Growing a Revolution, page 18
When Brown went no-till in 1993, his father-in-law was embarrassed and perplexed, convinced that “the more you worked the soil the better.” But as things went surprisingly well for the first few years, Brown diversified with hairy vetch and peas for livestock forage.
Then the day before harvest in 1995, Brown lost his entire wheat crop to hail. He barely managed to plant a quick cover crop for the cattle to graze. What do you do with hailed-out wheatland, especially if you’re a bit stubborn? Plant wheat again, like Brown did in 1996. Then hail returned for a second round. Brown had to take an off-farm job to pay the bills.
The next year, 1997, was very dry. He didn’t harvest a thing, and nobody else around did either. Only a loan from his family kept the bank from foreclosing. On top of that, he lost 80 percent of his next crop to—you guessed it—hail, in 1998.
This was a disastrous run. But looking back, Brown says that four years in a row of failed crops was “absolutely the best thing that could have happened.” Those four years—and his resulting desperation—pushed him to change the way he farmed. He couldn’t afford any inputs, so he had to figure out how to grow crops without them.
At the start of a long reeducation, Brown, curious about the use of cover crops, delved into Thomas Jefferson’s farm journal. It made him want to trade all of his agronomy books for ecology ones instead. He realized that modern agriculture had taken diversity out of the equation after he read Buffalo Bird Woman’s Garden, a 1917 account of a Hidatsa woman who grew a wide variety of corn and beans in alternate rows along with squash and sunflowers. Her story illustrated that rotating crops isn’t really anything new. Brown’s methods simply update old ideas that work.
Soon, Brown started noticing subtle changes in the soil. It smelled different, retained more moisture, and looked darker. Back then he hadn’t ever heard the words “soil” and “health” strung together, and he thought of a cover crop as something to use to keep erosion from happening. But it was becoming apparent that planting cover crops and not tilling improved his soil. And he liked that.
By 2000 he could afford to use fertilizers again. So he did. A few years later, in 2003, Kristine Nichols (who worked for the Natural Resources Conservation Service in North Dakota at the time), asked him why he was back to using synthetic fertilizer. Why not use soil biology instead to cycle nutrients? Intrigued by her questions—and attracted to the potential to save big using less fertilizer—he conducted side-by-side field trials from 2003 to 2007. Much to his surprise, he got equal or greater yields with no fertilizer.
Now he had some questions of his own. Had he already improved his soil enough that fertilizers wouldn’t help? Had he been writing big checks for nothing? Since then, Brown hasn’t added any synthetic nutrients to his fields. Instead, he relies on legumes to provide nitrogen to the grass, and grasses, through mycorrhyzal fungi, to provide phosphorus to the legumes. He hasn’t used pesticides or fungicides since 2000 and quit using pesticide-treated seeds a few years later. Finding he could maintain yields without paying for a lot of chemicals was a welcome discovery: “I like signing my name on the back of the check, not the front!”
Today, his goal is to keep advancing soil health and eliminate herbicides altogether. He still uses them occasionally, about every third or fourth year to beat back perennial weeds like Canada thistle. This is about the same interval that Jeff Moyer tills to manage perennial weeds at the Rodale Institute.
For Brown, the next piece of the soil health puzzle fell into place when he heard no-till champion Ademir Calegari speak about planting cover crops in multispecies combinations. Two things the Brazilian agronomist said resonated with him. Cover crops need as little as two inches of rain to grow and they were meant to be planted in mixes of more than half a dozen species. So Brown tried a multispecies cover-crop mix in what turned out to be a drought year. His crops did far better than expected; so much better, in fact, that he bowed out of government crop insurance. A decade later he doesn’t regret it. “I don’t want to be on welfare. Why should the taxpayers have to subsidize me?” Brown says he’s not only doing better than those who stayed in the program, he’s building resilience back into his land.
I couldn’t help but appreciate the way he frames the effect his new practices have had on his perspective. “When I was farming conventionally,” he said, “I’d wake up and decide what I was going to kill today. Now I wake up and decide what I am going to help live.”
