Understanding that agriculture teaches farmers about regenerative grazing.
Photo courtesy of Understanding Ag.
When Gabe Brown first got into regenerative agriculture over 25 years ago, he wasn’t trying to solve climate change.
“I was just trying to keep the banker at bay and feed my family,” Brown told CNBC.
Brown grew up in Bismarck, North Dakota and went to college to become an agriculture professor. He then married his high school sweetheart, whose family had a farm. The young couple moved home to help out on a farm that used the usual farming methods of the day. Eight years later, Brown bought part of the farm from his relatives.
From 1995 to 1998, Brown’s North Dakota farm was hit by natural disasters, with three years of hail and a year of drought. Brown needed to figure out how to make his land profitable. In addition, he had no money for fertilizers and chemicals.
“It led me to learning. And I really started to study nature and ecosystems and how natural ecosystems function,” Brown told CNBC.
Today, Brown manages his 6,000-acre ranch near Bismarck using regenerative methods and helps run Understanding Ag, a consulting company that advises farmers who manage 32 million acres across North America.
Gabe Brown came to regenerative agriculture to save his farm two and a half decades ago.
Photo courtesy of Gabe Brown
Although Brown did not intend to fight climate change, regenerative grazing is a way to capture carbon dioxide, a critical component of limiting global warming. Cattle grazing on the ground feed on plants that absorb carbon dioxide from the air. After grazing, cows do not graze on the ground for a long time, giving the roots the opportunity to grow another layer of leaves, capturing more carbon.
Dan Probert, Oregon rancher and marketing director for Farming Collective Country Natural Beef, explains that regenerative cattle farming involves moving cattle from one paddock to another on a regular, almost daily basis. Cattle eat grass in the pasture where they graze, cut it low, and then leave. Each felled paddock has a significant amount of time to rest and recover so that it can grow back.
“These cattle are bunched up, kept quite tight, and then they are sometimes moved twice a day. And then that land is left to rest and recover for a full year before the animals return,” Probert told CNBC. .
This process sequesters more carbon than feeding cows typical monocrops such as corn because these crops are annuals and grow quite slowly and do not photosynthesize when they are fallow.
Dan Probert takes care of the soil on his farm in Oregon.
Photo courtesy of Dan Probert
The amount of carbon sequestered by regenerative grazing practices varies greatly depending on how well the farmer grazes the livestock and how diverse the plant species are on the pastures. But the range is 2.5 to 7.5 metric tons of carbon per acre per year, according to Understanding Ag founding partner Allen Williams.
By comparison, southern pine forests, which receive some attention as a carbon sink, will absorb 1.4 to 2 tons of carbon per acre per year.
The team that Probert works for, Country Natural Beef, is partnering with the nonprofit Sustainable Northwest and the MJ Murdock Charitable Trust to more accurately quantify the carbon footprint of regenerative livestock by taking soil samples now and comparing the carbon content to past samples. will be adopted in three to five years.
Philosophy of land management, not a recipe
Regenerative agriculture is a philosophy of farming and raising cattle, not a specific recipe, explains Bobby Gill of the nonprofit Savory Institute. The practice is based on the work of Allan Savory, a leader in the field who began his work in the 1960s in Zimbabwe.
“He has been pounding this drum, developing these methods for decades. And often he was the only one to beat that drum,” Gill told CNBC.
Savory’s revolutionary idea was that farmers should prioritize soil health and graze their livestock in ways that mimic natural patterns.
The group does not focus on the environmental aspects of raising cattle, which activists often criticize.
“Someone who is a fifth-generation farmer … sucks to be called a flyover state or when people point the finger at him and say, ‘Because of you, climate change: it’s your fault,'” Gill said. “It’s important to engage in these conversations with empathy and understanding.”
Instead, the Savory Institute teaches farmers about regenerative agriculture as a way to run a profitable farm, provide for your family, and be proud of your land.
Savory is no longer considered a weirdo. The Savory Institute was founded in 2009 and currently has 54 centers around the world that have trained 14,000 people and have impacted the management of over 42 million acres of land.
