Growing a Regenerative Perspective | Jared Knock | TEDxSioux Falls

foreigner we are going to start our talk on

regenerative

agriculture in a strange place we are going to return to the third and fourth grade classrooms math to be exact and we are going to do a history problem anyone remember history problems any fan of history problems not a mixed crowd mixed crowd okay, very simple, right, you have 28 blocks, you have four friends, well, hopefully more friends than that, but for this context in this space and time, you have four friends that we are talking to and you. Are you going to give away 20 apples or are you going to give five apples to each friend?

How many apples do you have left? You have 28 apples. You are going to give five apples to four friends. You have eight apples left and if I was helping you, my primary school students came out with their math homework. , that's what I would tell you to answer, but you know what I really think, that's wrong and in fact, I would argue that because I'm an argumentative person, those who know me and if I were talking about tennis balls. or bowling balls or any inanimate object. I would say yes, you know, eight would be the correct answer, but no, we're talking about apples.

Says lifelong farmer and rancher in east central South Dakota. I want to share with you tonight a little more of my

perspective

on why I think that number is different than eight, you've probably heard of a lot of terms that are being used right now sustainable agriculture conservation agriculture the newest

regenerative

agriculture but in They are actually just a different way of saying the same thing about a circular regenerative system. I hope to tell you why focusing more on circular systems has great hope and encouragement for our future because ultimately this apple question is a very simplified version of a question we have to answer as a society we are struggling with.

Globally, it is a matter of natural resource allocation in terms of food, energy, water and other raw materials necessary for human activities. Everything we use or consume comes from very few sources. Everything in this room in your house, in a store you've been to. Today we have a huge cornucopia of options, colors, brands and types of things, but that really belies the fact that there are only a few sources where all of these things come from: they can come from a mine or a hole in the ground to extract things and oil or natural gas wells, a forest, a farm or a ranch, or we can fish it in the ocean, a big lake or a stream, that's it.

A couple of those systems are circular in nature and some of them are linear. deal with stocks that may run out over time, in fact, the clothes you are wearing tonight basically have two sources of origin: they came from the earth, cotton, wool, leather, silk, bamboo fiber, or it was a synthetic fiber derived from plastic, most likely from oil. Those were really the only two options that we're most used to understanding the world in finite stocks because that's how a lot of our daily work is we have X amount of food in our pantry and as we consume it it runs out and unfortunately , we have a finite amount of dollars in our bank accounts that are not replenished without intervention and from external sources in the linear

perspective

that defines our economy and our production practices and we deal with it almost exclusively in our daily lives. and a linear approach to understanding resources works for things that come from the mind or a well or an oil well.

If we look at a copper mine, these stocks are really limited, we have a finite amount of copper and oil, and if you have 28 million tons of copper in this mine and you take 5 million tons to four different customers, you have eight million tons left. tons less. That's how math works, but that's not the case with natural systems, the math is quite different in this type. of the system and to explain how I'm going to develop that Apple equation with another story problem for you, okay, in this situation I buy a five pound apple sapling and put it in a pot with 200 pounds of dry soil and water it . tree as I need it for the next five years going in and out of my yard or wherever I have it at the end of those five years I take the tree out of the ground, shake off all the dirt and dry it completely and weigh it The apple tree gained 80 pounds on a dry matter basis it gained 80 pounds so how much does a soil weigh?

Our initial and interactive talks when I ask this question I ask people to give their first impression, we think there is 120 pounds of soil. If the tree gained 80 pounds, something had to lose 80 pounds for that to happen, then the soil must have dropped by nature, but that is the wrong answer, in fact the soil weighs the same, it doesn't really change at all, So where did he do it? Where the tree actually comes from, so this experiment was done over 400 years ago by one of the most famous atmospheric scientists in the world, Jan Baptiste Von Helmet, and he postulated after doing this experiment with the willow that the tree came from the water because it didn't come from the ground, but actually the 80 pounds of dry matter came almost exclusively from the air and went back to things we all learned in grade school.

