Taking the Harm out of the Farm

Like most of those in his West Texas region, Eric’s fam­ily farm spe­cial­izes in cot­ton. “When I first returned to the farm, I didn’t know it was going to be my career,” Eric told Organic Connections. “I came back just to help my dad out for a cou­ple of years. Both my dad’s par­ents were in bad health and he was hav­ing a hard time recruit­ing farmhands. Soon it just grabbed hold of me, and I real­ized this is really where I needed to be. I saw the need for more young farm­ers; there were a lot of chal­lenges, and I felt that it was some­thing I couldn’t walk away from.”

Genesis of Change

As did the major­ity of farm­ers, Eric’s father uti­lized stan­dard indus­trial meth­ods. It wasn’t long after his return, how­ever, that Eric dis­cov­ered how dam­ag­ing those pro­ce­dures were. “I was just fol­low­ing accepted ways when I first came back,” Eric said. “We’d planted a lit­tle bit of Roundup Ready* cot­ton in 2005 and 2006, just try­ing it out. But in 2006, I hap­pened to read all the warn­ing labels on the bag. I was like, ‘What is this stuff I am putting in the ground here?’ I started look­ing around on the Internet and read­ing books—especially those by Jeffrey Smith [well-known author and activist on genet­i­cally mod­i­fied crops]—and found that I was con­tribut­ing to a huge part of the problem.”

Once Eric under­stood more about GMOs, he couldn’t in good con­science con­tinue plant­ing them. “I told my dad going into the next year that I’d never touch the seed again,” he said. “And we haven’t.”

With the dis­con­tin­u­ing of GM seeds, Eric real­ized early on that he wanted to make the whole change to farm­ing organ­i­cally. But it’s a tough sell on a com­mer­cial farm that’s never done any­thing but chem­i­cally based farm­ing, and he found he had to approach it grad­u­ally. “I couldn’t talk my fam­ily or any land­lords into going organic,” said Eric. “So I ended up buy­ing 250 acres so that I could do it myself.” After he got the new land pro­duc­ing, Eric started bit by bit mak­ing changes on his father’s 6,000-acre operation.

Having cut out GMOs, Eric then took the next step of con­vinc­ing his dad they should drop chem­i­cal pes­ti­cides. “In the years before we stopped, we were spend­ing between $30 and $40 an acre on pes­ti­cides,” Eric recalled. “The first time you spray, it kills all your ben­e­fi­cial insects, so you end up with aphids. Then you’ve got to spray for aphids; then two weeks later you’ve got another flair-up of boll­worms or beet army­worms or what­ever else comes along. It’s just a vicious cycle.

“One thing that pro­pelled me down this path of organ­ics was study­ing insects. When I first moved back to the farm in ’05, Dad put me in charge of being the bug scout. I went to a three-day school on it, but I really dis­cov­ered more on my own. I found that bollworms—our main enemy in cot­ton production—don’t have a pan­creas. They can’t digest sug­ars, so sugar water and molasses will kill them just as eas­ily as a pes­ti­cide will.”

In addi­tion to being far more friendly to the envi­ron­ment, this nat­ural pest-control method also proved sub­stan­tially more cost-effective than the chem­i­cals they had been pre­vi­ously apply­ing. “I achieved that suc­cess with pretty much $2 an acre, com­pared with the $30 to $40 an acre we had been spend­ing,” Eric said.

Not long after that, and with his dad’s bless­ing, Eric weaned the farm off chem­i­cal fer­til­iz­ers as well, instead pro­vid­ing nat­ural nutri­ents to the soil to make the plants healthy. “We use an organic fer­til­izer com­pany I have been doing busi­ness with for years, named Texas Earth. They make a com­post tea, which is the most effi­cient way I’ve found to help these plants grow.”

Similarly to some other sus­tain­able farm­ing pio­neers, such as Bob Cannard, Eric has also learned that health­ier plants deter dam­ag­ing insects. “Insects see in infrared and ultra­vi­o­let ener­gies, so they can per­ceive energy lev­els in plants,” he explained. “That is how they decide where to go and lay their eggs when they’re moths. When you have health­ier soil and crops, harm­ful bugs are going to bypass your field for the most part, and you’re going to min­i­mize your damages.”

Click any image above to see a larger version.

As he sees how sus­tain­able meth­ods are affect­ing the farm, Eric’s father is becom­ing more open to them. “I’m not where I need to be—I have no delu­sions about that,” Eric said. “But we don’t use pes­ti­cides, we don’t use com­mer­cial fer­til­iz­ers, and that’s over 6,000-plus acres. This was a huge step, because try­ing to sell it to my dad, who’s been farm­ing for forty years, wasn’t easy. But my dad is pleased. I’m out there count­ing, look­ing at these plants on a daily basis, and there’s no doubt in my mind that we’re improv­ing the plants and the pro­duc­tion, as well as improv­ing the qual­ity of life in the soil. We’re find­ing earth­worms in these fields the last cou­ple of years, whereas before, that never happened.”

Writing and Sharing

While Eric has been mak­ing his jour­ney, he has been writ­ing it down and is now shar­ing it through his book and blog. “I was ask­ing dozens of ques­tions, and I found out that a lot of guys couldn’t answer some of these ques­tions,” he remarked. “We were using more chem­i­cals than ever, but yet here we had more insects and weeds than ever. It seemed like the land wasn’t as pro­duc­tive as it had been when I was a kid, with the same amount of rain­fall. On top of that, I became frus­trated because I was mak­ing all these dis­cov­er­ies, not only about GMOs, but about organic farm­ing, nat­ural fer­til­iz­ers and healthy crop rota­tion, and I felt that many farm­ers had really lost touch with what we were. We some­how at some point turned into pro­duc­ers instead of farm­ers, and became an exten­sion of our machines and these chem­i­cal com­pa­nies instead of an exten­sion of the land. I chan­neled a lot of these frus­tra­tions into my writ­ing. I knew there were oth­ers out there who thought the same way, and it’s really about enough of us like-minded indi­vid­u­als con­nect­ing up and being the teach­ers to spread this word, to change agri­cul­ture for the better.”

The Spiritual Connection

Through it all, Eric has also dis­cov­ered a truly spir­i­tual con­nec­tion to the land—and it has become his key moti­va­tion for con­tin­u­ing his sus­tain­able farm­ing efforts and dis­sem­i­nat­ing his mes­sage to the world. “Being gone from the farm for so many years, I don’t think I truly grasped what I had out here,” Eric con­cluded. “But com­ing back I’ve been amazed at my con­nec­tion with this place, with the earth, with the land. I’ve come to so many real­iza­tions that we are nature, we are an exten­sion of nature. We’ve been work­ing so hard for so many years to con­sider our­selves supe­rior by manip­u­lat­ing and dom­i­nat­ing aspects of nature. I real­ize what a kin­dred rela­tion­ship we can have when we’re work­ing and learn­ing from nature, and try­ing as hard as we can to imi­tate her. It’s a rela­tion­ship that I hope more peo­ple will explore, because it opens us up to a higher aspect of ourselves.”

Eric Herm’s book Son of a Farmer, Child of the Earth is avail­able from the Organic Connections book­store.

Read Eric’s blog at www.sonofafarmer.com.

*Roundup Ready: Crops that are genet­i­cally engi­neered to be resis­tant to Roundup brand her­bi­cides man­u­fac­tured by Monsanto. This tech­nol­ogy allows the her­bi­cide to be sprayed freely across a field, killing the weeds but not harm­ing the crops. As this tech­nol­ogy is used, how­ever, weeds become more resis­tant to the her­bi­cides, requir­ing increas­ingly higher amounts of chemicals.