Rapid change for US farming as technology comes to the fore

American agriculture is changing – and changing fast.

The number of farmers is shrinking rapidly and now amounts to less than 1% of the population. As a result, the size of farms continues to grow.

When it comes to cropping, the changes are even more dramatic. The wheat acreage has shrunk by nearly a third (12m hectares) in the past 20 years, while yields have remained almost static. Maize and soyabeans, on the other hand, are booming. Unlike wheat, they have both benefited from biotechnology. Their yields have increased and they are today spreading north and west out of their traditional areas.

The changes in technology have been equally profound, with GPS today playing a far more important role than it does on most European arable farms.

I was curious to find out if any of these dramatic changes have any relevance to us in the UK. Which is why, one rainy morning in October, I found myself at the headquarters of Monsanto outside St Louis.

The first thing I learnt was that, after an interval of five years, the programme for GM wheat had just been restarted and is now under the control of a dynamic Englishman called Sean Gardner. He showed me a machine which could take a tiny chip off a grain of wheat, analyse its contents and repeat the process every second.

The plant breeders now know what characteristics are contained in each individual seed. These are then sorted into packets according to specific traits the breeders require. What would have taken months – and maybe years – can now be done in days.

I have seen the future and it works.

From St Louis I drove south to one of my favourite – but least typical – areas of the United States, the Mississippi Delta. For nearly 200 years this flat and fertile area has produced only one crop – cotton. But, today, the cropping is changing radically.

Marooned

Soyabean harvest in Mississippi.

Ricky Belk, who farms 2800ha near Greenwood, told me that this year, for the first time, his farm has grown no cotton. Instead he planted GM maize, GM soyabeans and rice, nearly all of which should normally have been harvested by the time I arrived.

Ricky’s two combines, together with his chaser bins, were marooned in a sea of mud. As I inspected a strange, metal-wheeled tractor he told me that they had endured 35in of rain in the past 30 days. The steel wheels were to cut drainage slits in some of the flooded fields.

Fifty miles south of Greenwood I found Brooks Aycock waiting by his pickup truck. “We’re cutting some beans today,” he said. “It’s really too wet. But we can’t wait any longer because we’ve already lost nearly half the crop.”

Unlike Ricky Belk, Brooks was persevering with some cotton. “If it wasn’t GM I don’t think I’d bother,” he admitted. “It’s made my life a lot simpler, because before GM cotton came along I’d have to spray maybe 10 times against budworm and weevil. Today I spray maybe three times – and I use a far less toxic chemical.”

A sugar cane harvested struggles throiugh the southern Louisiana mud

In southern Louisiana, among the marshes which line the Gulf of Mexico, the rains continued without a break. Here the main crop is sugar cane and I managed to see one farm on which the harvesters were ploughing through the fields leaving trenches 6in deep. I was sorry to leave Louisiana because both the food and the jazz are the best in America. But it was time to visit a few wheat farmers to find out how they were managing with falling prices and rising costs.

At Enid, Oklahoma, I knew I was back in arable country. On the edge of town was the biggest grainstore I have ever seen. In the field outside were the other two symbols of Oklahoma agriculture, cattle grazing and an oil well pumping slowly.

Joe Collins, who runs the Enid elevator for milling group ADM, explained that his operation holds 750,000t, most of which is wheat. “We’re very close to capacity today,” he told me. The wheat harvest in northern Oklahoma had been “fair”, averaging about 2.5t/ha.

“Farmers round here are, however, growing less wheat than their Dads used to,” Joe continued. “Instead they’re expanding the soyabean acreage, and some are now even growing winter canola (oilseed rape)”. I was amazed to learn that the canola was then trucked 820 miles to North Dakota to be crushed.

Alan States waits for the sun in Kansas.

North again to Kansas to meet my old friend, Alan States, who farms 2400ha and also owns the local bank in the town of Hays. Alan’s rotation consists of wheat, maize, soyabeans and wheat again. “I didn’t bother to grow beans until 10 years ago when Roundup Ready varieties appeared,” said Alan. “They just didn’t make any sense in this part of western Kansas.”

Better than average

This year’s wheat yield of 3t/ha had been better than average but, thanks to the rain, the soyabeans and maize harvest had barely started and was now a month later than usual.

We set out to look at his two combines and despite the fact that his pickup truck had four-wheel drive, we were forced to turn back by the mud on the country roads. When we eventually reached the field Alan showed me the rain gauge. There had been 3in of rain overnight.

I continued northwards through Nebraska where the Platte River is said to be: “A mile wide, an inch deep. Too thin to plough, too thick to drink”. Snow replaced rain, covering the combines with a thin white coat. Every 200 miles or so I would see clouds of steam, which marked the presence of yet another ethanol plant. On one occasion I noticed that an entire prairie farm had been completely flooded. Sometimes there would be grain elevators with mountains of soyabeans stacked outside in the open.

My destination was the small town of Andover, South Dakota, where Kevin Anderson manufactures some of the finest seed drills in the world and also farms 2000ha with one tractor, a 500hp Challenger, a self-propelled sprayer and an 18.5m-wide Horsch Anderson drill.

All are now equipped with the latest generation of GPS devices and I was particularly fascinated to see that these could be plugged into to any tractor, including the contractors’ who do much of the work on Kevin’s farm.

Kevin’s rotation is spring wheat, GM soyabeans and GM maize. Here, again, the monsoon had stopped his harvest soon after it had begun. The wheat harvest had, however, been good, averaging 3.8t/ha, but Kevin was worried lest the rain would start to damage the maize and beans.

“The winter’s going to be a hard one,” he explained as we looked across one of the ponds which litter the landscape. “The muskrat huts are big this year.”

Fargo, North Dakota, interested me because here the farmers grow a lot of sugar beet – and they own their own beet factory. Nick Sinner runs the Red River Valley Sugar Beet co-operative and explained to me that 82% of the region’s beet was today genetically modified.

“And we’ve only been growing GM beet for two years, so you can see how popular it is.” Once again the rain had made harvesting impossible. We went out into the fields to see rows of machinery waiting for the soil to dry out.

The system of sugar beet growing in North Dakota interested me. Yields hover around the 55t/ha level. Lifting starts in September and finishes six weeks later in November. The factory, however, remains in operation until late May.

Vast heaps of beet are stored outside under canvas for up to six months, during which time they are frozen solid by the temperatures which often drop to -20F.

Back home if I deliver frozen beet to the British Sugar factory at Bury St Edmunds they are immediately rejected. Maybe it helps if farmers own their own processing plant.

Flexible

My final destination was Minneapolis where, for the first time since the Mississippi Delta – 4000 miles and three weeks earlier – I saw a combine working in a field of beans.

It had been a fascinating and depressing trip. Depressing because of the appalling weather, but fascinating because I came away with the strong impression that American farmers are more flexible and less conservative than their British counterparts.

Every farmer I had met had changed his cropping radically in the past two decades. Every farmer appeared willing – and even keen – to make use of the latest technology, whether this was genetically modified crops or GPS controls for his equipment.

But what surprised me most of all was that in the course of my travels I did not hear one single farmer complain about his lot. Despite falling prices, rising costs and horrendous weather, they were a happy bunch of men.

The 750,000t grain store at Enid, Oklahoma.