CHAPTER 16
SOIL, WATER, BIODIVERSITY: WHY SHOULD WE CARE?
Our food doesn’t just magically show up in the grocery store; it emerges from a complex set of natural processes that we ignore at our peril. Unfortunately, we do ignore those natural cycles. Man conquering nature has always been our operating paradigm. We can plow the earth with machines, fertilize plants with nitrogen, kill weeds and pests with poisons, dominate nature, and use fossil fuels to supercharge the agricultural machine. It has worked for a while. Sort of. But along the way it has drained our natural bank account built up over millions of years—the soil, water, microbes, insects, and living systems that produce food.
We are in debt. Our natural capital is near exhaustion. Every five seconds a soccer field’s worth of soil erodes because of bad land management practices.1 At the current rate of soil erosion, we have only sixty harvests left before our soil is too depleted to grow food.2 Seventy-five percent of the world’s fresh water that is used by humans is used for intensive methods of crop and livestock production, depleting it faster than it is being replenished. Even industrial organic agriculture uses lots of water from deep aquifers and rivers. The water from these deep aquifers brings up salt and selenium. The salt damages the soil and the selenium kills birds. Most of that water cannot be stored in degraded soils, so it is wasted, running right past the roots of the plant. Nearly half of the sea-level rise since 1960 is due to irrigation water flowing straight past the crops.3 Pollinators, on which 75 percent of our agricultural production depends, are disappearing because of the pesticides, which also kill bees. Without this natural capital, no food. No food, no humans. There are very real solutions that can stop and reverse this trend—and all the side effects are good ones.
IT’S THE SOIL, STUPID!
We must treat the whole problem of health in soil, plant, animal and man as one great subject.
—SIR ALBERT HOWARD, SOIL AND HEALTH, 1947
Soil is the most ignored and most important solution to almost everything that’s wrong with our food system. In fact, could soil even be the solution to climate change? Let’s take a little science lesson.
I spent the summer of 1979 in the mountains of northern Vermont studying soil, taking courses in “biological agriculture,” or what we would now call regenerative agriculture. Probably not what my mother had in mind when she sent me to Cornell. But I was interested in natural systems, in growing food, in health and sustainability. In that idyllic summer, we made compost, built raised-bed gardens, planted marigolds to repel bad insects, and planted crops together that were mutually supportive, just as Native Americans grew corn, beans, and squash together. The beans provided natural nitrogen fertilizer and the squash, cover for the soil to retain water.
I read classic books on soil and agriculture including Soil and Health by Sir Albert Howard, the original tome on organic agriculture that implored us to work with natural systems rather than against them. The book was written in 1947. We are slow learners. But those lessons are now more important than ever. Understanding the problem of the health of soil, plants, animals, and humans is critical to our survival.
Soil is everywhere, but increasingly, our agricultural practices are turning our soil into dirt. Dirt is dead. Soil is alive. Plants thrive in soil, not dirt. Healthy soil rich in organic matter retains water, which reduces floods and the effects of droughts, puts carbon in the soil, which feeds all the microbial life that makes nutrients available to the plants (and to the humans who eat them), detoxifies pollutants, and more. Soil is rich in fertility, microbes, fungi, and nutrients. Dirt needs fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides, nutrients, and water to grow food. Soil doesn’t. Dirt causes climate change. Soil reverses it. The top meter of soil contains three times as much carbon as the entire atmosphere.4 Building healthy soil allows plants to put down deeper roots, pulling carbon from the air deep into the soil. The rich microbial life in healthy soil also helps keep the carbon in the soil, creating a virtuous cycle. Soil is our ace in the hole to reverse climate change, if we use it.
Healthy soils also provide healthy, nutrient-dense food. Our current plant breeding and loss of soil organic matter have produced plants lower in nutrients,5 higher in carbohydrates, and lower in protein. Research shows that by 2050, increasing CO2 levels and poor soil quality will worsen the nutrient composition of the food we grow, which could result in zinc deficiency for 175 million people, protein deficiency for 122 million, and iron deficiency in 1 billion.6 There is less calcium, magnesium, iron, and other minerals in food today compared to 100 years ago. Just as you can’t get blood from a stone, you can’t get nutrients from dirt.
Soil is a renewable resource we have squandered. We have lost 430 million hectares of arable land to soil erosion, which is one-third of the world’s available farmland. We have mined the land, turned it to dust, and lost the 60 to 80 feet of topsoil that existed in some areas of the Midwest. Through tillage and erosion, soils have lost 133 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere since we started farming, driving global warming.7
Across the globe, farmland becomes desert at alarming rates. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization says 12 million hectares of arable land (or about 23 hectares a minute), enough to grow 20 tons of grain, are lost to drought and desertification annually, which affects 1.5 billion people in more than 100 countries.8
According to President Obama’s 2016 initiative “The State and Future of U.S. Soils: Framework for a Federal Strategic Plan for Soil Science,” it is estimated that the United States will run out of soil by the end of this century.9 That’s a terrifying projection for a nation that is such an important exporter of grain and soybeans.
Experts say we have globally lost 50 to 70 percent of our topsoil. Soil degradation is caused primarily by
Livestock overgrazing (poor livestock management)
Industrialized agriculture
Deforestation
Urban industrialization
Overfertilizing
Monocrop agriculture
Tilling
Bad crop rotation
Bare fallows (leaving bare ground) and not using cover crops
In other words, industrial agriculture has strip-mined our rich organic soil. We ran mechanized plows through the soil for years, rupturing these biological and chemical cycles. Then we added chemicals and started killing off organisms. Big fertilizer conglomerates such as Yara, Mosaic, and Koch Fertilizer (yes, those Koch brothers) produce 20 million metric tons of fertilizer a year using fossil-fuel-intensive processes. When that fertilizer is applied to farms, the damage is wrought on the soil, and it weakens plants, pollutes water systems, and drives huge external costs, as we reviewed in Part 1. The bacteria in the soil convert the nitrogen fertilizer into huge amounts of nitrous oxide, which is released into the air, a greenhouse gas that has 300 times the heat-trapping potential of carbon dioxide.10 Adding nitrogen fertilizer to soil paradoxically makes the soil less fertile because it depletes the soil organic matter, which then results in the need for more fertilizer.11 Good for big fertilizer companies, bad for the soil, for us, and for the climate.
