Today David joins Ross and Christophe to explain why civilizations that degrade their soil don’t last. We discuss the troubling numbers around soil degradation and loss and the three simple farming practices that would restore our soil. David walks us through the residual benefits of regenerative farming and the factors that inhibit widespread adoption.
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Full Transcript
Alexsandra Guerra: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change Podcast by Nori, the world’s first carbon removal marketplace. Here are your hosts, Ross Kenyon and Christophe Jospe.
Ross Kenyon: Hello, welcome to the Reversing Climate Change Podcast with Nori. I’m Ross Kenyon here with Christophe Jospe. We’re here on the campus of UW today up in Seattle, which is great. We’re here with David Montgomery talking about the importance of tilling your farm and of using lots of fertilizers. Did you spit out your coffee a little bit? Yeah.
Christophe Jospe: Fertilizers are good. They help crops be more productive. I’m pretty sure. That’s what plants crave. We made a nice little video talking about something that we believe is indeed revolutionary and is going to change a lot and relates to what Nori is trying to do. So we’ll go into that today. How about we start with letting Dave introduce himself? But actually, I want to hear about Big Dirt because that seems like a really key piece that you have to include.
Dr. David Montgomery: Well, sure. I mean, I’m a professor of geomorphology, but I’ve also been a musician since I was in high school. And I’m currently in two bands. One’s called Big Dirt and the guitar player for that. There’s another guitar player. So I’m one of the guitar players. You can find us on iTunes, Spotify, that kind of stuff. And just joined a new band as a bass player called Good Bones that our first album will be out probably this summer whenever we get around to finishing it. But we’re sort of an alt-country pop kind of a vein, Wilco-ish, Jayhawks kind of band.
So I’ve been a musician for a long time. I’ve been a scientist for a long time. And I think they go well, really well together.
Ross Kenyon: People in geology just tend to be the most fun of the scientists I’ve met in general. They seem like they have a good time in general. Some of the physicists I meet, they’re not musicians. They’re not having a good time in that same way.
Dr. David Montgomery: When you think about the world through the lens of geological time, you realize pretty quick that we don’t live very long. Life is just too short not to have fun.
Ross Kenyon: Seems like you do a good job at that then.
Dr. David Montgomery: Oh, we try.
Ross Kenyon: That’s great. Where do we even start? Like what is soil? I know people probably don’t get that excited about it, but actually reading your book got me really excited about the possibilities for what soil can do.
Dr. David Montgomery: Great. Well, I mean, if you’re thinking about climate change, I mean, soil is one of the potential contributing solutions to the problem that we don’t tend to think about because it’s right underfoot. We take it for granted. I mean, most people look at the landscape as something that doesn’t change over time. And a geomorphologist looks at a Yeah. When you study landscape evolution, you study erosion. And when you study erosion, you’re studying the loss of soil. And I got into looking at soil and soil loss through a book I wrote about 10 years ago now called Dirt, the Erosion of Civilizations.
And that looked at the role of soil loss and degradation on ancient societies. The kind of thing you might expect a geologist to do, look backwards through history and look at climate changes of the past. I looked at erosion events of the past. And the story I came up with, which is actually pretty solid for societies around the world, is that civilizations that degraded their land didn’t last. If they didn’t take care of the soil, the soil didn’t take care of them. And that involves sort of two things, the loss of the soil itself and the degradation of the organic matter in the soil that is basically synonymous with carbon.
You know, where carbon-based life forms, living things, and their dead remains are very rich in carbon. And Carbon turns out to be in the form of organic matter, the fuel that runs the underground economy that recycles all the dead stuff on this planet. And new life relies on that recycled dead stuff. Otherwise, if dead things never broke down, if microbes never decayed them, we’d be buried in this stuff. And it’s also if you think about the bulk chemical composition of us or a tree or a blade of grass and the bulk chemical composition of the earth.
They’re really different. Life is a refined product made from breaking rocks down, weathering them, and it’s microbes that do the work, and a lot of the work happens in the soil. So the soil is kind of the foundation for life on Earth. We don’t know of another planet that has soil on it yet. It’s where geology and biology interface. It’s that frontier between the dead world of the rocky bones of the planet and the living world of us and every other life form. So it’s a really fundamental resource. And it’s actually, as I’m sure we’ll get into in this conversation, looking at the degradation and the potential to restore organic matter to soil is actually one of the real underappreciated levers we might have in trying to mitigate or potentially even reverse climate change.
Christophe Jospe: We’ve degraded soils and in your book, Growing a Revolution, I believe you mentioned soils around the world have lost 30% of the carbon in them since the Industrial Revolution and we started managing them. Is that about correct?
Dr. David Montgomery: Well, it’s a little right. It’s sort of mixing a couple statistics up. The sort of a one-third soil loss number is sort of a good estimate of the amount of agricultural land that’s been taken out of production globally due to soil degradation. But if you look at the actual loss of carbon from soils, of soil organic waste, In the US, the estimate’s probably closer to a half. Globally, it’s probably about the same number from our agricultural soils. Other soils haven’t lost as much, and we can get into that because it relates to farming practices.
