Gabe and I pull up to a field with an oat-pea cover-crop mix that was “mob grazed” by cattle. Mob grazing is an intensified version of Phil’s holistic management system. Under mob grazing, ranchers move livestock at least daily, usually more often, between small paddocks split with portable electric fencing. Animals either eat or trample every plant, and usually they don’t return to the same paddock for a year or so. It’s rotational grazing on steroids. To most observers (including me until I started writing this book), a mob-grazed field looks like a disaster. But that’s the point. Now that I am familiar with holistic management, I notice hoof prints and cow patties spread evenly over the field we’re touring. Gabe says crushed forage and evenly distributed animal impact are exactly what he’s looking for when the cattle leave a paddock. Even though the plants are trampled, he says, they still cover the soil so it doesn’t dry out, plus the roots hold it in place against the strong North Dakota wind. He says within a week or so he’ll seed the field to something else, right into the trampled plants.
Mob grazing was the final component of Gabe’s regenerative model for cropland. Removing synthetic fertilizer, tillage, and agrochemicals and adding cover crops and diverse rotations helped, but weren’t enough. Animal impact, Gabe realized, was the difference between great soil health and excellent soil health. For farmers practicing no-till, livestock are especially important because they provide soil ventilation in place of a plow. And with the addition of livestock, the farm becomes a true ecosystem, with soil biology, insects, plants, and animals working together. It’s not just the 350 cow-calf pairs and 400 to 800 yearlings that participate in the ecosystem—the Browns run other species, too. “My son came back from college five years ago, and even before he finished college he said, ‘You know, Dad, we got all this diversity of plant species, but we just have beef cattle. We need diversity in livestock, too.’ He wanted to start laying hens, so he started a laying hen operation,” Gabe says. “Now we’ve added sheep, we’ve added pigs, broilers, ducks, and turkeys. We don’t have ducks and turkeys this year. All we’re trying to do is, well, think of what you had on the native prairies. You had bison and deer and elk and you had all the birds following them. You had all these different species.”
Having multiple enterprises on the same land is known as stacking, a process Michael Pollan defines as “mimicking relationships found in nature and layering one farm enterprise over another on the same base of land . . . farming in time as well as in space—in four dimensions rather than three.”1 Farms that stack have financial resiliency; if one enterprise fails, the farmer still has income from other enterprises. Most farms only have one or maybe two enterprises, which is the equivalent of placing all of one’s eggs in a single basket. Gabe saw this firsthand when his wheat crop failed four years in a row and he had nothing else to sell.
The worst part about the limited-enterprise model, though, is that it isn’t an efficient way to feed people. Gabe explains it this way: “I get really frustrated about how one of the buzzword phrases is, ‘How do we feed nine billion people by the year 2050?’ That’s absolutely no problem. It’s no problem if we stack enterprises. The problem comes in that, with the current production model, we’re only producing one commodity, only so many kilocalories of energy, off of an acre, whereas if you stack enterprises like I do, you’re going to be producing many, many more nutrients on a per acre basis. So feeding the world is absolutely no problem if you change production models. It is a problem if you’re using the current production model because it takes so much fossil fuel that it’s not regenerative, it’s not sustainable, and it makes no sense.” So an acre of land on a regenerative farm utilizing stacking produces more food per acre with fewer input costs than on a conventional farm. This is true efficiency, the real answer to feeding a growing population.
Gabe offers an example of the danger that the conventional, limited-enterprise model holds for the future. He recalls a young person from northeastern Colorado who approached him after a speaking event. The young man asked Gabe how he could convince his dad and grandpa to diversify and be more holistic, as Gabe had urged during his talk. Gabe asked what the farm’s crop rotation looked like. The young man said the family had been on the farm since the 1920s and they had never grown a crop other than wheat. Gabe said he imagined the soil must be dead. The young man said yes, it was, that they couldn’t even get twenty-bushel wheat anymore.2 Gabe asked how they were surviving. The young man said everyone had off-farm jobs. “This is what’s happening all over,” Gabe says. “That’s why with production agriculture in the Midwest, they have so many inputs, inputs, inputs because it’s reduced to monoculture. That’s all it is. We’re reduced to this mentality that that’s all we can grow and that’s all we can do.”