Halting land degradation has become an urgent global imperative.
There is a way to fix all of this. We have the technology, it’s low cost, it’s available globally, and it has been proven and tested (for billions of years). It is called photosynthesis, the magic cycle plants use to turn water and carbon dioxide (which they breathe from the air) into carbohydrates, which we eat (called “carbo” hydrates because they are built from carbon in the air), and that also feed the microbes in the soil, which in turn feed the plants nitrogen, phosphorus, and minerals. It’s a great barter system that makes the world go around, and it’s one of the foundations of regenerative agriculture.
On the Great Plains of North America, tens of millions of bison, elk, and deer used to feed on deep-rooted perennial grasses. As these bison moved through the landscape, their hooves pierced the soil and their waste nurtured the soil biology and their saliva increased the growth rate of grasses.12 Native Americans participated in this process by periodically burning the prairie to encourage new growth. The plants, in turn, bartered some of the carbohydrates they made through photosynthesis with soil microbiology to make minerals and nutrients in the soil available to the plants.
Regenerative agriculture aims to restore soil by farming with those same principles in mind. That means using no-till methods that don’t disturb the ground, cover crops that protect the soil, and crop rotations that keep pests and weeds under control. The use of livestock in managed holistic grazing plays a critical role in stimulating plant growth, root structures, and soil fertility by adding manure, saliva, and urine. Some estimates are that this practice can draw down enough carbon from the atmosphere to result in a 15 percent13 to 100 percent14 reduction in all carbon released since the industrial revolution (from all causes). That big range relies on different estimates on the scalability of soil carbon capture throughout the world’s varied ecosystems. Regardless, it’s a lot of carbon—1 trillion tons. Not bad for just soil. Experts suggest that this is the most important untapped, low-cost solution to reversing global warming.
Five billion acres of agricultural land have been degraded through industrial, chemical-intensive farming practices. According to UN climate scientists, if we spent $300 billion (the total global spending on military for sixty days, or less than the annual amount the United States spends on type 2 diabetes—$327 billion) on restoring 2.2 billion of the degraded acres through regenerative agriculture, we could stop the rise of greenhouse gas emissions. That would delay climate change by twenty years, providing more time to innovation climate solutions.15
The good news is that some big players in the food industry are recognizing this. The former vice chair of PepsiCo Mehmood Khan told me he was invited to speak at the USDA about regenerative agriculture. Big Food knows that if there is no soil and no water, they can’t make their products. Danone, Nestlé, and Kellogg’s are among nineteen food companies with revenues of $500 billion that formed a coalition called One Planet Business for Biodiversity, launched September 23, 2019, at the United Nations Climate Action Summit in New York to support regenerative agriculture, biodiversity, eliminating deforestation, and the restoration of ecosystems.16
The international initiative “4 per 1000,” launched in 2015 by Stéphane Le Foll, then French minister of agriculture, agri-food, and forestry, includes more than 300 partners (governments, NGOs, foundations, farmers, scientists, and industry). The goal is simple: to increase carbon in the soil by 0.4 percent (4 per 1000) every year by scaling regenerative practices to the more than 500 million farms and 1 billion farmers worldwide.
DIRT TO SOIL—FROM TRAGEDY TO TRIUMPH
Several farmers have shown that we can do better farming with cheaper production, better-quality food, fewer or no chemical inputs, more yields and more profits to the farmer and lower costs to the consumer. Gabe Brown, a North Dakota farmer trained in land-grant colleges (funded in part by Big Ag) on the merits of industrial agriculture, assiduously applied these conventional methods to his 5,000-acre farm. After four seasons of crop failure from destructive hail, storms, and heat waves, he was about to go bankrupt.
Brown then discovered the principles of regenerative agriculture, and now 15 years later he has created a thriving, highly profitable, highly diversified carbon farm that lets nature do the work. Brown’s farm has created 29 inches of new topsoil, and his farm is healthier, more productive, and far more profitable than his neighbors’ farms. He says that his soil used to hold only half an inch of rain per hour; now it can hold 8 inches. Rather than buying fertilizer, by planting nitrogen-fixing plants and grazing cattle on those plants, which put down more nitrogen into the soil with manure and urine, Brown said he actually makes money from his “fertilizer,” instead of having to buy it. He produces 20 percent more food than his neighbors on the same land and makes up to twenty times more money from his diversified regenerative farm. Now he travels the country teaching other farmers the false promise of industrial farming and the true power of regenerative agriculture to help farmer, nature, and eater.
Allen Williams, PhD, a sixth-generation Mississippi farmer, bought a depleted 100-year-old cotton plantation, which had been overgrazed by cattle, then turned into hunting grounds, then sold for pennies to Williams because there was no life on the land. In five years, he created 5 inches of soil with regenerative agriculture. He has taught more than 4,000 farmers how to transition their farms and ranches. He is part of a group of ranchers and farmers known as the Soil Carbon Cowboys.17 They make more money with less effort and time and fewer inputs, and in tougher conditions, and are more resistant to climate stress than conventional farmers.
WATER: ARE WE RUNNING OUT?
