Plowed Under

Agriculture and Environment in the Palouse

Andrew P. Duffin

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780295989808
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

In Plowed Under, Andrew P. Duffin traces the transformation of the Palouse region of Washington and Idaho from land thought unusable and unproductive to a wealth-generating agricultural paradise, weighing the consequences of what this progress has wrought. During the twentieth century, the Palouse became synonymous with wheat, and the landscape was irrevocably altered. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, native vegetation is almost nonexistent, stream water is so dirty that it is often unfit for even livestock, and 94 percent of all land has been converted to agriculture. Commercial agriculture also created a less noticeable ecological change: soil erosion. While common to industrial agriculture nationwide, topsoil loss evoked different political and social reactions in the Palouse. Farmers all over the nation take pride in their freedom and independence, but in the Palouse, Duffin shows, this mentality - a remnant of an older agrarian past - has been taken to the extreme and is partly responsible for erosion problems that are among the worst in the nation. In the hope of charting a better, more sustainable future, Duffin argues for a candid look at the land, its people, their decisions, and the repercussions of those decisions. As he notes, the debate is not over whether to use the land, but over what that use will look like and its social and ecological results.

1 INTRODUCTION

A Place Called the Palouse

TRAVEL AGENTS do not steer vacationers to the Palouse. Tour buses do not stop here and few even pass through. Educated youth tend to leave for urban areas after college to escape its cultural shortcomings. Compared to some other places in the West, Palouse weather is not harsh, with relatively mild winters and long, sunny summers—but there is no ocean nearby; a lazy, almost motionless Snake River suffices for seasonal watersports and undergraduate high jinks from nearby Washington State University and the University of Idaho. It has always looked rather barren and sparsely vegetated; it is not blessed with majestic mountain peaks and many of its streams are narrow, shallow, intermittent, and lack the salmon runs that have sustained other parts of the Pacific Northwest for centuries. Even local Indians used the land only sporadically, preferring the bounty of fish that the Snake and Columbia rivers provided, or the camas-filled fields near the Clearwater Mountains to the east. Towns dot the countryside, but few could be called thriving, especially in this era of strip malls and drive-through espresso. Palouse communities appear to be from another time, with dated infrastructures and an aging population. Passers-by might call parts of the landscape endearing but would likely not consider it bucolic. At first glance the Palouse fits what historian Elliott West said of the Great Plains: “The country seems to have a lot of very little.”¹

The Palouse is a sparsely populated, semiarid, hilly expanse located in southeastern Washington and a thin slice of northern Idaho. While it may lack the dramatic vistas seen in other parts of the West, the place is nevertheless visually arresting.² The hills are what best distinguish the Palouse from neighboring zones—big, rounded mounds of loose earth formed just before, during, and after the last ice age. They are what make the region what it is. To many residents and visitors, they are beautiful, identifying a place that is quite unlike any other. Landscape artists and photographers have been drawn to the Palouse for decades, rendering what are mostly realistic impressions of this place, as though abstractions of this uncommon land would be unnecessary. But it is not an easy land to master. The Palouse is not intimidating in the manner of the giant Mount Rainier or the emptiness of the Snake River plain, but neither is it an easy place to scratch out an existence. All evidence indicates that for at least the last twelve thousand years, few people have called it home, compared to other locales in North America.³

One thing people can do here is grow crops, mostly small grains, peas, and lentils. Wheat yields in the Palouse are among the highest in the nation, and the agricultural sector has propelled regional growth since the earliest days of Euro-American settlement in the nineteenth century. Aided by improved transportation links to distant markets and continued advancements in farming technology, the natural fertility of the land produced bountiful harvests that encouraged capital investment and intensifying farming practices. By the beginning of the First World War, Palouse farming was the most important aspect of the regional economy and a key supplier of grains for the nation and the world, and Whitman County had the highest per capita income of any county in the nation.