In other words, farmers are convinced that they can only grow one or two things on the land, and these only with help from expensive inputs. In reality, the land could yield far more if farmers returned to diversity. Stacking enterprises has also allowed Gabe to reduce the farm’s size, meaning he’s more productive on fewer acres (and less stressed out by the work load). He used to operate 6,000 acres; now he’s at 5,000, and he continues to downsize. Of those acres, he owns 1,400 and leases the rest. He plans to let go of some leased land in the near future. “We’ve got way too many acres,” he says. “Paul and I honestly believe that we could easily support a family on a quarter of land, easily, with all our enterprises.3 We have so many different things going on.”
Adopting regenerative agriculture nationwide would allow more families to live on the land. Farm consolidation under the industrial paradigm displaced hundreds of thousands of rural families, people who got out instead of getting big. Gabe points to the example of his neighbors, three brothers who together operate around 40,000 acres. If Gabe’s claim is correct that 160 acres could support one family—when stacked with enterprises and managed regeneratively—then those 40,000 acres could potentially sustain 250 families instead of three. Even if we bumped the farm size to 1,000 acres per family, just under the North Dakota average farm size of 1,268 acres, an impressive forty families could make a living there.4 When we look at examples like this, it’s not hard to understand why our rural communities feel hollowed out. There are hardly any families left on the land anymore. No families actually live on Roth Farms, for instance, or on the sprawling, corporate sugarcane operations that cover the Everglades Agricultural Area. If we stacked enterprises and farmed more productively, then we could revitalize rural communities and take pressure off stressed urban areas.
If nothing else, being more productive on fewer acres with limited expenses makes farming enjoyable, something conventional agriculture hasn’t been for decades. Gabe doesn’t worry about fluctuating input costs, volatile commodity markets, or hefty loan payments. His primary concern is the soil. If he takes care of that, the rest of the farm will take care of itself for the most part. I remember the financial pressure Ryan Roth faces and the stress he feels, the razor-thin profit margins and the prospect of losing the farm to subsidence. I’d take Gabe’s job over Ryan’s any day. “It’s a lot of fun,” Gabe says. “It’s gotten to the point now that—how do I say this—I don’t mean to sound arrogant or that, but it’s really difficult for us not to make money. One of our mottos is that we like signing the back of the check and not the front. We just don’t have all those expenses.” Let’s be honest: making money is a whole lot more enjoyable than not making money. Why wouldn’t farmers want to reap these financial rewards and work smarter, not harder?
Selling conventional farmers on the concept of stacking, however, is a little like attempting to convert someone to a new religion. Most farmers have internalized the first commandment of industrial farming: specialization. Going back to the “old days” of cover crops and livestock is considered a backward move. When Gabe speaks in the Corn Belt about adding livestock, farmers think he’s crazy. At an event in Indiana, where everyone grew corn and soybeans only, the crowd overtly laughed when he discussed running cattle on fields. “I said, how much does the average producer spend in fertilizer every year?” Gabe says, describing his response to their laughter. “Well, if you get your soils healthy and integrate some livestock, you wouldn’t need that. I’m not saying you could eliminate all the fertilizer with just that, but a good percentage of it. What’s that worth? Then I ask, doesn’t anybody in Indiana eat beef? Why not get some on your farm?”
If saving money doesn’t persuade the crowd, Gabe tries another tactic: appealing to the farm’s future. Most people dream of passing the farm on to their children, but conventional farming parents are finding that the farm barely supports them. As is, it won’t support sons or daughters, their spouses, and eventually grandchildren. That should never be the case, Gabe says, especially on today’s farms that span thousands of acres. When farmers limit what their land can produce through specialization, they limit future generations. “A pet peeve of mine is when I hear, ‘We can’t have Junior come back to the farm because there’s no room,’” Gabe continues. By “no room,” parents mean there’s not enough land for everyone to make money. “I say, do you have livestock? Perfect opportunity for a young person. Any type of livestock. People, they put these blinders on.”
Blinders are a great metaphor for the conventional agriculture mentality. For those who did not grow up reading just about every horse-related novel out there like I did, racehorses and horses that pull carriages wear blinders, which are leather or plastic cups attached to the bridle that prevent the horse from seeing to its rear and side. The horse can only see what’s directly in front of it, which prevents it from being scared of or distracted by crowds or other horses. The blinders of conventional agriculture do the same by shutting out the past and narrowing the farmer’s focus to one or two crops and their yields per acre placed against input costs. The farmer can no longer see things like soil health, the environment, consumer health, and water quality—these are the distractions conventional agriculture seeks to remove from the farmer’s vision. It’s like the young man’s family from Colorado: the blinders of conventional agriculture prevented them from seeing that they could grow something other than wheat. These blinders make diversification—not only with livestock, but also with other crops—an invisible concept.