Soil loss is one of the many crises on the planet. We can add to that the depletion of the world’s freshwater supplies. Seventy percent of human use of fresh water (which is only 5 percent of all water on the planet) is used to grow food, much of it to feed animals for human consumption on factory farms, not rangelands. It is also used heavily in crops like almonds and cotton. The World Economic Forum declared water scarcity the fourth-biggest global threat right after weapons of mass destruction, climate change, and natural disasters (which are linked).18 Time to binge-watch reruns of Game of Thrones and forget about it all?
Remarkably, as I have mapped out in Food Fix, these issues are connected by food, and they are fixable.
Water is something most of us take for granted. Turn on the tap; buy a case of bottled water; take long, hot showers. Sadly, water is not so plentiful in much of the world. Cape Town, South Africa, recently almost completely ran out of water.19 Californians couldn’t water their lawns and were forced to limit water use because of droughts. About 2 billion people face water scarcity one month a year; half a billion face it all year round. Half of all major cities experience water scarcity.20
Sucking the Earth Dry
Groundwater is drawn out from our aquifers for irrigation of agriculture faster than it can be replenished. Water overdraw from irrigated agriculture is expected to increase with growing populations. Overuse (such as through pumping for irrigation or fracking) can mean that sources that were previously renewable get so low that they can’t recover. For instance, Saudi Arabia decided it wanted to grow its own food and used its ancient fossil aquifers. They were successful for five years, until all their water ran out.21 Forever. Closer to home, the 174,000-square-mile Ogallala Aquifer lies underneath the Great Plains and irrigates America’s breadbasket. It is also being pumped dry. We are currently taking out 1.3 trillion gallons a year more than can be replenished by rainfall.
Fortunately, innovations in farming and regenerative agriculture build soil, which acts as a sponge for rain, reducing the need for irrigation. Some farmers are changing their practices. Kansas farmer Rodger Funk now farms without groundwater. Today he pumps almost no water on his 6,000 acres, which are planted largely with wheat and grain sorghum. “We decided to go dryland,” he says.22 “Dryland” means growing crops without irrigation. Instead of plowing his fields after harvest, he leaves the stubble in the ground and plants a new crop in the residue. Leaving the roots and stems intact not only reduces soil erosion but also decreases evaporation and catches more blowing snow than bare ground. Leaving crop residue in the field can reduce moisture loss by the equivalent of an inch or more of rainfall annually, scientists say.23 Funk aims to capture every bit of the 18 inches of precipitation that fall on southwestern Kansas. “Got to,” Funk says. “It’s all we’ve got around here.”
Overflowing Manure Lagoons, Poisoned Aquifers, and Dead Zones
In addition to using up valuable water resources, agriculture can also pollute the water it doesn’t use. Industrial livestock farming manages to do both.
It is rightly said that it takes about 1,800 gallons of water to produce a pound of meat. But all water is not created equal. In fact, water in agriculture comes in three shades: green, blue, and gray. Pasture-raised beef uses mostly green water that comes from rain falling on grasslands that otherwise wouldn’t be converted into food. Feedlot-finished cattle (currently 95 percent of all beef cattle) use significantly more blue water (irrigation from groundwater sources, rivers, or lakes) than grass-finished cattle, but still most of the water is green water. Gray water is polluted water that comes from giant toxic manure lagoons full of antibiotics, hormones, pesticides, heavy metals, nitrogen, and toxic bacteria, which seeps into the ground, polluting aquifers and surface water and creating big dead zones in rivers, lakes, and oceans.
Confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs) are industrial farms where thousands of animals are crowded into massive barns and fed cheap grains and soy. The manure and urine from these barns are stored in nearby lagoons that can leak into waterways and aquifers and create air pollution for people who live nearby. The massive corn and soy operations that provide feed for CAFOs, ethanol, plant oils, and other uses in a biobased economy deplete our water reserves through irrigation and pollute our water supplies.
In 2018, Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency rolled back regulations, deprioritizing water-quality enforcement around CAFOs.26 Then Hurricane Florence hit, dumping 9 trillion gallons of water on North Carolina in four days. CAFO lagoons overflowed with waste containing E. coli, salmonella, Cryptosporidium, and other harmful bacteria into surrounding rivers and streams. The people who live in this area now face contamination of the wells they rely on for their daily drinking water.27
The overuse of pesticides and fertilizers also pollutes our water. Conventional farmers use large amounts of nitrogen fertilizer to grow large crop yields, and that fertilizer runs off fields and into the groundwater, rivers, lakes, and ocean. It destroys aquatic life in places like the Gulf of Mexico, Utah Lake, Lake Erie, and 400 other dead zones around the world.28 If those chemicals are killing fish and plants, then what are they doing to us through the food we eat?
Much of the drinking water in America is contaminated.29 Toxins, including pesticides, herbicides like glyphosate, plastics, prescription medicines, nitrates, and more, are in our water supply. Many of these toxins cause cancer, birth defects, cardiovascular issues, and reproductive problems, as well as other harmful effects. The food industry has a solution, though—bottled water! Not so fast. Water from plastic bottles contains phthalates or bisphenol A (BPA), which are also toxic. Purchasing bottled water puts a huge burden on our environment. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch (of plastic) between Hawaii and California is 1.6 million square kilometers (twice the size of Texas) and contains 1.8 trillion pieces, or 79 million tons, of plastic.30 We need clean public water for everyone. To best protect ourselves, we should drink filtered water. We need better public water safety and infrastructure.
Innovation in farming and regenerative agriculture and in water conservation, repurposing of gray water (wastewater), better stormwater management, and other innovations all can help avert a water crisis. But CAFOs and traditional farming techniques are a significant part of the problem and the best targets to address.
