I didn’t visit a farmers’ market until my early twenties. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to, it was that I never lived close enough to one until I moved to college. I grew up about as far away from the reach of fast food and grocery chains as you can get in America, yet there was nowhere for my family to buy locally produced food, at least not in an organized, dependable way. If you knew someone who had chickens (a rarity even for such a rural place), a milk cow (even rarer), or a summer garden, then perhaps you could buy some food here and there. Maybe you could call rancher neighbors and ask if they had any beef for sale. But there are no regular markets or even a farm stand. Nothing in Bison’s tiny grocery store is local. Nothing on the menu of the town’s one restaurant is locally raised. The corn in the surrounding fields isn’t edible until it becomes corn syrup and other by-products, or until CAFO-raised cattle eat it and turn it into fatty, dull-tasting meat. Practically none of the big farmers keep barnyard animals like hogs, chickens, or milk cows. Most don’t plant gardens. Many of them raise wheat, but have never eaten freshly ground flour, let alone milled wheat themselves. They taste none of the fruits of their labor until a big company returns them in the form of processed food. Even in a place where cattle outnumber people thirty-five to one, people eat CAFO-produced meat.1
Such a situation is an inevitable consequence of industrial agriculture. Farmers are now dependent on the sprawling food system they helped create and lack the power to feed themselves. Eating local is even harder than eating organic in many rural communities like Bison. Even if farmers reject the industrial production system, they still have to eat within it. Or do they? Gabe would argue no, that farmers hold the key to changing the system if they would put their minds to it. They have to find or re-create markets that disappeared as a result of conventional agriculture. “I tell people, what was it like in Missouri, for instance, one hundred years ago?” Gabe says. “You can’t tell me it was just corn and beans. We’ve lost these markets because of the current industrial production model, which makes no sense.”
It’s true: as farmers specialized, so did food markets. Midwestern grain elevators that mostly handle corn, soybeans, and wheat today once traded in a variety of small grains. Local slaughterhouses used to process a community’s livestock—chickens, geese, hogs, sheep, and goats, not just feeder cattle all at market weight. The push for uniformity and transportability, though, shifted demand away from localized crops and toward standardized plants and animals. Regions built markets that can handle only a few crops. In Iowa, for example, the market has been transformed to handle mainly corn, soybeans, and hogs. Farmers there would have a hard time selling, say, a crop of flax. Elevators would balk at it, and few specialty chefs or food processors exist there to buy it. Iowa is not the only region with a specific market: think of Idaho’s potato fields, New York’s dairy farms, and Florida’s winter tomatoes. Difference is not celebrated in today’s standardized food markets, but rejected and, in many cases, tamped down.
Specialized markets have created what we might call the corn and soybeans ideology. Midwestern farmers often claim they grow strictly corn and beans because that’s what the market demands; anything else won’t sell, they argue (never mind the fact that because all the farmers threw their lot in with corn and beans, the market followed suit, not the other way around). All over the country, farmers fear they won’t be able to sell alternative crops, so they don’t try. Gabe has little patience for that argument. “I say, does your semi have tires? So what if you got to go an extra four hundred miles? You can find the markets.” Gabe offers an example of farmers he met in western Nebraska who wanted to grow peas to help boost soil fertility. The problem was that they had nowhere to sell the peas after they harvested them. These farmers created their own market by convincing nearby cattle feedlots to buy the peas for feed. Perhaps this example isn’t perfect—in an ideal agricultural system, we wouldn’t have feedlots—but the point is clear: farmers can be creative in finding a market for alternative crops. Gabe rejects the idea that they are trapped by current markets and instead argues for the farmer’s freedom to find or create new ones, independent of conventional agriculture’s demands. “There are ways to market,” Gabe insists. “You can get several people together. Maybe you have somebody closer to a metropolitan area that you can work out an arrangement with to sell the products, but there are ways.”