Shifting into a solemn tone, he told me that many of those in the regenerative agriculture movement are Christians seeking to be good stewards of the land that they’ll someday pass on to their children and grandchildren. His faith is central to his enthusiasm about restoring his soil. It’s about taking care of Creation. But he also knows that if it’s to last, it has to pencil out as well. Fortunately, a regenerative model is profitable.
Paul, Brown’s twenty-seven-year-old son, is a taller, thinner version of his father. He’s also part of a new generation of farmers who have never tilled the soil. And he happens to be business-savvy; he pushed his folks to get into direct-to-consumer sales and to start their own trademarked “Nourished by Nature” brand to sell. They’ve been pleasantly surprised by the demand, and how consumers are starting to view nutrient-dense food grown in healthy soil as preventative medicine essential to their own health.
Brown wanted to make sure I knew that you don’t have to tie up a lot of money to do regenerative farming. You can do it at fairly low cost. Owning a lot of high-value depreciable assets, like combines and big sprayers, is what got many farmers into trouble in the 1980s. A conventional farm can go upside down remarkably fast, from $1 million net income one year to $1 million loss the next. All it takes is one bad storm or a too-dry summer. That sounds more like Wall Street roulette than a stable family business. Brown is certain that the financial diversity of his system is better for people and the land.
So what’s the strategy for growing small farms? Brown points to how turning farm waste into profits emulates nature’s efficiency and makes good business sense. Stacking enterprises in this way produces better margins and a more resilient, diversified income stream. At the heart of it all is rebuilding fertile soil, although he’s quick to add that it would help to reform or eliminate conventional farm subsidies, and crop insurance, and to simplify regulatory permitting for farm-to-table food marketing and sales.
As much as Brown would like to see more interest in prioritizing soil health, he does not like throwing around the word sustainable. “Why would you want to sustain a degraded resource? I don’t want that—first we have to regenerate the soil.”
In his experience, the information that extension agents, universities, and industry feed to farmers is geared toward promoting chemical-intensive monocultures. He summed it up pretty simply. “Everyone who advises farmers is trying to sell them stuff or make a living off them. People come here to see my equipment! But it’s not the equipment that matters. It’s the system you use it in that matters.” While he may not outyield his neighbors, Brown assures me that his farm is much more profitable. “The guy with the record corn yield lost money doing it—how stupid is that?”
Yet regenerating soil fertility offers benefits that extend well beyond revitalizing small farms. “Have you heard about the drought in California?” he asked. “Or all the nitrates in the Gulf? We’ve known for half a century that half the nitrates we apply to our fields don’t get into our crops.” Nitrate pollution, excess runoff, drought susceptibility, soil degradation: these things can all be rectified if we manage our farmlands to fix one problem—soil health. Brown says this isn’t rocket science—anyone can understand it. Research funded by big businesses doesn’t tend to focus on low-cost preventative practices. But farmers increasingly do.
After all, there’s nothing magic about Brown’s farm. He just adopted methods based on the full suite of conservation agriculture principles—and took it to another level with livestock.
TURNING WEEDS INTO BACON
The next morning, the sky was overcast as I tagged along with several dozen farmers from Minnesota, Manitoba, and South Africa who had come to visit the farm. Brown does this several times a week each summer, for several thousand visitors a year. He says he has time to do it only because he went no-till—and because Paul cares for their cattle.
The farmers were there to see Brown’s soil. We all followed his Green Bay Packers sweatshirt to a 3-acre field, where green beans scrambled up a scaffolding of six-foot-tall corn. He half-joked that he likes to grow beans and corn at the same time because then he doesn’t have to bend over to pick the beans. Various other vegetables were growing between the rows of corn; he told the group that this field produces three times as much food per acre than growing a single crop. In fact, they grow enough in this field to harvest their own food, supply their farmers’ market demand, and still make substantial donations to a local food bank.