THE LOSS OF BIODIVERSITY: WHY SHOULD YOU CARE?
If the bee disappeared off the face of the Earth, man would only have four years left to live.
—ALBERT EINSTEIN
In recent books like Growing a Revolution by David Montgomery and Kiss the Ground by Josh Tickell, and films like The Biggest Little Farm, the importance of rebuilding soil is being shared with new audiences. What we are learning is the crucial biological elements of soil health: the critters living there. These critters include the familiar earthworm as well as ones that may be new to you: arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, soil bacteria, protozoa, nematodes, and arthropods. Together they form complex ecosystems that build soil structure, prevent erosion, and absorb water and carbon from the atmosphere. Living creatures are central to decomposition, nutrient cycling, and plant growth. Working together, these ecosystems can nurture crops and protect them from pests and diseases. The soil is home to a large proportion of the world’s genetic biodiversity. There are more microbes in a handful of soil than all the humans that ever lived. The soil food web is the whole life cycle of the Earth. When soil is depleted, small insects die, then larger insects that eat the small ones die, and then the birds, small mammals, and amphibians that eat the insects die, which is why these populations are crashing around the world.
In 2019, the UN Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) released the most comprehensive report of biodiversity to date, estimating that 1 million species are on the verge of extinction because of human activity. That includes 40 percent of amphibian species, 33 percent of coral reefs, and 10 percent of insects.31 According to the Living Planet Index, we have seen a 60 percent decline in species since 1970.32
Why should you care? Aside from just the idea of destroying the natural world, what does it really matter if we lose species, insects, forests, plants, and microbes and damage oceans and kill coral reefs? It matters because biodiversity is essential to grow nutrient-dense (or any) food, to have coral reefs that support our fisheries, to protect our coastlines and control floods, and to have fresh drinking water filtered by wetlands, medicines from wild plants, and even building materials and breathable air. Economists estimate that these ecosystems provide services worth $125 trillion a year in benefit to humanity (the total global GDP is $80 trillion).33 In the end, saving nature is not about saving it for its own sake (which should be enough), but about saving it for our sake.
According to the UN report on biodiversity, “The health of ecosystems on which we and all other species depend is deteriorating more rapidly than ever. We are eroding the very foundations of our economies, livelihoods, food security, health and quality of life worldwide,” said IPBES chair Sir Robert Watson. “The Report also tells us that it is not too late to make a difference, but only if we start now at every level from local to global. Through ‘transformative change,’ nature can still be conserved, restored and used sustainably—this is also key to meeting most other global goals.”34
We are witnessing massive insect population collapses due to pesticides and land use changes such as converting land into monocrop agriculture.35 But it is not just soy fields and cornfields that are the problem. Massive almond orchards in California require “slave” bees to be shipped in from around the world, and local bee populations are dying because once the almonds are pollinated, there is no other food to eat.36 We have seen a 75 percent decline over 30 years in flying insect biomass.37 Just the decline in pollinators is putting $577 billion of food crops at risk. No pollinators, nearly no food. Insects are crucial to the web of life. Their demise ripples up the food chain; bird populations are declining because they have less food. It also has huge economic implications for us. Bees, butterflies, and other insect pollinators contribute $29 billion to US farm income.38 There is no doubt that our well-being is interconnected with biodiversity on farmland.
Many causes contribute to the biodiversity loss: climate change, pollution, invasive species, human encroachment on natural habitats, and excessive harvesting through fishing, hunting, and poaching. However, regenerative agricultural practices at scale can stop the destruction. This is not some hippie fad, but the position of the UN, the European Union, and every major scientific and governmental assessment of our current state of affairs.
FOOD FIX: REGENERATIVE AGRICULTURE—WHAT IS IT?
There are so many labels for our food it’s a bit overwhelming and confusing: factory-farmed, grass-fed, organic, sustainable, pasture-raised, and now regenerative. This simple concept is relatively new but is based on ancient principles to restore and enhance natural systems. While it can be organic (and ideally should be), it goes beyond organic by laying out the principles for building soil, enhancing biodiversity, and reducing outside inputs. Large-scale organic farms can use methods that, while better than conventional agriculture, still can deplete soil, require extensive inputs, and drain water resources. Michael Pollan refers to this as “industrial organic” in his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Even small organic farms that don’t use regenerative practices can contribute to the problem through tillage and leaving land bare instead of planting cover crops to protect the soil and build organic matter.
Regenerative agriculture on farms, grasslands, and rangelands is the most powerful force for fixing much of what’s wrong with agriculture while producing more and better food. And the practice can be adapted across diverse and global environments. These are the foundational principles:
Regenerative agriculture is a system of farming principles and practices that increases biodiversity, enriches soils, improves watersheds, and enhances ecosystem services.
Regenerative agriculture aims to capture carbon in soil and aboveground biomass, reversing current global trends of atmospheric accumulation.
It offers increased yields, more nutrient-dense foods, resilience to climate instability, and improved health and vitality for farming and ranching communities and consumers.
The system draws from decades of scientific and applied research by the global communities of organic farming, agroecology, holistic management, and agroforestry.
We need to quickly and radically change how we grow food and change the food we eat. But our systems and policies make it hard for farmers who want to do the right thing. Farmers growing healthy food, using sustainable, organic, or regenerative methods, often impoverish themselves to grow food for the rich, while conventional corporate farmers supported by our government get rich growing food for the poor. This must change and is changing.