But any way you look at the problem of feeding the world in the future... Those numbers should be troubling because we’re actually on track presently. There’s a UN Global State of the Soils Assessment from a couple of years ago that concluded that we’re losing about a third of a percent of 0. 3% of our global agricultural production capacity each year to soil loss and soil degradation, loss of organic matter, reduction of fertility. That’s kind of a small number, right? 0. 3% is kind of what all our savings accounts gets these days.
If that, yeah. But if you play it out over a century, it adds up to another third of our agricultural capacity. We’re on track with conventional agriculture to degrade at a time when our population is expected to increase by 50%, if not double. Those trends are working against each other. So I got really interested in soil restoration, not only through the climate angle, but also through the angle of just how are we going to feed the future? How are we going to avoid the fate of the past civilizations that I documented in the dirt book?
Because we can’t afford to repeat that globally. There’s various motivations for thinking about soil restoration, which is how I got into visiting the farmers whose stories I tell in the new book. And now I’ve forgotten where your original question was, so I’ll kick it back.
Christophe Jospe: You answered it and you gave a great distinction. I mean, at Nori, we don’t like to focus on doom and gloom or problems. We like very solution and action oriented. And it is exciting because it seems like, yes, there’s a problem, but there’s a very obvious solution to it. So the problem, if I may, is that farmers are planting monocultures. There’s a supply chain that takes those monocultures and says, you need to plant a lot of corn. Oh, and by the way, you need to Buy a lot of fertilizer to keep planting that corn and you plant it over and over, which degrades the land and depletes the carbon from the soil and creates all these issues.
And what you’re saying in your book is, well, in concert, farmers can do these three very simple practices. They can use no-till agriculture, they can plant cover crops, and they can rotate their crops.
Dr. David Montgomery: Someone’s been studying, huh? Right? Yeah, that’s the recipe though.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, I read the spark notes, not the book. So, okay. Take us through that a little bit. We’re a farmer. We’re going to do these practices and we’re going to start storing way more carbon in the soil. Our productivity might go down the first couple of years, but if we keep at it, not only is the soil going to retain way more water, not contribute to the runoff or to use a big word, eutrophication.
Unknown speaker: Oh, that’s a good one.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah. And that’s when you have like too much fertilizer that then fertilizes the water and creates algal blooms. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: I literally just gave Kristoff a wedgie. Yeah. Nerd alert.
Christophe Jospe: And so what happens there is the algae wants to basically fertilize and then die and it kills off. The fish die. There’s no oxygen in the water. Yeah, dead zones.
Dr. David Montgomery: All that decaying dead stuff burned young.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, it’s a problem.
Dr. David Montgomery: It takes out the oxygen and that’s something that a lot of life forms need.
Christophe Jospe: What we’re seeing is that can all basically go away. And then on top of that, we’ll have more productive lands, which can create greater yields and save farmers money because they’re not spending as much on fertilizer. Is that about it?
Dr. David Montgomery: That’s about it. I mean, that’s the beautiful thing about restoring fertility to the land is when you look at it through the sort of the lens of how do you build a healthy, fertile soil so we can support agriculture? All these side benefits come along. And we can get into sort of the origin of fertilizer intensive agriculture and so forth. But the key villain in the destruction of soils in the past has really been the plow, tillage. It’s kind of ironic because when you think about, you know, our cultural icons of agriculture, the plow is right up there.
It’s on the seal of the USDA when Thomas Jefferson’s plow is on it. And no-till agriculture was really not practiced for a long time or in many parts the world for a very simple reason. It’s plowing is really good weed control. And if there’s something farmers don’t like, it’s weeds. You know, they want their crop to be the one that’s really healthy and thriving. The other sort of components of that recipe of, you know, doing no-till, planting cover crops, doing a diverse rotation, two of those three were discovered independently by cultures around the world and got integrated into traditional practices, cover crops, planting legumes along with crops.
That was done on a regular basis all over the world long before we knew about the bacteria and the roots of plants That were fixing nitrogen from the atmosphere and basically manufacturing fertilizer in the root zone of the plants. Those practices were adopted because they worked to support fertility. But when you till the soil, when you basically, you’re breaking up the mycorrhizal fungi, you’re disturbing the soil life, that affects the structure of the soil, which affects its water holding capacity. It helps to accelerate the breakdown of the organic matter that’s feeding all the microbes that turn out to be Central to supporting the health of the plants, whether it’s a crop or in a natural grassland or forest.
And we didn’t know a lot of that stuff until fairly recently. But those traditional practices were used because they worked really well. But if you use it with the plow, with tillage, you gradually degrade the productive capacity of the land and you lose the soil itself. You can look at places like Syria and Libya today where we have really good records of Roman tax records of high wheat yields back thousands of years ago in places where there’s no soil anymore. This process played out over the long run can really be damaging.
But if you look at what those three things together, going to no-till, that’s sort of the modern technology of no-till and merging it with the ancient wisdom of cover crops and crop rotations, that’s a recipe for building soil life because you’re not breaking it up and disturbing it. You’re feeding it by giving it carbon and you’re essentially not just feeding the same plants. One of the big problems with monocultures is if you plant corn in the same field year after year, you just created a grocery store for things that eat corn.
