Soil Health Academy

Health and Wellness Through Regenerative Farming

Leah Bischof — Mon, 16 Oct 2023 11:57:34 +0000

Health and Wellness Through Regenerative Farming

First-generation farming sisters grow loyal customers, social media following

By Ron Nichols

After four undergraduate years of study, six additional graduate years of study and on the eve of defending her mechanical engineering Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Illinois, Ashley Armstrong decided to do the unthinkable: pursue a different career.

Today, 30-year-old Ashley says she still has a vivid memory of the day she told her graduate research advisors that after she finished her Ph.D., she was not going to be a professor or go into research and continue their legacies in academia. Instead, Ashley told them she was going to become a regenerative farmer.

“It was the hardest conversation I think I've ever had,” she says. “I was in tears. And because these advisors give you so much and help fund you through graduate school, it was just so hard.” To her enormous relief, however, the graduate advisors Ashley describes as her “second parents,” were very supportive.

First-generation regenerative farmers Ashley Armstrong, left, and her sister Sarah Armstrong established their 26-acre Angel Acres farm in 2021.

“It made me realize that at the end of the day everyone in your life wants you to do what makes you happy and wants you to do what you're passionate about,” she says. “I realized that no one is going to be upset, no one is going to be angry. They're just going to be happy that you're happy. And so, I think that the positive reaction from that meeting made me realize that it’s okay to do this and pursue something totally different and totally crazy and have the support of people that I look up to a lot. It was a really powerful moment for me.”

But the seeds of Ashley’s new, regenerative journey were planted years before.

As an undergraduate collegiate golfer at Notre Dame University, Ashley says she was “a little bit obsessive” about being perfect in sports, requiring “perfect nutrition,” and perfect exercise—and about “blindly listening to the mainstream health advice.”

To improve the nutrition of their eggs, the Armstrong sisters created their own organic, low in polyunsaturated fat (PUFA) feed that contains no corn, no soy, and no high PUFA ingredients such as flax seed, sunflower seeds or seed oils. The hens have access to fresh pasture daily where they forage on bugs and grasses, plus they receive meat scraps, meat organs, as well as our organic food scraps (fruits, vegetables, and more).

“I was just severely nutrient deficient, running on empty for a number of years and that had some profound negative impacts on my own health in my early and mid-20s,” she says. “Things that I shouldn't have had to deal with at such a young age, including hormonal issues, autoimmune-like symptoms and many others.”

Along the way, Ashley realized it was the mainstream nutrition advice that was as deficient as the food she was consuming. As she researched, then implemented the carnivore diet, she discovered that red meat and healthy animal products are the most nutrient-dense foods one can consume. Although she no longer describes herself as a “full carnivore,” Ashley says that dietary experience was an important step along the way because it allowed her to discover regenerative agriculture.

Facing health challenges together

About the same time as Ashley’s health struggles, her younger sister Sarah was diagnosed with lupus. At that time, Sarah was in her early 20s.

“The doctor told Sarah that she was going to be dealing with lupus for the rest of her life and prescribed drugs just to reduce the symptoms,” Ashley says. “That was a huge red flag and we thought that should not be the only option.”

Ashley describes Sarah (now 27) as her best friend, the two becoming even closer because of the health challenges they have faced together. “We've dug ourselves out of it and we both stumbled upon regenerative agriculture and the benefits of eating animal products together,” Ashley says.

Although she nor her sister come from farming backgrounds, throughout her post-graduate years, Ashley and Sarah volunteered at local farms to learn as much as they could about farming. Ashley subsequently immersed herself in learning more about regenerative agriculture by attending the Soil Health Academy at BDA Farms in 2021, taking Holistic Management courses, and by learning from regenerative pioneers Nicole Masters, Allen Savory and Gabe Brown. It’s also how her passion for regenerative agriculture grew.

Taking a ‘huge risk’

Ashley says that after graduate school, it was time for her to relocate, so she and her sister sold their house to make the down payment on a farm that was “too good to be true” in Marcellus, Michigan, about 40 miles south of Kalamazoo. Just before the outbreak of COVID in 2020, lower land prices made the farm acquisition possible, so Ashley and Sarah took a leap of faith and established what would become the 26-acre Angel Acres farm in 2021.

Describing the move as “a huge risk,” Ashley says the wedding barn on the property provided an additional income stream, allowing the sisters to expand the business by offering wedding and other events at the barn.

“It was definitely a hard couple of years, and I don't know if the path that I we took is one that everyone should take because I don't always advise people to borrow money and be in debt,” she says. “But it's ultimately what my soul was telling me to do. And I had confidence that it was going to work.”

