Thoughts on the Soy Harvest
By Samm Kaiser
My favorite aspect of communal farm living so far has definitely been the food. At Zumwalt Acres, dinner is an event; every night, we all sit down together to enjoy whatever masterpiece that night’s cooking crew has spent at least an hour (usually more) orchestrating. Everyone brings their own cooking background into the kitchen, resulting in a wide variety of soups, stews, and salads. We haven’t yet had a bad meal.
Personally, I have very little cooking experience; my mom cooks for me at home, and at school I am more of a microwave connoisseur than a chef. My main contribution to our table is a bottle of Whole Foods Organic Soy Ginger Sauce. I love the stuff - my family puts it on everything, from marinated tofu to cucumber salad. It’s been a staple in our household for years, and I was eager to introduce it to everyone else.
But where does it come from? My first thoughts involve the shiny linoleum floors and neatly stacked aisles of the Whole Foods in Downtown Chicago. This is as far back as I can trace it, but obviously Whole Foods is much closer to the end of the line. This past week I got a chance to see the beginning of that line - on soy fields in Iroquois County, IL.
Growing up a self-proclaimed city kid, I’d always had an irrational yet deeply held aversion to rural areas. This is common for people like me - urban, socially-minded environmentalists who preach the benefits of this and that without first-hand knowledge of the world they claim they want to save. I’ve spent the last few weeks knocking myself off my high-horse, learning about real farming from real people. I’ve witnessed the power of industrial food production; power we can’t overlook when building sustainable food models.
Last week, I rode shotgun in our neighbor Johnny’s combine during the soy harvest, and it was one of the most incredible things I’ve ever seen. The combine feels like a wild animal, like part of the landscape; it moves gracefully, quietly, and with razor-sharp precision. I was amazed at how quickly it turned the vast fields of brown soy plants into enormous trailers full of tiny, yellow beans. The combine handles the soy with such care - the beans were not crushed, split, or otherwise damaged. They were perfect. The whole process felt high-tech and futuristic, even though the combine was almost as old as me. I realized the power of this system; here we had an enormous, industrial machine that could carefully and perfectly extract individual beans from dozens of acres of land. Incredible.
After harvesting tens of thousands of pounds of these itty-bitty beans, we hopped into the truck and headed into town to drop them off at the grain elevator. Johnny handed us some receipts from previous offloads, and we learned how they price the beans based off of factors like moisture and foreign material levels. Driving up to the grain elevators for the first time, I was amazed by their size; looking up at them gave me the same shudder as staring up the side of a skyscraper. Inside of these behemoth metal structures were millions of tiny yellow beans, beans that would go on to become tofu and oil and sweetener and even sauces like my beloved Soy Ginger, among countless other products. This was where it began.
The soy harvest varied greatly from the autumnal images of gourds and wheat bushels that are now more symbol than reality. Now when I think about harvest, I think big; from the hum of the combine to the dozens of tons of beans, across thousands of acres, all farmed by one man. This is the power of modern-day industrial agriculture, and as environmentalists, we should work to sustainably enhance these systems. Too often we demonize conventional farming, seeing it as a cop-out or “the easy way” to grow these days. Our experience this week has shown us that there’s much more to the story; industrial agriculture is impressive. Imagine what we could do if we implemented these principles of efficiency and scale into regenerative, polycultural farming? I’m not saying I know how to do this (I’m just a city kid college student transplant in this world), but I’m saying we need to leave it on the table. Witnessing the soy harvest showed me how powerful modern day farming is, and reminded me that the best way to move forward is to work with the people who already know what they’re doing.
On our drive back from the grain elevators, we asked Johnny questions about the various farmers in town. He estimated that there are about a hundred farmers in Sheldon, most farming hundreds of acres. He asked us, “Who do you think is worth more, a doctor or a farmer”? Not wanting to be fooled by a trick question, we said farmers, expecting a philosophical answer on what “worth” really is. We told Johnny this and he laughed, handing us a calculator. “A farmer out here could have a thousand acres, each one worth nine thousand dollars. You do the math. Farmers are literally worth millions of dollars, but we’re humble. We don’t need fancy cars or expensive restaurants. Give a farmer some beef and a bowl of beans, and we’re happy”. I’ve been thinking about this sentiment quite a bit, the juxtaposition of the powerful machinery we’d seen versus Johnny’s relaxed and humble demeanor. I now see the people behind the soy, people who operate combines and airplanes and harvest miles upon miles of crop. People who, after producing millions of beans, settle down for a bowl of their own, bringing this powerful process full circle. As we work towards a sustainable and just future, let’s work with these people. They understand the power of industrial systems and the simplicity of dinner. They plant the soybeans that will become our favorite sauce. We need them for this movement as much as the world needs us - let’s start acting like it.