Gabe didn’t transition all at once, nor did he do it alone. He sought help from the local Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) office and other farmers and ranchers using regenerative models. “It’s been a long learning process,” Gabe says. “I was really fortunate that I met the right people at the right time.” One of those right people was Dr. Kristine Nichols, who at the time worked for the USDA Agricultural Research Service (ARS) Northern Great Plains Research Laboratory across the Missouri River in Mandan. Nichols has spent much of her career studying soil biology, particularly the union between plant roots and fungi. From the days of Earth’s first photosynthetic organisms, plant roots and fungi have enjoyed a symbiotic relationship, an association called mycorrhizae (from the Greek mykos, or fungus, and rhiza, or root). Mycorrhizal fungi live in and extend from root tissue, bringing nutrients and water to the host plant, suppressing weed growth near it, binding the nearby soil into aggregates that hold water, and probably dozens of other activities that we don’t fully understand, since scientists haven’t been able to culture even the most common mycorrhizal fungi in labs for further study. The fungi simply die if they aren’t attached to plants. Plants return the fungi’s allegiance by supplying energy from photosynthesis and, some scientists venture, important growth hormones.1
Some mycorrhizal fungi form microscopic tree-shaped structures called arbuscles within their host’s root tissue. These arbuscles shuttle nutrients from the fungi to the plant. Fungi that create arbuscles are called arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi, and they exist on most temperate and tropical plants and crops virtually everywhere in the world except a few arctic areas.2 AM fungi perform their plant-assisting functions in part by producing a substance called glomalin. Nichols is a leading researcher in glomalin and how crop rotation, tillage practices, organic production, cover crops, and livestock grazing affect the way AM fungi produce it.
Aside from the relationship between plant roots and fungi, researchers also look at the integrated, three-tiered system of “consumers” chomping away at organic material, turning it into nutrients. First-level consumers, like microbes, the smallest and most numerous soil citizens, turn big pieces of organic matter into smaller ones. Secondary consumers, such as protozoa, eat these first-level consumers or their waste. Third-level consumers, like ants or beetles, in turn eat the secondary consumers. All this eating creates soil that contains abundant nutrients easily accessible to plants.3
If soil biology seems daunting, don’t worry—it is. Soil is one of the most complex substances on Earth, if not the most complex. Humans understand only a tiny fraction of what’s actually going on underground, but we do know that billions of microorganisms work together to make soil a living substance. Ecologist David Wolfe explains it this way:
Step out into the backyard, for example, push your thumb and index finger into the root zone of a patch of grass, and bring up a pinch of earth. You will likely be holding close to one billion individual living organisms, perhaps ten thousand distinct species of microbes, most of them not yet named, catalogued, or understood. Interwoven with the thousands of wispy root hairs of the grass would be coils of microscopic, gossamer-like threads of fungal hyphae, the total length of which would best be measured in miles, not inches. That’s in just a pinch of earth. In a handful of typical healthy soil there are more creatures than there are humans on the entire planet, and hundreds of miles of fungal threads.4
The thought of a handful of soil containing so many life forms—more than there are people on the Earth—is mind-boggling, as are the gaps in our knowledge of soil. As a layperson, I have only a rudimentary understanding of soil biology, and it’s safe to say most people are like me. The average person doesn’t need to be a soil scientist, however, to recognize that invisible forces make plant life possible, which in turn make animal and human life possible. It also doesn’t take a scientist to see that human life depends greatly on the billion organisms in that pinch of soil.
Still, it’s good that some people understand more of what’s going on and can articulate its importance, like Gabe’s friend Kristine Nichols. Nichols, now with the Rodale Institute, spent a lot of time on Gabe’s farm in the early 2000s, observing the effects of his no-till farming, cover crops, and reduced input use. Back then he was still using small applications of synthetic fertilizer and herbicide, but he hadn’t used pesticides or fungicides since the 1990s. Gabe said Nichols convinced him to quit using synthetic fertilizer once and for all as her research revealed its negative impact on glomalin production in AM fungi.
“She said, ‘Gabe, you’ve come a long way, but your soils will never be truly sustainable until you remove the synthetic fertilizer. Because with the synthetic fertilizer, your soil biology populations won’t propagate to the numbers needed to convert organic material into inorganic plant-usable forms.’ So from 2003 to 2008 we did split trials where we would fertilize half a field, not fertilize the other half. In four years, the unfertilized yields were equal or greater than the fertilized. There’s been no synthetic fertilizer here since 2008. We’re not organic; we still occasionally use some herbicide.5 But I’m down to about one herbicide pass every two to three years. With our yields, our proven dryland corn yield is 127.6 The county average is 100. So we’re about 25 percent greater than county average without all the inputs.”