And ecologically, that’s going to promote pests and pathogens, which is what we saw happen with 20th century agriculture. After we went to fertilizer intensive agriculture, we ended up needing more in the way of pesticides because of all the problems that came along with that. So you turn it around with these three principles. It’s sort of an ecological way to manage the soil that promotes the microbial life that could work for the farmer rather than the farmer working against that trend. And it turns out to save on diesel because you’re not plowing so much.
It saves on fertilizer. Once you build up the organic matter, your crop doesn’t need as much fertilizer and it reduces pesticide use. That all reduces offsite pollution. It allows the soil to store more water, which helps with climate resilience. And it puts carbon in the ground, which basically gets it out of the atmosphere. And it also is more profitable because if you’re growing just as much food and you’re spending less to do it, it’s better for the bottom line on the farm. And that’s what turned me into an optimist on all this, in visiting those farmers and growing a revolution.
Ross Kenyon: It’s great when you can rely on, man, this always comes up, when you can rely on people making money off of something rather than just being altruistic about it. Oh, yeah. It makes a big difference, doesn’t it? It makes a huge difference for adoption. I think it’s great. I have a fundamental distinction question I’m going to ask. It’s one of my basic science questions that allows the listeners to feel superior to me intellectually. Oh, good. What is the difference between soil and dirt? Because I think people don’t make the distinction as much, but I’m sure you have a strong opinion on how that might be.
Dr. David Montgomery: Well, one of the funny things is when I wrote the book that I titled Dirt, I got some blowback from soil science colleagues, like, because you’re never supposed to call soil dirt, right? That’s a violation.
Unknown speaker: That’s a rough crowd too.
Dr. David Montgomery: Yeah, yeah, yeah. They can be brutal. But I got thick skin, right? Yeah.
Christophe Jospe: Do they play dirty in their feedback?
Dr. David Montgomery: Oh yeah, absolutely. But you know, the real difference is the presence or absence of life. I mean, there’s sort of two ways you can spin that difference. You look at a pile of sand, it’s not soil. You look at sand that has mycorrhizal fungi and some dead It’s on its way to becoming soil. Literally that mix of biology and geology. The other way to look at dirt versus soil is that dirt is soil where you don’t want it. It’s out of place. And that’s why I titled the book about soil erosion, Dirt, is that when you look at soil that’s in a farm field, that’s left on the field, it’s productive, it’s where you want it, it’s where it belongs.
If it erodes and it ends up in a river silting in a reservoir or it buries a house or it basically is removed from where it’s productive and put where you don’t want it, That’s dirt. Then it’s dirt. Yeah. So there are two ways to spin it. But I would be dishonest if I told you I wasn’t also just sort of having some fun and doing a little poke at soil scientists because you’re not supposed to call stuff dirt. Just never? No, no, no, never. It’s a cardinal rule. So I’m not very good at following rules.
So I had a little fun with that.
Ross Kenyon: Now you seem a little bit like a wild man. I bet you’re fun at parties.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah. We’ve also got the word revolution in your book, which means things are happening and things are changing dramatically. And that’s great. Let’s talk a little bit about some of the changes that you’re seeing on the ground.
Dr. David Montgomery: Well, you know, if you look at the adoption of no-till agriculture, back in the 1960s, there’s hardly any in the United States. We’re up to about maybe a third of our cropland is practiced with no-till. Cover crops are down at a few percent and catching up. Anyone who’s driven through any of the I-states recognizes that corn and soy is still the dominant sort of rotation in the U. S. And I think I put it in the book. I think I said corn and soy is not a rotation. Yeah. You know, to actually have a diverse rotation, you need like three or four or more crops in it to actually trip up the bugs.
Ross Kenyon: And they deplete the same stuff and they have the same pests or no? It’s just not enough to do more rotations?
Dr. David Montgomery: If you just have one or two crops that you’re growing, pests will adapt to it. They’ll figure it out. So if you have, say, like a corn borer and you grow a field of corn and you don’t spray it, so you feed a few of them and they reproduce. So they got some eggs in the soil and some of those eggs will hatch out for the next year. And if there’s soybeans there, they’re out of luck. But some of them will hatch out, you know, two years down.
Ross Kenyon: And then they evolve to sort of do that.
Dr. David Montgomery: Exactly. Evolution is a vicious steal and it’s mercilessly efficient. So if you’re predictable and they have the genetic plasticity to either sort of level... And so if we give them a very regular banquet, they’re going to come or their descendants will come and they’ll figure it out pretty readily. On the other hand, if you’ve got, say, four different crops and you mix the order in which you grow them up, so it’s not predictable.
Ross Kenyon: Like corn, corn, soy, sorghum, corn.
Dr. David Montgomery: Wheat.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Dr. David Montgomery: So if you keep it unpredictable, you’re using ecological principles to defeat the pests without using any herbicide. You’re keeping them off balance because there’s a number of the farmers that I visited basically said, look, the biggest problem with pest management is you got to understand the pests and you don’t make the habitat for them and you don’t feed them. You don’t sort of play into their life history. You play against it. You keep them off guard. It’s a pretty sophisticated and interesting ecological concept model, but it really seems to work.