When Will Harris got into regenerative farming in Georgia, he wasn’t trying to solve climate change either. He didn’t even know the climate was changing.
Harris is fourth generation in his family and runs his 2,300-acre White Oak Pastures farm in Georgia, and he has some understanding of recent farming history.
Board of Directors of White Oak Pastures: front row, from left to right: Gene Turn, Jody Benoit, Will Harris, Jenny Harris, Amber Harris. Back row, left to right: John Benoit, Brian Sapp.
white oak pastures
In the years after World War II, agriculture became highly industrialized, Harris told CNBC.
“Europe is starving. There was a huge demand for cheap, plentiful and safe food,” Harris said. “Industrialization, commercialization, centralization really did it … it made food obscenely cheap and wastefully plentiful, and very boring, very, very consistent.”
Factory farming has led to monoculture farming, where only one product is grown on a piece of land. It has also led to the use of chemical fertilizers, tillage, pesticides, hormonal implants in animals, sub-therapeutic antibiotics in animals, and large equipment.
Harris didn’t like it. Financially, he was fine, he said, but he didn’t like the methods that had become the industry standard.
White oak pastures cultivated with regenerative farming methods are on the left. The land on the right is cultivated by conventional industrial methods.
“I have just become disillusioned with the excesses of this farming system. I just started moving away from her. I did this by simply stopping using technology “products” that I didn’t like and doing things that I didn’t like.” I didn’t mean to do it on purpose. I didn’t move my farm towards anything on purpose. I just moved away from what I didn’t like.”
The change was not free. Harris says it takes Harris two years to raise a 1,100-pound cow, while with industrial methods, a farmer can raise a 1,400-pound animal in 18 months. But the quality of his meat is better, and he can charge more from discerning customers.
Harris says his margins have shrunk as international farmers jumped into the “grass-foraging” game and slipped into markets as “Americans,” taking just one small step in the US production process, but the value of his land is high. are not included in the price of the steak.
“You don’t measure the degradation of this non-depreciable asset on your balance sheet,” Harris said.
“As a practitioner with 25 years of experience in regenerative land management, I can confidently tell you that you cannot regenerate degraded, desert land without impacting animals.”
In addition, two of his daughters and their spouses have returned to the farm, in stark contrast to many other farming families whose children leave for other professions.
“I can quite assure you that if I continued to farm on an industrial scale, my daughters would not want to return.”
good for business
Although regenerative farming may take longer to bring cows to maturity, this practice can help ranchers use the land more efficiently.
“My ranch maybe five years ago had 1,000 heads, and now there are 1,200 heads in the same ground base,” Probert told CNBC.
There aren’t many upfront costs to transitioning a farm to a regenerative grazing paradigm, except for education, which Williams points out is tax-free for farmers.
But farmers usually do not know this.
“They have the false idea that it will be expensive and that they will take a big financial hit in the first few years. But that’s not the case at all,” Williams said. Once farmers start adopting regenerative grazing, they don’t have to buy synthetic fertilizers, herbicides, fungicides and insecticides, so their costs go down, Williams said.
Teaching other farmers the benefits of regenerative grazing and agriculture has become a business in its own right.
Williams, a sixth-generation family farmer with farms in both Mississippi and Alabama, spent 15 years in academia teaching at both Louisiana Tech University and Mississippi State University before he began teaching regenerative grazing techniques to farmers. and agriculture. literally.
Allen Williams (left), a sixth generation family farmer and founding partner of Understanding Ag, teaches another farmer about regenerative grazing.
“You cannot realize what you do not know. So someone needs to be there to teach and educate you,” Williams told CNBC.
Spreading the word about regenerative grazing around the world is drawing attention to itself, Probert says, which makes some farmers uncomfortable.
Probert takes over the leadership of the farming community he is part of because he knows it is critical to the survival of his industry.
“We can’t live here on the island. We have 100 ranches on six and a half million acres. And we are heavily dependent on Portland, San Francisco, Seattle and Los Angeles to market our products,” Probert said.
“So we’re just constantly working to bridge this gap between the city and the countryside. And we know we can’t hide here. We have to find a way to tell our story and make people feel good about the food they eat.”