Gabe’s method of running livestock on his cropland is at once ordinary—humans have done it since ancient times—and novel, since the idea of putting livestock on cropland is unorthodox to longtime conventional farmers and the new generation alike. Of course, the potential level of livestock integration depends on a farm’s environment. Farmers can identify where their environment falls on Savory’s nonbrittle to brittle continuum and cycle livestock accordingly. In his chapter on cropping in Holistic Management, Savory discusses the role of livestock on farmland, particularly in relation to after-harvest residues. He points out that “plowing raw organic matter into the soil does more damage than good. . . . Animals, on the other hand, will reduce the residues to dung and urine and still leave a mulch to cover the soil. Poultry also consume insects and help to keep their numbers in check.”5 He warns producers not to allow livestock to stay in a field too long because they will eat too much residue (leaving none for mulch) and over-churn the soil (because farmed soil is looser than grassland sod). Concentrating animals on small crop areas for very short periods works best, he writes. That’s exactly what Gabe does with mob grazing.
It’s not impossible for farmers to build back soils without livestock. Farmers like Klaas Martens, featured in Dan Barber’s The Third Plate, used cover crops and rotations for years to regenerate soil, though he eventually added animals. Kevin’s use of compost is another example. But spreading compost is not a realistic option for farms that span thousands of acres. Plus, a cover-crop/rotation system without livestock usually doesn’t replicate nature’s way of building soil. Animals are part of the soil system in most environments. Livestock make the farm a real ecosystem, something it hasn’t been for many decades.
But to me, the most exciting part of livestock integration on cropland isn’t the soil benefits (sorry, soil enthusiasts) or the economic gains (sorry, bookkeepers).6 It’s the opportunity such a model provides for dismantling the CAFO system. If farmers welcomed livestock back to the farm, then we could stop confining cattle, hogs, and poultry; these animals would reach slaughter weight on the land instead. Livestock raised on midsize or small regenerative operations would be grass-fed instead of corn-fed, and producers could tailor animal species to their specific environment for maximum benefit, creating more variety in a market dominated by beef, chicken, and pork. The destructive ecological and social consequences of CAFOs would start to disappear, livestock would live more dignified lives, and consumers could eat meat knowing that livestock help the environment instead of harm it. Putting livestock back on America’s cropland could finally shut down the CAFO.
So are mob grazing, cover crops, and diverse rotations working? It’s time to look at some soils, this time more closely. We get out of the Ranger and Gabe grabs a shovel. He jams the shovelhead into the ground and bends down to examine what he’s unearthed, fingering through the soil for earthworms. “Last year, we did earthworm counts and we were averaging sixty per square foot. That’s a lot of earthworms,” he says. “When we started there was zero. You’d never find an earthworm because of all the tillage.” We don’t find any earthworms today, but there’s plenty more to see in this soil. Gabe reminds me that the organic matter composition of the farm’s soil used to be 1.7 percent to 1.9 percent, very low. “This field last July was 6.1 percent,” he says, beaming with pride. “We’ve tripled the organic matter levels, which is carbon stored in the soil. Carbon is what all that soil life eats in order to convert it to forms that we can use.” He grabs a handful of soil and holds it out for me to inspect. “That’s what you want soil to look like.”
The soil is black like the muck in Belle Glade and damp in my hands, even though Gabe says the ranch hasn’t received any rain lately. It’s not loose and fluffy, but clumpy, caked together in small chunks that break off against my fingers. “If you can imagine, this soil was just dull and gray and lifeless from all the tillage,” Gabe says. “Now it’s like cottage cheese. See all the soil particles, how it looks like black cottage cheese? That’s what you want. So now you think, if a raindrop falls, it’s going to go right through there. Where we could only infiltrate half of an inch per hour before, now we can infiltrate eight inches an hour. Which is unreal.”
Eight-inch rains are rare in North Dakota, but that is precisely why it’s so important for the soil to be absorbent. When a heavy rain hits, then the soil needs to be like a sponge so the water doesn’t erode the ground or cause excessive flooding. Gabe mentions a section of the Red River, around Fargo, with a history of floods, some catastrophic to the city. Every spring, residents await the rising water. Gabe sees the Red River flooding not as a problem with the river or with excess rain or snowmelt, but with the soil in the Red River valley. It used to have about 8 percent organic matter; now it has less than 2 percent because of industrial farming. Gabe believes the Red River has flooded more often in recent decades because the soil in the valley and other drainage areas don’t contain enough organic matter to absorb water, so it runs off. “We waste money on disaster relief for floods and then for droughts when we wouldn’t have to if the soils could just absorb the rainfall to compensate for high levels of rain and store water for when there’s little rain,” he says.