So a number of the farmers that I visited who had gone no-till for years had been growing cover crops. They were building their organic matter back up. So they had a reservoir of micronutrients and macronutrients in the soil to feed their crops. When they went to sort of the complex rotations and had the diversity in their approach, they had essentially gotten almost off of agrochemicals. And their productivity was the same as their conventional neighbors, if not better. So they’re spending less money to grow more food. It was a really powerful sort of combination and example.
But what it really is rooted in is a very different way of thinking about the soil. And with most people, we don’t think about the soil. We just take it for granted. Farmers obviously think about the soil, but they’ve been trained to think about it as something to hold plants up that you add The nutrients that you need to grow the plants kind of like you would just in like a little if you’re trying to grow a seedling in my coffee cup and we had nothing but sand in there. Well, the plants are going to need some else.
They’re going to need some nitrogen. They’re going to need some micronutrients. So you could add stuff. You can grow plants hydroponically, right? Plenty of people in this town that do.
Unknown speaker: Oh, I didn’t pick up on that reference.
Dr. David Montgomery: Yes, a new growing industry that’s thriving in Washington State. And that’s one of the reasons that the whole fertilizer intensive approach to agriculture really was successful and evolved in the 20th century is that we had already degraded our farmland to the point where you could get a response out of adding those additional nutrients. If you have nitrogen depleted soil, zinc depleted soil, and if you add those kinds of things, it will help your plants. If you have a healthy fertile soil and you add fertilizer to it, you’re just wasting your money because you don’t get any yield boost.
You don’t get any benefit from it. The real challenge that I see in terms of where we went wrong with agriculture in the 20th century, given what we know now, it’s not that it was seen as wrong at the time or that it was necessarily wrong at the time. But we understand so much more now about soil biology and soil ecology and the role of soil life in creating not only the structure that makes soils fertile, but in terms of recycling that organic matter into the forms that become soil carbon, soil organic matter, and that also help feed soil.
And support the health of not only our crops, but whatever’s growing there. We know so much more about that now that we can look back and go, oh, there’s a different way to do things that might be rooted in a different philosophy of how you look at the soil. So if you look at those three principles, no-till, cover crops, and a diverse rotation. And then you look back at what were we teaching farmers for most of the 20th century to do? It was to use intensive tillage with a lot of fertilizer and grow one or two crops.
It’s 180 degrees from those principles that build soil health and soil fertility.
Christophe Jospe: And allowing the farmers to also fail at subsidizing that failure if we want to add a fourth category.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I was going to ask. This seems so logical and it makes economic sense. I know it’s a little bit difficult to transition for a couple of years or so I’ve heard. What’s stopping this from being only a third? Why is it not 90% or 100%?
Dr. David Montgomery: Well, just a third is no till. But where you really get the benefit for building soil is adopting all three principles.
Ross Kenyon: The one third is just no till.
Dr. David Montgomery: Just Exactly.
Christophe Jospe: Which gets a little soil carbon up there, but not really the effects that we’d like to see.
Dr. David Montgomery: Yeah. And if you look at the meta studies, the sort of the studies of studies that look at everybody who’s looked at no-till and does it increase soil carbon? There’s a huge range of answers you come up with because no-till is not the only sort of variable involved. You know, if you do no-till and you then sell off all your crops double to the biofuel plant. You’re not going to increase your soil carbon. Those farms are in those examples of sort of does no-till increase carbon or not, right along with the farms that do all three principles that can build carbon fast.
So what you get is essentially a wide range of effects. It kind of muddies the water in a sense. You’re asking, can new farming practices build up soil carbon? The take home I took from interviewing farmers around the world who had actually done it. So it’s not a theory. It’s basically, you know, give me a shovel. Let me dig in your field. Let me dig in your neighbor’s field. Let’s look at the difference. Let’s measure the difference. Then tell me how you did it. The commonalities where they used all three principles was how you would do it fairly fast.
And not coincidentally, it’s basically the same principles that my wife, Anne Baclay, and I used to rebuild the soil in our yard where we’ve gone from less than about a percent organic matter to about 10% on average over the yard. And we’re in a city. We’re not a farm. Those same principles built our soil up. Of course, the practices we used were a little different than you’d use on the farm. We used, you know, like cast off Starbucks coffee grounds and Zudu as sources of organic matter. But those principles translate right across.
And that’s where I think the real opportunity lies in trying to learn the lesson of the people who made the mistakes of adopting one and then adopting the other and sort of piling all three on. The really big effects happen when you do all three together. And that constitutes a real new philosophy of farming. That’s where the revolution word comes in. This next agricultural revolution that I’d like to see, one that embraces soil health building principles of farming, is really rooted in how we think about the soil. It’s a different philosophy.
And you look back through history, we’ve had, by my count, four major agricultural revolutions. We’re poised to be able to pull off a fifth if we promote This style of soil health building farming. And so you were asking, what’s standing in the way of it? Change is always hard for people. I don’t know about you guys, but I know that we all have habits. It’s hard to change your habits, whether it’s your daily routine, your favorite drink, whatever. And the way that people farmed is a very good predictor of how they will keep farming.