“The thing of it is, though, you can’t do that with just a corn and bean rotation,” Gabe continues. By “that” he means produce yields that are 25 percent higher than county average by growing just two crops over and over. It takes diversity to build soils that are rich enough to produce high yields. “We grow—oh man, if I listed all the crops—oats, barley, sunflowers, corn, alfalfa, winter triticale, hairy vetch, all of our cover crops, and there are a lot of others, rye, I’m not listing even all of them. Peas. We don’t grow all of those each year, but the same field won’t have the same crop type for a number of years. We are rotating all the time.”
In addition to yearly rotations, he also does seasonal rotations, so that each field is home to multiple crops within a year’s time. “We try on every field, every year, to grow a cover crop besides the cash crop,” he continues. “That might be before a cash crop, after a cash crop, or along with a cash crop.” With a cash crop, as in two crops growing at the same time? How does that work on one piece of land? I ask. “I seed the cover crop along with the cash crop,” Gabe explains. “For example, I seed clovers with an oats crop. The oats is taller than the clovers so I can straight combine the oats, leaving the shorter clovers to continue growing. Corn with hairy vetch would be another example.”
Gabe’s fields are also smaller than those on most conventional farms, which creates more variety on the land—think a patchwork quilt instead of a solid-color blanket.7 These small fields plus his combination of intercropping and multicropping better reflect the native prairie and are the best way to regenerate soil because there’s continuous life in the fields. “That’s the key to healthy soil, is something living all the time,” Gabe says. “Look at your native prairie soils; there’s something living all the time, obviously until the snow comes, and even then they’re still alive. That’s the problem with farming today: people are in monocultures and you don’t find that in nature. Where is there a monoculture? There isn’t one. It’s very seldom you find a monoculture.”
Something living all the time—a simple rule, but a hard one to follow under the conventional model. Gabe wouldn’t call a monoculture “living” in the sense that his diverse fields and pastures are alive (teeming is more accurate) with insects, earthworms, birds, soil microbes, and more. The agrochemicals required to grow monocultures kill good as well as harmful insects, most of the soil biology, and all plants except the desired crop. The chemicals essentially sterilize the field, meaning the members of the three-tiered soil system practically disappear because there’s little to eat. The only thing left is the corn, wheat, soybeans, tomatoes, or whatever the specialized crop. The monoculture itself is alive, but there’s very little life happening among it—the ecosystem is gone, both above ground and under. That’s why the monoculture model, even on “sustainable” farms, is so harmful.
The monoculture model kills the soil in other ways, too. On such farms the land lies fallow, or unplanted, when the cash crop isn’t in the ground. Even weeds don’t grow because farmers use herbicides to “burn down” the fields. Sometimes fields lie empty all growing season in a practice known as summer fallow. Farmers leave the field unplanted and either spray or till to control weeds, with the good intention of letting the land rest. Just a few days before visiting Gabe, I rode my horse in the summer fallow field behind my parents’ house, just for fun. Riding over the brown, lifeless field, I remembered that barren is the ideal look for summer fallow. People talk scornfully about farmers who let “trash” (weeds) grow in their fallow; they see these farmers as lazy. A bare field is a clean field and thus a desirable one, the thinking goes. Gabe explains why this practice isn’t resting soil, but taxing it: “There are more microorganisms in a teaspoonful of soil than there are people in this world. Think of that,” he says. Gabe echoes Wolfe whether he realizes it or not. “So you’ve got a little bit the size of your thumb, and there are more organisms than there are people in the world. What are they going to eat? They have to eat from a living plant root. If you summer fallow, you don’t have nothing alive. There’s nothing to feed them.”
One problem with summer fallow is underground—the soil’s microorganisms starve—but another problem is above ground, and that problem is soil exposure. Soil erodes when farmers leave it bare: wind carries it off and water washes it away. The soil also dries out. “People think they’re saving moisture by summer fallowing,” Gabe says. “You’re not, because what stores moisture is that organic matter because that soaks water up like a sponge and it’s there. Well, the only way to grow organic matter is by growing something. So you’re actually better off to grow a cover crop in those off years, and if you have livestock then you convert it to dollars by grazing it, and you will store more moisture long-term than you will in summer fallow.”