Agricultural expansion continued and Palouse farming prospered for most of the twentieth century. But the advent of intensive agriculture in the nineteenth century required a fundamental reworking of the land and a concomitant reorientation of the Palouse ecosystem.⁴ Those transformations and their accompanying social impact are the primary foci of this book. The most significant ecological change involved the soil itself. Annual crops meant repeated plowing, first by horsepower, then by tractors in the 1920s and 1930s. Once the initial layer of organic matter and native bunchgrass root systems had degraded in the early twentieth century, soil began to erode into nearby streams. The Palouse hills became less fertile. By the 1930s, scientists predicted that erosion would reduce crop yields, preliminary findings that were confirmed in the 1970s. The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) determined in 1978 that since Euro-American settlement in the late nineteenth century, erosion had stripped all of the topsoil from 10 percent of the land, and from 25 to 75 percent of the topsoil from 60 percent of the land. In addition, the US Geological Survey (USGS) found in 1994 that 87 percent of the nitrogen in regional streams and rivers came from agricultural fertilizers.⁵ The combination of eroded soils and farm chemicals choked Palouse waters, making them unfit for human consumption and unsuitable as habitat for many fish species. By the late twentieth century the Palouse River system, the region's major drainage, was among the most polluted in the state of Washington.⁶

Farming activity brought physical disturbance to the Palouse, as it has in every other agricultural region. But its erosive effects were more acute here because of the unique topography and geology. The hills are everywhere, forming the most identifiable landmarks of the area. Indeed, finding suitably flat land to plat towns was a struggle for nineteenth-century settlers. From the air, the land looks like a huge expanse of ski moguls, except that they are fifty to two hundred feet high. From the ground, the hills appear as giant sand dunes—which is what they are, except that grasses, shrubby plants, and a few trees subsequently grew on and around them. These hills are central to this story. Their steep pitch and light, geologically young soil (called “loess” by geologists) meant that when people began repeatedly using steel farm implements on them, the land began to wash away.

The reactions to these conditions and the meanings behind them serve as a lens for peering into the collective actions of Palouse farmers and American agricultural society in general. On repeated occasions questions of ecological degradation and long-term agricultural sustainability confronted farmers; in most cases they continued with their traditional farming practices. The explanations for the persistence of what many considered unsustainable methods are multiple: farmers had to be concerned with immediate financial returns; sizable harvests belied the dire predictions of soil conservationists; and farmers believed that new technologies would negate future problems. Farming innovations sometimes mitigated or masked ecological harm, but plowing the steep slopes of the Palouse continued to take its toll in erosion. Technology—whether in the form of hybrid seed, machinery, herbicides, or fertilizer—increased farm yields and gave farmers a sense that they could successfully manipulate nature without negative consequences. Their practices continued to produce abundant harvests, yet ecosystems eroded.

The story of ongoing environmental damage in the Palouse also reveals how governments responded to a persistent, yet rather undramatic, agricultural problem. In short, government agencies involved in such matters (chiefly the USDA) reacted as most of their constituents wished. Although the USDA stated in 1938 that “the well-being of future generations must be secured if the nation is to continue to live. One of the great national objectives is to pass the soil on to our descendants as nearly unimpaired as possible,” their actions in the Northwest reflected less urgency.⁷ The Palouse erosion problem never looked like a disaster; soil was lost, but it did not resemble the Great Plains Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Palouse soil moved silently into gullies and streams and did not drift like snow, block trains, or force residents to wear masks. Erosion temporarily defaced the land in spring but was subsequently plowed out of sight or covered by sprouting crops. Because crop yields continued to increase, especially after the Second World War, few people demanded thoroughgoing change in agriculture. Volumes of scientific evidence suggested that erosion threatened future productivity, but high yields in the short term buoyed farmers' convictions that they could continue business as usual.

The Palouse soil story validates theories that Piers Blaikie spells out in The Political Economy of Soil Erosion in Developing Countries (1985). In this influential treatise on political economy, Blaikie argues that erosion has been and is a multicausal phenomenon of interrelated components, “the interaction between land use, the natural characteristics of that land and its vegetation, and the erosive forces of water and wind.”⁸ In other words, erosion and soil depletion are both dependent on and yet independent of humans, its level of intensity based on both the lay of the land and the people (and politicians) who live on the land. Blaikie suggests what environmental historians would later find true: people and nature both have agency, engaging in a dynamic historical relationship. Soil in the Palouse moves because it has always moved, simultaneously accumulating and receding as it has since the Miocene epoch and before. But it also moves and is replaced at rates that are a direct result of human activity.