Gabe has a ready-made market, Bismarck and the surrounding metropolitan area, practically in his backyard. He doesn’t have to go an extra four hundred miles to sell his grass-fed beef. I can’t help but see how easy it is for Gabe and Kevin to sell alternative products when urban customers are within easy reach. I think of Phil, though, who lacks a market for retailing grass-fed buffalo meat. He’s where Gabe was a year ago, selling all live animals because he has neither a slaughterhouse nor a way to reach consumers. Is Gabe’s argument wishful thinking for isolated producers like Phil, or my brother for that matter? I don’t think so. Ideally, the markets will appear or at least get closer as regenerative agriculture takes root. This kind of agriculture will revitalize rural communities, which will give farmers and ranchers more opportunities for marketing. If we can rein in our top-heavy food system and replace it with a regionally and locally driven system, then farmers will likely enjoy more demand from places now closed to them, such as retail stores, restaurants, schools, farmers’ markets, food processors, bakeries, anywhere people buy food.
Gabe sees these kind of farm-to-consumer transactions as empowering for farmers. When farmers and ranchers set their own price, something they cannot do under the conventional system, they can better ensure their economic survival. “We’re capturing all that extra value,” Gabe says about selling retail meat instead of live cattle. “Right now, a fat animal will bring about $1.60 a pound, say, if it was in the conventional market. A 1,200-pound animal, you’re at whatever that comes to be, $1,800, $1,900, something like that. We are making much, much more,” he says. He tells me exactly how much more, but, as midwestern modesty dictates, asks that the number not be put in print. The point is not how much profit Gabe makes, but the fact that vertically integrated companies like Cargill, Tyson, and JBS don’t control him. He doesn’t conform to their demands, but to his customers’ demands. Here, the consumer has real power. The price Gabe charges better reflects the meat’s true cost while simultaneously removing the social, environmental, and health costs of industrial meat. Gabe would rather see responsible ranchers empowered, not corporate beef producers. “Us as farmers and ranchers, we’re used to giving somebody else all the profit,” Gabe says. “Why not take it for yourself? Then we have control. What’s wrong with taking the next step and putting more of those dollars in our pocket?”
We walk into the pull-type concession trailer that’s parked in the farmyard. It’s a white, rectangle-ish trailer with a flip-open counter, and the words “Nourished by Nature” and pictures of cattle, sheep, hogs, and chickens out on pasture are emblazoned on one side. It looks somewhat like a food truck. I stare into a deep freezer full of packaged beef, lamb, and poultry, the waft of cold air refreshing in the August heat. A refrigerator sits in another corner; that’s where Gabe keeps the eggs. I open it and gaze inside, mostly for the cooling effect, though I claim to be admiring the eggs. Three days a week during the summer, Gabe and Paul work the farmers’ market in Bismarck. In the winter, when the market is closed, they email order forms to customers, who meet them in town to pick up their goods.
Buzzwords like “grass-fed” and “local” might attract customers initially, but Gabe is more interested in convincing people to buy his products because of the regenerative agriculture system they represent. “What we’re trying to do, then, is teach our customers that we’re doing the full circle,” Gabe says. “They come and the first thing they want to know is, where are you from? And we tell them. Then they want to know, GMOs or not? That’s number two. Then it’s antibiotics, hormones, and grass-finished. Those questions follow. What we’re trying to do is sell the whole story. We’re trying to produce healthy food on healthy soils, and hopefully that will equate to human health.” Despite his preacherlike vibe, Gabe isn’t on a mission to convert, but to educate. It’s up to consumers to make the choice once they have the facts, he tells me. “I’m not going to get in an argument with anyone about GMOs, non-GMOs, all that kind of stuff,” he says. “All I’m saying is, this is what we want to offer. If you want it, fine. If not, that’s fine. Everybody should be allowed to put in their mouth whatever they want as long as it’s legal. It’s just our choice that we would rather not have GMOs. Hence the name, Nourished by Nature, our trademark. We want it to be as natural as possible. We don’t want any of the synthetics.”
