What does it mean to farm regeneratively? Or to farm conventionally, for that matter? Is regenerative agriculture size-dependent? What are its benefits and how does it work?
Today's Reversing Climate Change podcast episode has Jada Dormaier, Supply Account Manager at the Nori carbon removal marketplace, join Nori Cofounder and Director of Creative & Marketing, Ross Kenyon, to discuss regenerative ag.
Like our recent show reintroducing carbon removal generally, we thought it was a good idea to go back to basics on regenerative agriculture. We've put out lots of shows on the topic, but sometimes you need to redo the 101 and catch those newer to the topic up to speed.
In this show, Jada talks about growing up on a farm, working in farm insurance, and then at Nori for the last several years. She has a huge amount of experience with farmers working to change their practices and just make sure their businesses stay afloat. There are plenty of misconceptions about food, farming, rural communities, and agriculture, and Jada shares her experience of what to keep in mind on the topic.
More from the show
Ad-free episodes and other benefits come with a paid subscription.
Carbon Removal Newsroom, the news show that ran alongside this one, is over. Its episodes are still up, on the feed Climate Workers Anonymous now uses.
Carbon Removal Memes is still going.
Resources
312: Nori's collab with the Texas Climate-Smart Initiative—w/ Dr. Julie Howe, Professor of Soil Science & Project Director of TCSI
S2E57: Farming While Black: race and regenerative agriculture—w/ Leah Penniman of Soul Fire Farms
309: Will Harris's Legendary Regenerative Agriculture Journey, AKA A Bold Return to Giving a Damn
S2E44: Can permaculture scale?-w/Mark Shepard, author of Restoration Agriculture
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: You're listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by the team at Nori, the carbon removal marketplace. This is a show about the innovators and entrepreneurs developing solutions to climate change.
Jada Dormaier: I just — I'm only having one. And so I have thought about it, then in the end [unclear], but that's really hard.
Ross Kenyon: This is Jada Dormaier, Supply Account Manager at Nori. And I'm Ross Kenyon, Cofounder of Nori and Director of Creative and Marketing here. Discussing which Nordic country to live in where you could have a child every two years and theoretically never go back to your job ever again. And does the math work or does it not? I think we determined that on net, it would still be harder to just keep having children at that rate. Is that where we landed on that?
Jada Dormaier: I think so. But it's really good to, like, really balance it out, and I think it deserves more thought. Ross, do you want me to — do you want me to just be your co-host from here on out?
Ross Kenyon: Are you asking me to be talking about this all the time? You know I can't say no. Super imposing and rude, Jada.
Jada Dormaier: Just say you'll think about it.
Ross Kenyon: I'll think about it. No, it's great having you here. I really wanted you to come back on because you come from the agricultural world. You grew up in it. You worked in it. Now you're here at Nori, you're continuing at this sort of, like, high-tech ag link. I don't know, you probably — are you not the closest person on the team to ag? Is there anyone who even is closer to it? Can anyone give you a run for your money?
Jada Dormaier: You know what? I don't think anyone can at this point. There has been people that could, but honestly, I think I was always the only one that had grown up on a farm. But definitely, I think there were other people that could give me a little bit of a run for my money. But you're right, I grew up on a farm. I worked as a crop insurance agent before coming to Nori, and I'm really focused on, like, relationship building with farmers. And so I really enjoy that piece of my job.
Ross Kenyon: And today we wanted to sort of go back to basics. Radhika Moolgavkar and I did a show recently where we asked, what is carbon removal? Because some of these shows, they get pretty esoteric. We're talking about inside baseball companies, you know, methodologies, techniques for removing carbon. We might even have molecular name drops here of molecules. That's kind of spooky for new people. And in the same way, regenerative agriculture — people say it all the time. What do they mean by it? What is it, or why is it important? We want to just start over, reintroduce it, and then we'll have an episode, Jada, that we can just point to and say, start here. This is the first one that you listen to.
Jada Dormaier: I think that's great.
Ross Kenyon: I think it's great too. Unfortunately that puts you in the hot seat, though, since you are the closest one to it. What even is regenerative agriculture? And good luck, because there's probably an infinite number of ways to answer that question.