So getting people to change how they do things. Stop plowing, for example. A number of the farmers I visited when they first went no-till, their neighbors thought they were crazy. They were, you know, this crazy guy is going to be out of business in two or three years.
Unknown speaker: You have some stories about them copying them a couple years later, right?
Dr. David Montgomery: Yeah, exactly. It’s like, you know, when he ends up buying a new pickup truck, having a new barn and being much more profitable after a few years, they start going, hmm, well, maybe the crazy guy is on to something. But that can take time, right? It takes time for that kind of knowledge to diffuse. In any population, you’ll have a certain number of innovators and a certain number of people who will never try a new idea. And I think where we are right now is that some of those really progressive, curious, tinkering innovators have done enough work and transformed enough farms from degraded land to really productive land that we can see it works.
Their neighbors are starting to see it works. And we’re starting on that sort of rise in the S curve of adoption. Yeah. So that they can see at the scale of a real farm, does this work? And how do you do it? Rather than like on a small university plot in a greenhouse.
Ross Kenyon: It’s not very convincing for your livelihood.
Dr. David Montgomery: Yeah, exactly. I mean, would you risk your whole farm based on some professor’s experiment in their greenhouse? Right. You’d probably want to see it done at field scale when someone else’s money is on the line.
Christophe Jospe: Sure. Then the proof is in the pudding at the end of the day. But what we’re talking about. They call soil pudding. Do you guys do that?
Dr. David Montgomery: That would be mud.
Christophe Jospe: But at the end of the day, the crux of the matter is farmers. Farmers need, if we’re going to use that as a strong word, but farmers need to change their practices in some way. And another, as we’ve done our research and learned about this space, we actually realized that there’s other hurdles in the space. So farmers are very trusting people. They have the people that they have long relationships with, and they’re going to listen to those people year over year. And one of those is actually the consultant who comes around and tells the farmer, What to do with their land, what seeds to buy, what fertilizers to buy, what new plows to buy.
And that consultant is incentivized because every time he makes a sale, he gets a cut of the things he’s pushing. Here, we’re saying the answer is to buy less, is maybe even to recycle your seeds, is not to buy any fertilizer. And so I wonder, you know, in this whole calculus where we’re changing the paradigm, ultimately empowering farmers to do more and incentivizing more farmers to get involved, how do you shift some of that dynamic where the seed companies and chemical companies have to lose somehow here, right? Right. Are they part of the solution too?
Dr. David Montgomery: They actually could be, but we can get back to that because when you look back to the last 50 or 60 years or so, from my perspective, what I’ve seen has happened to farmers in the developed world at least is that they’ve been sold a new way of farming, what we call conventional farming today, which is very intensive on oil inputs for your tractor, for plowing. It’s very reliant on chemical inputs in terms of fertilizer and pesticides. The farmers don’t get to set the prices for those things. You know, the companies that supply them set the prices.
And, you know, over the last 50 years, the real average cost of that has not gone down. It’s gone through the roof. It was increasingly expensive to rely on those inputs. And farmers have been so good at coaxing yield out of Fairly degraded soils that the price they receive for what they produce is fairly low in terms of historic terms. So they’re squeezed in the middle. They don’t set the price for their harvest either. It’s kind of monopolized on either end. There’s a few big companies that sell them stuff. There’s a few big companies that buy their product from them.
They’re squeezed in the middle. And that’s one of the drivers for the loss of family farms across North America. And for why you look at the sort of the capitalization on a modern farm, you know, as an academic geologist, I’m not used to thinking about activities that involve, you know, loans of hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars. You go look at a modest to a fairly large size farm in North America, there’s a lot of money on the line every year. And the margins are really small. So it’s a business model that is kind of set up for the people in the middle to bear all the risk and to be at risk of failure.
But when you look at the potential for change, I think there’s a really powerful argument to be made that if there is a suite of practices that could be adopted, those are the kind of things a farmer can have control over. They can’t control the price of fertilizer. They can’t control the price they get for corn. They can control what they grow and how they grow it. So if they can mix up their practices in ways that reduce the expense that they have up front for all those inputs and yet maintain their yields, that’s a better business model.
And that’s exactly where regenerative agriculture is going and why I sort of look at it as Something very different than the distinction between sort of conventional and organic agriculture that we usually talk about in media. This is different. A lot of the farmers that I visited were conventional farmers who were still using some agrochemicals, but by adopting regenerative practices, they had so reduced the reliance on them that I started teasing them that they were organic-ish farmers. And I’m sure some of them probably would have punched me out if I called them organic farmers because culturally, they just didn’t want to do that.
It was not them. They were never going to do that. But they like the organic-ish label. One guy in particular basically said, you know, I like signing checks on the back, not in the front. They’re not. Don’t we all? I think that we’ve greatly undervalued in the 20th and early 21st century the ingenuity and creativity of our farmers. If we can define... Feed the world. Feed the world, for example. Yeah, exactly. You know, small problems like that. You know, if you start the conversation in a different way than sort of prescriptive, if you invite them to it and you show them examples that, hey, your neighbors have been doing this and it kind of works and here’s the why and the challenge to you is to figure out how do you do this on your farm?
