Understanding Ag teaches farmers about regenerative grazing.
Photo courtesy Understanding Ag.
When Gabe Brown first got into regenerative agriculture more than 25 years ago, he wasn’t trying to tackle climate change.
“I was just trying to keep the banker and feed my family,” Brown told CNBC.
Brown grew up in Bismarck, ND, and attended college to work as a professor of agriculture. He later married his high school sweetheart, the family has a farm. The young couple moved back home to help on the farm, where conventional farming practices were in place at the time. After eight years, Brown bought part of the farm from his wife.
From 1995 to 1998, Brown’s farm in North Dakota faced constant natural disasters: Three years of hail and one year of drought. Brown needed to figure out how to make his land profitable. In addition, he did not have money to buy fertilizers and chemicals.
“It set me on a learning path. And I actually became a student about nature and ecology and how natural ecosystems work,” Brown told CNBC.
Today, Brown runs his 6,000-acre farm near Bismarck with renewable operations and helps run a consulting firm, Understanding Agadvises farmers who manage 32 million acres across North America.
Gabe Brown came to regenerative farming as a way to save her farm two and a half decades ago.
Photo courtesy Gabe Brown
While Brown doesn’t set a goal to combat climate change, regenerative grazing is a way to sequester carbon dioxide, a key ingredient for limiting global warming. Cattle that graze on plant-fed soils have absorbed carbon dioxide from the air. After grazing, cows do not graze for long periods of time, giving the roots a chance to grow another layer of leaves, capturing more carbon.
Dan Probertan Oregon rancher and marketing manager for the farm collective Country natural beef, explains that regenerative livestock farming involves herding livestock from one paddock to another on a regular, almost daily basis. Cattle graze on the pasture where they are grazing, cut low, then move on. Every patch of land they cut down has a significant amount of time to rest and recover so it can grow again.
“Those cattle are put together in herds, they’re raised to a fairly high density, and then they’re moved sometimes twice in a day,” Probert told CNBC.
This process absorbs more carbon than feeding typical monocultures like corn to cows because these crops are annuals and rather slow growing, and do not perform photosynthesis when they are left unattended. wild.
Dan Probert oversees the land on his farm in Oregon.
Photo: Dan Probert
The amount of carbon sequestered with regenerative grazing practices varies considerably, depending on the extent to which farmers graze and the diversity of plant species in the grazing land. But the range is between 2.5 and 7.5 metric tons of carbon per acre per year, according to understanding founding partner Ag Allen Williams.
For comparison, southern pine foresthas gained some attention as a carbon sink, which would sequester 1.4 to two tons of carbon per acre per year.
The Probert collective works for Country Natural Beef, which is a non-profit operation Sustainable Northwest and a grant from MJ Murdock Charity Foundation to more accurately quantify the carbon impact of farm regeneration by taking soil samples now and comparing the carbon content with samples to be taken in 3 to 5 years.
Land management philosophy, not prescription
Regenerative agriculture is more of a philosophy of agriculture and livestock rearing than a specific prescription, explained Bobby Gill are from Institut Savoury, a non-profit organization in space. Practice based on the work of Allan Savourya leader in the field who started his work in the 1960s in Zimbabwe.
“He’s been banging on this drum, developing these methods for decades now. And often, he’s the only person out there banging this drum,” Gill told CNBC.
Savoury’s revolutionary message is that farmers need to prioritize soil health and graze livestock in ways that mimic natural patterns.
The group did not emphasize the environmental aspects of livestock farming, which activists often criticized.
“Someone is a fifth generation farmer… it sucks to be called an overpass state or have people point their fingers at them saying, ‘Climate change is your fault: it’s your fault’, ‘ said Gill. “It’s important to enter into these conversations with empathy and understanding.”
Instead, the Savory Institute talks to farmers about regenerative agriculture as a way to run a profitable farm, provide for their families, and take pride in their land.
Salty food is no longer considered a delicacy. The Savoury Institute was founded in 2009 and now has 54 centers around the world, having trained 14,000 people and influenced the management of more than 42 million acres.
