[…] the problem of nutrient loading into the Mississippi isn’t the methods of commodity-crop farming but commodity-crop farming itself: a system that destroys how water should naturally move from the plains to the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico. Chief among those critics is Wes Jackson, director of the Land Institute in Salinas, Kansas, and an oft-quoted spokesperson for the ending of farming as we know it.
“The essential problem is this,” Jackson told me. “Humans went from perennial polyculture to annual monocultures. This in my view was the biblical fall.”
Jackson’s goal is to create, through plant breeding, a set of crops that function like the plant communities of the native prairie. His research has shown that the root structure of the perennial and diverse prairie grasses of the primeval Midwest extended their roots as much as three feet down into the soil. When nutrients flowed toward the Mississippi and its tributaries, they were intercepted by these root structures, processed, and dissipated. Indeed, Jackson’s monitoring of a plot of prairie left in its native state on the Land Institute’s grounds reveals that almost zero nutrients leave a system planted in native grasses.
Paul Greenberg, A River Runs Through It
(via stoweboyd)