The farmers I’ve talked to and met around the world in research at Growing Our Evolution, they were curious, they were smart, they were ingenious in terms of how to actually, I mean, they were building things that I wouldn’t have any idea how to build. And they were clever in terms of how to ecologically sequence things when they started thinking that way. And we’ve basically, in modern conventional agriculture, tried to take a simple set of practices, plowing and fertilizing and then, you know, having patented seeds that you can’t sort of keep as a farmer, but they’re expensive.
We’ve basically tried that.
Christophe Jospe: They’ll sue you if they’re in your land and pay for them.
Dr. David Montgomery: Yeah, exactly. That’s just quite crazy, right? We’ve basically tried to take a single industrial model and apply it across the landscape indiscriminately. And that underutilizes the creativity of farmers. They know their land. Who knows their land better than farmers? So I was really excited about the idea of... Challenging farmers to think about how to adopt these new principles and tailor them to their region, their crops, their technological sophistication level. These principles worked on small subsistence farms in Africa to double or triple the yields. They worked on large farms in North America to maintain their yields while having their inputs or reducing it even more.
The reason I sort of called the book Growing a Revolution is that adopting those principles in both organic and conventional agriculture around the world I’d like to speak very conditionally and subjunctively.
Ross Kenyon: There’s crop insurance too. So people can take risks with maybe not doing the most efficient ways of farming. And if the crop doesn’t go very well, taxpayers bail them out just through insurance or something like that, right?
Dr. David Montgomery: I’d love to have that for my research papers. If I submit it to a journal and it doesn’t get accepted, some other journal will automatically pay me for it or accept it. That’d be wonderful. That’s a great deal.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, it’s a tremendous deal. The only government would give you that kind of deal.
Dr. David Montgomery: And there’s almost all the farmers I visited who had gone through this transition to regenerative, who were still sort of conventional in the sense that they would use some fertilizer if they thought they needed it. They might use a little roundup if they thought they needed it. They all basically argued that on a level playing field, conventional agriculture could not compete with what they do. And that basically if we took away the subsidies, if we took away the crop insurance, that their style of regenerative farming would be the one that would be adopted much more widely because it makes economic sense.
And there’s this other aspect too. Most of the farmers I met really care about their land. I mean, yeah, how about that? What a shock and surprise. I mean, they want to leave their land in better condition to their grandkids than they got it. You know, when they were a kid, they knew the soil that their grandparents had and they don’t have it anymore. They’ve seen the degradation over their lives and they want to turn it around. So there’s both the economic motivation, which is really powerful. I mean, we’re really good at responding to that stimuli.
But there’s this other motivation. About wanting to take care of the earth and take care of the land that I don’t think we give farmers enough credit for in general. And there’s a lot of people out there in farming communities that I’ve talked to who are really concerned about that, care about it, and they’ve seen the damage that conventional agriculture has done to the land. And they’d like to be part of fixing that.
Ross Kenyon: You have some stories in your book where you’re speaking in front of farmers and you’re like, they’re going to get the pitchforks out, like they’re looking at me. Yeah. Some like West Coast long-haired kind of guy. Yeah, an academic at that, right? Yeah, that sounds like a slur against you. I also want to ask Paul too, can you confirm whether or not subsidies distort market signals?
Paul Gambill: That’s an affirmative.
Ross Kenyon: Okay, that was confirmed. So I had to go to the judges for that one.
Christophe Jospe: I’d like to take this conversation in a different direction.
Ross Kenyon: You’re done with my direction?
Christophe Jospe: Yeah. Look, subsidies aside, they may or may not work. That’s fine. At the end of the day, Nori’s motivation is to make it as easy as possible for people who want to pay to remove carbon to do that.
Dr. David Montgomery: Yeah.
Christophe Jospe: We’re going to start by paying farmers and building a platform that helps farmers get paid and essentially taking out all the middlemen and just get the accounting right and out in the open and improving over time based on the inputs that go into it.
Dr. David Montgomery: Great. Can you pay us retroactively for what we did to our yard?
Christophe Jospe: We’ve talked about this a little bit, right? I mean, I don’t want to commit myself by saying anything on the air and then having to say it.
Ross Kenyon: I think it is safe to say we’ve committed to avoiding any sort of additionality tests in the credit issuance that we’re talking about. And so what we want to do is baseline. Baseline measurement and then measure the change over time and then issue carbon removal credits based on that change.
Dr. David Montgomery: I think it’s pretty straightforward. You know, measuring carbon on a farm is kind of a challenge. It’s a surmountable challenge, I think. You look at the landscape and we did this to our yard, basically. We sort of measured how much we’d changed the soil carbon over the course of 10 years of composting and mulching and throwing coffee grounds and composted herbivore turds all over the place. And some planting beds, it was about 68%. Beneath the lawn, it was about 6%. The veggie beds, it was like 12%. So what’s the average?
