By DOUG GRAVES

Ohio Correspondent

LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Some people say nothing beats the good old days. And according to some agronomy experts, produce is less healthy than it was 70 years ago.

“Take broccoli for example; it’s one of the most nutritious vegetables on the planet, but 70 years ago it contained twice the calcium and more than five times the amount of Vitamin A,” said Harold van Es, a professor of soil and water management at Cornell University. “The same could be said for a lot of our fruits and vegetables. The answers lie in the soil and how Americans farm it.”

Van Es isn’t alone with these conclusions. “More and more farmers are recognizing they are part of the problem, one that extends beyond their farms and impacting the water quality in our lakes, rivers and oceans downstream,” said Eileen Kladivko, a professor of agronomy at Purdue University.

Slowly, a soil health movement is spreading across the Midwest and other parts of the country. Farmers, agronomy experts say, are changing the way they farm, adding cover crops or changing up crop rotation. They’re finding ways to use less fertilizer, which is linked to decreased soil healthy and water degradation.

“This has an impact on everybody who eats,” Kladivko said.

Van Es and Kladivko agree U.S. population growth and food production methods have stressed and degraded the dirt, saying the soil is not as alive as it once was.

“It’s a complex issue, and there are various factors at play, but studies through the years draw a direct line back to American farms,” van Es said.

Farmers everywhere have learned from mistakes from the past. In the 1930s, poor land management and farming practices led to the Dust Bowl. Land was plowed until it was pulverized. Topsoil blew away in the dry spell, creating dust storms.

Farmers couldn’t grow food and millions were forced to leave their homes in the heartland. The result was the creation of the U.S. Soil Conservation Service and the birth of the modern soil health movement.

“Still, we harmed the soil unintentionally,” van Es said. “IN the 1950s, farmers began using synthetic fertilizers and they allowed for a new way of farming in America that would often further degrade the soil.

“Many farmers stopped raising livestock for the manure and focused only on cash crops, like corn and soybeans, which go into many products. They produced these crops year after year. Over time, the combination of these things lowered the biodiversity of the soil.”

Van Es explained healthy soil should be teeming with microbes and worms and rich with decomposed organic matter.

To this day, the government budgets billions each year ($6.7 billion in 2017 alone) for conservation through the farm bill. That funding goes toward agencies like the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), which offers financial and technical assistance to farmers to adopt practices such as cover crops.

“I think we’ve reached a tipping point in terms of awareness and experimentation,” van Es said. “In terms of adoption, we simply need more farmers to start doing it.”

Some in the tri-state are making that change, focusing on the health of the soil. Richard Stewart of Carriage House Farm in southwestern Ohio has a goal of stopping conventional farming and growing only food people eat. The farm has been in his family now for five generations.

He recently converted about 60 acres of his 300-acre farm to product fruits, vegetables, honey and a line of vinegar. He plants a cover crop of mustard before he grows a crop of potatoes. The mustard, he explained, keeps the Colorado potato beetles away from the latter.

“I want to make sure there’s a good strip of trees and native plants between my fields and the Great Miami River, because I want to keep my soils in place and avoid any runoff,” he said. “The Shawnee were people who farmed and hunted this land 3,000 years prior to use, and we’ve taken more nutrients out of the soil than human beings did the last 3,000 years.”

Growers in Indiana are making slight changes. The number of farm acres sowed with cover crops in the Hoosier State more than quintupled the last five years. Still, just over 90 percent of cropland in Indiana still goes without cover crops.

“Here in Indiana we estimate we’ve lost about 50 percent of our soil’s organic matter,” said Shannon Zezula, state resource conservationist for the Indiana NRCS. “How much longer can we continue to farm this way? We have to reverse that trend.”

Nick Goeser, director of the Soil Health Partnership (a program launched by the National Corn Growers Assoc. in 2014), sees the soil health movement catching on as more farmers see results. His program helps farmers do economic assessments to understand where one is making or losing money. It helps farmers improve the soil, aid the environment and increase their profit.

Goeser said cover crop adoption is accelerating. When the program was installed in 2014 the goal was to sign up 100 farmers in the first five years. It reached that goal in half the time. Combating farmers in this movement is climate change, which is “messing with our food,” he said.

“Over the past few decades, the number of suitable days to plant corn has dropped. Heavy rains are partially to blame. But even more damaging is the heat. Warmer nights keep the corn from resting, which can affect its ability to pollinate.

“Humans have a long history of manipulating crops and cultivating strains to withstand certain conditions. We’ve been able to figure out how to keep growing more, even with the heat. But that tinkering can have unintended consequences, like making our food less nutritious,” he said.

The consumer can play a key role in this process, Kladivko said. “The masses can do that by paying more attention to where their food comes from, shopping local, asking the farmers who grow food what they are doing and know where their politicians stand.

“Indirectly, one can support conservation programs at the federal and state level. One can also trust that organic food is soil-friendly. The soil health movement will continue to spread as it does today, from farmer to farmer.”