Nature is self-organizing, self-regulating, and self-healing. And if we follow her patterns, we can heal our ecosystem, produce better quality food, and more profitable farms and ranches. So, what does it look like when we adopt regenerative agricultural practices that work with nature’s principles? And what can we do to support the farmers and ranchers who understand the relationship between carbon and soil health?
Farmer, rancher and soil health pioneer Gabe Brown is the bestselling author of Dirt to Soil: One Family’s Journey into Regenerative Agriculture, and his work is featured in the new Netflix documentary, Kiss the Ground. On this episode of Reversing Climate Change, Gabe joins Ross and Christophe to explain what inspired his own transition to regenerative agricultural practices and how he works with farmers and ranchers, using the context and tools available to move them down a regenerative path.
Gabe walks us through the six principles of how nature functions, describing how we can work with nature to heal our ecosystem and why we all benefit from a shift from monoculture to polyculture. Listen in for Gabe’s insight on how a farmer or rancher’s profitability depends on carbon and learn how you can vote with your consumer dollars to promote regenerative agricultural practices.
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hey, everyone. Welcome to Season 2 of Reversing Climate Change. We are doing that podcast thing now and launching a Patreon. You can find it at patreon. com slash noripodcasts. There are various tiers with different types of goodies available. Do you want to receive a special newsletter digest of what norinauts are reading that week? Be a part of a nori book club? Get special access to nori events? Go take a look at patreon. com slash noripodcasts for what we’re offering. And in that spirit of being lean in that startup kind of way that, you know, we like to do, this list of goodies is subject to change and we’d very much like your feedback.
Is there something that you’d really like to see but it isn’t listed here? Honest feedback does a lot to help us shape what we offer to you. You can send an email to podcast. nori. com or fill out our podcast survey anonymously in our newsletter which you can find at nori. com slash subscribe. And thank you so much for listening to another season of Reversing Climate Change. Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon, joined by my colleague Christophe Jospe. Hey, Christophe.
Christophe Jospe: Hello. Great to be on this one.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, actually, I think something like 100 episodes ago, I think you had said, we’re coming for you, Gabe Brown. I’m not sure how long it took us to do this or why. We Finally, at long last, Gabe Brown, farmer, rancher, and author of Dirt to Soil, One Family’s Journey into Regenerative Agriculture. And also, on the day that this episode comes out, September 22nd, you have Netflix. You can also see the new Kiss the Ground documentary, which you totally should because Gabe is in it. Well, that’s one reason among many you should see it.
But also, Gabe, you figure quite prominently into it. So thanks for joining us.
Gabe Brown: Yeah, thank you. Pleased to be with you today.
Ross Kenyon: We are pleased to have you. It sounds like in reading your book, and I think you get into this a little bit in the documentary, that you have made conceivably every farming mistake it is possible to make before learning about regenerative methods and finally making that switch. Is that an okay way to sum up your learning experience?
Gabe Brown: Sure. I tell people I learn by my mistakes, and I’m a slow learner, so I’ve had a lot of them.
Ross Kenyon: That is great. And so you’ve gone from conventional agriculture to more regenerative practices. Maybe to give listeners an idea of your background, maybe you could walk us through how that came to dawn on you.
Christophe Jospe: And I want to know your favorite mistake. Favorite mistake?
Gabe Brown: That’s one I’ve never been asked before. So I’ll give that some thought. A little bit about my past. And I actually grew up in town. I did not grow up on a farm or ranch, but I took an interest in agriculture when I was very young and started taking vocational agriculture classes in the ninth grade and was very active in FFA during high school. And I actually went to college to become an agricultural education instructor. Well, I ended up marrying my high school sweetheart and she was from a farm. She had two sisters and her parents farmed and ranched here.
And so to make a long story short, her parents asked us if we’d be interested in moving back to the farm. So once I graduated from college, We moved back onto her parents’ farm, ended up purchasing that in 1991. And so I learned how to farm from college textbooks and from my father-in-law, both of which taught me the very conventional model. You know, one of tillage and using a lot of synthetics, whether it be fertilizers or herbicides or pesticides. And that’s how I learned to farm. However, one thing about me is I’m just an avid learner.
