The Cow Ahead of the Plow, Part Two

On the Coastal Plains soils of the South, the automobile tourist is constantly confronted with the hazard of colliding with cattle crossing the highway pavement. They are not casual inhabitants there. They must be regular highway grazers. There are permanent highway signs to give warning of “cattle at large.” These animals come out of the “Piney Woods” seemingly for miles on either side to graze this “chosen” strip of forage.

In spite of the punishable offense of killing one of them, many cattle in the South are accidently destroyed annually by the traffic. The high death toll results because the cows insist on grazing, not at some distance from the pavement, but right along its very edge on the grassy margin no wider than about one foot from the traffic-way. There the calcium, possibly other plant nutrient elements, in the concrete mixture, diffusing through the adjacent soil or being taken by root contact of no more distant plants, apparently contributes a quality of feed the cows recognize and relish beyond that on any other part of the highway shoulder or the surrounding territory in the woods.

With the cow grazing so close to the pavement’s edge, and crossing so often to the other edge or side, she certainly is a serious hazard to the motorist. But she is a much larger hazard to herself. The larger number of fatalities to the cows as one of the two parties involved testifies accordingly. Here the mechanics of our well-developed system of transportation run not only ahead of, but counter to and in conflict with, the ancient agricultural art of letting this beast go out to select her own grazing under her judgment of its nutritional values reflecting the fertility of the soil growing it. While the machinery (the automobile more than the plow, in this case) is going ahead, the cow is not necessarily following it. She is being exterminated more often than the motorist, uninformed as he is of the forces responsible for bringing the dumb beasts as well as himself into this death-dealing situation.

An arable and exploitive agriculture was invited by extensive, fertile soils. Shrinking soil fertility prompts interest now in more pastoral farming.

We have been prone to ridicule the simpler arts of agriculture in the older countries, and the older civilizations where the plow and other modern agricultural machinery followed rather than preceded the cow. Just now we are engaged–on an almost international scale–in educational activities, savoring of a missionary nature, and aimed to bring these ancient agricultures up-to-date, at least in agricultural mechanics for mining their soil fertility. We are unmindful of the fact that in these older countries the agriculture was always highly pastoral. The arable agriculture never dominated so highly as we know it here, if the European manure pile in the front yard or the tank wagon flowing its liquid manure on the pastures and meadows dare to be considered as reliable indicators.

For us in the United States the plow has always been ahead of the cow. The plow has been agriculture’s emblem. Arable agriculture and not pastoral has regularly been dominant. This was not so unexpectable in the age of farm machinery development, of more internal combustion engines, and of labor-relieving devices. It was the most expectable on soils containing great stores of reserve fertility. Our soils were of most extensive areas, very level topography, silty texture coming with windblown origins, high fertility In terms of its exchangeable forms on the clay, and rich in ready reserves of nutrients in the silt minerals brought as ample varieties from the arid West. Such soils naturally invited the plow and all kinds of machinery. Soil conditions of this type are natural temptations to convert them into cash crops, even for city suitcase farmers who would gladly escape the routine and daily work of milking cows and hauling manure.

Now that (a) the seriousness of erosion is being recognized; (b) the areas of fertile soils to be so easily exploited are gone; (c) the fertility decline is becoming apparent after being hidden so long under crop juggling; (d) the problem of protein supplements as animal feed and many of the troubles in animal production are being traced back to the soil and not alone to the feed store, and the veterinarian; and (e) we are saddled with the responsibility of being Santa Claus for a much more inflated and hungrier world; we are coming to talk about less plow and more cow as means to save the soil and to give us more meat and more milk.

While all these problems are too readily attributed to possible irregularities, in economic and social arrangements, we are reluctantly coming to see the fertility of the soil underneath the whole picture. It was through the plow that we led the cow to soils contrary to her choice of the fertility there. The plow held her there just as the fence confines her to the deficient fertility in the pastures which are growing weeds in place of feed. In similar manner, our technologies of engineering have extended agriculture in its many forms of so-called “crop specialization” that are in reality cropping limitations because of limited soil fertility. Cotton farming is a case, sugarcane farming is another, forestry another, all of which are special kinds of farming that occur on soils of which the fertility would not entice the cow, and of which her assay would declare them too deficient to support her with good nourishment.

It was the plow ahead of the cow that took both of them to the once-forested soils in our eastern United States. It certainly would not have been the cow ahead of the plow. Would she select a forest site, clear it, and expect the crops to be a good nutrition, when originally the Creator himself could grow only wood there, and that only by the return annually to the soil of all the fertility in the leaves? We have allowed the mechanics of growing grass and feeding the cow to dominate our thinking so completely that the physiology of the plants and the physiology of the cow eating them have had little consideration. By way of the soil fertility we must be reminded that the cow is more than a mowing machine or a hay baler. Her physiology, and not just those mechanics, are connected with. and dependent on the fertility of the soil. She is not calling for merely tons of feeds, and acres of grazing. She is calling for complete nutrition to undergird the reproduction of herself and for the establishment of the subsequent milk flow of high nutritional values for her calf. She is not aiming at establishing records of gallons of milky liquid and pounds of butter fat.

New criteria for agriculture will establish it as a creative business premised on the fertility of the soil.

These visions and appreciation of the plants as physiological processes creating good nutrition for us and our animals do not come to us as readily as do our concepts of crop yields in terms of bushels of grain and tons, or bales of hay. The crop yields per acre as criteria of how well we are farming are the mechanical phase of farming, the plow part. The hays as good feed, rich in the vitamins, the minerals, and the proteins to grow healthy cows giving much milk are the physiological phase of agriculture creation, or the cow part. As these mechanical aspects became more and more prominent in our thinking, the physiological aspects were of less concern. By that token, the soil fertility as the foundation of agricultural creation has been disregarded and neglected.

Under the prevailing agricultural criterion of more bushels and more tons we have taken to searching for new crops, whenever a tried one began to fail. Instead, we should have been building up the soil fertility to nourish the failing one. The cow has never judged crop values according to crop pedigree. She has been telling us by her choices of the same plant in different places that the crop pedigree does not determine its chemical composition or its nutritional values for her. She does not follow the textbooks on feeds and feeding, accepting average values of chemical composition and digestibility per plant species, with no mention of the wide variation in these respects with the same species. She more than the textbook is reminding us that variations in composition mount to as much as a thousand or two thousand per cent, according as the crop is grown on sorts of differing fertility. Surely the cow that is eating these variable samples of the same crop isn’t taking them all at the same nutritional value. She hasn’t ever heard of the mathematical mean or the average. She is given to marking out the differences and exercising her choice according to those variations. Hers is not the acceptance of the lot in terms of the average. With the cow going ahead, we too see the variations in chemical composition. But We see only the average figure when the plow is going ahead.