Abstract
Nanci Griffith’s “Trouble in the Fields” is one of my all-time-favorite songs. With a haunting melody and poignant lyrics, it speaks of love of place, and of the hard work and perseverance that farm life requires. It also speaks of an event in US history as dark as the skies during its worst days: the Dust Bowl.
You’ll be the mule, I’ll be the plow
Come harvest time we’ll work it out
There’s still a lot of love here in these troubled fields.
—Nanci Griffith
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Notes
- 1.
For a rich account of the Dust Bowl, see Egan, The Worst Hard Time.
- 2.
One liter per calorie from Molden, ed., Water for Food, Water for Life: A Comprehensive Assessment of Water Management in Agriculture, 5; eight times from Shiklomanov, “World Fresh Water Resources.”
- 3.
Tallman, “No-Till Case Study, Brown’s Ranch: Improving Soil Health Improves the Bottom Line”; Ohlson, The Soil Will Save Us, 78–112.
- 4.
Brown, “Holistic Regeneration of Our Lands.”
- 5.
Rawls et al., “Effect of Soil Organic Carbon on Soil Water Retention”; 58 percent carbon from US Department of Agriculture, Natural Resources Conservation Service, “Soil Quality for Environmental Health,” at http://soilquality.org/indicators/total_organic_carbon.html.
- 6.
Blanco-Canqui et al., “Soil Organic Carbon: The Value to Soil Properties”; Jones, “Soil Carbon: Can It Save Agriculture’s Bacon?”
- 7.
Loss of organic carbon from Teague et al., “The Role of Ruminants in Reducing Agriculture’s Carbon Footprint in North America.”
- 8.
Voth, “Tighty Whities Can Tell You about Your Soil Health.”
- 9.
Tallman, “No-Till Case Study, Brown’s Ranch.”
- 10.
Yield and organic matter from Tallman, “No-Till Case Study, Brown’s Ranch.”
- 11.
Erosion and fertilizer runoff from Ohlson, The Soil Will Save Us, 107–8; Strom, “Cover Crops, a Farming Revolution with Deep Roots in the Past.”
- 12.
Moebius-Clune, “Introducing the New Soil Health Division,” US Department of Agriculture, Natural Resources Conservation Service, webinar, January 12, 2016, available at conservationwebinars.net; Averett, “Healthy Ground, Healthy Atmosphere: Recarbonizing the Earth’s Soils.”
- 13.
105 million hectares from Winterbottom et al., “Improving Land and Water Management.”
- 14.
Postel, “Getting More Crop Per Drop”; share irrigated from United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), Aquastat Database, at fao.org; 200 million from Winterbottom and Reij, “Farmer Innovation: Improving Africa’s Food Security through Land and Water Management.”
- 15.
Winterbottom et al., “Improving Land and Water Management.”
- 16.
McWilliams, “All Sizzle and No Steak: Why Allan Savory’s TED Talk about How Cattle Can Reverse Global Warming Is Dead Wrong.”
- 17.
Robbins, Diet for a New America, 367; Chapagain and Hoekstra, Water Footprints of Nations: Volume 1: Main Report, 42. More recently, WFN recalculated the average water footprint of beef to total 15,400 liters per kilogram (1,840 gallons per pound). At that rate a quarter-pounder would consume 460 gallons of water. See Water Footprint Network (WFN), “Product Gallery,” at waterfootprint.org/en/resources/interactive-tools/product-gallery/.
- 18.
Beckett and Oltjen, “Estimation of the Water Requirement for Beef Production in the United States”; eggs and coffee from WFN, Product Gallery, viewed October 21, 2016.
- 19.
Ruechel, Grass-Fed Cattle: How to Produce and Market Natural Beef, 9.
- 20.
Robert Potts, president, Dixon Water Foundation, author interview, Fort Davis and Marfa, Texas, October 25, 2016.
- 21.
Mankad, “Does Grass-Fed Beef Have Any Heart-Health Benefits That Other Types of Beef Don’t?”
- 22.
Species decline from the North American Bird Conservation Initiative, US Committee, The State of the Birds 2014; Beth Bardwell, director of conservation, Audubon New Mexico, author interview, Los Lunas, New Mexico, October 17, 2016, and email correspondence, January 5, 2017.
- 23.
Beth Bardwell, author interview and email correspondence.
- 24.
Goodloe, “Ranching and the Practice of Watershed Conservation”; in Loeffler and Loeffler, eds., Thinking Like a Watershed: Voices from the West, 193–214.
- 25.
Goodloe quote from Western Landowners Alliance, “Stewardship with Vision: Caring for New Mexico’s Streams.”
- 26.
Teague et al., “Multi-paddock Grazing on Rangelands: Why the Perceptual Dichotomy between Research Results and Rancher Experience?”; Park et al., “Evaluating the Ranch and Watershed Scale Impacts of Using Traditional and Adaptive Multi-Paddock Grazing on Runoff, Sediment and Nutrient Losses in North Texas, USA.”
- 27.
Teague et al., “The Role of Ruminants in Reducing Agriculture’s Carbon Footprint in North America.”
- 28.
Loss of rangeland from National Science and Technology Council, “The State and Future of U.S. Soils: Framework for a Federal Strategic Plan for Soil Science.”
- 29.
Fairlie, Meat: A Benign Extravagance.
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© 2017 Sandra Postel
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Postel, S. (2017). Fill the Earth. In: Replenish. Island Press, Washington, DC. https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-791-9_6
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