I can’t read enough. And, you know, back then there was no internet. I’m aging myself. So it was mostly reading that I learned and I had studied about no-till. So in 1994, we sold all our tillage equipment and went 100% zero-till. And I did that because I thought I would save time, less trips over the field. And save moisture. I’m in an environment that gets about 16 inches of moisture a year, so we’re a little bit limited in moisture. And then what happened, the year 1995, the day before I was going to start combining our wheat crop, we lost 100% of the crop to hail.
So that was pretty devastating. And a young farmer starting out, I had a lot of money borrowed from the bank in order to operate. And that put us back, obviously, behind in the payments. 1996 came along and we lost 100% of our crop to hail again. My wife and I both took off farm jobs to pay the bills and things were getting tougher. 1997 came along and we dried out. It was a major drought in the area, so we didn’t combine any crop that year. 1998 came along and we lost 80% of our crop to hail.
So I tell people those four years were extremely difficult to take at the time, but it was absolutely the best thing that ever could have happened to us because I had to figure out how can I make our branch profitable without all these expensive inputs because the bank wasn’t going to loan me money anymore. So that sent me on a path of observation and learning as to how ecosystems really function. And I tell people... You know, 25 plus years later, I’m still learning every day. And I learned that nature is self-organizing, self-regulating and self-healing.
And if we are smart enough to step back and observe and follow these patterns and these principles of nature, we can heal our ecosystems. And we think our ranch is starting to prove that with the changes we’ve documented on it.
Christophe Jospe: I love this story, Gabe. And I want to go back to something that you brought up, which is that what you were doing on your farm was not the conventional way of doing things, nor was it in the textbooks. And what I’m hearing you say is that you learned a lot from nature. Nature was your teacher. But I’m curious, because I’d imagine there’s a continuum between what is taught to agronomists across the country and That is sort of thinking about, I don’t know, maybe it’s the four R’s of agriculture and nutrient stewardship, where for our listeners who are not familiar, that’s the right source, right place, right time and right rate.
And what I think is embedded within that is a sort of, I think, on the transition from one form of agriculture to another, maybe there’s something good there. So can you unpack a little bit why maybe we should or shouldn’t throw out the textbook of what people are taught on how to farm?
Gabe Brown: Well, one of the things, you know, what my life’s transitioned in is now today I’m part owner in a company called Understanding Ag and also a 501c3 nonprofit called Soil Health Academy. And our goal there is all about education. And I tell people, we work right now, we’re consulting on over 17 million acres across North America. And we tell our clients, We are not going to come onto your farm or ranch and drastically change how you do things. We’re going to take you where you’re at and then using the tools you have and the context, your context, we’re going to move and educate you down the regenerative path.
You know, we tell our clients, Soil is like a drug addict. It’s addicted to these synthetic inputs. Like a drug addict, you just don’t pull them off cold turkey. You have to wean the soil off of these synthetics slowly over time as you’re advancing the biology and the living ecosystem in the soil. And so you’re absolutely right. You don’t just slam the door on the Quote, Unquote, Industrial Model on the textbook, so to speak. You use the tools you have available to you to work with nature instead of against her.
Christophe Jospe: So if you could sneak one thing into the textbooks that you don’t think is there today, what would that thing be?
Gabe Brown: Yeah, that thing without a doubt would be the power of a living plant in biology. Ray Archuleta, my business partner, said it best when he said, plant and soil are one. What is not taught in the textbooks, of course, back in seventh grade biology, we all learned about photosynthesis and what takes place there, but we did not learn that the plant makes all of these carbon compounds, amino acids, and pumps them out through root exudates to feed soil biology, and it’s the soil biology That drive the nutrient cycle. And it’s that interaction.
You cannot have healthy food without healthy soil biology. And that interaction between diverse living plants and soil biology. And that just isn’t taught enough. And then on top of that, to really have a healthy ecosystem, and I’m talking about land-based, you have to have Animals and insects present. And unfortunately, in agriculture, you know, we’ve removed most of the animals from the landscape and that’s absolutely the worst thing we can do. It’s accelerated climate change and accelerated the degradation of our ecosystem.
Ross Kenyon: So you’ve incorporated using livestock and growing various types of crops, which I’m sure people listening know these are conventionally separate activities. So when I describe you as a farmer and rancher, that’s already somewhat of an unusual pairing, right?