Before he showed the assembled farmers his soil, Brown lined three buckets up in front of them, each with soil from one of the fields he and I had visited the day before. One by one, the farmers shuffled by, thrusting their hands into buckets to feel the soil, break it up, and, of course, comment on it. “Not very crumbly. Not much organic matter.” “This one’s got no pore spaces.” “That’s the worst one,” opined one farmer after inspecting a clod of tilled organic soil. Everyone agreed that the densest was the high-input one. Nobody was too thrilled with any of them.
During their inspection, Brown had sent a volunteer into his cornfield to get a shovelful of soil. When the volunteer returned, the tone of the commentary shifted as the shovel was passed around. “This is nice stuff,” one gentleman standing beneath a cowboy hat said. “It’s darker and full of holes—like Swiss cheese,” added another. “Nice aggregates,” said a third.
Picking up on this last comment, Brown told the group that it takes mycorrhizal fungi to make this kind of soil. Both tillage and too much nitrogen kills mycorrhizae. The former slices them up, and the latter makes plants cut way back on their exudate buffet, which starves the mycorrhizae and other beneficial soil microbes. This was the problem with his neighbor’s soil—the problem with conventional agriculture.
For emphasis, Brown held up two chunks of soil, one from his field and one from the tilled organic field next door. The neighbor’s dry light-brown soil looked anemic next to Brown’s moist blackish soil full of holes, recognizable bits of organic matter, and stable aggregates. The farmers were riveted as Brown spoke. “It’s the biology that drives the system,” he said. “We all know that. More carbon and aggregates mean more biology and more cycling of nutrients.” He’d taken this plot from less than 4 percent organic matter to over 10 percent in just six years, adding about 1 percent a year. He did it without inputs, herbicides, or amendments, just using cover crops, manure, compost, mulch, and his secret ingredient—wood chips to add carbon and boost growth of mycorrhizal fungi.
The big question now, he explained, was how to scale it up, since they didn’t have enough wood chips to cover the entire ranch. The native prairie soils had up to 8 percent organic matter, and Paul aims to bring their whole ranch up to 12 percent over his lifetime. How were they going to manage that, the assembled group wondered?
“With help from our cows,” Brown replied.
The aboveground chewing, tearing, and trampling by livestock grazing creates wounds that the plant must heal. But the plants don’t do it alone. They need soil micronutrients and microbial metabolites—both of which will be delivered only if they pump a steady supply of carbon-rich exudates out of their roots to recruit microbial assistants. This is nature’s way of building fertile grassland soils. It’s also how cattle can contribute to restoring soil health and promoting nutrient cycling on farmland.
While Brown sees grazing as an effective way to get more carbon into the soil, he doesn’t like to say he’s “sequestering” carbon. It’s simply part of the natural cycle: as plants fix carbon and push it out of their roots to feed microbes, they build up the stock of carbon in the soil. So he uses high-density, low-frequency grazing to restore both his soil and the native prairie.
Brown led the group to an idyllic spot where several hundred chickens scurried around a couple dozen cows grazing on a field of sorghum, squash, and rotting pumpkins. As annoyed cows chased nimble chickens, he explained that this is how stacking enterprises boosts soil fertility—and farm profits.
A pair of trailers labeled “Paul’s Poultry” were parked just outside the single-wire electric fencing at the edge of the field. These egg mobiles, as Paul calls them, are made from old cattle trailers. Inside, Paul had built roosts and little boxes for the chickens to lay their eggs in, and he’d installed grate flooring so that their droppings could fall right to the ground. By day, the chickens wander around and manure the field near their portable coops, then find shelter within them at night. Plus, they trade fly control for the cows for protection from coyotes and foxes, through their proximity to the big bovines. While the farm does lose a few chickens to predators, Paul shrugs that off as part of nature’s cycle.
The Browns see the key to making money on a farm as using the cull of one thing as the input for another. They make chicken food out of grain screenings, turning something that would otherwise go to waste into more chickens and eggs. The only time they come out to tend the chickens is to collect eggs and move the egg mobiles around to follow the cows. At peak production in spring and summer, they sell more than $700 worth of eggs a week. They can barely keep up with demand.