The good news: It turns out that regenerative agriculture is more profitable (for farmers, not Big Ag or Big Food) and produces higher yields and better-quality food, even when used to grow commodity crops (soy, corn, wheat), all while reversing climate change, conserving water, and increasing biodiversity!39
There are extraordinary examples of conventional farmers who turned to regenerative agriculture to save their farms after hail and drought destroyed them and now have more productive and profitable farms than their conventional-farming neighbors. There are “soil farmers” like Joel Salatin from Polyface Farm, who use animals as a method for building soil, increasing productivity and the nutrient density of food. Their mission statement is to “develop environmentally, economically, and emotionally enhancing agricultural prototypes and facilitate their duplication throughout the world.” They say they are in the redemption business, healing land, food, economy, and the culture. They are grass and soil farmers. The amazing-quality food created is a natural by-product of a soil farm!
Three longtime farmers—Dave Brandt, Gabe Brown, and Allen Williams—are teaming up with the government’s Natural Resources Conservation Service soil champion Ray Archuleta to help farmers and ranchers across the world apply soil-health-focused, regenerative agriculture systems.40
Their consulting focuses on ecological principles that can be applied practically and profitably in any farming operation:
Limiting the amount of soil disturbance, preferably using no-till methods. Tilling turns over soil, disturbs root structures, and leads to soil erosion and loss. A number of effective alternatives to digging up the soil, such as seed drills or strip-till plows, minimize soil disturbance.
Leaving no bare soil. This means leaving some plant material, such as roots and stalks, on top of the soil or planting cover crops during fallow periods, which help reduce soil and water loss and increase soil organic matter, soil biodiversity, and nutrient content.
Maintaining diversity in what is planted in the fields. Rotating between crops prevents diseases and pests. In fact, regenerative farms have far fewer invasive insect pests than conventional farms that use insecticides. Using diverse cover crops can help break up soil compaction and bring nutrients like nitrogen into the soil.
Integrating livestock into the farming operation. Cycling animals through the land means that their manure, urine, and saliva fertilize the soil, building soil the fastest. This must be done correctly by moving a diversity of animals around the farm ecosystem. If it’s done incorrectly, overgrazing can harm the farm. There is no regenerative agriculture without animals as part of the ecological cycle.
FOOD FIX: THE GUATEMALAN AND THE COWBOYS—FOREST-FED CHICKENS!
In a room full of cowboy hats, Regi Haslett-Marroquin cuts a contrasting figure. As the native Guatemalan takes the stage to address the hundreds of farmers and ranchers who have gathered in Albuquerque, New Mexico, for the 2018 Regenerate conference, his humble brilliance electrifies the room. “We are not food producers,” he says, softly smiling at his paradoxical challenge. “We are energy managers.”
Regi is one of the architects of the Main Street Project (MSP), a poultry-centered regenerative agroforestry system that aims to equip farmers to solve our nation’s food crisis. It’s not enough to just blame Big Ag, he says; we need to create new ways of thinking and doing when it comes to food production.
MSP starts with a regenerative farming model that is built not on a nearsighted drive toward maximum profit, but on a triple bottom line. Agriculture must be ecologically, economically, and socially viable.
Regi says their methods are informed by indigenous knowledge, supplemented by farmers’ own experiential learning, and validated by scientific testing. When he tells the story of chicken, he speaks of their origin as jungle fowl, living under the canopies of forests. This origin is a long way from the cages of today’s factory farms. Regi and MSP are designing a system that mimics this origin by raising chickens in food forests that produce the food sources that the chickens eat. MSP’s free-range poultry are raised in paddocks planted with a “stacking function” combination. This type of farming is called “silvopasture,” or raising animals in forests or trees. Hazelnut trees provide shade, food for the chickens, and an additional source of income from selling the nuts. And the trees protect the chickens from aerial predators such as hawks. Cover crops like legumes, along with the manure from the chickens, help to put nitrogen into the soil. A variety of grains grown on-site provide more chicken feed, which reduces the amount of money farmers have to spend on outside feed sources. The chickens also eat tons of insects. The farm is built as a living ecosystem, and Regi jokes that it’s easier to work with nature rather than fight it.
With their quick growth, chickens, whether for meat or eggs, provide a positive revenue stream at a low cost of entry. Think of this type of farming as a mutual fund versus an individual stock. There are multiple crops, livestock, and multiple streams of revenue, creating a healthier farm and more stable economics for the farmers. Chickens are at the center of MSP’s system because they work so well with the crops, farmers, and environment. They are a “one-stop weed-eating, bug-killing, soil-enhancing replacement for the counter-productive synthetic pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers destroying conventional farms and their communities.”41 This type of agriculture—diversified, intensive, integrating animals, trees, and plants in a natural ecological restorative cycle—is resilient and low impact, protects and builds soils, conserves water, and draws down carbon from the atmosphere, all while producing healthy, nutrient-dense food.
This is quite a contrast to the factory-farmed horror that is the majority of American chicken production: massive buildings where thousands of chickens are crammed into cages, are fed imported grain and antibiotics, and pollute the environment. Tyson Foods dumped 104 million pounds of pollutants into waterways, more than Exxon, and is the second-biggest industrial polluter after Big Steel.42 Which chicken would you prefer to feed your family? The antibiotic- and arsenic-laced industrial chickens? Eggs that are pale yellow, devoid of nutrients? Or forest- and bug-fed chickens, and eggs with deep orange yolks dense in phytochemicals and nutrients?
MSP helps farmers incubate their own enterprises with a goal of developing regional food systems. They are building a poultry-production system that can also help immigrant communities move from laboring in an exploitative system to owning a small business. At the same time, the community benefits from the increased access to local, healthy food and the economic boost of thriving local markets. After years proving their concept, MSP is expanding from their central farm into a regional cluster of farms in southeast Minnesota. Their blueprint is also being applied to partner farms in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and South Dakota. Everybody wins when the goal is regenerating human and environmental health rather than simply extracting a profit at any cost. If the true costs of food production were included in the price, these methods would provide much cheaper food.