Gabe Brown: Unfortunately, it is today. You know, back 100 years ago, it was not. All farms, of course, had draft animals and they had very diverse array. Of livestock on their farms. And we’ve removed that. And why have we removed it? Well, we were told it’s all about specialization. It’s all about monocultures. And, you know, that occurred, of course, after World War II and the uptick, heavy uptick in the use of synthetic fertilizers. And if you look at how nature functions, there’s really six principles that are constant. You know, nature always Operates in context.
You know, there’s a reason bananas and oranges do not grow in North Dakota where I’m from. You know, it’s out of context. You know, we freeze for a good part of the year. So there’s this ecological context that nature follows. Second principle is in nature, there’s no mechanical disturbance and there’s minimal chemical disturbance. Now, plants emit chemicals all the time. But it’s not this copious amount of synthetic chemicals we’re putting into our environment today. Nature always tries to cover the soil. You know, you just don’t see bare soil in a healthy ecosystem.
Nature always tries to put a living plant there and cover it. Otherwise, the soil is prone to wind erosion, water erosion, evaporation. In agriculture today, unfortunately, massive amounts of tillage and even in home gardens. You know, the worst thing a person could do for a garden is to till it. Yet the vast majority of gardeners do. That’s going against nature. The next principle is diversity. You know, go into a quote unquote native ecosystem and you’re going to see tremendous diversity. You know, you can walk into one of my native pastures and count over 100 different species of grasses, forbs and legumes.
That Diversity feeds soil biology, a diverse diet of root exudates, and in turn then you have a healthy, diverse biological ecosystem that’s feeding the plants. The next principle is living root in the soil as long as possible throughout the year. There’s always something growing in a healthy ecosystem year round because you have to take this solar energy, carbon, All these other compounds out of the atmosphere and pump that into the soil to feed soil biology. And then the final principle is that one of livestock and insects are a part of that integration.
You know, nature does not function properly without animals. And yet here farmers and ranchers today have removed animals from the ecosystem. And I agree so often that I get interviewed a lot for articles and stories about climate change. And they say, oh, we have to remove the animals from the landscape. Well, that’s absolutely the worst thing we could do. It’s not the cow, it’s the how. People blame livestock for land degradation. Well, that’s the management of the livestock. It’s not the livestock themselves. If you look at how deep, rich soils were formed, It was with grazing animals because when a plant is grazed properly, that plant then sends signals, sloughs off roots and root exudates in order to regrow, thus cycling more carbon out of the atmosphere.
Worst thing we can do is remove animals from the landscape. And so when we go work with people and teach them about regenerative agriculture, it’s all about how do you use these six principles that are constant Anywhere in the world. I mean, I travel extensively and been to other continents. And I don’t care if I’m in Australia or Canada or Mexico or United States, Europe. These principles are the same. Now, the tools you use, the species of livestock, what crops you grow, the diversity, et cetera, are different. But the principles are the same.
So I tell people, I’m not 99. 9% confident that I can Regenerate your farm or ranch, I’m 100% confident because the principles are constant all over the world.
Christophe Jospe: Thanks for that, Gabe. What I hear you saying, I mean, what we’re talking about here is the land operator or the land steward or whoever it is considering actions of regeneration performing some kind of an intervention. And you could argue that agriculture has been intervening with nature for a really long time. And what you’re doing here is stepping back, listening to how might we farm in nature’s image and what are the interventions we can make. And so to your point of folks talking about getting animals out of agriculture as an intervention, you’re saying, no, there’s actually a way to use this in the right method.
I do want to push back. I mean, I appreciate your confidence. Context. And optimism, because I think the world needs a lot of it, especially in this space. But to your point, it’s not the how, it’s the how. You know, you may have someone who’s trying out some of these things, they give up, it doesn’t work. The intervention just doesn’t work for them. I mean, it’s around the way in which people are intervening and meeting them where you’re at and seeing what works best and then what hasn’t worked in your experience.
