This Blessed Earth Read online

  The decision might seem impulsive—why not wait just a few more days?—but this urgency arises from a particular oddity of soybean biology. “Beans are weird,” Rick told me. “With corn,” he said, pointing to the stalks in the neighboring quarter, “it’s growing degree units, the heat.” Then he pointed straight ahead to the horizon, the sun orange and sinking low. “With beans,” he said, “it’s sunlight.” So, unlike most crops, which begin to mature when the weather turns cold and the air dries, soybeans are short-day plants—meaning, simply, that their final stages of maturity are triggered by waning hours of sun.

  This poses two major problems when you run into an unusually wet fall. First, the days get shorter no matter what. Weather-dependent crops like corn slow their maturation on rainy days. You can get lucky—catch a warm spell or even a single sunny day—and get out in the field and back on track. Not so with soybeans. While you’re waiting for the clouds to clear, the beans are going past maturity. Second, soybeans have to be delivered to the grain elevator at a precisely defined moisture rate: 13 percent. “We’re at twelve-point-nine right now,” Rick showed me on the touchscreen, “but when we get down there where the ground is a little wetter, it’ll go back up.” Above 14 percent, he said, the grain elevator not only charges you for drying but also docks you for the estimated shrinkage. “And you would think, ‘Well, one percent of moisture would be one percent of shrink,’ ” Rick told me, “but no. They dock you one and a half percent.” At 15 percent, they’re apt to reject the whole load.

  So to make your best profit on soybeans, you need a sunny day (but not too sunny) with a dry breeze (but not too dry), and you need that day to fall exactly when the plant has received the precise number of hours—yes, hours—of sunlight from the moment you planted it months earlier. To make hitting such a tight window even remotely possible, seed companies, like Rick’s supplier DuPont Pioneer, have hybridized soybeans for nearly a century—and genetically modified them in recent decades—according to bands of latitude, called “maturity groupings.” They number these photo-regions from zero in the northern growing zones of Canada up to seven in the light-drenched flatlands of Florida. If you’re lucky enough to have ground in the middle of a maturity grouping, then you can buy a single variety. But Nebraska is almost exactly divided between groups two and three, the line bisecting the state into north and south. Which means that farmers here, especially in central regions like York County, plant both varieties to spread out maturity, allowing them to harvest one group or another first, depending on the weather, and still get a consistent yield. Some daring farmers like Rick will formulate a guess as to what the weather holds for the growing season and plant more of one group or another, hoping for higher yields and higher returns.

  In 2014, after several years of drought, Rick bet on another dry year—and planted incredibly short-season beans. While most of his neighbors were planting 3.5 maturity groupings, Rick had planted 2.4. And he was dead on, right up until the rains started in August. If he could have gotten out early, ahead of farmers in other parts of the country, and caught the market at its peak, he was positioned to make up for all the other setbacks going into the harvest. But if you guessed right on the growing season, as Rick did, and then got an extremely wet fall, you could end up with hundreds of acres of mature soybeans and fields too wet to run the combine. With each storm that rolls up on the horizon, you move from making a hefty profit to incurring a crippling debt.

  Rick knew prices would hold for a time, on the chance of an unforeseen, late-season catastrophe, a hedge against an ice storm freezing crops or a line of thunderheads dropping hail that could send prices skyrocketing. But as grain started pouring into the elevators, prices on futures were sure to slump. With the market already in free fall, some farmers had decided not to wait: they went out as soon as the mucky furrows would allow and used propane or electric dryers to deal with the high-moisture grain. But this was yet another expense, and if the moisture levels were too high, the cost of drying could cancel any profit. Other farmers, like Rick, had held out as long as possible, but eventually everyone had to make hard choices.

