Regeneration of Our Lands: A Producer’s Perspective | Gabe Brown | TEDxGrandForks

Transcriber: Rhonda Jacobs Reviewer: Ellen Maloney How fitting that this event, titled “From Roots to Wings,” takes place here in North Dakota, as North Dakota’s state motto is “Strength Through the Soil ". And that is what I am going to visit you about today, it is about our soil resource. Agriculture has been questioned. How will we feed nine billion people by 2050? With the current production model, we can do it. It is a model with which the land is tilled. It is a model of monoculture production practices. No matter where you go in this great state, there are wheat fields, corn fields, soybean fields and many other crops.

These are the cattle that are now confined; whether poultry housed in chicken coops or cattle in a feedlot, for example. However, these practices have come at a cost. They have caused a loss of biodiversity. Healthy native grazing

lands

have hundreds of different species of plants, animals and insects. Monocultures have very few. This lack of biodiversity has led to the destruction of our soil resource. And that is what I am going to visit you about today. I will share some evidence with you, and these are statistics provided by North Dakota State University. In Walsh County, North Dakota, in 1960, the topsoil was 34 inches deep.

In 2014, that topsoil was just 15 inches deep, a staggering 56 percent loss. The level of organic matter in that same soil had gone from more than 8 percent to less than the current 3 percent. Look at the ramifications of that. The soil to his left was soil that had not been tilled and had not seen monoculture production practices. That is the same soil 17 years later on the right, after 17 years of the productive model of tillage and monocultures. It also destroys the pore spaces in the soil. Those pore spaces are critical for life in the soil, they are critical for water infiltration, because if we don't have aggregates in the soil, we can't infiltrate water.

I took this photo in a field less than ten miles from where you are sitting today. That shows that half an inch of rain can no longer infiltrate the soil profile. If we can't infiltrate water, what happens? We turned to things like tile drainage. And today we are seeing this throughout the central United States. What happens when we put down tile drainage and we don't have the soil aggregates to hold the soil in place? That soil ends up in the basin, and unfortunately, along with it, all the nutrients that could have been applied to those fields go.

That lack of biodiversity also leads to less nutrient cycling. If we do not have a proper nutrient cycle, we will have to add more and more synthetic fertilizers. These synthetic fertilizers have a cost: the cost of using fossil fuels and they also stimulate the deterioration of soil biology. We need to understand how soil works. The functioning of the soil is due to that biology, because plants obtain their nutrients through biology. High use of synthetic fertilizers also helps the spread of weeds. Most weeds love nitrogen. The more synthetic fertilizer we apply, the more weeds we get. If we have increased weed pressure, what do we have to do?

Spray herbicides. Unfortunately, many of those herbicides are chelates. What is a chelate? A chelate binds metals. Therefore, any of the metals such as magnesium, manganese, iron, zinc, copper become unavailable to plants. If the plant cannot absorb these micronutrients, it is more prone to disease. Since plants alone cannot protect themselves from diseases, it is necessary to spray fungicides. So, fungicides are harmful to what? Soil biology. Since the plants are not healthy enough to protect themselves from pests, what should we do then? We spray pesticides on crops intended for human consumption. Because we spray pesticides, we have a decrease in what?

The same predatory insects that would take care of the pests we are fumigating. We also have a decline in pollinators. Nowadays it is difficult to read a newspaper or magazine without reading about the plight of our pollinators. These pollinators are essential in our agricultural production. The current production model is all about killing. Whether it's weeds, a fungus, a pest, our diversity or our profits. Take a look at these projections just released by North Dakota State University. These are projections for 2016 for some of the main crops in our state. Each of them projects a negative return. What impact does that have on the quality of life of those who produce that crop?

But let's go one step further: what impact does it have on our schools? Drive around this state of ours and you will see many small towns that have fewer and fewer children attending schools. What effect does that have on our businesses? And then in our communities? What effect does the current production model have on our health? Look at this. The nutrient density of the food we produce has decreased by 15 to 65 percent over the past 50 years. This has had many negative consequences. The United States spends more on healthcare than any other developed country in the world. However, get this: we lead the world in incidence of ADD, ADHD, cancer, osteoporosis, Alzheimer's, autoimmune diseases, and the list goes on and on.

This is not acceptable. Can't continue. But the good news is that there is another way and I am going to share it with you. It is the way of nature. See how nature works. Mechanical tillage does not exist in nature. However, in our production model, we are tilling the land. In nature, there is always armor on the soil surface, which protects it from wind erosion, water erosion and evaporation. However, in our production model, the fields are empty. Nature recycles water very efficiently. It is able to infiltrate the soil profile and then, due to the large amount of organic matter, is retained there, for as long as the plants need it.