Regi’s story is one thread in an expanding tapestry of regenerative agricultural innovation that is occurring across the world. Efforts are underway to convert millions of acres of land to these types of integrated regenerative farms and ranches. While this innovation has developed on the margins, it’s making its way to the mainstream. General Mills, one of the nation’s largest food companies, has pledged to “advance regenerative agricultural practices” on 1 million acres of farmland by 2030.43 That’s a huge step in the right direction. Other companies such as Danone and Nestlé are also committing to shift their supply chain to regenerative agriculture. Purdue Farms has also responded to consumer demand by removing all antibiotics from their chicken farms, and shifting toward more organic, regenerative, and pasture-raised animal farming.
OTHER INNOVATORS
Other business start-ups are increasingly focused on regenerative agriculture, not only because it is the right thing to do, but because it is more profitable. Investors are getting in on the action.
Big start-ups like Pivot Bio (supported by investors such as Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branson) and Joyn Bio (supported by Bayer) are solving the nitrogen problem using natural principles such as applying nitrogen-fixing bacteria to seeds, which eliminates the need for fertilizer. Some suggest, however, that this is just another way for big companies to control seeds with patents and intellectual property protections. And there are other ways to do this with natural biostimulants, which are biological or biologically derived fertilizer additives, and similar products that are used in crop production to enhance plant growth, health, and productivity. Bio-Integrity Growers farm in Australia, for example, uses biostimulants.44
One investment fund, Farmland LP, buys conventional commodity-farmed land and converts it to regenerative agriculture, turning conventional farms with profits in the single digits into regeneratively farmed land with profits of 40 to 50 percent, while increasing productivity, biodiversity, resiliency, soil carbon, and water conservation, and reducing pollution and agrochemical inputs. These are called ecosystem services. Transitioning farms to regenerative agriculture with their first fund produced a 67 percent return and $21.4 million in benefits to the environment and local communities, while those same farms continuing business as usual would have caused $8.5 million in harm to the environment.45 It takes time to transition farms from conventional—three to five years—but once the transformation is complete, a regenerative farm outperforms a conventional one in every metric.
Exciting innovations in technology (like using bacteria to fertilize plants) and global recognition of the need to reverse the harm of our agricultural practices are cause for hope.
Leading groups like the Carbon Underground are working with big businesses like Danone, governments, and grassroots groups globally to educate and support them to transform harmful systems of food production into healing systems.
A large study of 163 million farms using regenerative or sustainable practices shows that they are actually more productive than agrochemical-dependent farming.46 So much for Big Ag needing to feed the world. It’s propaganda. And Big Ag’s front groups, like CropLife, and initiatives like “Climate Smart Agriculture” seek to confuse policy makers and consumers. It sounds good, but think of it like “clean coal.”
Join the Carbon Underground’s campaign to Adopt-a-Meter of soil for $5, which will go toward initiatives that support regenerative agriculture (https://thecarbonunderground.org/adopt-meter/).
The Soil Carbon Initiative has developed metrics that can be used to measure the performance of every part of the food chain and its contribution to soil health. Imagine if we as consumers could have front-of-packaging labels that provided transparency that showed how our food affects soil health and its impact on sequestering carbon, reversing climate change, improving biodiversity, and protecting our water resources. Wouldn’t that be nice to know? This initiative can push farmers and food companies to shift their practices toward regenerative agriculture.
FOOD FIX: THE ROLE OF GOVERNMENT AND POLICY MAKERS
As individuals we can advocate for change, drive changes in the marketplace, hold our representatives accountable, elect members with values we share, and engage in individual choices that don’t contribute to the problems we face. “The only remedy for the threats we face at the scale at which they confront us is massive political and economic change,” Dr. Daniel Aldana Cohen, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, says. “By far the most meaningful thing an individual person can do is join a social, political, or cultural movement aimed at transforming our political economy. No individual’s consumer choices and no group’s consumer choices are significant in the absence [of] structural change.”47
Here are key policy levers that can move us to a saner approach to our agriculture and food system. In the United States these reforms must happen across agencies, but the most important instrument of change is the USDA’s Farm Bill. Much more has been mapped out in the reports I have mentioned in this chapter, among others.
1. Establish a national food policy and a national food policy advisor48 and reinvent the USDA as the US Department of Food, Health, and Well-Being to align our agricultural and food policies with economic and public health goals, coordinating policy across all agencies that touch any aspect of our food system, from seed to fork to landfill. Much can be done with regulation, executive action, and enforcing existing laws, even in the absence of legislative changes (which are desperately needed). We need to stop incentives for growing the wrong stuff, which makes us sick and poisons the planet, and support growth of food that focuses on quality of calories rather than quantity.
2. Re-solarize agricultural production. Shift the energy input to farms from fossil fuels to the solar inputs of photosynthesis, which will improve our diets and reverse climate change.
3. Increase publicly funded research on sustainable, regenerative agriculture to improve practices, build soil, determine best regional practices, and address water issues. Much research is done through publicly funded land-grant agricultural colleges, which now receive funding from Big Ag, helping them generate private profits from public investment. That needs to stop. Future studies should focus on evaluating reductions in concentrations of toxic runoff such as nitrogen, phosphate, and organic carbon from integrated crop and livestock systems.49
4. Start a Farmers Corps to enlist a new generation of farmers in regenerative agriculture and help them overcome the financial and education barriers to joining our food production system. Provide training and funding to access land and resources for converting conventional farms to regenerative farms. Think of it as a Peace Corps for regenerative agriculture.
