Home. I go the first week in August, when wild sunflowers bloom in the road ditches and the warm bread smell of wheat fills the air as combines chug across the fields, spewing straw behind them. Golden grain pours into the chalk-gray bins, and my father keeps some in a coffee can in the pickup, partly for taking to the elevator to test the protein and moisture but also for snacking. I ride my paint horse through the pastures and yellow sweet clover brushes my boots in the stirrups. Sometimes I’m too lazy to put the saddle on, and soon my Levis smell like horse sweat and are covered in white and brown hair.
I walk alone into a hayfield one evening with my camera and a beer and climb onto a round hay bale. It takes a running jump and an awkward scramble, and the hay leaves red scratches on my forearms and shins. When I was a kid, the run-jump onto bales was as effortless as stepping over a puddle. The hay is still warm from the afternoon sun. A doe and her fawn leap over a barbed-wire fence and bound into the pasture on the other side. Coyotes howl. I photograph the sunset and drink my beer and cry a little because it’s been so long since I’ve felt the peace, the belonging, the fierce but loving hug of the prairie. I haven’t been home in the summertime for two years.
I spend a lot of time with my brother, Joshua, on this trip. We lurch across the pasture in the pickup to check the cows and the water tanks, go ’round and ’round the hayfield in the swather (I drive partly for fun and partly to prove to myself that I remember how), and practice jitterbugging in the living room so he can impress the girls at a Saturday night dance. One morning he makes French toast from bread he baked himself. He wears his hair long for around here—it just brushes the top of his shoulders—and he’s one of the kindest, most patient people in the world. We talk about holistic management, organic farming, and the pitfalls of industrial agriculture. Josh is interested. He’s always been interested, but now he’s serious. He wants to get started running some grass-fed, organic cattle, maybe next summer.
Josh is twenty-one years old. He didn’t go to college. Didn’t like being in the classroom, didn’t see the point when he could learn how to farm and ranch from Dad. The problem is that he’s not learning the important stuff by working on our conventional operation, at least to my mind (Josh is beginning to think the same thing). I ask if he knows what it means for plants to fix nitrogen. He doesn’t. What about cool- and warm-season grasses—what’s the difference? Not sure. I sprinkle other questions in during the week: What nutrients does corn take from the soil as opposed to small grains like wheat or oats? What’s the purpose of a cover crop? Why is it important to have carbon and organic matter in the soil? He doesn’t know, but he wants to.
I leave home one morning and drive to central North Dakota, where I’ve heard a guy named Gabe Brown grows both cash grain crops and livestock using regenerative agriculture—a model that sounds very applicable to my family’s ranch. The environment he’s working in is similar to western South Dakota: little rainfall, formerly native prairie, cold winters and hot, hailstorm-ridden summers. I have to see for myself what he’s up to, and not just for this book. I turn north on a gravel road that hops over Interstate 94 and settles into a rural landscape outside of Bismarck. Wild sunflowers line both sides of the road in thick stands several feet high. I drive with the windows down, and the smell of sap from a shelterbelt of tall pine trees fills the car. The day is cloudy and cool but still dry, a typical northern plains weather trick that makes farmers hope rain is on the way, but it never falls. When I spot the Brown’s Ranch sign, I turn down a narrow gravel driveway.
I pull up to the yellow brick house and get out of the car, intending to knock. Instead I hear someone yell, “Stephanie!” and I turn to see a short, heavyset man smiling and waving from the nearby machine shed. He’s standing in front of a stainless-steel chicken evisceration table, which thankfully has no eviscerated chickens on it at the moment. I walk over and we shake hands. “Just a minute, I gotta tell these guys what to do,” he says, and then instructs two young men (I later learn they are interns) to replace a broken corner post in the pasture where the chickens are. After some small talk about my drive up and the weather—no midwestern conversation starts without this ritual—Gabe suggests that we jump in his Polaris Ranger utility vehicle and “go look at some soils.” I would love to see some soils. I’ve been thinking and reading about soil for months in anticipation of this day. I’ve come to understand that soil fundamentally sustains me, sustains all of us. Soil is the key to human life. The nutrients we need to survive flow from the soil and into the food and livestock forage that grow in it. Healthy soil preserves water, resists erosion, and stores carbon (the basis of life on Earth and essential for all living organisms). Without healthy soil, we are nothing.
The link between soil, human health, and the environment is one of Gabe’s primary concerns. Industrial agriculture makes that link weak, he believes. “I started studying a lot about human health,” he tells me as we drive out to a field. “You look at the nutrient densities of the foods we produce. It’s just plummeted. In my mind, that’s directly related to the loss and degradation of our soil resources. Soils no longer have all the nutrients that they need.” Why? I ask. “You talk to any grain farmer today, and they want to farm by a recipe card,” Gabe explains. “I’ll seed on this date, I’ll seed a monoculture, it will need so many pounds of N, P, and K, then I’ll spray this herbicide, I’ll spray this fungicide on this date, and it’s all off a recipe card. It’s not that way. It shouldn’t be that way. What needs to be done is you gotta look at each field and ask, what does that resource need? What is missing in that field? Then you start building back your soils, and as you do that the soil biology will make more nutrients available so the plants will be healthier, and the animals will be healthier, and then the humans that consume those products will be healthier.”
This is Gabe’s mission: to build back soils, or bring the levels of carbon, organic matter, and microbial soil life to what they once were. It’s not enough to simply maintain soils because most are already degraded. Farmers need to go a step further by improving the soil, he says. “I hear it so often. People want to be sustainable, sustainable, sustainable. That’s the cliché word; everybody wants to be sustainable,” he says. “But why do you want to sustain a degraded resource? We need to be regenerative. If we are going to have healthy food and healthy soils for the next generation, and generations to follow, we got to build our soils back.”