In Blaikie's examples, which come mostly from Africa and South Asia, soil erosion is a “political-economic” issue that persists until it causes land degradation that forces regional economic change. At that point, it also becomes a “social phenomenon” that can create an enormous political stir. The discovery of environmental problems, the impetus for reform, and the development and enforcement of any land-use changes, however, come “from above.” In Blaikie's framework, the grass roots are secondary in importance to those with access to political power. Moreover, once reform measures are either suggested or insisted upon, local farmers usually resist: “Soil conservation measures [are] seen by land-users to be symptoms of oppression.”⁹

The confluence of Blaikie's theories and the recent history of the Palouse are striking. The federal government, not Palouse farmers, was the first to address the erosion problem, a response that came only after scientists and bureaucrats forecast dire conditions in the absence of reform. Conservationists in and out of government acted as a kind of regional intelligentsia, delivering their message to an audience that embraced only parts of the lecture. That audience—Palouse farmers—loosely resembled Blaikie's agriculturalists from the developing world, who indeed saw any government attempt at land use regulation as a “symptom of oppression.”

Partly in response to local opposition, the federal government's policy aimed to reduce, not eliminate, erosion. USDA initiatives provided farmers with incentives to conserve soil, but never controlled farming practices. Federal policy acted in the short-term interests of the agricultural establishment— farmers, land-grant universities, and equipment and chemical manufacturers—who resisted strong remedies. As early as the 1930s scientists knew erosion could be controlled by eliminating annual cropping on steep hills and ending summer fallow, the practice of keeping ground bare for a year to prevent weed growth and to maintain moisture. Neither of these conservation measures were ever implemented. Instead, soil conservation programs focused on the voluntary set-aside of erodible land and the voluntary adoption of soil-conserving tillage practices. Both failed to reduce erosion to levels that scientists considered sustainable. When strict federal soil and water-quality laws emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, agricultural groups stymied corrective measures that might have improved the long-term viability of Palouse agriculture. Farmers and farm-lobby groups flexed their electoral and financial muscle and legislators and bureaucrats compromised.

Other less-noticeable environmental and cultural phenomena contributed to an ethos of ceaseless disturbance. Euro-American settlement in the Palouse occurred within a context of a wild flurry of economic activity in the United States. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed a flood of immigration, resource use, and capital investment—events that left indelible marks on both land and people. In the Palouse, whole communities owed their existence to the presence of inexpensive, fertile land and a willingness to use it to produce salable products. The value system that emerged in the Palouse and elsewhere centered on those things that had contributed to regional growth (i.e., intensive agriculture), producing a utilitarian landscape that its residents grew to love. As essayist William Kittredge notes in remembering his family's southern Oregon ranch, “all the work . . . was directed toward making it orderly, functional, and productive—and of course that work seemed sacred.”¹⁰ The successful commodification of the land denoted a willful dominance of nature that would imbue all future activity.

The human preoccupation with dominion over nature left little room for ideas concerning land stewardship to take hold. This should not surprise us. The idea that farmers got into farming for the singular purpose of living out some kind of Jeffersonian agrarian dream is illusory. Nationally and in the Palouse, homesteaders staked their claims and eked out a meager existence at first, but then moved as fast as transportation lines, new equipment, and easy credit would allow to become whole-heartedly enmeshed in an endless drive to accumulate wealth. Farmers have been no more exempt from the urge to increase productivity and live more comfortably than any other segment of the population. They are we, as we are they, to a great degree. The physical act of working the earth ensures neither a spiritual nor an environmental awakening. Thus, it should come as no real surprise that for most of the twentieth century Palouse farmers made decisions based predominantly on crop yields and investment returns, not on long-term environmental sustainability. From very early on, agricultural experts urged them to look, act, and think like businessmen. They did so with gusto.