Cover crops include plants like turnips, peas, sorghum, clover, and countless others. Anything can be a cover crop if it helps the soil in some way, even plants that conventional farmers call weeds. I read about a farmer who planted yellow mustard, which people typically call a weed, as a cover crop because disking it into the soil replenished sulfur levels.8 Good luck finding a cover crop in the corn-heavy Midwest, though. Despite the benefits cover crops provide, conventional farmers tend to see them as a waste of time and resources because they do not generate calculable farm income; they usually can’t be harvested and sold the way cash crops are. Some covers can be hayed, but most farmers sold their haying equipment long ago, when they got rid of their livestock. Some can be combined for seed, but farmers usually lack these specialized machines, too. In other words, farmers can’t transform most cover crops into commodities. Cover crops do not fit into the industrial model because farmers can’t quantify their benefits on a balance sheet. From the industrial viewpoint, spending money and time planting a crop that doesn’t turn a profit is unwise (with the exception of crops that are subsidized by the government, as corn and soy are). The industrial model only compares inputs versus outputs and doesn’t consider intangible gains like soil health, water infiltration, nutrient cycling, or the life of billions of microorganisms.9
For the regenerative farmer, though, planting cover crops for the intangible benefits is worth it. On a diversified farm like Gabe’s that also includes livestock, cover crops are doubly worth the effort because they do have a tangible value: they can be “harvested” by livestock. When livestock graze a cover crop, they absorb the nutrients and convert them into meat, milk, or eggs—commodities a farmer can sell, which means they “market” the cover crops through the livestock. Gabe tells me he can also market a failed cash crop through the livestock. “People say, ‘Gabe, how can you farm with no crop insurance?’ Livestock are my crop insurance. If I get hailed out, the livestock will move on those acres and we’ll convert it to meat dollars.” Livestock aren’t the only method for marketing cover crops: Gabe harvests the seed from some of his covers and sells it to other farmers because such mixes are practically impossible to buy. In fact, Gabe has to purchase most seed varieties individually and mix them himself in a giant seed mixer.
But why can’t we create a more direct market for cover crops that doesn’t always require livestock to ingest them first? asks Dan Barber in The Third Plate. Barber envisions a new American cuisine built around everything the land provides, including cover crops. Cover crops such as millet, flax, buckwheat, and peas—plants that make the soil fertile enough to support our favorite items like wheat, fruits, vegetables, and meat—should be integrated into our diet, Barber argues. Livestock that help with soil fertility and other farm functions should be included as well—not just the choice cuts, but the entire animal. He calls on chefs and consumers to cook with the whole farm instead of just with prized or familiar items, such as steak, winter tomatoes, or enriched flour. Cooking with the whole farm will create a market for covers and encourage farmers to grow them, which will financially benefit farmers, increase soil health, and create a national cuisine that rewards regenerative agriculture instead of the production of a small number of cherry-picked crops and meats.10
Gabe and I stop at a field with a cover crop on it, a mix of twenty-one species. Some I know—clover, alfalfa, and sudangrass—but most I’ve never seen before. Gabe walks into the field and shows me different plants. “This is sorghum. The sudan you can recognize. Here’s buckwheat. This here is a common vetch. There are clovers growing,” he says. He points out a type of edible kale, then a grass called teff. “Now think, Stephanie, if I was to grow a monoculture,” he says. “Say this was just sudangrass. That biology would only be eating root exudates from sudangrass.11 Now with twenty-one different species, think of the diet that biology has. They are going to propagate numbers and they’re going to be much healthier.”
He looks out over the field, which is thick and green. Unlike a monoculture corn or wheat field, the plants vary in height and appearance. Instead of a flat, even expanse similar to a mowed lawn, the cover-crop field is an undulating mosaic. It looks almost like native prairie. “This doesn’t look bad,” Gabe says. That’s the modest midwestern way of saying it looks amazing. “This was just seeded here about two and a half weeks ago. It’s had no fertilizer, no chemicals, it just is what it is.” Gabe’s cover crops are essentially giant salads for the cattle. These cow salads are high in nutrition because of the plant diversity, which helps the cattle put on weight and fend off sickness, the same benefits Phil’s buffalo enjoy when grazing diverse native prairie. In turn, the cow manure and urine mineralize the soil, naturally replenishing the nutrients removed during grazing.