  “Every day that the beans sit out there,” Rick said, “you’re under risk of a big, smashing storm. And then, every day that we wait, the days get shorter. And beans get harder and harder to get out, because they just soak up moisture like crazy. And then, the more that happens—when they’re dry, wet, dry, wet, after they’re mature—they’re prone to shatter. They’ll split wide open in a big wind.” So when the rains finally let up, he decided it was time to go, soggy fields or no. It wasn’t worth risking the return on this field this year just for the promise of above-market prices on seed corn next year. He had Dave set up the harvester, and he started across the field to judge for himself if the beans were ready.

  Now halfway to the end of the swath, Rick checked the level of the grain tank. He needed to empty it out before he turned the combine and aimed back toward the barn and cluster of outbuildings on the eastern edge of the property. He radioed over to Kyle on the CB, “Can I dump on you?” Kyle pulled up alongside the combine with the tractor and grain cart, moving in perfect parallel. While the harvesting reel kept spinning and the combine inched across the field, the unloading auger arm started pouring out soybeans, sputtering and thrumming until the tank was empty and Kyle peeled off to unload into the trailer of the big rig. Rick’s mind was already back on the moisture levels. At the end of the swath, he took a wide sweeping turn and set the harvester back on autosteer.

  “This here is instant yield, instant moisture,” Rick said, pointing to the screen, “and this is average yield, average moisture.” As we moved, he could see in real time if he was on track to hit his production targets or falling short and whether the moisture of the entire load was within the acceptable range or inching high enough that he’d have to pay a penalty for drying. He watched the data rolling across the screen, giving the minute-to-minute condition of the crop, like watching the stock market ticker rise and fall. The colors of our current twelve rows shifted back and forth from green to yellow, from profit to loss. All the perils of modern farming seemed to crawl across the four-inch screen, teetering from making a living to accruing debt.

  So far, everything looked fine. “They’re about thirteen and a half,” Rick said. “We’ll get a little dock, but that’s okay. A year like this, if you can get a couple of loads in, you just keep pecking away at it.” So he continued across the field, until the sun was almost gone and the night cool made the beans too wet to cut. By then, Kyle was at the wheel of the harvester and had cleared the clogged cutting blades four times, trying to get just a few more minutes in. Finally, he came over the radio. “It’s time,” he said. “It’s past damned time.” And with that, everything was over for the night. Dave and Kyle parked the tractor and seed cart next to the outbuildings, but left the combine precisely where it sat. Dead in its tracks until the sun and the wind came up again in the morning.

  But harvest, at last, was officially underway. Now, Rick just had to get his crops in as soon as possible. It was going to be a race.

  THE OVERPRODUCTION of corn by the American agricultural industry has generated a lot of attention in recent years, as food activists and environmentalists have grown worried about the middle of the country turning into a vast monoculture. But that’s only half the picture. In truth, the corn boom, to a remarkable extent, has been made possible by a co-equal boom in alternate-year planting of millions of acres of soybeans. In many ways, corn and soybeans seem made for each other. Soybeans are a natural nitrogen-fixer, replenishing the soil for nitrogen-hungry corn hybrids, and the plants share almost none of the same pests or diseases, preventing insects, molds, and bacteria from overtaking fields. But the soybean is more than an enabler of King Corn; it is, in fact, far and away the most successful crop introduced to the American farm in the last century.

  In 1920, there were fewer than a million acres of soybeans planted in the whole of the United Stat
es, well behind traditional staple grains. But soybean production boomed during the 1930s and after—surpassing barley and rye production by 1940, cotton in the 1950s, oats in the 1960s, and wheat and hay in the 1970s. Today there are more than 85 million acres of soybean fields in America, almost exactly equal to the acreage of cornfields, with which they are rotated from year to year, and almost all of those acres are concentrated in the Midwest and on the Great Plains. How did the soybean, a legume native to East Asia and traditionally used primarily in foods from China, come to have such a place of prominence here? The rise of the soybean in the United States is attributable to, more than any other person, Henry Ford.