I try to picture my father interacting with customers at a farmers’ market and, well, I can’t. Retailing isn’t part of the modern rancher identity—it doesn’t jive with “get big or get out” because it takes time and resources away from production and expansion. I ask Gabe if he ever thought he would be marketing meat directly to customers from a trailer like this. Never, he said. “It was never a real desire of mine, but as I’ve grown and studied more about human health, it has become that way,” he says. The connection between non-nutritious food grown in dead soil and poor human health is all too clear to him, though he admits a part of America’s health problem stems from bad food choices. “You can’t blame it all on poor soil. A lot of it is eating habits—fast food, processed foods,” he says. The problem is that, even when consumers chose vegetables and grains over fast food, their health still suffers because the “good” food doesn’t contain the nutrients it should. The way to fix this problem is to grow food in healthy soils, plain and simple. “A lot of it, I think, is what we’re doing to do our soils,” he says. “If we can teach people, even a little bit, that healthy soils can produce healthy food, that’s what it’s about to us.”
It’s the soil, stupid. I imagine this must be a tough revelation for Gabe to bring about in customers. The mental leap between soil and food seems easy to make, except that powerful agribusiness voices keep insisting there is no connection. Even I didn’t grasp the importance of soil until I started writing this book, and I went a bit deeper into the subject than most people go. How do we help urban consumers, who’ve lived off the farm for generations, value soil that they might never hold in their hands, never gaze over in the spring, never plant seeds into? How do we insist that they help protect microorganisms that they can’t see? I’m not saying urban consumers can’t grasp these concepts—far from it—but it’s been extremely difficult even to get farmers, who live on the land and rely on it for their economic survival, to care about soil. Yet without a focus on soil, the regenerative agriculture movement can’t succeed.
The customers in Bismarck, at least, seem to be making the connection between soil and food, as shown by the demand for Gabe’s products. This winter, he hopes to buy a walk-in freezer; the deep freezer is already too small to accommodate his sales. He is also reaching out to chefs to develop a line of Nourished by Nature sausages without nitrates, nitrites, or GMOs. That’s about as far as he wants to go with chefs, though. He has received requests from restaurants, but he has turned them away because they want choice cuts and nothing more. “They want all T-bones or porterhouses, and what do you do with the rest?” he says. The demand for choice items is a major problem in the farm-to-table movement: farmers end up growing popular, marketable crops or cuts of meat that are often ecologically taxing. As Dan Barber argues, “Farm-to-table chefs may claim to base their cooking on whatever the farmer’s picked that day (and I should know, since I do it often), but whatever the farmer has picked that day is really about an expectation of what will be purchased that day . . . the farmer ends up servicing the table, not the other way around. It makes good agriculture difficult to sustain.”2 Barber is wise to point out this flaw in farm-to-table production, and his observation applies to farming in general. Unlike most cuisines, American food culture revolves around food fads and choice items. We don’t pride ourselves in using the whole animal or cooking with edible but unorthodox crops.
It’s not just chefs who demand choice cuts—most shoppers do, too. People prefer cooking with familiar items like steaks and ground beef. That’s one reason we have CAFOs: so everyone can eat steak and avoid what most of us consider gross or unrefined items like brains, tongue, and liver. A quick scan of any grocery-store meat counter confirms this. In Bismarck, some customers are more adventurous: “Soup bones are one of our best sellers at the farmers’ market,” Gabe tells me later. “Liver also sells. There is a market for everything, including the fat.” These consumers are anomalies for the most part, though. Gabe says that people have lived in the convenience-food era so long that many don’t know how to handle basic cuts, let alone more adventurous products. “They have no idea how to make a roast. It just blows our mind,” he says. “We sell ground beef in chubs, it’s in a package. They look at it and say, ‘No, I want hamburgers.’ They don’t put two and two together. In Bismarck, North Dakota, you’d think . . .” He shrugs and shakes his head. “But it’s not that way.”