Our biology class did a fantastic job of teaching and instilling that in us. our oxygen comes from plants and I think almost everyone in this room knows that and in fact they know those reality shows where they do an interview on the sidewalk or on spring break in Fort Lauderdale and they interview people on the street and they don't know who it is. The first president was: They don't know when the Revolutionary War was fought or who won the Civil War. These people know that oxygen came from plants. Everyone knows that oxygen comes from plants. to a lesser extent was that plants don't do this because they love animals because of their benevolence towards humans, they do it because they are stealing carbon from CO2, they are taking CO2 out of the air and they are using carbon to build. themselves and then releasing or exhaling oxygen as a waste product of photosynthesis, so in this situation the 80 pounds of apple tree that was grown was grown almost exclusively from carbon with all of the carbon coming from the air.

The reason this illustrates is that instead of dealing with finite stocks within natural systems within apple orchards or farms and ranches and forestry, we're actually dealing with cyclical flows, there's a carbon cycle and there's Nutrient cycles and there are water cycles, in other words, all of these things move seamlessly within our ecosystem interaction endlessly. Over time, agriculture, forestry and other natural systems where raw materials are derived from a mixture of these two systems, as they move towards cyclical nature, become more regenerative the less they depend on inputs, the more they try to recycle the nutrients back into the system, the more we would classify them as regenerative the carbon cycle I described above is happening on every farm, on every blade of grass on every ranch, carbon dioxide in its presence in the atmosphere, precisely what we are told it is the biggest threat to our planet is actually food for plants actually how they are built science will tell you that we actually have versus the same amount of carbon molecules the same amount of water molecules or carbon atoms now that we had since the beginning of time, it's just that our cycles have become a little off.

Again, what defines regenerative agriculture is a focus on management strategies that effectively cycle these primary substrates with the goal of using as few external inputs as possible while maintaining or increasing production for the rest of civilization. This builds more resilient and robust farms. Understanding these cycles allows us to find nature-based solutions that maximize the Sun's energy to better store and recycle water, improve mineral absorption, and enhance biodiversity and more abundant life. Even the topsoil, which we are told, could be in limited supply in the future due to soil erosion or degradation can actually be restored and replenished using many of these same regenerative practices that we talked about.

Cycle nutrients, water and carbon more effectively. Using this perceptive perspective, we can see that agriculture can be a solution for cleaner air and water. a solution to capture carbon, draw it through plants and into the soil, rebuild the land and the answer is not to treat life forms as something of finite nature or a linear path, a reserve that needs to be preserved for the future, the answer to making the cycle of life better is maximum life today for maximum life tomorrow a greater abundance of more diverse living things that grow in the soil for longer throughout the year is key to maintaining an increase in the cycling cyclical nature of all of these substrates is a key to improving and increasing biodiversity, wildlife, livestock, food production and soil health, it is the foundation of how we build these systems, so when we have this perspective and we look at the eight apples that left from our first story problem, I realize that not only do we have eight apples, we have eight apples that we can eat and we can save the seeds, we can plant the seeds, we can capture sunlight, water, nutrients and build the soil and grow some trees, those few trees produce more seeds which make an orchard, once we have established it we plant grass in the middle to control soil erosion and then that growth has to be controlled by small ruminants like goats or sheep, so we also place them in the landscape and in addition we have to add legumes to increase nitrogen in the soil for fertility, which adds forage availability and protein supply to make goats and sheep grow faster , so actually not only do we have eight apples left, we have Infinity apples, wool, lamb and goat meat. and honey and all the other things and so on because once a thing starts, it becomes additive by nature, so I want to show you some examples of things that we are doing within agriculture, some on our farm and some. helping other farms and ranches explain that so up here this is our orchard this is a photo of our farm here this is what that field looked like before we took over management three years ago like you I can see there's a severe soil degradation in the lower right corner.

This is called a salt spot and I will explain it in nature. I want to show you one more time what it looked like today and talk about how it looked again. As before, salt flats are one of the most destructive and impactful phenomena happening in eastern South Dakota. In fact, in the Dakotas there are millions of acres of soil affected by salinity. They have been overgrown with a short rotation of different crops, mainly corn. and soybeans with full control, conventional tillage practices, sometimes irrigation that contains salt water, essentially they have been overgrown, they have had compaction in those areas and things of that nature, so it is a significant problem or a significant opportunity when We analyze those areas.