5. Create incentives and support for regenerative agriculture through the USDA (and global agriculture ministries and departments) including financial support for farmers to transition from industrial, chemical-intense agriculture and to integrate animals into farm ecosystems. New Zealand ended all agricultural subsidies, and as a result, its farms are more diverse, productive, and profitable.50 Support for regenerative agriculture will increase productivity, reduce soil and water loss, reduce fertilizer, pesticide, herbicide, and antibiotic use, and promote the production of healthier foods and the creation of healthier ecosystems. Kiss the Ground is an education and advocacy nonprofit advancing initiatives across four distinct programs: advocacy, farmland, education, and media. One of their programs provides training and support for farmers to transition to regenerative agriculture. I was able to connect Kiss the Ground with a venture philanthropist who could provide up to $1 billion in funding for farmers to transition to regenerative agriculture.
6. End the ethanol mandate. The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 mandated that US farms grow corn for ethanol to decrease reliance on foreign energy sources. This led to 33 million acres producing 40 percent of our corn crops being used for ethanol.51 It takes more energy to produce ethanol (from all the fossil-fuel inputs needed to grow corn from fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides, etc.) than the energy that is provided by the ethanol, according to Cornell scientist David Pimental.52 Environmentalists and oil companies both oppose the ethanol mandate. Agricultural policies could be implemented that simultaneously protect the farmer who grows the corn and convert those 33 million acres to regenerative agriculture, creating more and better food, restoring ecosystems, and helping reverse climate change.
7. Create a safety net of credit and risk management tools for farmers who practice sustainable and regenerative agriculture, not just for commodity farmers who produce corn and soy. The farmers are pawns in the big game of agribusiness and food conglomerates. If we reduce or eliminate subsidies for commodity crops, it won’t be enough to protect farmers. The subsidies encourage overproduction of corn, soy, and wheat, leading to low prices, which hurt farmers. The real beneficiaries of the subsidies are the factory farms, food processors (like Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland), manufacturers, and meat-packers that buy the cheap raw materials from the farmers. Rather than taxpayers helping Big Food and Big Ag buy cheap food, farmers should be protected, and industry should pay the true cost of the food. I once asked the vice chair of PepsiCo why the company uses high-fructose corn syrup in their beverages. “Mark,” he told me, “it’s because the government makes it too cheap for us not to.”
8. Pay for ecosystem services.53 Many countries have created systems to support farmers and corporations who restore ecosystems through reforestation, soil restoration, better water management practices, and improvements in biodiversity. Costa Rica has been a pioneer in this. Payment for ecosystem services (PES) incentivizes farmers and corporations to solve the problem of climate change, water shortages, biodiversity loss, and soil degradation rather than contribute to it.
9. Consider a “nitrogen tax” levied on fertilizer companies to account for the greenhouse gases and the destruction of our soils, waterways, and fisheries and provide funds for the cleanup of our lakes, rivers, and oceans and fund transition to regenerative practices. Shouldn’t big fertilizer companies be accountable for the harm they cause?
10. Implement mandatory municipal and institutional (and even personal) composting and provide the compost to farmers and ranchers.
11. Have Congress fund, and the USDA implement, programs that help farmers grow more fruits and vegetables, or actual food. Support the development of “specialty crops” such as fruits and vegetables, whole grains, beans, nuts, and seeds. This could create 189,000 new jobs and $9.5 billion in new revenue for healthy foods.54
12. End penalties for farmers who receive crop insurance so they can create diverse farms that include fruits and vegetables. Research has shown that if farmers in six midwestern states shifted some of their cropland to fruits and vegetables it would create 6,724 new jobs and $336 million in additional income.55
13. Include environmental and sustainability guidelines in the US Dietary Guidelines. The 2015 scientific advisory group recommended including this in the guidelines, but the politicians took it out under pressure from Big Ag and Big Food.
14. Ensure that the next farm bill helps break up monopolies and addresses consolidation of seed companies, seed patents, grain trading, animal feeding, meatpacking, agrochemical companies, and supermarkets.56 This will create a fairer and more sustainable marketplace. Antitrust legislation would break up these monopolies, encouraging open access to and use of seeds, supporting local farming systems, and increasing the diversity of our food by supporting diverse seed libraries. Remember that 75 percent of our food comes from just twelve plants (all controlled by Big Ag and chemical companies) and 60 percent comes just from rice, corn, and wheat. This is not good for humans or the planet.
We need to enforce and strengthen antitrust laws to establish fair and functioning markets by breaking up the massive consolidation in the seed, agricultural chemical, fertilizer, and food industries. There is enormous control of the food system by a few dozen companies across these sectors, with very little oversight, which prevents fair competition in the marketplace. They control what is grown, how it is grown, what seeds and chemicals are used, what’s manufactured, and even what ends up where on the grocery store shelves. The first antitrust laws were established to break up the railroad, oil, and steel conglomerates in the 1890s. Senator John Sherman, author of the first antitrust law, said, “If we will not endure a king as a political power we should not endure a king over the production, transportation, and sale of any of the necessaries of life.” These laws were established to protect consumers, ensure fair competition, and rebuild the infrastructure to link farmers to eaters in their region. The harm done by today’s monopolization of the food industry is far greater than any impact of the railroad, oil, and steel industries 100 years ago. Yet the laws are not enforced.
15. Build local and regional capacity to transition the food system from extractive agriculture to regenerative agriculture. While it could take years for land reform and a new farm bill to go into effect, consumers, farmers, and state governments can still do plenty to stem the tide of the environmental fallout and build better farming and better food. As you’ll see in the next chapter, regenerative agriculture is absolutely essential. And it will take more than farmers to make that transformation.
16. Align all agricultural and public health policies by providing incentives for purchasing healthy foods and limiting harmful foods in all federal, state, and local programs.