When Will Harris started regenerative farming in Georgia, he wasn’t trying to tackle climate change either. He doesn’t even know the climate is changing.
Harris is the fourth generation in the family to run his 2,300-acre Georgia farm, White oak grasslandand have some perspective on recent agricultural history.
White Oak Pastures Board of Directors: Front row, From left to right: Jean Turn, Jodi Benoit, Will Harris, Jenni Harris, Amber Harris. Back Row, Left to Right: John Benoit, Brian Sapp.
White oak grassland
In the years following World War II, agriculture became highly industrialized, Harris told CNBC.
“Europe is starving. There’s a huge need for cheap, abundant, safe food,” Harris said. “Industrialization, commodification, centralization, really did that… it made food inexplicably cheap and wasteful, and very boring, very, very, very boring. shop.”
Factory farming takes the form of monoculture, where only one product is grown on one piece of land. It also introduces the use of chemical fertilizers, tillage, pesticides, hormone implants in animals, antibiotics as adjunct treatment in animals and large devices.
Harris didn’t like that. Financially, he’s doing great, he said, but he doesn’t like practices that have become standard in the industry.
The White Oak Meadow, farmed with regenerative agricultural practices, is on the left. The land on the right is cultivated by conventional, industrial methods.
“I’ve just become fed up with the excesses of that farming system. I’m starting to move away from it. I’m doing this simply to stop using technological ‘products’ I don’t like and do things that I didn’t” I didn’t want to do anything. I’m not intentionally moving my farm towards anything. I just want to stay away from anything that makes me unhappy. “
Changes are not free. It takes two years to raise a 1,100-pound cow, where with industrial operations a farmer can raise a 1,400-pound cow for 18 months, Harris said. But the quality of his meat tastes better, and he can charge more for discerning customers.
His profit margins have shrunk as international farmers enter the “grass-fed” game and enter markets like the “American” by taking even a small step of the production process. Made in America, but the value of his land is not included in the price of steak.
“You don’t measure the deterioration of that non-depreciating asset on your balance sheet,” Harris said.
“As a 25-year practitioner of regenerative soil management, I can tell you with authority that you cannot regenerate degraded, desertified soil without the intervention of animals.”
In addition, his two daughters and their wife have returned to the farm, a stark contrast to many other farming families whose children have left for other occupations.
“I can very well assure you that, if I continue to do industrial farming, my daughters will not choose to come back.”
Good for business
While it may take longer to bring cows to adulthood using regenerative farming, it can help ranchers use the land more efficiently.
“My farm might have had 1,000 cows five years ago, and now we have 1,200 on the same plot,” Probert told CNBC.
There aren’t many upfront costs to converting a farm to regenerative grazing, other than the education, which Williams notes, is tax-deductible for farmers.
But farmers tend not to know it.
“They have a misconception that this is going to be expensive and that they’re going to have a big financial impact in the first few years. But that’s just not true,” Williams said. According to Williams, once farmers start regenerative grazing, they don’t need to buy synthetic fertilizers, herbicides, fungicides and pesticides, so their input costs go down.
Educating other farmers about the benefits of regenerative grazing and farming has become a business of its own.
Williams, a sixth-generation farmer family with farms in both Mississippi and Alabama, spent 15 years teaching in academia at both Louisiana Tech University and Mississippi State University before transitioning to teaching methods. Regenerative grazing and farming for farmers in the field – literally.
Allen Williams (left), a sixth generation farmer family and founding partner of Understanding Ag, teaches another farmer about regenerative grazing.
“You can’t do what you don’t know. So someone has to be there to teach you and train you,” Williams told CNBC.
Spreading the word about regenerative grazing means focusing on the self, a place that makes some farmers uncomfortable, Probert said.
Probert leads the farming collective he’s in because he knows it’s vital to the survival of his industry.
“We can’t live here on an island. We have 100 ranches on six and a half million acres. And we depend a lot on Portland and San Francisco and Seattle and Los Angeles to market our products. your product,” said Probert.
“So we’re constantly working to bridge the gap between urban and rural areas. And we know we can’t hide here. We have to find a way to tell our story and make people feel.” satisfied with the food they ate.”