We said what we can do differently to change our practices and by the way, we can make this image a year after the date after the previous image. Okay, in a year that's how things change, so it's not a seasonal effect. The colors you're seeing are not different seasons, it's exactly the same time of year, so when we took that, we approached the management of this farm in a very particular prescriptive way, we identified the saline areas and the water areas that needed to be fixed. . on the outside of the field and planted a perennial Clover Alfalfa grass mix in those areas to try to bind the soil to increase water infiltration and make those areas productive again, we added corn in the middle of the field in the central part , but we flew over a cover crop with a plane actually in August Rye, winter camelina, radishes and crimson clover in the middle of there and that's what fills that green between the residue of that crop, so instead of use tillage to control residues that go to For next year's crop we use cattle and sheep to graze those residues to open up the soil and expose it for planting instead of using diesel fuel and iron.

So within these different systems we now have a food source. for our cattle and sheep over the winter outside with that hayfield, I call it going from being an eyesore in our front yard to becoming a solar-powered carbon capture facility whose byproduct is hay, aka hay field right in this situation, although it starts in the next situation, both start with a seed, in this case, the legume seed, in reality, several legume scenes at once were brought to agrass to increase biodiversity, so we commonly know Cadillac T grass, but we should also tell you that it likes to eat many other things besides clovers, such as wide, deep leaves.

They will actually have quite a diverse diet when given a lot of different variety in grasses to eat, so we can introduce things like grazing alfalfa and safe clovers into these existing pastures and they can fix nitrogen from the air. Nitrogen is the most common substance in the atmosphere. We talked a little bit about carbon dioxide earlier, which is about 0.04 percent of the atmosphere and nitrogen is over 20 percent. That's a significant portion of the atmospheric total, it's the majority of the atmosphere, so Nitrogen represents a huge opportunity, but it is all in a covalent bond that is inaccessible to plants in its current form, there are only two main categories of ways we can get it out. of the air meets the process called Bosch hap technology, this was perhaps one of the most important inventions of the last century, perhaps of the entire history of humanity, it is where approximately half of the commercial nitrogen fertilizer used in agriculture comes from today day and does not come from manure or legumes, but is derived from extremely intensive fossil fuels.

A lot of natural gas is used in this process. The other ways we can access this is through legumes. Legumes absorb not only carbon. build themselves, but they create what are called carbon accidents where they feed bacteria in their root system that actually pull nitrogen out of the air and turn it into an available source. This is one of the most powerful ways we can eliminate dependence on a fossil fuel-based fertilizer system into one that is regenerative in nature and the way the byproducts are better quality forage greater biodiversity longer duration of catch. of carbon better water infiltration and pollinator habitat is not a bad set of by-products or products encoded within a process when Look at the different opportunities we have to add resilience to the agricultural system to create systems with livestock and crop integration that cycle nutrients and all these other things faster, it creates a tremendous opportunity for us to regenerate agriculture, to regenerate soils across our system, looking back.

In my field that could not support the annual harvest by changing perspectives and management strategies, we say that this land stopped producing and became a highly productive hay field. Also, after three years we went back and tested the only organic matter in these fields. Before, since we were laid off when we started like you saw in the before to after picture and our organic matter increased by 0.5 percent, well that doesn't sound like much, less than half a percent, but that half a percent . The percent represents about five tons of actual carbon or about 18 tons of CO2 equivalent, which means that for every acre of this field that we were able to affect in this way we offset the emissions of an entire tanker truck of diesel fuel that was emitted. in just three years.

By adopting a strategy of increasing living roots over time, more living beings, more life, more grazing, more wildlife, more livestock as consumers, as citizens, as investors, you have the opportunity to invest, buy or promote systems that come from a circular or linear base. For the most part, things that can replace each other and in a regenerative system are preferable to those that are linear, often we are not quite in direct phase of a con of a choice, a dichotomy when we make decisions, but it is your You have the right as a consumer to ask how things are done and to ask for practices and to pressure and ask companies to improve the way things are done and with that we hope you have understood a little more about a regenerative perspective and how it can affect you. you and your decisions thanks