Cover crops also provide homes for beneficial insects. “This one here is fusilli,” Gabe says. “This plant here, that’ll produce a big purple flower. Cattle don’t eat this, but it’s in here for that flower because we want to attract the pollinators and the beneficial insects.12 We try and have, in all of our mixes, flowering species to attract pollinators and the beneficial insects. That’s all part of an ecosystem. Look at the prairie. If you’ve got true native range, you always have some flowering species. That’s what we’re trying to do. We’re just trying to mimic nature, is all we’re trying to do here.” Beneficial insects can be pollinators, but they can also be predators such as wasps and ladybugs. Predators find cover crops inviting because they contain lots of bug prey. These predators help control insects that harm the cover crop, making pesticides unnecessary. Even in Gabe’s cash crops, like corn or wheat, predator insects are still present, attracted by nearby cover fields, native prairie, or other crops he has seeded among the corn or wheat. These predator insects do a better job than pesticides of controlling bugs that snack on the cash crops, Gabe says. “People can ask me, ‘Gabe, how can you get by without spraying for insects?’ Well, it’s because I got the home for all the predator insects,” he says. “You look at our plants, yes, you can find a few holes in some leaves and that, but it’s never to the point that it’s economically detrimental to us because we have the lady bugs and all the good insects that take care of that.”
In nature, he says, beneficial or neutral insects far exceed the number of pests (which are only defined as such because they harm human endeavors, not necessarily the environment). Gabe cites work by Jonathan Lundgren, a research entomologist at the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service facility in Brookings, South Dakota. According to Lundgren, Gabe tells me, for every insect that’s considered a pest, there are 1,700 other species that are either beneficial or neutral. “Think of that!” he exclaims. “My neighbors who farm forty thousand acres, the airplane’s flying over all the time spraying something. Fungicides, pesticides. He’s targeting that one pest, but he’s killing all 1,700 other ones. I’m not saying they all live right in one place, you know, but you know what I mean.”
When I look into Lundgren’s work later, I find out Gabe is way off—for every one species considered a pest, there are perhaps as many as 6,000 species that either help people or contribute positively to the ecosystem.13 In many cases, we don’t understand what exactly they do to help us, but we know they aren’t hurting us. By contrast, between 1,000 and 3,500 insect species are labeled pests. Gabe is right in saying that not all beneficial or neutral bugs are in once place at one time, so it’s not like a pesticide pass kills thousands of species. But it does kill hundreds and, depending on the chemical, prevents others from coming back. As Lundgren writes, “Pest management shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bath water; controlling a few pests should not come at the expense of beneficial species simply because we don’t understand the benefits they provide.”14 Because pesticides kill every insect in their wake, they fumigate a field in the same way an herbicide does: with total destruction.
The absence of bug life eventually causes environmental imbalances. Without predators and beneficial insects, pest populations explode out of control, something nature would rarely allow since its model of checks and balances does a good job of keeping bugs in line. Monocultures also contribute to bug population imbalances because they encourage the presence of the very bugs that love snacking on them. Corn leaf aphids prefer corn, for example. When farmers plant a huge field of corn, leaf aphids can show up en masse; it’s what they evolved to do. When practically every field for hundreds of miles is also planted to corn, one can see how easily the leaf aphid population can get out of hand.
Now that some insects are immune to pesticides, relying on chemicals to control them makes even less sense. Worldwide, more than five hundred insects and arthropods are resistant to agrochemicals.15 But conventional farmers simply apply stronger concentrations, mix different chemicals together, or turn to older, more toxic chemicals. It’s what they were taught to do by their parents and grandparents. Pesticides ensure minimal insect damage, which in turn ensures more profit, the thinking goes. Most farmers have zero tolerance for pests and even less of a desire to gamble, as they see it, by not applying pesticides. They’re right in that sense: growing in monocultures without pesticides is almost impossible. It will take a drastic change in perspective for farmers (and ranchers, for that matter, who spray hay fields and pastures for insects) to trust that nature can control pests better than companies like Syngenta, Bayer, and Monsanto. It will take a similarly drastic change to stop the monoculture system that makes chemicals necessary in the first place.