Gabe Brown: Yeah, that’s a very good point. And I will answer that. What is missing in agriculture is the educational component. And this goes back to what we talked about earlier, that you’re not taught these things in a conventional model. Take a farmer today. Okay. Who influences that farmer? Well, it’s peer pressure, you know, neighbors, community. Okay. And then they hear from the land grant university specialist. They hear from their agronomist. They hear from their chemical salesman. They’re seed salesmen. All of those people have a vested interest in that farmer and rancher staying the status quo.
They’re not out there educating them as to these principles. Why would a fertilizer salesman tell the farmer that he needs to focus on biology, needs to focus on diverse living plants to drive the nutrient cycle? That’s not in that fertilizer salesman’s best interest. Okay. And so as we educate farmers and ranchers as to how these principles work, then they’re able to make the decisions that move their farmer ranch down the regenerative path. But it’s about education. You know, our firm Understanding Ag was hired by General Mills to Lead their regenerative wheat and also their regenerative dairy project.
Because General Mills realized that in order to move farmers, ranchers down this regenerative path, the missing link was education. And right now, unfortunately, there’s not a lot of organizations or individuals out there that are really educated themselves on how these principles work. And then have the skill set to be the mentor for these farmers and ranchers and moving down that path. That’s one of the reasons our business, even though we’ve only been a business three and a half years, to go from zero acres to over 17 million in three and a half years, I think is pretty remarkable.
It also shows the need that’s out there, that farmers and ranchers are looking for something different. You look, you know, bankruptcies, And farming are going through the roof. Unfortunately, suicides go along with that or sky high. Farming and ranching has one of the highest suicide rates of any profession in the United States. Why is that? The current model is broken and we need to change that. And I like to tell people the beauty of regenerative agriculture is no matter where you’re If you’re passionate about climate change, regenerative agriculture certainly can play a positive role in addressing climate change.
If your passion is in water quality or quantity, regenerative agriculture certainly can heal the water cycle, keep nutrients on the landscape rather than in the watershed. If your passion lies in healing and restoring our rural communities, Nothing can do better at that than regenerative agriculture because we have the ability to add profitability to the farm and ranch sector, which will then be multiplied in our local community. And the thing that really drives myself and my business partners, our passion lies in how do we create nutrient-dense foods to stem from The current health problems that we have in this country, you know, the United States spends more on healthcare than any other country in the world, yet look at it.
We’re either on top or near the top in ADD, ADHD, cancer, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, autoimmune diseases, osteoporosis, obesity, and the list goes on and on.
Ross Kenyon: Okay, well, what is the reason for that?
Gabe Brown: Obviously, part of it is our sedentary lifestyle, but certainly a major component in it’s the lack of nutrient densities in the foods that people are consuming. And if you really look at nutrient density of foods, the way to get nutrient density in foods is through a healthy soil ecosystem. That’s the only way you’re going to get all these diverse phytonutrients into a diet.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, we’ll have to come back to that because nutrient density is one of those things that we have not covered to the depth that we really should. I wanted to ask you about this question of scale. So when I think about conventional agriculture, I think about monocultures, I think about an economy of scale. I associate that with assembly line thinking, with Fordism, and Taylorism, and sort of these industrial models Yeah, you can think about the Model T and how that made cars available to everyone. And what people don’t know is that there was a huge, you could even say artisanal automobile industry before the assembly line really took off, but there were decisive benefits to being And so when people are talking about polycultures and having diversity, it sounds complex.
And I’m going to have to expend a lot of cognition. And we tend to be overall very excited about polyculture and agricultural models that rely upon it. But I wonder, do you think that we’re giving up anything by focusing on diversity at the expense of scale? Is there anything that you think that we’re leaving behind by focusing on diversity in that case?
Gabe Brown: Yeah, you will lose ease of production. And we tell people regenerative agriculture is a thinking person’s game. You know, in agriculture today, we’ve lost the power of observation. I can walk onto my fields, and if I see a certain forb growing, or as a lot of people call them weeds, I can tell you what that signifies. That’s there to heal something, okay? There’s a reason nature put it there. Most farmers look at that, oh, that’s a weed. I need to spray it and kill it. They’ve lost the power to observe what nature’s telling us.
