Free The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food by Dan Barber Page B

on the problem. That’s what your crop starts to look like before an insect attack—not quite right.”
    Klaas approved of the analogy. “Among the hardest lessons to learn in farming is that too much of a good thing isn’t good,” he said. Because farmers see how fertilization brings growth, they’re often motivated to overfertilize as insurance. The effect can be destructive. Galinsoga, a weed feared by every small farmer, grows out of soil thirsty for carbon—which it needs to sober up after the inebriating effects of too much fertilizer. It’s how the soil fights to balance the excess nutrients.
    I told Klaas about a farmer who once told me that the sight of galinsoga is a declaration of war, that he would mow all his crops, take down the peas and the carrots—everything—just to get rid of the stuff. Klaas said he must have been applying too much fertilizer and guessed—correctly—that his farm was not organic.
    “On a small farm,” he said, “you can deal with the problem of weeds byconstantly weeding, or you can become a nozzlehead and just spray the weed or the pest away.”
    On a grain farm the size of Klaas’s, weeding by hand is impossible. So weed suppression (without spraying the problem away) means listening to the soil and maintaining plant health. If your farm becomes so large you can’t identify the different grasses and what they are telling you about the health of the soil, then you’re not really farming, at least not at the right scale. Limiting yourself to what you can see, either by choice or, like the Mennonites, through the decree of steel tires, isn’t such an antiquated idea.
A CASE OF VELVETLEAF
    So how do you grow great wheat?
    I think that’s what I was learning. But I couldn’t be sure, because by late afternoon that same June day, Klaas and I had covered only two fields, and all the talk had been about wild grasses (formerly known to me as weeds). I was also learning that while I traffic, for the most part, in simple sums, farmers like Klaas deal in calculus. Klaas had spent the day not so much answering questions as making connections, a habit that made him slightly less frustrating to consult than the Oracle of Delphi.
    I finally got my answer when we walked into a field growing soybeans, another profitable crop for the farm. Klaas reached for a broad-leaved green plant that seemed to be everywhere and, to my rookie eye, looked very nearly as vibrant as the soybeans around it. Velvetleaf, he told me. He turned over one of its leaves and smiled broadly. The underside was blanketed with tiny flies. There must have been several hundred, maybe even several thousand, on that one leaf. He turned over another infected leaf, and then another. Walking down the row, he continued turning leaves over for me to inspect, like a magician showing his cards.
    “I wanted you to see what I consider to be my greatest success,” he said.
    That the velvetleaf is a noxious weed (yes, absolutely a weed) and the tiny flies are a troublesome pest named whitefly not only didn’t trouble Klaas—it thrilled him. He was in that moment as satisfied and contented as I would ever know him to be.
    Why the exuberance in the middle of a field riddled with pests and weeds? Klaas found inspiration in another soil scientist. “When we went organic, I started reading Dr. William Albrecht. “You know how sometimes we read something and immediately recognize we’re not going to think quite the same way again? That’s what it was like to read Albrecht. He said, ‘See what you’re looking at.’ I love that quote. Think about that. It requires close observation without prejudice. How often do we see something without really
seeing
?”
    Klaas looked down at the velvetleaf blanketed with flies and held it in his hands. “A field of velvetleaf with an infestation of whiteflies can actually be a good thing. It can be the greatest success, actually, but you’ll only understand it if you’re able to see what