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A book excerpt from Slow Money, by Woody Tasch

Excerpts from "Reconnoitering" in Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered by Woody Tasch. Reprinted with permission of the publisher, Chelsea Green Publishing.

Earthworm numbers are less stratospheric. There can be as many as two million earthworms in an acre of fertile soil. Or should we measure them in pounds per acre (estimated at from 356 to 612 by one researcher in New Zealand)? Or should we measure them in burrow-miles per acre (estimated at 1,100)? Or should we measure them in castings per acre (estimated at 33 to 40 tons)? Darwin estimated that 50,000 earthworms carry 18 tons of soil to the surface of an acre.

The number of earthworm species is a moving target. Edwards and Lofty estimated 1,800 species in their 1972 work, The Biology of Earthworms. According to encylopedia.com, the number is 2,200. According to compost-bin.org, the number is more than 4,400, in three categories: endogeic, anecic, and epigeic. Amy Stewart reports 4,500 species (739 genera, 23 families, several suborders and superfamilies, and two orders).

“There is no better soil analyst than the lowly earthworm,” Sir Albert Howard wrote in his introduction to a reprint of Charles Darwin’s final work, The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Actions of Worms with Observations on Their Habits.

Referring to “the war in the soil” and “the battle of organic and inorganic,” Howard offered that it would be the earthworm that would interpret Mother Earth’s final “decision.”

Howard’s war in the soil harkens back to Gene Logsdon’s evocation of farmers reconciling “the opposing forces of ecology and economics.” These opposing forces manifest themselves as a battle between SOM (soil organic matter) and SCM (supply-chain management):

There is a growing consensus outside the industry that the crisis may already be beyond growers’ ability to fix. Despite the media’s focus on the feral pigs as the killer vector in the spinach outbreak, for example, researchers have identified dozens of other “nodes of risk” where pathogens could have breached the industry’s safety systems. And, as with the meat business, many of those nodes were created by the very technologies and business practices that allow the industry to deliver ever greater volumes of produce year-round at declining costs. “There guys are in supply chain mode,” says Trevor Suslow, a University of California at Davis microbiologist and a leading expert in food safety investigations. “And when you’re in that mode, when your objective is to fill orders, you tend to stretch your system—in terms of capacity and throughput, but also in terms of what you can really handle while paying attention to all the details of quality and safety.”

Third-generation Japanese American peach grower Mas Masumoto echoes the challenges of reconciling his role as a farmer with his role as a business manager. “Once you start hiring a lot,” he recalls his father’s advice, “you’re not just a farmer anymore.” Expenses per acre and yields and aspects of the work that are “easily quantifiable” battle with his awareness that “simple linear formulas do not apply in farming.” He minimizes this tension by keeping his farm small enough so that he and his father can do most of the work, except for pruning and harvesting. He speaks of what he calls “synergism,” through which the gifts of nature almost magically add up to a whole that is greater than the parts, but he also speaks of war: “I sometimes picture my farm as a battlefield with troops of people struggling with nature in a hundred-year war.”

It is a struggle to keep the “culture” in “agriculture.” The modern era is replacing “culture” with “business,” producing a high-yielding hybrid activity called “agribusiness.” This is an activity defined by commodity producers and commodity markets and global trade, by industrialization, mechanization, and what some have even called “chemicalization.” For multigenerational farm families who have a visceral attachment to and intimate knowledge of a certain piece of land and certain way of life, or, even, a certain variety of peach, the march toward larger farms and larger markets and larger machines comes at a cost for which no financier can compensate.

Lest we too easily dismiss them as remnants of an agrarian past, let us consider the possibility that such farm families, and the communities of which they are a part, are microorganisms in the soil of the food system. They are the humans who care for the humus. They do not survive, well, the heavy application of the synthetic nutrients of industrial economics. They are as susceptible to arbitrage and futures contracts as an actinomycete to Round Up and Malathion. And without them, not only soil health, but also cultural health, indigenous culture, and local economies—the social and environmental relationships that promote the health of families, communities and bioregions—all are at risk.

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