Jada Dormaier: Yeah, I'm glad you asked me that. But you're right, there's very many ways to answer that. But I would say that regenerative agriculture is the practice of replenishing the soil instead of depleting it. So that could be using practices like cover crops, reducing your tillage, making as little soil disturbance as possible, adding perennials so there's longer growing seasons. And by doing that, you're increasing soil organic carbon, you're increasing the organic matter in your soil, and you're getting some co-benefits from that. So, like, your soil is able to hold water better and there's a lot more biodiversity within the soil. So there's a lot of things that you could do. People talk about, like, regenerative grazing and grasslands. And so a lot of those things kind of fall within the regenerative agriculture category.
Ross Kenyon: No simple question to answer here, and I have so many follow-up questions. Which way do I want to go first? Maybe we should contrast it with how agriculture is, quote unquote, conventionally practiced — a farm that is not farming regeneratively and yet is a bigger operation. What kinds of practices might they be doing? What are they thinking about when they're growing? And then we can contrast that with a more regenerative mindset.
Jada Dormaier: Yeah. So modern agriculture, I mean, I think everybody kind of thinks of, like, a really big farm and they're growing one or two crops, and that actually is, like, a pretty short growing season. So maybe they'll plant in the spring and harvest in the fall, and then for the winter, there's just bare ground. And then they're also maybe intensively tilling or doing some sort of tilling that's really disrupting the soil and taking all of the organic matter off of the soil and not incorporating it back.
Ross Kenyon: Why even bother doing that, though? Because the way that you're describing this makes it sound like no one in their right mind would ever do this. But there's a rationale behind why someone would want to till the soil and turn it over, right?
Jada Dormaier: Yeah. And I think it really came from when we started, like, specializing in monocrops and also wanting to produce, like, mass amounts of food in one area. And so you can handle, like, weed control and some of those things a lot easier, like if you're not putting on herbicides, if you're starting to put on cover crops and things like that, maybe you're not focusing on weed control. And so sometimes weeds can overtake your crops or something like that. And so when we started specializing in monocropping and wanted to produce mass amounts of food, it maybe made sense to do some of this, but it actually is depleting our soil and just making dirt that can't hold all of the nutrients that crops actually need to thrive.
Ross Kenyon: One of the other ways I've heard it put is that when you till the soil, you're making a lot of the good carbon content in the soil bioavailable to those crops that you want to grow. But it also releases a huge amount of it too. So it's like a hit of the good stuff, but a good chunk of it just, you know, evaporates into the air and into the atmosphere all of a sudden. Is that a correct way to understand it?
Jada Dormaier: Yeah. And I think it's good to know, like, there's always going to be some carbon releases, but we want to make sure that we are, like, keeping the — keeping the soil covered and keeping as much of it in the soil as we can. So even, I mean, even when you are practicing regenerative agriculture, there's going to be, like, some variation of carbon staying in the soil and leaving the soil, but we want to, like, find the balance where we're keeping the most of it stored in the soil.
Ross Kenyon: So conventional agriculture is using a more intensive tillage system. Obviously there's some nuance here too, where some strip tilling, but it's like a very specific kind and it's less invasive. Or I know no-till is sort of the gold standard, I think, for a lot of regenerative farmers too. I'm sure there's some nuance here too, where some amount is good and maybe they can thread the needle.
Jada Dormaier: Yeah, I think that there is, like, a range of different tillage types. So, like, intensive till is a really, really deep tillage, and then there is kind of like a scale that there's less and less tillage that goes up to no-till. Some people, of course, do strip till, and some of those things are just, like, reincorporating the organic matter back into the soil instead of just taking it all off and going so far into the ground. So there are benefits to doing some of those things. And then also, like, changing your practice costs a lot of money too. So sometimes maybe you're not going to go as extreme if it costs a lot of money.
And, you know, farmer input costs are, like, really high. As everybody knows right now, costs are high for multiple industries. But I think in farming, we don't realize that their input costs — they have to pay for gas, they have to pay for seeds, they have to pay for this equipment, and their prices are pretty low too. So all of those things come into play to decide, like, whether or not to do what practice.