  The American farm underwent a period of unmatched innovation in the early twentieth century. The arrival of the gas-powered tractor for plowing, the combine for harvesting, and affordable farm trucks for hauling grain to market made it possible for farmers to plant more and more acres and to manage those acres with fewer farmhands. But by the mid-twenties, the market was glutted with grain, depressing prices and endangering the very family farms that the technological revolution had promised to empower. Farmers began calling for research and development to turn toward finding new uses for existing agricultural supply rather than continuing to search for ways to increase yields.

  In January 1927, Wheeler McMillen, associate editor of the popular magazine Farm & Fireside, published a watershed article entitled “Wanted: Machines to Eat up Our Crop Surplus.” He wrote that he had been receiving panicked letters from farmers, lamenting that more grain was being produced than people could possibly eat. Seeing as how “the human stomach isn’t elastic,” McMillen suggested that chemical compounds in plants might be converted into industrial products. He even advocated for government backing for such research. “There is no wrong in channeling some federal funds into farmers’ pockets,” he wrote, considering that the American farmer “by cheap food has subsidized the growth of cities.”

  Among McMillen’s most interested readers was the owner of the Ford Motor Company. Ford, after all, manufactured much of the equipment that had contributed to booming yields—and if the company was to maintain that market share, then it had to find a way to sustain its customers. To Henry Ford’s mind, it also made perfect sense to subsidize research into the uses of farm products, because he was already growing concerned about dwindling petroleum supplies. Numerous auto parts were made from petroleum-based plastics, and, of course, all of Ford’s engines ran on diesel and gasoline refined from petroleum crude. “If we want the farmer to be our customer,” he said, “we must find a way to be his customer.” In early 1928, he met with McMillen to discuss this new field of research—what was eventually dubbed “chemurgy”—and came away even more convinced that the key driver should be private industry, not the government.

  Soon after, Ford authorized dramatically expanding the agricultural laboratory in Greenfield Village at Ford’s headquarters in Dearborn, Michigan. He appointed Robert Boyer, a self-taught but eager young chemist, to manage what came to be known simply as “The Chemical Plant” and to oversee its staff of a dozen or so young men from the Henry Ford Trade School. Under Ford’s direct supervision, the lab technicians experimented with a staggering range of vegetables, fruits, grasses, legumes, tubers, and roots. Ford would meet with Boyer to hear new ideas—which plants might contain high levels of cellulose for plastics, which might contain sugars that could be converted to ethanol to make biofuels. The next morning, Boyer would find a truckload of fresh produce waiting at the front door of the lab for testing.

  After the stock market crash in October 1929, the financial crisis for farmers deepened. Ford publicly advocated for continuing full production of all crops and again urged the government to resist stepping in. “The farmer and the chemist will solve farm relief, not the politician,” he told the New York Times. Nevertheless, the USDA sent emissaries around the world in search of new crops that could be planted on American farms—crops intended for industrial use, not food. On one such trip to China, William J. Morse gathered more than 10,000 soybean varieties for American researchers to study. Learning of this, Ford urged Boyer to look at the soybean. His staff found that soy had unexpected levels of usable oils and yielded high-protein soy meal after the oil was extracted. It appeared, in short, that the soybean could be used to produce industrial lubricants and that the byproduct could be turned into plastics.

  The results were so encouraging that, in December 1931, Ford approved $1 million in new research funding and instructed Boyer to halt work on all other plant life. The following spring, Ford had 300 varieties of soybeans planted on 8,000 acres on his farmland in rural Michigan. The next year, he expanded to 12,000 acres—making him the single largest soybean grower in the United States. That same year he announced that he would buy any soybeans delivered to the Dearborn plant. To encourage production, he made 400 Fordson tractors available for free use to Michigan farmers and offered gas and diesel at a penny per gallon—less than a quarter of what it cost at the pump. Farmers put more than 35,000 acres of land into growing soybeans, and Ford bought their entire output as promised. It was a daring move but also good business. Between 1931 and 1933, with few farmers buying trucks or tractors, the Ford Motor Company lost nearly $120 million. Henry Ford was convinced that turning those numbers around would require restoring the buying power of the American farmer.