So we need to get that power of observation back. So the ease is lost. Most farmers today want to farm by a recipe card. They listen to their seed salesman, how much seed, their agronomist, how much fertilizer, their chemical dealer, what spray to kill the weeds. That’s not what regenerative agriculture is. Regenerative agriculture, you have to think and observe and then react accordingly to work with nature. You give up that ease, but what’s gained is significant improvements in the nutrient cycle, the water cycle, the nutrient density of foods, and you significantly reduce the input costs, significantly.
So you’re actually able to produce that product at a much lower cost than The conventional model. And most people don’t realize it. The other thing that’s gained in regenerative agriculture is the stacking of enterprises. I’m often asked, how are you going to feed the world through regenerative agriculture? And I laugh because an average farmer, for instance, only grows corn on an acre or only grows soybeans. But what I’m doing, I’m not only growing corn, then we’re running livestock. We got beef cattle. We got hogs. We got chickens. We got bees.
We’re stacking enterprises, so I’m producing many, many more, not only calories, but much more food that’s higher in nutrient density. And I can’t emphasize that enough. Then if we start thinking of food as medicine, this all makes sense. There’s a difference between producing something on an assembly line that’s just a fixed item, such as a car, And producing food that is preventative medicine. They’re vastly different and society needs to put a value on that. What does it mean to heal the water cycle so that we do not have the nitrates and the phosphates in the watersheds, in the drinking water of our community?
What does it mean to take that carbon out of the atmosphere and put it in into the soil cycle? And it is a cycle where it belongs. You know, what’s that worth? What does it mean to produce food that’s much higher in nutrient density so we don’t have to consume near as much of it? And I think that’s playing out right now with this COVID pandemic. Look at who’s succumbing to it. It’s the people who have a weakened immune system. They have underlying health concerns. Those who have a healthy immune system, such as myself and my family, we’ve all had COVID.
It was no big deal. Didn’t slow us down at all. We tested positive. Why? Because our immune systems are healthy. We’re able to ward it off because we only consume nutrient-dense food. So we have to look at all these other factors. It’s not like comparing an apple to an apple because regenerative agriculture is totally different than conventional agriculture.
Christophe Jospe: I like where you’re going. I mean, it reminds me of this time. It was a few years ago, and I was at a summer... Outdoor barbecue and ate a strawberry that should have been delicious. It was massive and red and it tasted like styrofoam. And it’s funny, that was a pretty transformative moment for me where I was like, I don’t want to eat strawberries that taste that way. I’ve had delicious organic strawberries. They weren’t that big, but my, they were delicious. And it goes to... Certain mindset shift that the consumers have on the other side, looking at food as medicine and really embodying the old trope, you are what you eat.
And we think a lot about this. We’re geeks for regenerative ag and we read a lot of books about soil. And it’s always like, if you’re going to do this thing, read this one book. And quite frankly, I think, Gabe, that might be your book that we recommend to a lot of conventional farmers. How have your peers received it? Do you ever get run out of town and you say, man, this crazy guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about? Or are you seeing this pick up steam?
Gabe Brown: Well, I tell people, realize, you know, I’ve been in this so long, 25 plus years, that there isn’t much I haven’t seen. And I’ve had about everything up to the kitchen sink thrown at me and it just doesn’t bother me. Because, you know, there’s an old saying, when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. A lot of them just aren’t ready. So I speak to a lot of people every year, tens of thousands. And I know that my message is going to be received by very few that are there that day.
But what happens, these farmers, ranchers go back on their farm or that, and sometime, might be a week later, a month later, all of a sudden they’ll see something. They’ll go, oh, that’s what Gabe was talking about. And some of them never do come around. They’re not in that right frame of mind where they can accept it. But by and large, those that hear me, I make them think. I like to say that I make them a bit uncomfortable because I tell them that their farm, their ranch is a direct reflection of them.
So if they’re not profitable, that’s their fault. If their soils aren’t healthy, that’s their fault. It’s up to them to change. I have that kind of personality. It doesn’t bother me at all to make people uncomfortable. You want to be uncomfortable? Lose four crops in a row and try and dig out. I tell people, and this is one thing that was left out of my book that I wish would have been left in there was on how financially at the end of those four years, we were 1. 5 million in debt.