I feel sheepish and try not to let it show: I’ve said the same thing many times, that I want agriculture to be sustainable. But Gabe is right. Sustaining degraded land, water, air, and ecosystems through better agriculture is not enough. Agriculture needs to not only stop further damage, but also regenerate resources to preindustrial farming health or better. Regeneration comes from treating the farm and ranch as an interconnected environment, Gabe says. Diversity of life is necessary for a healthy ecosystem, and the same is true on a farm. “You gotta think of your operation, your ranch, as an ecosystem, because that’s what it is,” Gabe says. “It’s the soil biology, it’s the insects, it’s the plants, it’s the animals, all working together to be healthy, just like a native prairie ecosystem would have been three hundred years ago with the bison and everything.”
Gabe reminds me of an old-time preacher, an association that isn’t surprising when I learn that he spends the winter traveling around the United States preaching the gospel of regenerative agriculture to other farmers. People also trek to his farm every summer to see the restored soil and grassland, the free-range chickens and sheep, the grass-fed cattle, and the twenty-species cover-crop mixes. “It’s to the point where we’ll have two thousand people a summer through here,” he says. “We’ve had visitors from all fifty states, sixteen foreign countries. It’s gotten to the point where it’s become our life. Like my phone, I’ll average twenty to twenty-five calls a day. I’ll spend two hours every night answering emails. During the winter, I’m pretty much gone from mid-October through mid-March; that’s when I shut it off. I’m just traveling, speaking about soil health and sharing our story.” And when Gabe gets to talking, there’s no stopping him. When he’s passionate or upset, his voice booms and his words rush out in a flood. His face reddens. When he’s feeling sentimental or serious, his voice softens and his words slow. When he’s indignant, he asks loud rhetorical questions that he answers. He’s opinionated, but he listens and nods when others say their piece. He often speaks in jokes, sarcasm, and idioms. He uses colloquial language, and his speech patterns are distinctively midwestern. He challenges his neighbors about their conventional practices, and he’s made enemies. He’s also inspired people around the world to farm and ranch using regenerative principles.
From the pulpit of his Ranger, Gabe launches into the story of Brown’s Ranch. He and his wife, Shelly, moved to the ranch—then owned by her parents—after college in 1983. They ran cattle and farmed cash grain crops conventionally, and they also worked in nearby Bismarck. Shelly had grown up on the place, and in 1991 she and Gabe bought the home section from her parents. Free to run the farm how they wanted, the Browns “went no-till” in 1993, meaning they stopped using plows to prepare the soil for planting or till harvested crops under. Instead, they leave the residue on the fields to break down and act as mulch.1 “I was interested in saving moisture and time,” Gabe says. By then they had 100 to 150 cow-calf pairs and were raising specialty breeding bulls. Wanting to try something different than the usual small grains like spring wheat, oats, and barley, Gabe planted some new crops in his no-till system. “I started planting peas, alfalfa, a few different crops,” he says. “Then in ’95 what happened, the day before we were going to combine—we had 1,200 acres of spring wheat in—we lost 100 percent of our crop to hail. Boy, after the hailstorm—I had no crop insurance, nothing, it was pretty devastating—I started thinking, what do I do for feed for livestock? So I started planting some sudangrass, millet, a few things, and of course couldn’t pay back the operating note. So then the banker, he didn’t want to loan me so much money the next year. Well, we made it through, thanks to off-farm jobs and that.”
Since the Browns were farming conventionally at the time, the operating note Gabe couldn’t pay included bills for fertilizer, agrochemicals, seeds, machinery, and fuel. Most conventional farmers take out loans every year and pay them back at harvest—if there is a harvest. When farmers specialize in one crop, like the Browns did in wheat, and suffer a 100 percent loss, then things can get ugly, especially without crop insurance. The Browns survived the year of loss, only to find themselves in another crisis the next season. “The next year then I started to diversify a little more, planting a few different species and that. Lost 100 percent of our crop to hail again. So that was two years in a row. Well then, things were really getting tough. We started to diversify even more, more alfalfa. At that time I didn’t know what a cover crop was. We just were trying to grow feed for the livestock to stay alive. That was two years in a row. Ninety-seven comes along, and it was a drought. Nobody combined an acre.2 So that was the third year in a row. Ninety-eight comes along—meanwhile I’m diversifying even more, I’m trying different species, I kind of got interested in growing different combinations of covers, two- and three-way mixes—’98 comes along, we lost 80 percent to hail. So we lost four crops in a row.”
Desperate to save cash, Gabe had stopped buying fertilizer, pesticides, and herbicides. He was replenishing his soil and combating pests and plant diseases the only way he could afford to: naturally. Because the soil had been farmed conventionally for decades, the first few crops grown without inputs looked “just fair,” as Gabe puts it. Slowly, though, the crops began looking better with every input-free year. Gabe also realized that the soil was changing. “We started to notice the soil health improving,” he says. “I was pretty fortunate that when I first started we took some soil tests. These soils on this cropland here were from 1.7 to 1.9 percent organic matter.3 I noticed that started to inch up. We’d also done some basic infiltration tests around that time, and we could only infiltrate a half of an inch of rainfall per hour. That was pretty poor. So if it rained over half an inch, it was just running off. From all the years of tillage, that’s what happened. Well, we noticed the more we grew these covers and the more diversity we had, that the soil was infiltrating better and it was also cycling nutrients.”
More organic matter, better water infiltration, and improved nutrient cycling: the silver lining of what many people would see as a dark time. Those years allowed Brown’s Ranch to emerge stronger and more self-sufficient. Not that they weren’t hard—Gabe jokes that they were so broke the banker knew when they bought toilet paper—but they led him to realize something that fundamentally changed the way he operated: he did not need inputs.