  To that end, Ford put the full muscle of his publicity machine behind promoting soybeans—and chemurgic applications for other crops as well. He hosted the national convention of the American Soybean Association. He helped organize and again played host to the Farm Chemurgic Council, which was promoting Agrol, an ethanol-blend alternative to gasoline, over the loud objections of the petroleum industry. And Ford gave a series of interviews, telling one reporter that he envisioned a time when much of an automobile “could be made from by-products of agriculture.” He even announced a plan to decentralize Ford production by opening a constellation of factories in rural areas to manufacture plastic parts made from local soybeans. “He wants to make as many parts as he can in small factories, whose workmen will live nearby, each tilling his little plot of soil,” reported Fortune. While talking to one reporter, Ford had an assistant bring to his desk a steering wheel, a distributor box, and a grab bag of small electrical parts. He bragged that he used soybean oil in his paint and to lubricate his casting molds. Soybean meal was reacted with formaldehyde to produce a thermoplastic resin, which was used to make gearshift knobs, window frames, distributor caps, and horn buttons. “There is a bushel of soya beans in every Ford car,” Fortune declared. “He is as much interested in the soya bean as he is in the V-8.” Ford even switched the company commissary over to baked goods made with soy flour and ice cream made with soy milk.

  To expand and expedite processing, Ford soon began experiments using hexane solvent for extraction of soybean oil. In 1933, he sponsored the Ford Exposition of Progress in New York City, where he debuted a glass model of an extractor that used hexane—and called on American companies to build full-scale versions. The federal government, the State of Illinois, and the Illinois Farm Bureau all contributed funds to take up the challenge. Within months, Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), a milling company which had been supplying linseed oil to Ford for its paint until Henry Ford ordered it replaced with soybean oil, purchased from Germany a 150-ton-per-day Hildebrandt hexane extractor. When it began operation on Blackhawk Street in Chicago in March 1934, it became America’s first continuous solvent extractor—and the most modern soybean processing plant in the world.

  At the same time, Ford unveiled a home version of the extractor, which he hoped would be used on a small scale by farmers to extract oil and sell it directly to the company. The enormous Ford exhibit at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1934 included a diorama of a working soybean farm and a modern “Industrialized Barn” with one of the small extractors inside. “I see the time soon coming when the farmer will not only raise raw materials for industry but will d
o the initial processing on his farm,” Ford said. “He will stand on both his feet—one foot on the soil for his livelihood, and the other foot in industry for the cash he needs. He will have a double security. Agriculture suffers from a lack of market for its product, industry suffers from a lack of employment for its surplus men. Bringing them together heals the ailments of both. That is my conviction and that is what I am working for.”

  That summer, Ford’s promotions got an unexpected boost. The first of several years of severe drought, what soon proved to be the worst dry time in American history, engulfed 75 percent of the country. An apocalyptic dust storm carried 350 million tons of topsoil from the Great Plains all the way to the East Coast. Corn and wheat withered in the fields. Amid rampant crop failures, farmers harvested 23 million bushels of soybeans, a better yield than most crops and far better than its oil-producing competitors like linseed and canola.

  In the spring of 1935, farmers planted soybeans in record numbers. In preparation for the coming harvest, Ford spent $5 million to construct his own soybean mill with solvent extraction units at the flagship River Rouge plant in Dearborn—and boasted that he had jumpstarted demand for soybeans nationwide. That year roughly 70 million bushels of soybeans would be harvested. Selling for 50 cents per bushel in the absolute depths of the Great Depression, soybeans were hailed as a godsend. They now generated more income for farmers than either barley or rye, and soybean trading had become so active and central to industry that the Chicago Board of Trade started offering soybean futures for the first time. By the end of the 1930s, the soybean harvest was approaching 100 million bushels per year. Time magazine declared Henry Ford “a bean’s best friend.”