And that was a lot of money back in the mid-1990s. How do you get out from that? I had to really observe nature and do what I had to do to dig out from that mountain of death. But the beautiful thing is with regenerative agriculture, it can be very profitable. You can make a decent living, support your family and bring the next generation onto the farm or ranch. So it’s a good life for those that go down it. Now, I say that. About three to four years ago, the snowball was finally large enough just to really start rolling downhill.
Because you can’t pick up a farm publication or listen to farm TV or look on all the YouTube videos, podcasts, without hearing about regenerative agriculture. And, you know, I mentioned General Mills, their regenerative agriculture mindset. I’ve been contacted on almost a daily basis from companies and large multinationals. How do we move down this path? So it will be mainstream very soon. There’s zero doubt about it. And hopefully the release of the Kiss the Ground mobile helps for that even further.
Christophe Jospe: I think I’m kind of convinced that this isn’t just this will only work for Gabe, but it’s more of a, hey, if you try it for a bit, you’ll find it works for you too. You mentioned something that I would be remiss not to bring up. And just so you know, Gabe, in the course of my career, I got called a used carbon salesman, which means I have an obsession with pulling carbon out of the atmosphere. And that’s what Nori is all about. And obviously a big theme of an outcome that can come from regenerative agriculture and something that’s talked about in the Kiss the Ground documentary.
But what’s your hot take on carbon in the soils as it relates to regenerative ag? And what do you think is the biggest misconception that people out there talking about it have today?
Gabe Brown: Well, OK, from a farmer rancher standpoint, I can tell you that. There’s probably less than 1% of the farmers and ranchers out there who truly understand that their profitability depends on carbon. You know, everything is carbon based. So farmers, ranchers do not understand just how important carbon is to their financial well-being and the health of that ecosystem that is their farmer ranch. I think one of the real misconceptions is that there’s a lack of understanding of just how powerful that living plant is of taking carbon out of the atmosphere. I mean, it’s huge.
If we in agriculture would only cover the soil with living plants, yes, it can be cash crops. Now, we need to grow cash crops that feed people instead of Feeding ethanol plants and feeding livestock that shouldn’t be fed grain. We need to grow vegetables and fruits and truly food that can be consumed by humans. And then we need to plant cover crops and graze those cover crops with livestock. And if we do that, we can take massive amounts of carbon out of the atmosphere and put them back into the soil.
And we’re proving that. We’re working with a number of scientists who are documenting this.
Ross Kenyon: Very exciting. We are optimistic about all of that. There’s quite a lot to be enthusiastic about. And we’re also very excited about the Kiss the Ground documentary. I thought it was very nicely done. Also, Woody Harrelson narrates it. So it must be cool to have Woody Harrelson talking about you, Gabe. You’re a part of a small crew that’s true for. But yeah, what was that like? And what do you expect the reaction to be? I think it’s going to be a rather big documentary.
Gabe Brown: Yeah, my hat’s off to Josh and Rebecca for the job they did. You know, Josh first contacted Ray Archuleta and myself. It was over seven years ago. And at that time, Josh was charged to do a movie on healthy organic soil. So when he first talked to us, you know, we had to have the conversation that, okay, Yes, there are some organic farms that have healthy soil, but by and large, most organic farms till too much. I said, you need to quit talking about it as an organic versus conventional and start talking about it as regenerative.
Because I don’t care if you’re in the conventional mindset, organic mindset, we all need to regenerate our soils. You know, I have the benefit in that I’m on hundreds of farms every year all over the world. And I tell people I have never, ever not once been on a single farm, including my own, that’s not degraded. All our farms and ranches, gardens, they’re all degraded. We need to regenerate them. And so Josh came up to my ranch and spent nearly a week here. And when he left here, he kind of had an epiphany from the standpoint.
He realized that, you know, it isn’t just about being organic. It’s about looking at the ecosystem as a whole and focusing on what’s needed to work with nature to regenerate those soils. And it’s been a wonderful experience. They did a wonderful job. We filmed with him, I believe, in four different locations over a period of about a three-year time frame and learned a lot along with him. And I thought they did a very good job. Of trying to balance the point of view of a farmer, point of view of a scientist, point of views of consumers, and why it’s so important for us to focus on the health of the soil ecosystem.
Christophe Jospe: So Gabe, I want to go back to that question I asked early on. So hopefully I gave you enough time to stew on it. But now it comes to the advice part of this podcast. So first of all, what advice would you give to new farmers?
