil, or that land, and the more stable that land is. If we have one purpose here, it's trying to build our store of biological capital. If we have that biological capital and are reasonable managers, then over time, the financial capital will follow.

DT: Thank you. I think you've taught us a lot about how to bring stability and sustainability back to agriculture and I wanted to thank you.

WD: You're welcome.