SPARC-ing Change on the Plains:
Soil, Health, and Sustainable Wheat

—Wylie Harris

Seventy-odd giant windmills slowly churn the sky from the ridges around Weatherford, turning the sun-baked air of the southern Plains into a clean, renewable source of electrical power.

However, more than just hot air is driving other currents of rural sustainability in western Oklahoma.

Larry Wright, the Resource Conservation and Development Coordinator for southwestern Oklahoma's Great Plains Area, is helping wheat growers chart a course through some of those currents.

With a group of farmers, university staff, and other agency personnel, Wright in 2004 formed the Southern Plains Agricultural Resources Coalition, or SPARC.

The group's aim, he says, is to "spark" sustainable change in the region's agriculture.
Wright began formulating the idea of SPARC as a kind of self-test as he completed a five-year area plan for the Great Plains RC&D.

To really make a difference, he thought, any conservation plan would have to affect a large portion of the land area. In western Oklahoma, that line of thought leads straight to wheat (Figure 1).

"So," Wright asked himself, "What can I do to add value to wheat?"

The Value of Ideas
Originally from Hinton, Wright is a career Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS, formerly the Soil Conservation Service) employee with 22 years under his belt as district conservationist for Weatherford. So he naturally thought of answers to that question in terms of conservation.

"This is catching the wave of the Conservation Security Program," he says, "The idea of rewarding farmers for stewardship."

SPARC's idea, he says, is to take wheat into the market not as a commodity, but as a finished product, produced in an environmentally friendly way.

"It's a new way of thinking," says Wright. "We need that in agriculture in order to be economically sustainable."

According to Wright, SPARC's economic rationale is similar to the one that planted windmills outside Weatherford. "We all want to do our part," he says. "People are willing to pay more for sustainability."

"Wind-generated electricity costs $5 more a month," Wright says. "Within the first 6 months, they had 8,000 people sign up."

To generate the same "green" consumer appeal for wheat, SPARC proposes to create a certified label for products made from wheat produced in accordance with its standards of sustainability.

To qualify for the label, producers must be certified by an independent third-party inspector. SPARC has negotiated an arrangement with the Portland, Oregon-based Food Alliance to conduct the inspections and certification.

By December 2005, according to Wright, ten Oklahoma wheat farmers have signed up and paid their SPARC membership fees. Later in the winter, SPARC elected its board of directors and officers.

It also drew 277 participants to a SPARC-sponsored no-till seminar in Hollis. Food Alliance certification visits may begin as soon as early spring of 2006.

Making the Grade
The label tells the consumer that the wheat in certified products was grown in a way that improves soil health and water quality, two of SPARC's priority resource concerns.

Criteria for certification are based on growers' use of practices that improve the soil conditioning index, such as minimal tillage, and maintaining soil surface cover in the form of crop residues or cover crops.

The Food Alliance certification criteria include four fixed standards that must be met by all certifying farms. These are: no genetically modified organisms, no use of synthetic hormones or feed additive antibiotics, no use of a prohibited list of highly toxic pesticides, and continual improvement in production and management practices.

In addition to these fixed criteria, there are other "scored standards," for which farmers receive points on a sliding scale, with a set minimum number of points required for certification. These include whole farm standards, such as soil and water conservation, reducing pesticides, safe and fair working conditions, and animal welfare.

Finally, there is a set of product-specific standards that must also be met to complete the certification process. For wheat, these include detailed evaluations of cover crop usage, seedbed preparation, grain storage, and several other practices.

The Dough in Wheat
As consumers opt for SPARC's certified, labeled wheat products, they will help the coalition realize its third priority research concern —that of improving local rural economies.

"We ask only the cost of production, plus a reasonable rate of return," Wright explains.

As part of that rate of return, the consumer pays a premium for the ecosystem services, such as soil and water conservation, provided by environmentally friendly wheat farming.

Here, too, Wright uses wind power as an analogy. "The payment from one of those windmills to the landowner is about $4,000 a year," he says.

With over seventy windmills in the area, most on land held by different owners, the economic returns are large and relatively well distributed.

For wheat, SPARC's scenario runs like this: Imagine that a regular loaf of bread costs $1.00, of which the wheat grower receives 3 cents. Now, say that a loaf of bread bearing the SPARC label retails for $1.05.

"If we can get the producer another 3 cents out of that extra nickel," Wright says, "We've doubled his income."

"Then," Wright continues, "what if a third —or half —or even all, of the wheat growers sign up? What has that done for the economy?"

SPARC is focusing first on wheat, Wright says, because the crop is such a major part of western Oklahoma's farm economy.

But once the system is in place, he points out, it can be expanded to other crops —cotton, beef, fruits and vegetables —as well as to other areas, both in Oklahoma and in neighboring states.

Wright emphasizes the market-oriented nature of SPARC's strategy, providing a product to satisfy consumers' expressed demand while using a price premium to persuade farmers to change their practices.

Contact:
Larry Wright, RC&D Coordinator
Great Plains Resource Conservation & Development
580-832-3661

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