Gabe Brown: So that’s a very good question. And here’s how I approach it with somebody who wants to go down this path. It doesn’t matter if you’re a gardener, a farmer, a rancher, whether you have one acre or 100,000 acres. I tell them you have to commit for five years. Take a part of your land. Doesn’t matter if it’s one acre or 500 acres. Doesn’t matter if it’s along the road where all the neighbors can see or over the hill where nobody can see. But commit that parcel of land for five years.
And then you have to be intentional. You cannot be intentional-ish. And the difference I realize that’s not a word, but that’s a phrase we use because we see it often. People mean well, but they don’t do the steps necessary to really be intentional. So what we tell our clients is and tell people wanting to move down this path is you’ve got to commit an area for five years and that you’re going to, in your context, follow the six principles.
Ross Kenyon: And I say that.
Gabe Brown: Because obviously, if you’re in Los Angeles and you have a flower pot there on the deck that you’re gardening with, you know, you can’t really integrate livestock. But you can certainly have some insects there. So you got to put it in your context. But then you follow those principles, you know, remove the tillage and keep armor on the soil and have diversity there and have a living rut. Plant a cover crop once your garden’s You know, you’ve harvested your vegetables and to what extent you can integrate livestock. Normally, what happens by the end of year three, they’re committing their entire farm, ranch, garden, whatever the case may be, to these principles in regenerative ag.
We have never, I have never, ever seen anyone do that, go five years and go back to the way they were doing it. They all just buy in if they’re intentional and committed. So that’s how we start people down this path. And it’s very successful because they have mentors that they can ask questions to. I tell people, when I went down this path, I had nobody. However, very early on, it didn’t take very long. And all of a sudden, I had a district conservationist with the Natural Resource Conservation Service who Became really interested in it.
And he was a great friend and mentor. David Brandt, who farms in Ohio, he and I became friends. Ray Archuleta and my friends, all of a sudden, I wasn’t talking to the neighbors about farming and ranching. I was talking to people a thousand miles away, but we were of like minds. And so you have to associate with like-minded people. You have to have the fortitude to stick it out and realize that nature can be very humbling. But if you give her the chance, she is self-healing, self-organizing, self-regulating and things will come into balance.
Christophe Jospe: I’m just letting your words wash all over me and sort of satisfy a fantasy of farming myself one day. But until then, I’m kind of indirectly connected to agriculture. So I’m curious for those who don’t have the luxury of a parcel of land to experiment with, but very much want to see more of the things you’re talking about that result in Increased nutrient density, carbon sequestration, all the good things that come with regenerative agriculture. What advice do you have for them?
Gabe Brown: Thank you for asking that question. Because what is going to drive real change throughout the world, what’s going to heal our ecosystems, what’s going to mitigate climate change, is consumers voting with their buying dollars. And by that, every consumer, I don’t care where you’re located, Has the ability to make a connection with a farmer, a rancher, a gardener who’s using these regenerative principles and then purchase your food from them. Support them because the more support they get, the more that individual farmer or rancher is going to be able to make a positive change out on the landscape.
Ross Kenyon: If you’re listening, that’s essentially who Kiss the Ground is pointed towards, both in their documentary, which you should boot up Netflix and watch after you finish this episode. But also, this means what, Gabe? Shopping at farmer’s markets, knowing your farmer, knowing where your food comes, trying to really support these farmers who are making what sounds like a harrowing switch in terms of practices. There’s a fair amount of risk involved here, too. Or they’re just people at the end of their rope like you were.
Gabe Brown: Right. Typically, when we go out to educate, we have different groups. You’re absolutely right that come. Some are on the end of their ropes. Financially, their backs are against the wall and they need to change or else they’re going out of business. Others, though, have had this gnawing feeling. There’s no farmer or rancher out there who likes to go spray chemicals. I’ve never met one, you know, and when you do that, you get a sickening feeling because you know it’s not right. You know, I tell people when I was farming or ranching conventionally, I’d wake up every morning trying to decide what I was going to kill that day.
