Last week, Montgomery Fellow Dan Barber gave a lecture on food ("Barber discusses food production," Feb. 23). Barber is a chef and co-owner of the Blue Hill restaurant chain in New England. His extraordinary culinary skills are indisputable many food critics consider him one of the best chefs in America. But unfortunately, his understanding of basic agricultural reality was lacking. Perhaps because he is a chef and not a farmer, Barber seems to know far more about cooking than about agriculture.
I happen to have grown up on a farm in western Canada. My family grew grains wheat, barley, lentils, canola, peas, oats, flax and sunflowers and raised beef cattle. When I say a "farm," I mean a real, commercially-viable, zero-till farm that stood on its own two feet. Unlike Barber's 30-acre tourist attraction that he called a "farm," our farm did not survive solely by the grace of a restaurant that sells $40 entrees. Furthermore, I lived right next door to one of Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada's 19 research farms. My parents were very good friends with the farm's head researcher, and we conducted many large-scale field trials with the research farm. By taking part in these experiments, we got to test out some of the newest methods in farming, and the researchers got to see if their ideas really worked when tried on an actual farm.
So I hope you will forgive me if I hold Barber to too high a standard. But, while I may be just a dumb farm kid, it sure seemed to me that he piled it higher and deeper than our bulls did. While I could easily write half a dozen columns on Barber's various errors, permit me to point out just one of his more glaring mistakes.
Barber simply did not understand the differences between various methods of grain farming. At one point, he said that the zero-till technique is a great idea and then proceeded to argue that "farmers need to be converted to a more organic" approach. These two statements are inherently contradictory. Zero-till means what it sounds like: The farmer doesn't cultivate the soil. But because organic grain farmers can't use synthetic herbicides, they must cultivate the soil in order to control weeds. While researchers are still hard at work trying to find an alternative to herbicides or cultivation for weed control, zero-till and organic farming are fundamentally incompatible as of right now. Barber's ignorance of this basic problem is perhaps not surprising, as his "farm" only grew vegetables and raised sheep and chickens. But, if you want to make sweeping claims about agriculture as a whole, you cannot leave out grains.
Barber made the exact same mistake when he talked about the problems of water loss and soil erosion. These two problems are primarily due to cultivation and are thus non-existent with zero-till. Where I lived, we received an average of just over one foot of rain per year and had no irrigation, yet we had crop yields that were far better than many other areas with more rain and irrigation. Since organic farmers will cultivate three to five times a year, the fact that each cultivation results in water loss equivalent to about half an inch of rain is a big deal. Likewise for soil erosion. The "dirty '30s" weren't really that dry or windy the huge dust storms came about because everyone tilled the soil. Last year, when there were winds of up to 60 miles per hour where I lived, the only farms with blowing soil were those few (mostly organic) farmers who still cultivated.
Most suburban and urban people I've met hold a romanticized view of farming that bears little resemblance to agriculture today. Unfortunately, Barber's lecture played to these romanticized misconceptions and thus drew fundamentally incorrect conclusions about agriculture as a whole. Little useful information could be harvested from his discussion because his theories were inundated with factual errors.
This event was an embarrassment to the College. While Barber's culinary wisdom is self-evident, he said as many intelligent things about agriculture as I could reasonably be expected to say in a lecture about preparing exquisite cuisine. Dartmouth is one of the best educational institutions in America. Surely if the College wishes to host a lecture about modern agriculture, it could find an agronomist who actually knows what he's talking about perhaps the head researcher at the farm next door to my family's?