You know, how many numbers do you get? And then start thinking about a 20,000 acre farm in eastern Washington. How many numbers do you need to do it? That’s a technical challenge. And they vary seasonally. They vary over time. There’s some interesting challenges of how you would actually quantify that and pursue it. The thing that I think is an interesting idea for how to go that you guys might want to think about in that regard is could we basically incentivize the practices rather than the product? In other words, if you adopt all three of these principles of conservation agriculture, you’re going to build your soil carbon up.
It’s going to happen. It may take you five years of measurement to have statistical certainty that you’ve gotten outside of the variability of what you’d find across the landscape from the first measurement, from the baseline. But you’re moving the ball in that direction. So what I would love to see at a national level to revisit our agricultural subsidies and our crop insurance and basically in how we set those programs up, incentivize farmers to adopt this new system of farming and then maybe track what’s happening to carbon over time with less measurement rigor.
Yeah, changing things.
Ross Kenyon: Payning farm subsidies, I think, is just like an impossible thing.
Dr. David Montgomery: No, it’ll happen down the road.
Ross Kenyon: You think so?
Dr. David Montgomery: Oh, yeah. I’ve seen big pushes among farming communities. People who’ve started to adopt these practices may start to push for that.
Ross Kenyon: To get rid of the people just paying them?
Dr. David Montgomery: No, to get rid of paying their neighbors to destroy their land.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, that’s a good way to reframe it. Yeah. A little more optimistic. It just seems like one of those things that will probably be there when I die. Yeah.
Dr. David Montgomery: Well, see, that’s one of the advantages, perhaps, of being a geologist. If we can change the global agricultural system so that modern conventional agriculture becomes what I’m calling organic-ish agriculture, if we can do that over 30 years, that’s fast. I may not still be alive then, but still be fast. The political inertia in terms of the Farm Bill, it’s a major challenge. But I think as more and more farmers realize that this is kind of in their economic best interest to actually reframe things so that they can be subsidized to build equity in their farms rather than mine equity out of their grandchildren’s inheritance.
If you have to have it one way or the other, I would take it that way.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Or like you write in the book too about maybe helping the transitional period because it can be costly to switch. So like maybe giving them a little bit and then once they’re there, maybe that’s enough.
Dr. David Montgomery: Yeah, I mean, if you look at it from a societal level, which presumably policies should be looked at from, one of the best investments we could make is in assisting farmers to make the transition to a lower input cost, equivalent yield, better profitability for the farmer style of agriculture. You could kind of view it almost as weaning them off of subsidies. If their soil can be rebuilt to health and fertility so that their land and their crops are resilient to things like that drought that will come the year with, I don’t know, The vicissitudes of market forces, if their economic model could be made more self-reliant and resilient, Society would be a much better investment than paying people to destroy the land that their grandchildren will depend on and that our grandchildren will depend on for their food.
I mean, there’s some real problems over the long run. Again, sort of the geological perspective, it makes no sense to have a system of farming that depends on the degradation of fertility. And the fertility that we add now out of a bag, that’s coming straight out of fossil fuels. What’s the one thing that we really need to transition off of in the 21st century? We’ve got the potential for a major train wreck if we don’t change agriculture. And when I wrote the dirt book, I was a bit of a pessimist because the history looking back, it’s not a pretty story.
But when you actually go out and talk to some of these farmers who have already made the transition and demonstrated that we could do it, it opens the door to optimism. Given the choice, I prefer that.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, us too. Yeah. Totally. And you just brought up something in the book, which I think is a really important point, which is the production of fertilizers, incredibly greenhouse gas intensive and emits so much carbon dioxide that they just freely vent. So, hey, wow, what if we didn’t need to produce all that fertilizer because the plants were actually doing it for us?
Dr. David Montgomery: Yeah, exactly. And when most people look at the sort of the climate mitigation potential of putting carbon back in the soil, they don’t sort of include that, oh, we don’t have to make as many fertilizers. We don’t have to burn as much diesel for the tractors with this full suite of conservation agriculture practices. It’s essentially a whole lifecycle analysis of whether you actually need that or not. And when you look at it that way, those numbers start to actually get pretty big. You know, if you could take a 50% bite out of fertilizer production around the world, that’s going to help.
Unknown speaker: Anything else you want to cover?
Christophe Jospe: Well, there’s a lot to unpack. So maybe I wanted to go into the nuances a little bit. We talked about these three practices and it’s kind of seems too good to be true because you have different soil types, hundreds of thousands of different soil types.
Dr. David Montgomery: There’s several hundred thousand different soil types in the world. Yeah.
Christophe Jospe: Even more than I could have ever imagined. And that means you need different practices for different places. There’s no kind of one size fits all.
Dr. David Montgomery: Yeah, it’s not quite as bad as you’re portraying it, but yes, the general principles may translate, but the specific practices don’t. If you look at most soils around the world, their fertility is going to correlate with their organic matter content. The principles work because there’s some commonalities despite the great variability in soils. There’s even greater variability in crops and in the sort of economic position of farmers. You go talk to farmers in subsistence farmers in Africa, they just don’t have the same Tools, the same options as a farmer in North Dakota working 20,000 acres with a giant prairie crawling machine that has GPS and measures the tire pressure and how many seeds per meter they’re actually putting down when they seed.