But what sort of good businessman would purposely allow such a precious resource to deteriorate? And what sort of farmer would want to abandon the relative security of subsistence farming so quickly and without any obvious misgivings? The answers to these questions form the basic paradox of this narrative, and I believe they require a thorough reexamination of our ideas about American farming since the mid-nineteenth century. But solving the puzzle also involves the reworking of our current political lexicon and a willingness to see farming as the complicated social and cultural mixture of past, present, and future. We need to abandon our common use of the terms “conservative” and “liberal”—most definitely with regard to Palouse farmers, but also when it comes to describing modern farmers around the world in the context of a host of historical and contemporary environmental issues.

Consider the Palouse farmer as an amalgam of old and new, part antediluvian, part riverboat gambler, and part ward of the state—what I call an “agrarian liberal.” Despite their positions on most social issues, these people were hardly conservative in terms of their relationship with the land: they took great risks in settling the land, then proceeded to plow the steep hillsides and exhaust soil nutrients until a technological fix (e.g., the farm chemicals that arrived after World War II) allowed them to continue the same practices. Then, when wheat farming nationally became perfected to the point that surpluses and low prices became a problem, farmers asked for and received an endless string of government subsidies: state college and private sector scientific research, construction of a series of dams along the Columbia and lower Snake Rivers, and generous price supports that virtually assured long-term solvency.

Palouse farmers were not conservative, in that they did not act with care, caution, or deliberation. They were eager to drink from the federal trough all the while maintaining a veneer of independence, thinking themselves immune from environmental difficulty because of technological advancements and government support. Here again Blaikie is instructive, stating that “if farms remain profitable, yield-increasing technologies tend to mask the effect of soil degradation and erosion and make up for declines in fertility that would have occurred if land had been cultivated and with a constant level of technology.”¹¹ Farmers used their land to its limits for immediate financial gain and insisted in the 1930s and beyond that the USDA assist in the process. Indeed, farmers welcomed the expansion of twentieth-century government largesse, provided it did not dictate land-use practices in the Palouse. So in another sense, farmers also espoused the virtues of nineteenth-century liberalism: economic growth and development, publicly sponsored internal improvements, and a lack of government regulation. By the mid-twentieth century, however, these agrarian liberals were also keen on maintaining a nostalgic link with the past, one that they used to create an image of the Palouse yeoman—someone who still firmly believed in the inherent goodness of the farming life. Hence they were both agrarian and liberal — in ways and amounts that changed over time. They wanted the support of an expanding federal safety net when it served their needs and they clung to an outdated myth of independence.

These evolving political and commercial values, however, proved inflexible when confronted with environmental problems. A Palouse society devoted to maximizing farm profits viewed the land solely as a means of production, even when erosion, farm chemicals, and water-quality issues came to the fore. Kittredge identifies a similar problem in Warner Valley, Oregon, when describing the parallel, regrettable pasts of the American West and Jack Ray, a family ranch hand:

Looking backward is one of our main hobbies here in the American West, as we age. And we are aging, which could mean we are growing up. Or not. It's a difficult process for a culture which has always been so insistently boyish. Jack Ray has been dead a long time now. As my father said, he drank his liver right into the ground. “But, by God,” my father said, “he was something once.”¹²

The Palouse also operates as if it too were “something,” and unless farmers take better care they risk jeopardizing the future of farming.

Kittredge's thoughts on land ethics bring up a broader point: agriculture is audacious. It is the purposeful, repeated manipulation of the land so as to produce quantities of food.¹³ That may sound like a simple endeavor, but to succeed requires a tremendous amount of human, animal, and fossil-fuel energy, centralized political authority, and luck. It is a massive undertaking to perpetually manipulate ecosystems to prevent them from returning to their former states or, more likely, to evolve into some other hybrid landscape.¹⁴ Changing the land is easy; making those changes conform to precise human whims over decades and centuries is another matter. Agriculture entails a biotic revolution that, once begun, cannot be abandoned without serious social and ecological ramifications.¹⁵ Nor can its imprint on the land be easily removed; areas converted to monocultural crop production only rarely can be returned to their prefarming condition. Agriculture is one of the many activities in which humans seem eager to “play God,” that is, to tinker with the land and remake it according to their image.

Besides cutting and cle...