The Red River is not a perfect example. The river floods for other reasons, such as the fact that it disregards the Continental Divide and runs northward. As springtime temperatures rise, the river carries snowmelt and ice north, right into areas that haven’t thawed yet, instead of carrying water south and away like other rivers. When the snow and ice finally start melting in the river’s northern sections, usually near Fargo or Grand Forks, the river already contains so much backlogged water and ice that it floods. Another problem: the Red River valley is a valley in name only. It’s pool-table flat. When the Red River breaches its banks, the water fans out every which way.7 These anomalies contribute to the river’s floods, but the soil certainly plays a role, too. The valley is divided into farms as far as the eye can see, and these soils can’t absorb near the water they once did. More than 95 percent of the valley’s native prairie, once the sponge for excess water, is gone.8 Increasing water infiltration in the Red River valley wouldn’t solve the flood problem, but it would no doubt help. I wonder how many other floods we could prevent or reduce by regenerating soil.
With the exception of those living along the Red River, though, flooding isn’t the North Dakota farmer’s main concern. Dry years are more common than wet years in the Dakotas, and even in an average year rain might not fall for weeks or months. The problem is that soil in conventionally managed fields neither absorbs water when it falls, nor stores it when it doesn’t. Because of synthetic fertilizer, monocultures, agrochemicals, and tillage, it lacks the organic matter that creates soil particles, the clumps I see in Gabe’s soil. Rainwater washes away, and when droughts come, the soil has no water stored for the crops. Unfortunately I saw this firsthand; my high school years coincided with an intense four-year drought in western South Dakota. No one had a crop. Our wheat was so poor that many fields weren’t worth harvesting for grain—Dad had me swath them for hay instead. In a cab-less swather, I crawled across the dusty fields, a rag over my face and a dirt cloud trailing behind. I had to set the swather’s header so low to the ground—the wheat was incredibly short—that I’d often doze it into the dirt and get stuck. I carried a fire extinguisher at all times in case I hit a rock and sparked a fire. Our pastures wore down to practically nothing (everybody’s did). We sold some cows. We ran short on hay. I remember fields blowing, the wind carrying off the topsoil.
In dry years like those, Gabe’s soil reveals its resiliency. His crops and pasture thrive while his neighbors’ land withers in the heat. One of those dry years occurred last summer. Near the end of the summer, Gabe hosted a tour group of four hundred people, one of the largest tours he’s ever done. From June 1 until August 20, the day of the tour, the ranch had had 0.38 inches of rain—practically no moisture. “Yet we stood down in a cover-crop field that was waist high,” Gabe tells me. “They said, ‘How can you grow that?’ I said, ‘It’s not how much rain you get; it’s how much infiltrates and then how does it move through the soil.’” I think of what Phil said when he showed me the picture of the water runoff from his neighbor’s pasture. Is it a problem of not getting rain, or not using the rain that we get? By now it’s clear to me that as a nation we’re not using the rain we get because we’ve degraded the soil. Gabe’s black cottage-cheese soil drank up every drop of that summer’s meager rain, plus it contained reserves. That wasn’t all, though. The cover-crop field was not a monoculture—far from it. Fields with multiple species are more resilient during droughts because the plants can access moisture at different levels, Gabe says. “There are all different root types,” he says. “There are taproots, fibrous roots, shallow, medium, deep-rooted. The deep-rooted plants actually bring moisture up, and the shallow-rooted plants feed off that in droughts. So we’re able to get by on much less moisture than most people.” Monocultures, on the other hand, have no root diversity, so the plants only access moisture from one level of soil, usually near the surface where the soil is driest. When fields contain shallow-rooted monocultures year after year, they exhaust the moisture resources at that level.
Because his pastureland is also diverse, Gabe can get by on less moisture there as well. Ranchers up and down the Great Plains live in fear of not having enough grass and hay for their livestock—and if they don’t, they have to sell part or all of their herd. Gabe practically laughs in the face of drought. That’s somewhat overconfident given the promise of future climate change–induced droughts, but he knows that his pastures can withstand extremes. They have before. “If you do a good job of rangeland management, one year of drought is never a problem. You don’t have to destock or nothing because your soils have some resiliency built in them,” he says. “I honestly believe here that we would have to get into the third, fourth year of drought before we start cutting back on any numbers at all. It’s just not going to matter with the resiliency.”