17. Support urban agriculture and vertical farming to both improve food access and food quality and revive impoverished urban communities. A real food fix will align agriculture with nourishing people, repairing our environment, stabilizing our climate, and taking hidden costs out of the system. This alignment is one of the most important challenges of our lifetime.
18. Create federal, state, and local food procurement standards and practices to ensure that tax dollars are spent only on health-promoting foods. This initiative could be modeled after the Good Food Purchasing Program, whose mission is to transform “the way public institutions purchase food by creating a transparent and equitable food system built on five core values: local economies, health, valued workforce, animal welfare, and environmental sustainability. The Center for Good Food Purchasing provides a comprehensive set of tools, technical support, and verification system to assist institutions in meeting their Program goals and commitments” (www.goodfoodpurchasingprogram.org). This should also apply to public hospitals and health care institutions with any government funding (which essentially includes every health care institution that receives money from Medicare or Medicaid). And of course, it must apply to all schools and universities with government funding, the military, prisons, universities, community colleges, day care centers, government offices, and any other government organization or organization that receives government funds.
FOOD FIX: GRASSROOTS AND CITIZEN ACTION
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world: indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.
—MARGARET MEAD (ATTRIBUTED)
If we’re not farmers or policy makers, or don’t run a Big Ag or Big Food company, can we influence change in agriculture and our food system? Here’s the truth: The deck is stacked against us by the corporate control of government.
But that doesn’t mean our actions, our voices, and our votes don’t matter. They do. Change happens from the margins to the center. Did Harriet Tubman believe that ferrying a few slaves to freedom was fruitless? Did Emma Goldman believe there was no point marching because the Equal Rights Amendment would not pass even decades after women got the right to vote? They were radicals, on the sidelines, but their voices and actions carried, inspired, and changed an entire entrenched agriculture system based on slavery and delivered women from second-class citizenship.
Your daily food choices absolutely matter, and we all must work together to make agriculture work for producers, consumers, animals, and the land that grows everything we eat.
Here’s a list, by no means exhaustive, of what you can do to be part of the solution.
1. Look for the regenerative organic certified label. In 2019, a coalition of groups launched a pilot program to develop Regenerative Organic Certification (ROC).57 These guidelines should seem self-evident but are not; they are aspirational. ROC is a “beyond organic” certification that involves three areas: soil health, animal welfare, and social fairness.
Learn more about what brands are certified at regenorganic.org/pilot/. It’s a start and creates awareness of issues that matter.
2. Join a community-supported agriculture (CSA) program in your area for local organic produce. Go to www.localharvest.org to find one in your area. They will deliver a box of organic vegetables every week at low prices. Get a cow share from a regenerative farm. For example, you can get grass-fed meat for an average of $8 a pound from Mariposa Ranch58 and other regenerative farms and ranches across the country. That’s $2 for a 4-ounce serving or about half the price of a Big Mac. Certainly, this is doable for most families.
3. Shop at farmers’ markets. The popularity of farmers’ markets is growing, and they support local food systems. While the impact may be small, it provides a foothold into innovations in agriculture that eventually will spread.
4. Start a home garden (even a windowsill of herbs is great). Or reserve a plot in a local community garden. Turn your lawn into an edible garden or orchard. Plant fruit trees and avoid the use of glyphosate herbicides like Roundup and pesticides.
5. Create a community garden. Do it with your church, school, or company or as a family project. Even the CDC determined that community gardens can help rebuild broken communities and reduce violence in urban areas.59
6. Educate yourself and your community about regenerative agriculture. Films like Kiss the Ground and The Biggest Little Farm are a good start. Check out the Carbon Underground to learn more.60 Take a tour of a regenerative farm to see how it all works.
7. Change your banking and investment strategy to support regenerative and sustainable business solutions. Check out Good Money digital banking (www.goodmoney.com) to learn more about how to put your money in a banking system that aligns with your values. Seek out other social investment companies and options. Most big investment firms now offer this. The Jeremy Coller Foundation in the United Kingdom aggregated institutional investors with $12 trillion in assets and got them to agree to change their investment policies to end factory farming of animals.61 Their first step was to get the largest twenty fast-food companies to agree to end the use of antibiotics in animal feed by a certain date. They simply told those companies they would divest all their investments if they didn’t do what they asked. Who knows? Their next target may be to force Big Food to source from regenerative agriculture. That would be a game changer. Not all of us have that power, but all our little choices matter.
8. Avoid GMO foods as much as possible. Everyone can do this to some degree. In Chapter 6, I mentioned buying non-GMO foods as a way to support grassroots efforts to support non-GMO labeling, but it’s also a way to support better agricultural practices through your food choices and avoid potential health issues from the pesticides and herbicides like glyphosate used on GMO foods. You may want to check your urine levels of glyphosate. One test is offered by Great Plains Laboratory; ask your health care provider to order one for you.
9. Vote with your vote. The truth is that if we had an active voting citizenship, much could change. Only 55 percent of Americans vote in presidential elections, and even fewer do in midterm elections, while an average of 70 percent vote in most other democracies.62 The Food Policy Action network created “An Eater’s Guide to Congress” scorecard,63 rating each member on how they vote on food and agriculture policies. In the 2018 election, two congressmen with dismal scores on food policy were defeated by a targeted social media campaign focused on low-turnout voters.
These are just a few ways to push the rock up the hill. Buying local, organic, and regenerative food is a start. Consider joining or starting a food policy council, through which local people can educate one another and advocate for better food policies.64 Petition anchor institutions like hospitals and schools to buy locally sourced, regenerative food.65 Support farmworkers and the organizations, such as the HEAL Alliance, fighting for their rights.66 Small steps add up to big change if we all participate.