Paul has been a driving force behind increasing livestock diversity on the farm, adding sheep and hogs to the mix as well. “Anytime you can turn weeds into bacon, it’s a good thing,” he said. And their cows don’t just graze on native prairie. They also graze on cover crops and harvested cropland.
Cover crops bridge the Browns’ no-till cropping and grazing systems. Gabe seeds cowpeas and other cover crops along with their corn, with the corn coming up first and the cover crops then growing in under it. After they harvest the corn, the cattle graze the cover crop and manure the field before no-till planting into the residue.
They’d tried using a crop roller, like Jeff Moyer uses at Rodale, but the cover crop has to be flowering for that method to work properly, and their growing season is too short to get in a cash crop after that. So they use cattle instead, taking advantage of how cows move themselves around—and poop a lot.
Brown will tell you that there’s no simple formula for deciding how many species should be included in a cover crop mix. He gets better results with seven or more species and now typically uses ten to twenty, although he has included as many as seventy in a mix. He customizes each mix to his goals for particular fields, mindful of synergies such as combining sunflower and daikon radish to provide deep taproots with buckwheat for phosphorous scavenging. He’ll plant what I came to think of as bovine salad mix—winter cover crops that stick up through the snow for their cattle to graze from December into February.
When Brown first got the farm, he seeded some of the degraded soil back to perennial prairie. It didn’t work. He had better luck after using cover crops and grazing to start improving the soil. Then he could reseed it to native grasses. After that he began rotational grazing to promote exudate production and, he hoped, further improve soil health.
At first, his farm had three large pastures where cattle grazed year-round. Now it has over one hundred small pastures chock-full of over a hundred species of native grasses that will be grazed for a few days a year, at most. Brown explains the idea crisply. “Cattle have four legs for a reason—so we let them use them.” They mix up the timing of grazing so as to be unpredictable in terms of the sequence or time of year. Their cows can graze on crop stubble into February before they shift to bale feeding. Brown won’t export baled hay from his land. His cows eat it in the same field it grew in. He will, however, import straw from neighbors when they’ll sell him $30 worth of nutrients and only charge him $5 for the straw they come in.
Brown began rethinking his grazing practices when he came across the controversial ideas of Allan Savory, a wildlife biologist turned alternative-grazing guru in Africa. Originally an opponent of grazing, this guru of “holistic management” had made a surprising observation while studying wildlife management in Africa. It wasn’t having too many grazing animals on the land that led to soil degradation, it was keeping them too long on any one area. So Savory prescribed intensively grazing any one piece of ground for just a day or two per year.
When I asked Brown his opinion on what drove the division of livestock and cropping in the first place, he was quick to respond. “Extension agents,” he said. “The reason feedlots were started was to get rid of excess grain production.” And as automation spurred the growth of centralized feeding operations, it saved the farmers who specialized in grain production the extra work involved with livestock. The loss of manure then helped push grain farmers into fertilizer dependence.
Back when Brown and his son first changed up their grazing practices, they didn’t see many dung beetles. Three years later, they started to notice more coming around. Now they have sixteen species and Paul has become something of a dung beetle expert. He lit up describing the different kinds: rollers that round up little dung balls, tunnelers that bury dung, and dwellers that simply live in it. Some burrow up to eight feet deep, mixing manure down into the soil. They all eat fly larvae, which helps keep the cows happy.
Changing their grazing practices not only brought native plants back from the brink, but it attracted more native wildlife to their fields. As Brown told me this, a sharp-tailed grouse rose from the field to flee our advance. “It’s a great indicator species—if you have those, it’s a healthy ecosystem.” Brown described how when he first moved onto the farm, he never saw white-tailed deer. But in a recent and particularly hard winter, they found hundreds taking shelter on the east end of the farm. They also now routinely see foxes, weasels, raptors, and “too many songbirds to count.” If he wanted to charge people to hunt, he could turn all the new wildlife into another revenue stream. But some he really wants to keep, like the cowbirds, a subspecies of blackbird, that are masters of fly control. He loves that a flock now overwinters with his cows.