Ross Kenyon: What are some other differences here between how farmers might farm conventionally versus regeneratively? What have we even gotten to so far? There's cover crops, there's tillage. I imagine there's some amount of complexity of rotation or something like that is probably in the mix here. What else is there?
Jada Dormaier: Yeah. So increasing the diversity of the crops you use, adding perennials so that we're keeping that soil covered. Like, people add cover crops in the fall and then you have a ground cover through the winter. If you add, like, something as simple as — farmers are typically growing spring wheat, and instead start planting winter wheat, you have a longer growing season there. So having that plant grow through a longer growing season, and also, like, keeping the ground covered, so, like, even wind erosion and those things aren't as drastic as they would be if you have bare ground.
Ross Kenyon: And then you're feeding the microbes in the soil, essentially.
Jada Dormaier: Yeah, yeah. For Nori, we also consider things like adding organic matter, so, like, litter or compost — that also increases organic matter. There's always, like, a conversation about if you're adding manure or something. There's also the conversation of where that's coming from and the methane loss, but it also does increase soil carbon. So there's, like, a balance there too.
Ross Kenyon: For regenerative farming, do you think it necessarily has to be a smaller farm? Are there big farms that can farm regeneratively, or does it have to be Old MacDonald's farm to truly be regenerative?
Jada Dormaier: I think that may just be, like, somebody's opinion. I think anyone can farm regeneratively. Like, on a small scale you could have a couple of acres, or even — I've talked to people that have regenerative gardens and are planting perennials, maybe native crops and things like that, that maybe it's not what we would think of as typical agriculture. But they are, like, working in the soil and increasing soil organic carbon and all the organic matter in their soil, and they have low soil disturbance and all of those things. And, like, one of my dreams is to have a food forest someday, and anyways I won't go into that, but something like that in your backyard, you could do something that small.
And then for Nori enrollment, we typically have farms about 2,500 acres on average, which some people might think is really big. And of course there are bigger farms than that. But you don't have to transition your entire farm to regenerative ag if it maybe costs too much, or something like we talked about. But I don't think there's a limitation to how big or small a farm can be. You just have to start employing the practices as needed and over time.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, we've seen a fair amount of talk about this. It always comes back to this Omnivore's Dilemma portion where Michael Pollan talks about the fights over organic labeling. And yeah, there were people who were sort of true believers of organic, and that meant things, practices that were much more restrictive and much more inside of the organic ethos of, like, you have to be a small farm and it should be, you know, hundreds of things all growing. It should be super complex and almost by necessity must be small and labor intensive.
And then you'd have, you know, big organic producers that would come along and they would restrict the use of certain types of pesticides and herbicides, but they were not practicing the more thoroughgoing organic way of farming. Surely it's good on net that the big producers do that. That's where you're having huge land use changes. But it doesn't give some people maybe the same warm fuzzy sense as the smaller stuff. Like, you'll see movies like The Biggest Little Farm or something like that, or you'll see this stuff in Kiss the Ground, which I think is super cool as well. But it maybe takes more of an intellectual understanding, maybe, than the sort of emotional response that some of this media elicits.
Jada Dormaier: No, I actually think that potentially also could be because that's relatable to us. It's something that it's like, oh, on that scale I could do that too.
Ross Kenyon: And it's like — I feel that big time when I see it, yeah.
Jada Dormaier: Me too. I mean, I'm like, I want a food forest. I've seen — how can I do this in my backyard? So I think it feels more close to home. But the earth, if we're thinking about it that way, like, the earth doesn't care. And honestly, when you think about agriculture, farmers really haven't been in the climate conversation. And so I think even having big producers, just the fact that some of them are transitioning into adding cover crops, no-till, these practices, it's a really good thing for, one, the earth, for the rest of the country. And just, like, that we're all starting to think, like, I can get co-benefits for this. I can make a difference also, even though maybe I haven't been in the conversation in the past.
Ross Kenyon: What do you think the potential is for farmland to become farmed regeneratively? Is this something that could have a huge impact? Is it overstated in how people understand it? How important do you think the change in agriculture could be?