Was it going to be a weed? Was it going to be a pest? Was it going to be a fungal disease? I was going to kill something. Now I wake up every morning. How do I get more life onto my farm? And it’s much more enjoyable and profitable working with life than death. And a lot of people are gravitating to regenerative ag for that reason. They’re feeling better about themselves. They’re feeling better about their family. They’re able to bring the next generation onto the farmer ranch. It’s an uplifting way to farm and ranch.
And then that carries over into the community and it’s much more enjoyable.
Christophe Jospe: So Gabe, we’ve given you some time to think about it. You’re still on the hook. What’s your favorite mistake?
Gabe Brown: I don’t know that there’s a favorite mistake, but one of them that comes to mind is not having a living root in the soil. Growing a cash crop, harvesting that cash crop, then letting that land sit idle till the next spring. You know, like right here now in North Dakota where I’m at, we froze last week, we froze five nights. So everything pretty much is wilting in that except my newly seeded covered crops. They’re emerging from the ground and they’re capturing sunlight and they’re frost tolerant crops that are able to take that carbon out of the atmosphere.
And so my favorite mistake was early on how I didn’t know that. I didn’t know the power of that carbon and the importance of having that living plant in the soil at all times. And so that’s a big change. And it really has changed this farm. I tell the story that I lived here four years before I saw my first deer walk through this farm. Now I can look out my window any evening and count 100 deer grazing on my cover crops and You know, enjoying a peaceful life and realize that my farm is actually in city jurisdiction.
I’m surrounded by housing developments, but still it’s a mecca for wildlife. And that’s a good thing. That’s the compounding, cascading, the compounding benefits of this type of agriculture is it affects all living things.
Ross Kenyon: And if you’re listening and you’re a gardener, I know many of you out there are, the nursery that I go to actually has a fairly well-built out cover crop section for seeds. So if you want to get a mix where there’s rye grain and triticale and fava beans, There’s all sorts of things that are packed into these cover crops for fall, winter cover crop. And there’s also buckwheat for summer too. But you can actually be doing this and you don’t have to just let your garden fallow over those times. And I think people are becoming more and more aware of this, Gabe, thanks to your efforts in your book and documentaries like this.
It feels more mainstream than it did even a decade ago.
Gabe Brown: You know, I’m glad you said that because we get a lot of people through the farm every year. Over 2,600 this past year have come and toured our farm. And the first place I take them is to my garden. And, you know, you get these farmers who farm 10,000 acres and you’re taking them to a garden and they’re going, what the world can I learn here? But then when I show them the principles in the garden, You know that our garden’s been no-till for 25 plus years. There’s always living plants, the diversity, the armor covered, the insects that are there.
And farmers and ranchers, too many of them think of insects as a pest. Oh, we got to kill that pest. But for every insect species that’s a pest, there’s 1,700 that are beneficial. Well, I’d rather work with the 1,700 beneficial ones, giving them the home and habitat, And they will balance that pest, you know. And so I take them into a garden to show them that. And then the other thing is, you know, as was said earlier, the taste of the food out of a garden. And I always use tomatoes as an example.
You know, we’ve all had a delicious homegrown tomato. But then we’ve gone to a restaurant and had these pale little orange things that you just throw aside because it’d be like eating cardboard, you know. That’s not what we should be consuming. So we can change our gardens to be the epitome of this regenerative egg. It can show people just how these principles can be used to produce nutrient-dense foods.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, absolutely. That makes me happy. And I guess I might as well give them a shout out here, Swanson’s Nursery in Seattle. You guys are great, showing some good leadership there. Okay, Gable, we need to start wrapping it up. So where might you direct people to keep in touch with what you’re doing in this space?
Gabe Brown: Sure. So I would direct them to, first of all, watch Kiss the Ground, the movie. They can read my book, Dirt to Soil. But you can also go on a couple of websites, soilhealthacademy. org. Is our nonprofit educational arm. We have a lot of information there on these principles. And then our other business is understandingag. com. And we have a lot of resources on that website as well.
Ross Kenyon: Links to all of which are in the show notes. Absolutely go watch Kiss the Ground on Netflix today. I think if they see good numbers on a documentary about regenerative ag, we’ll see more of them in the future. So easiest piece of activism you could do today, one might say. Thank you for being here, Gabe.
Gabe Brown: It was my pleasure. Thank you for asking me.
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