Gabe is convinced that most conventional farmers feel bad about using agrochemicals, as much as they defend their need to do so. “Does your dad have row crops and that?” Gabe asks me. I say yes, that he’s fully invested in the industrial model. Gabe nods, not condescendingly but empathetically. “If you ask him, ‘Dad, how do you feel when you go out and spray something?’ I’d be willing to bet, deep down, it bothers him. It will everybody. If that will kill life, then why do we want to feed it to people? Now, I don’t want to be a hypocrite because I told you that I still use herbicide, too, now and again, so I’m not trying to tell you I’m above any of that. But it bothers me every time we do it. You look at a lot of the farmers today and they do a pre-plant herbicide, they do an in-crop, they do a burn down postharvest and it’s like, ‘My goodness, that can’t be healthy. It’s got to be getting into the food.’ I just think we got to get away from all of it,” Gabe says. He pauses. “I’ll be honest with you; there are a lot of times I’m tempted to do a little tillage so I don’t have to do that herbicide pass. Then I get to looking at how I’ve gotten these soils to such a point that I don’t want to go backwards. I wrestle with that all the time. It’s tough.”
Gabe is getting to a question I’ve been meaning to ask: why hasn’t he gone USDA certified organic? The answer is in the soil. One way organic farmers control weeds is through tillage—but Gabe is firmly no-till. Instead he relies on crop rotations and plant residue that stays on top of the soil to prevent weed growth. It isn’t easy to keep a thick, consistent layer of residue, however. “It’s not all roses here,” he tells me. “We battle some perennial noxious weeds because in our system I’m only using an herbicide every two to three years. We have sixty earthworms per square foot. You get soil alive like that, and you’re cycling nutrients so fast that I can’t keep enough of that residue on the surface. Then we get some weeds.”
Gabe keeps the herbicide option in his toolbox for extreme weed issues, and it’s the one practice stopping his operation from being certified organic. Even a single application every two or three years breaks the rules. While Gabe’s pastures are organic, his fields aren’t, and because the cattle, sheep, and chickens eat the cover crops, they aren’t technically organic, either. I think of Kevin’s commitment to the organic standards and his doggedness in finding ways around issues like weeds and disease. I ask Gabe directly: couldn’t you find organic ways to overcome the noxious weeds? Couldn’t you earn USDA organic certification if you really wanted to?
He’s silent for a moment, then says, “I haven’t been smart enough to figure out how—and I’m serious about this and I’ve been trying—how do I do away with the herbicide so I can be organic, but not till. Because I will . . . not . . . till.” He pauses for dramatic effect between each word. “The other thing, though, even if I could, I probably would not because I don’t believe in somebody else putting a stamp on me.” Like Phil, Gabe has a wide independent streak—most farmers and ranchers do in some way—and that makes him uncomfortable with submitting to the authority of a certification organization. Except for the herbicide, he operates organically by choice, so he doesn’t see the point in obtaining certification. To him, the proof is in the products he sells at the farmer’s market, not in a label. “My customers know,” he says. “We invite them all, we say, ‘You come out, anytime you want, to see how those chickens are raised, you want to see how the beef is raised, you come out and let’s do it face-to-face.’ I don’t need a third party putting a stamp on my operation. I want to build enough rapport and trust with my customers that they know that’s what it is.”
To label or not to label—that is the question. As an urban consumer who buys roughly 90 percent of her food at grocery stores, I want a label. I don’t have a farmer telling me about the product, and I don’t trust corporate food conglomerates who might try to convince me a product is organic without a USDA label. As an advocate for farmers and ranchers, though, I want producers to operate according to their principles because they are the ones on the land. They are responsible for what is gained or lost. Obviously they don’t operate in a bubble; corporate pressure, legislation, and consumers partly dictate their actions. But whether nonfarmers like it or not, farmers and ranchers are free to choose how they want to operate for the most part, even if that means continuing to use conventional practices. Nonfarmers can encourage them to operate differently or, as I hope young people will increasingly do, they can join the system and become farmers who do things regeneratively—change from within.
It’s not terribly productive to bicker over whether to certify farms as organic or not. What would be more productive is action. In the end, I hope labels become unnecessary due to a nationwide shift away from industrial agriculture and toward regenerative agriculture. Such a shift won’t happen unless we commit to it in the same way we committed to industrial agriculture: wholeheartedly and with an unwavering focus that isn’t on yields this time, but on growing the most wholesome food possible. We need widespread change, a turn of the tables so that most of our nation’s farmland and grassland is organic or practically organic and conventional land is the exception. Most of all, we need this change to stem from the inside, from the hearts and minds of growers who believe or have come to believe, like Gabe does, that mimicking nature is better than fighting it.