By destroying our soil resource, we can no longer infiltrate water and store it for when it is needed. Nature has living networks of plant roots; There are things that grow all the time during the growing season. The same is not true of production agriculture. Very often we hear about the production model we have today as the "conventional model." I would say that nature's way is the conventional model, because it has been around for eons of time. Think about it this way: what was this earth like 400 years ago? You had a lot of diversity. There was a diversity of plant species: herbs, grasses, legumes, trees.

And then there was also a diversity of animals and insects, and they all worked together to build a healthy ecosystem. So there are five principles that we must follow to follow nature's model. They are, number one: the least amount of mechanical disturbance possible. On my own ranch, we have been 100 percent zero until 1994; We haven't tilled the land at all. The second principle of soil health is the armor of the soil surface; We always have the ground covered. That's a photo of one of our fields after planting. That field is no longer prone to wind or water erosion because we maintain an armor on the surface.

The third principle of soil health is diversity. My son teaches rangeland management at the local community college. He took his students to one of our pastures. They counted more than 140 different species of grasses, herbs and legumes. Why don't we have that in production agriculture today? In our operation, we are trying to imitate him. These are just a few of the cash crops we grow at our operation. We don't just grow one cash crop, we grow many. On top of that, we don't grow cash crops as monocultures. At the top left are oats with three types of clovers growing on them.

At the top right is a very diverse mix of cool season broadleaves. The bottom left is corn with hairy peas growing on it. At the bottom right, there are sunflowers with over 19 species of covers growing with them. An enormous amount of diversity fuels soil biology. We also have orchards in our operation. These orchards, in addition to giving us fruit, we can have livestock grazing under them, thus stacking companies. We have five hectares of vegetable production, but not as monocultures. Between each of those rows of corn are rows of peas, beans, zucchini, carrots, squash and a variety of other species so that we can benefit from the diversity.

The fourth principle of soil health is to leave the roots in the soil as long as possible. You don't have to drive far through this state to see that there are monocultures that grow only for a short period of time and then the land is left idle. These are just a few of the cover crop species we planted at our operation last year. In fact, we plant more than 70 different species. From the time the snow melts in the spring until it lingers in early winter, we have a variety of species growing on our land to fuel soil health.

We are optimizing the collection of solar energy. Because the way the system works is that we take light from the sun through photosynthesis; produces carbon; That carbon is transferred to the roots, where it is filtered as root exudate, which is what all biology feeds on. We need that biology to deliver the necessary nutrients to the plant to feed animals and people. You see, if we have healthy soil, we will have clean air, clean water, healthy plants, healthy animals, and healthy people. We have to focus on the biology of food. In addition to this, we are able to feed all the wildlife found on our operation.

We also feed a wide variety of different insects. Insects tend to get a bad reputation. We like a wide variety of insects, including all the predatory insects that deal with pests. We want to address our problems by biological means, not by chemical means. Dr. Jonathan Lundgren, one of the world's leading entomologists, told me: For every insect species that is a pest, there are 1,700 that are beneficial. Why in production agriculture is our goal to simply kill that pest, when we should aim to provide habitat for all those benefits? The reason growers have a pest problem is because of a lack of diversity.

We need to think biologically. The fifth principle of a healthy ecosystem is animal impact. On our farm we have a herd of 350 beef cows. We also finish our meat on grass because we know it's healthier, both for us and the animals. We have a flock of sheep and raise grass-finished lambs. We have grazed pork. We have broiler chickens that are grazing. And we have a flock of 750 laying hens that are also grazing. We also have bees. These bees, in addition to pollinating our crops, provide us with honey. This is what we have done in our operation.

When we started in 1993 on the left, we had a very shallow topsoil: 1.7 percent organic matter. We were only able to infiltrate half an inch of rain per hour. Then we did no-till. We began to diversify the commercial crop rotation; We noticed an improvement in soil health. From there we started adding cover crops – another improvement in soil health, our organic matter levels increased and our infiltration improved. We then began to integrate all of these livestock species, another marked increase in the health of our soil ecosystem. Now, in 2013, we have a plot of land that is now over 11 percent organic matter.

The same soils that in 1993 could only infiltrate half an inch of rain per hour can now infiltrate more than 15 inches of rain per hour. We have done this without the use of synthetic fertilizers, pesticides or fungicides. We have done it following the principles of nature. This has resulted in a ranch that is profitable every year, regardless of the price. And we do this without participating in any government subsidies of any kind, whether crop insurance, EQIP, CSP, or any other form of government payment. Therefore, we are not a burden on society. The accumulation of companies has allowed us to produce many more calories of nutrient-dense foods at a lower cost compared to the current production model.

Yes, we can feed the world and we can do it in a way that regenerates our resources, thereby healing farms, families and communities. Thank you.