Agriculture and War – Some Thoughts

by John Mattingly

“You’re in the army now,

You’re not behind the plow. . .”

I remember hearing this verse from a song played on movie newsreels in the decade following WWII, in which the farmer appeared in agony, sweating behind a horse. Until he hears a bugle in the distance. Shedding the shackles of the field, the farmer dashes off to enlist, and is soon seen in uniform, holding a gun across a big smile as he enters a roaring field of battle, his honor and fate now restored far above those homely stands of corn.

Farmers in that era were not held in high professional regard. A young man stayed on the farm, or went back to the farm, only if he couldn’t get a decent job, such as fighting a tyrant in a foreign land, or qualifying for solid industrial employment in the nearest city – a job with regular hours, security, and a pension. I recall depictions of farmers on TV in the 1950s, characters named Amos, Rueben, and Silas, decked out in overalls, thumbs under the shoulder straps, chewing grass stems around oinking hogs. One would hardly be surprised if weeds sprouted from their ears. Soldiers, on the other hand, seemed to always get the girl.

By the time I turned 18 and bought my first farm, things had changed a bit. The Vietnam War faced all young men of my age, but it was different from WWII, and I don’t recall any enlistment promotionals touting warfare over crop production. In fact, a married farmer could get an exemption from the draft, though I don’t recall if marriage or agriculture was the determining factor.

By the time I was farming full time, few of my cohorts were tempted by the battlefield. Farmers had risen a few rungs on the ladders of society. They were seen less as hayseeds and more as upstanding Americans, so there clearly was less pressure to shed the shackles of the profession and do something else, let alone leave the farm for the military.

Farming requires peaceful commitment to a piece of ground by the farmer, backed by a basic level of stability in society. The vagaries of farming are sufficient without the added chaotic prospect of a field of crops turning into a field of battle.

By the time I retired from farming there was no draft, and farming had ramped up to a serious calling, on par with any profession. Absent a compelling threat comparable to that of WWII, a young person with a future in farming would be far less likely to choose a career in the military over a career managing crops.

Despite the apparent reversal of perception from the 1940s (when farmers apparently were glad to get out from behind the plow) to today, when anyone fortunate enough to own a plow and something to pull it with would think hard about leaving it to become a soldier, there remain three surprising links between war and agriculture.

1. The same nitrate that helps corn grow high as an elephant’s eye will also cause ordinance to do its job. And the same diesel fuel that powers a tractor will also yield glycerin that, when combined with nitrate can produce a crude nitroglycerin. The Oklahoma City bombing was done mostly with ingredients found on most U.S. farms.

Given that U.S. farmers command a comprehensive, diverse network of ingredients capable of making ordinance, it isn’t surprising that the Farm Bill was titled the Farm Security Act. Any invader who penetrated the U.S. coasts and tried to take over the greater Midwest would soon learn that farmers of that region comprise and control a massive, diffuse retaliatory network that belies the pastoral stereotype of small farming communities. Some conspiracy theorists claim this is by design. I conclude it is simply a curious accident.

2. It is a common myth that war controls population, but it simply does not. In the last 5,600 years, during which time we have reasonable access to records of human activity, there have been over 14,000 wars, not counting the thousands of incursions by one group against another that were too minor to be named. There hasn’t been a single generation of humans in the last five and half millennia to live their entire life without a war going on somewhere on Earth. Yet, in that same period, the human population has enjoyed an exponential increase, from about 15 million people in 5,500 BC to nearly seven billion by 2008 AD. Clearly, war has not been a deterrent to population growth.

In fact, over the last 5,600 years, the most dramatic population spikes have occurred immediately following major wars. Conclude what you might about the needs of either pillaging or returning warriors, but whatever the root cause, war has consistently stimulated human population growth. In turn, this has simulated advances and innovations in food production, both for the war effort and for the burgeoning human population that consistently follows the war.

The U.S. population, for example, increased over 36% after the Civil War, and the Industrial Revolution commenced, bringing the steam engine, refrigeration, and transportation systems into the food production chain in the next generation.

In the decade following W.W.II the U.S. population jumped by nearly 30 million, creating a huge demand for food. This, in fact, is what forged the connection between nitrate munitions and nitrate fertilizer. Prior to WWII, very little fertilizer was used in crop production. Farmers relied on crop rotation, fallow sequencing, inter-cropping legumes, and incorporation of animal manures to build fertility. After WWII, it is well documented that the same factories producing nitrate for munitions in the 1940s became fertilizer companies in the 1950s, and this led to an industrial food supply chain in the U.S. that effectively eliminated the “old” organic systems.

More recently, satellite technology from military spy systems is now employed by many farmers to guide and instruct tractors, spray rigs, and crop dusters via GPS linkages.

3. War is grisly, and no more so than in the way it has contributed to the Earth’s fertility, distributing iron (blood) and phosphorus (bones and teeth) over the land masses. On both the European and Asian continents it is estimated that much of the fertility in the parent soils is the result of dead human bodies. Graveyards being a relatively recent invention, human bodies were routinely dumped into trenches or left on the field of battle. The number of dead in Europe from millennia of battles prior to graveyards would cover the entire continent 150 bodies deep, while in the Middle East and Asia the dead from past wars would stand an estimated 320 deep.

In the U.S., the Civil War alone covered the East about six bodies deep, and contributed to the low pH, high iron, and high phosphorus content in Eastern soils.

In his book Terrible Love of War, James Hillman hypothesized in parallel with James Lovelock that Earth is a giant organism, Gaia, on which humans are no more than a tolerated symbiote. Gaia needs iron and phosphorus for survival, and human warfare has done a stellar job of distributing these nutrients over the land. This hypothesis leads to the conclusion that Gaia creates circumstances that insure humans will continue to fight a war at least once every generation. A sobering notion, but certainly supported by ground truth, particularly in light of the often flimsy rationales for most wars.

For millennia, farmers have left their fields of crops for fields of battle and have been perceived by their society as heroes for doing so. Whether it’s to slay a tyrant or a heretic, or to recover the honor of a maiden, or command crucial resources, or again to retaliate for an injustice or a slight, humans seem destined to put bodies in the ground. If Gaia is in charge, from every corpse sprouts a crop that helps feed a hungry and growing human population.

You’re in the army now,

Soon to be under the plow. . .

John Mattingly cultivates prose, among other things, and was most recently seen near Creede.