Jada Dormaier: I think that it could be really good, but it kind of goes back to having more people at the table and determining, like, how to do it and what the easiest way to do it is. And then there's a lot of mindset that needs to change from how things have always been done. And really, things haven't always been done in this modern farming way. It's just that in the last, you know, however many years of our lifetimes, that's what we're used to. And so it seems like if something isn't broke, then we don't need to fix it. But that mindset has to change. Something is broken. Yes, we can produce a lot of food. Yes, we're feeding people, but there's an easier way. There's a better way to do it, and you do see co-benefits from it over time.
And so I think there's just, like, a mindset shift that has to happen, and I think it could have a huge impact. But I don't know, like, how long that mindset shift takes to get to that point. But imagine if, like, some of these huge farms did go completely regenerative — like, that would be huge for at least carbon storage. I think when I think of, like, individual people being inspired by some of those things that they saw, and then we're all starting these little plots of farms or, like, producing your own food.
And also, you know, maybe, like, digging up your lawn and making a food forest, and some of the co-benefits for that would be, like, you're producing your own food and you're also storing carbon and doing some of these things on your own. And I think that's really the way that we have to build it up.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I think it's really inspiring to see our work, not to pat ourselves on the back, but everyone who's working on soil carbon. This is really important work, and if we don't have soil as a carbon sink for the planet, the numbers start looking real scary. It puts pressure on everything else to a huge extent. I think people sometimes lose track of, we really need to make soil work, we really need to make natural carbon sinks work, or the pressure on DAC is going to be enormous, and probably — I don't think we'll be able to get there in time. I don't even like saying that. That made me feel icky to say. That's scary.
Jada Dormaier: Yeah. And I also think it's important to think about, it's not only — I mean, yes, that's true, but it also, like, puts pressure on our food system and all of those things too, if we don't change. So there's so many reasons that we need to do this.
Ross Kenyon: One of the things that I really love when we talked to Will Harris was about how regenerative ag can rehabilitate some of these towns, that a lot of small towns in America have emptied out with industrial ag, where machines have replaced people, and being able to see rural good jobs on healthy farms as being a possibility for this. Because a lot of times I think the switch for regen ag is also one that requires more labor than was previously done conventionally, and that actually can be a good thing. I don't know, I'm sure you've driven through some of these small towns in the hinterlands, and some of them have a spooky feel, or they feel like they've just been hollowed out and deserted, and it doesn't have to remain this way. And regen ag could be part of that solution, I think.
Jada Dormaier: Yeah, I think Will too still, like, considers his farm a family farm. And if you think about other family farms, like, it's literally like the immediate family that's working on the farm. Because you're right, you need a few tractors. There's not a ton of outside labor that you would need. But this builds so much community, and that's one of the things that I also like about it.
Ross Kenyon: If you're interested in this topic, we have so many podcasts with so many luminaries of regenerative agriculture on. I'll include links to several shows in the podcast notes here, so you can check that out. If you go to nori.com, we have lots and lots of stuff written. All the podcasts are there too. You can also email hello@nori.com and get in touch if you have a question. But we have so much stuff online too, and podcasts, and you know, we've been running our yaps here for years. At this point, there's lots and lots of cool stuff we've talked about.
This is only the barest scratching of the surface too. Agriculture is surprisingly robust. There's so much to it. There's so much hardcore intellectual thinking to it that we're not able to get into today for a little introductory show. But hopefully this whets your interest, and more to come. But thanks for being here, Jada.
Jada Dormaier: Yeah. Thanks for having me, Ross. That was fun. And just let me know about the co-hosting.
Ross Kenyon: Adding to my — oh, I was like, co-editing. You're adding to my editing duties right now.
Jada Dormaier: All right, [unclear]. I'm so sorry.
Ross Kenyon: Thank you so much for listening. If you could please subscribe and give us a great rating and review on Apple Podcasts or a rating on Spotify, that'd be much appreciated. It helps us get our content out to more people. You can sign up for our newsletter at nori.com. Follow us on social media. We will catch you next time.