Those worlds are just completely different in terms of the practices that they may have available to them. What’s so powerful, I think, about this new way of thinking about farming is that those principles that overlay it really seem to translate. And so the challenge is figuring out how to adapt to your situation as a farmer. And they’ve been doing that their whole lives in other ways. It’s sort of a next level of challenge for them. And I was really impressed with the farmers I visited in Ghana, a gentleman named Kofi Boa, who runs the Center for No-Till Research near Kumasi in Ghana.
They’ve completely transformed their traditional agriculture into something that doubled or tripled their yields without additional inputs. No patented seeds, no fertilizer, a bare minimum of herbicide. The big change was how they thought about the soil and how they sequenced and grew things. It was their practices. And practices can change overnight. That’s a question of changing our mind, of our thinking about how to do stuff. With assistance through the transition, it can help economically. But the real power of a different philosophy is that it’s easy to adopt. But of course, that’s also one of the big barriers is that changing your mind is one of the simplest things to do, but it’s one of the hardest for us to actually pull off.
Christophe Jospe: Well, that’s all well and good, but... Let’s say I’m Walmart and I have a purchase agreement from you, the corn farmer, and I want this much corn. And suddenly you’re going to plant like 18 different crops and rotate all of them. And I have no idea now how to manage my supply chain. And you’re telling me this is going to happen all around the country.
Dr. David Montgomery: No, that’s actually one of the really big issues is essentially how do you deal with those kind of issues in the supply chain? And there’s a couple of issues of what do we eat? What should we be eating? What’s healthy for us to eat? There’s a whole series of parallel questions embedded in the food system. And at what time of year and where from and all that kind of stuff. If you look across the sort of the vast area in the middle of North America, where a lot of it’s planted in corn and soy.
If you were to ask farmers to go, okay, now you need four crops. So what else? Can you bring wheat that’s only going to grow in some areas? Are you going to bring barley? One of the gentlemen I visited in his rotation was a really diverse cover crop. He was basically growing a prairie. For one of his crops and then he would basically let that decay to feed his next cash crop. But you have to have the ability to sell what they’re growing for farmers to stay in business. That’s another area where at the policy level it would be really useful to see some change.
Some of the most successful farmers who’ve gone regenerative have sort of what they call stacked enterprises on the farm where they’re not only growing crops, they’re bringing livestock back in, they’re growing chickens and eggs, they’re keeping bees. They’re going back to a style of farming. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, like multiple income streams and you keep bees and they fertilize and you have all sorts of things going on there.
Dr. David Montgomery: Yeah, and you let your cows graze off your crop stubble so they maneuver the fields and then you’re basically turning your cover crops into beef or into bacon. You know, there’s ways to essentially rethink the style of farming. The farming we know as modern conventional farming is a really recent invention. It may be really widespread, but you go back 100 years and it was not common. They just have monocultures and giant fields.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah.
Dr. David Montgomery: Yeah, they were heavily fertilized and heavily pesticided and heavily tilled. I mean, you go back long enough and the sort of ideas of cover crops and crop rotations were central to farming, as were the integration of animal husbandry and cropping. And what we did in the 20th century is we took the animals off the farms that got rid of a very powerful way to recycle organic matter through manure into forms that plants could take up to nourish the next generation of crops.
Ross Kenyon: I don’t want to eat food that has manure involved in it, though. You guys are gross.
Dr. David Montgomery: Yeah, boy, you must be a big fan of biosolids then.
Ross Kenyon: No, no.
Christophe Jospe: I’d like to keep us on the optimistic note. So you think it’s reasonable that by the year 2050 we can restore all the world’s soils to have the amount of carbon and productivity that they had before we started messing them up?
Dr. David Montgomery: You know, in all honesty, I don’t think we’ll do that by 2050 with the keyword being all. What I think we could do over the next few years quite feasibly is change the sign of what we’re doing to the soil. Change it from degradation to rebuilding soil. And I think we could make a lot of progress. I think we actually could go a long way towards that goal, but I don’t think we’ll go get completely there by 2050. I don’t think that’s possible. Might we get there by 2100 or 2200?
Yeah, I think we could. But what it’ll require is this change in philosophy of farming and really embracing the new science that has come along in the last 50 to 80 years of soil ecology and understanding that as the basis for thinking about fertility. When I was trained in grad school, we were thinking about fertility as physics and chemistry. In the 20th century, we kind of forgot about the biology part. Not totally, but it didn’t really make it into our agronomic philosophical foundation. We need to bring that back in. And if we do that, I think we really could change the world.
If we could change conventional farming into this organic-ish style of farming, it would change the world. Most definitely for the better.
Christophe Jospe: Awesome. Sign us up. Nori wants to pay farmers to store carbon. Plain and simple. So let’s do it.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that was great. Thanks for being on, Dave. That was very fun.
Dr. David Montgomery: Hey, no worries. It’s fun to talk to you guys.