Eating high on the hog, so to speak, is inherently unsustainable, even if we use regenerative agriculture to produce those choice items.3 If we want diversity on the land, then we need diversity on our plates. Remember Ryan Roth’s attempt to grow hybrid radishes that looked unfamiliar to consumers, and how he couldn’t sell them? Consumers will have to reject standardization at the grocery store and be open to new things. Changing a nation’s food culture sounds daunting, but think about how rapidly our food tastes changed with the appearance of processed foods and industrial agriculture. Think about how quickly we forgot what a vine-ripened tomato tastes like and came to see green tomatoes ripened with gas as normal. Think about how often people cook a whole chicken versus the breast only, or how we reach for a can or box instead of making something ourselves. We radically changed our conception of good food in less than a hundred years. If we’ve done it before, we can do it again.
This year, the Browns started an internship program, with the long-term intention of helping a new generation of farmers learn to practice regenerative agriculture. They welcome young people from any area: urban, rural, East Coast, West Coast, and anywhere in between. The first season hasn’t gone exactly as Gabe expected. Of the hundred or so applicants, the Browns selected two young men and one young woman. The young woman didn’t stay long; she was hired to help with marketing but later revealed that she “didn’t like people,” which made a public relations role difficult. Of the young men, one is the son of Gabe’s farmer friend from Indiana. When the twenty-one-year-old arrived, Gabe discovered he didn’t know how to use basic tools—tools so rudimentary I can use them, like vise grips—or how to change a tire (again, something even I can do). Gabe politely says that the learning curve has been high with this intern, but he’s improving. The other young man, Troy, is a better fit, partly because he worked for the Browns during previous summers. But mostly, Troy is a hard and conscientious worker; he notices things that need to be done and completes them without being told.
Despite the initial setbacks, Gabe is optimistic about the intern program and plans to keep it going. He believes that rural areas aren’t the only legitimate places for farmers and ranchers to grow up, that urban people can and should return to farm country to help revitalize food production. These young people need guidance and time to attain skills that farm kids grow up learning, he says. “There is a huge number of young people that want to come back to the farm, but they’re not from the farm, you see,” Gabe says. “I really think the next generation of true agricultural leaders is going to be from the city because they are way more open-minded and they know how city people think and what they want. I say ‘city people’ kindly.”
In fact, Gabe would provide start-up capital and even land for the right young person. “One of our passions is to help young people. If the right interns come along and they really have a passion, too, I’ll get them started. I’ll buy the land and get them started. Paul and I have talked about it,” Gabe says. “We would love to have somebody come and intern and raise bees. We would love to have one start with rabbits. We would love to grow the orchard and the vegetable business. But they gotta have the drive and want to do it. I’m not going to have them say they’re going to and come and then all the sudden they don’t like it. If the right young people come along, I’ll help them get started.”
I am amazed by Gabe’s frank admission that he would help a young farmer in a significant financial way. I worry that he’s a bit overconfident in the next generation and will grow disappointed with the interns over time, or that he will invest in the wrong person. I think of Eustace Conway as profiled in Elizabeth Gilbert’s book, The Last American Man. Eustace lives off the land in the Appalachian Mountains, wearing clothes made from animals he’s skinned and eating food he forages, kills, or grows. He rejects capitalism, consumerism, and “boxes,” which are televisions, cell phones, suburban houses, and cubicles. He started an internship program for many of the same reasons Gabe did: to teach the next generation how to live from the land. Over and over the interns disappointed him. They wouldn’t work hard, or couldn’t handle the lifestyle, or weren’t truly committed to it. Granted, what Eustace asked young people to do—give up the materialism of American life and find meaning in nature—involved a radical change. Gabe will likely have more success teaching young people how to farm regeneratively, but I wonder whether those teachings will translate into actual farms. The right person might seem right until money enters the picture.
Besides, shouldn’t those resources be used on Brown’s Ranch or maybe saved for future grandchildren? I ask. That’s not how Gabe sees it. “Spiritually, my wife and I and son honestly believe that God put us through those four years so that we could get to this point. I’m just paying it back,” Gabe says. “I saw the difference it made for us. I’m just trying to help people as much as I can. When you’re as broke as we were for those years, you realize money doesn’t matter. It’s nice to do something once in a while, but money to me, it doesn’t drive me. I could care less. I could sell this place for millions and not do a thing, but what good does that do? What do I do? It’s not me. To me, it’s more important if I can help other people and help the next generation, and inevitably I really hope we can change the production model and improve human health.”
The next generation on Brown’s Ranch is, of course, Gabe’s son, Paul. Gabe says he knew when Paul was a young boy that he would grow up to be a farmer. Paul loved being outdoors and helping with farm chores, but he also understood the importance of regenerative agriculture from an early age. Plus, their farm is a fun environment that young people would want to return to, Gabe says. Not that there aren’t hardships, such as animal deaths or equipment-related frustrations, but Brown’s Ranch isn’t like conventional farms and ranches, where people race to get big or get out. That’s a key difference between conventional and regenerative farms: there’s room for personal fulfillment under the regenerative model. “What’s so hard about this life?” Gabe asks, referring to life on his farm. He answers his own question yet again. “The money is there. The joy is there. Why wouldn’t you want young people to take over? I get really frustrated when I’m out speaking and I see [farm] couples who have children, but they discourage them from coming back [to the farm]. That bothers me. Why don’t you want your children there? To me, that’s a compliment if your children want to take over the business. That’s how it should be.”
Paul graduated in 2010 from North Dakota State University (NDSU) with a major in range management and minors in crop and weed science and animal science. Gabe tells me that Paul found college far less interesting than life on the ranch. The agriculture NDSU teaches is not regenerative, but industrial, meaning Paul saw most of his courses as a waste of time. The value of his degree lies not in its agricultural lessons, but in that it allows him to teach at the university level. For a while he taught at Bismarck State College. Gabe says Paul enjoys teaching because he wants to help young students see that there’s a different type of agriculture available than the one taught in most universities.
Most semesters on the first day of class, Paul asks his students if they are from farms and ranches; the vast majority always is. Then he asks if any know the names of the consumers who buy their farm’s products. Paul has yet to have a student raise his or her hand. Most of them come from conventional farms, so Paul has the difficult task of introducing them to regenerative agriculture and helping them understand why it’s better than industrial—a lesson many students balk at because it inherently challenges the way they were raised and the work their parents do. I understand why some students reject Paul’s philosophy; I rejected such ideas for a while, too, for the same reasons. I did not want to admit to my family’s participation in a flawed system, so if I refused to believe the system was flawed then I could avoid the guilt. In many ways, the students’ reactions mirror the reactions of beginning students in any course that challenges their preexisting notions. In the writing classes I teach, for example, students from conservative households often argue that racism does not exist, or that poverty occurs strictly because people don’t work hard enough. When we look at evidence that proves otherwise, some get angry and retreat further into their preconceived notions—but most begin to open their minds and engage in the type of critical thinking required in today’s world, and many of Paul’s students do the same.
Like Gabe, though, Paul realizes he can’t reach everyone. All he can do is expose students to new ideas and let them make their own decisions and create their own agricultural philosophies. He takes them on field trips to see how people are practicing various forms of regenerative agriculture, including to Brown’s Ranch. Every year, Gabe tells me, one or two students truly understand what Paul is teaching and “run with it” by starting their own diversified and holistic operation. Like his father, Paul is making a difference for the next generation, equipping them with the skills to succeed in a world that, I hope, will increasingly demand regenerative agriculture.