Today, still paying off some of the loans, Ashley says things are “starting to come together,” crediting her team for their success to date. “We also visualized seeing what we wanted in the future and trusting that every single day we were moving closer to that,” she says.

Providing frank advice

Despite the appeal of their lifestyle and success to date, Ashley says the life of a regenerative farmer may not be a good fit for many people. “They're used to traveling a ton and spending money on various material items and going out to eat a lot, which can all get expensive over time,” she says. “I am in no way perfect, but I am a very simple person when it comes down to it. I want food, I want shelter, I want nature, I want happiness.”

The wedding barn on the farm provides an additional income stream in the future for the sister farming partners and is known as The Red Barn at Angel Acres.

Farming, she says, takes “certain sacrifices,” so when consulting with others who are interested in creating a regenerative start up, Ashley delivers frank, but important, advice.

“The sale of our previous home the income that we received from the Strong Sistas wellness business helped us get started,” she says. “It’s an important thing for people to realize because I've seen people go bankrupt in two to three years. Understanding where you're at financially will impact what steps you take forward to pursue your farm, whether that's completely leasing or working at someone else's farm and getting the experience firsthand.”

In addition to the financial challenges, Ashley is also transparent in communicating to prospective start-up farmers the amount of hard, physical labor that’s involved and what’s required in good animal husbandry.

“You really have to be able to put animals needs over your own and that was really hard for me to learn the first year because that's something I never really developed or learned growing up,” she says. “I really think it takes a special type of person to be able to be a part of regenerative agriculture. There are no weekends, no off days, no holidays, it is 365 days a year. Animals need to be fed and taken care of every day. And I don't think that there is enough discussion of how hard it is financially to get started, so I do try to make that abundantly clear when I talk to people about this because, honestly, there are more people that follow us on Instagram that want to do what we're doing more than they want to buy products from us.”

Angel Acres farm provides the eggs, some of the lamb, some of the beef, some of the pork, and a lot of the chicken meat for the recently created Nourish Cooperative, a collective of small, regenerative farms in the area.

Building the business ‘from the soil up’

Fueled by their passion for health and regenerative agriculture, the first-generation, sibling-farming partners focused first on revitalizing their soil and pasture resources to raise healthier food and add life back to the soil. Currently, the sisters are in the process of converting a row crop field (it was used for beans and corn for many years) into a perennial pasture. “We have a long way to go still but we have made some pretty awesome progress,” Ashley says.

That philosophy is front-and-center in the sisters’ management and also in their marketing and social media communications efforts, the latter of which Ashley says helped provide the customer foundation for their latest venture: establishing the Nourish Cooperative, LLC.

“Nourish Cooperative is a collective of small regenerative farms in our area that we’ve created that allows us to provide nutrient-dense food to consumers without us trying to just expand and expand and ultimately become a confinement operation,” Ashley says.

Instead, the sisters decided to create a farming partnership, with their own farm, Angel Acres, as one of the farm partners in the venture. “We provide the eggs, we provide some of the lamb, some of the beef, some of the pork, and we also provide a lot of the chicken meat,” she says.

Ashley has spent the last 6-7 months vetting farm operations, developing new products, and meeting with local farmers to help ensure that the products from the co-op’s partner farms are grown in a way that is consistent with the sisters’ regenerative philosophy. Sarah has led the efforts with developing the website, helping with product ideas, and developing a strong customer trust as she communicates with every single customer.

“It’s honestly been one of the most fulfilling things we’ve ever done.” Ashley says. “A lot of the farmers we are working with are like, ‘Well, I've got to do a 9-5 job to support myself because I don't have a market for my products. I want to just farm full time, but I can't afford to do so,’” Ashley says. “By working with these farmers, we can allow them to be full-time farmers and give them a guaranteed market where I can pay them above what they're getting at the sale barn and I can have a guarantee that their product is going to be purchased.”

The first products from the co-op to their customers were shipped on September 5, while they have been shipping their own eggs for more than two years now.

Ashley says their new co-op venture has been buoyed by the accumulation of followers from their six years of sharing on social media, which allowed them to establish “tremendous trust” with their customers.

“Our customers know that we’ve shared everything we’ve ever done so they trust our vetting, our sourcing and our products,” she says, “It’s been really cool. It really has.”

Growing the team for the future

From the Angel Acres website: “We started with just a few egg layers, and now, thanks to our new team members, we've grown to manage a large flock of hens, grass-fed lamb, forest-raised pigs, and both forest-raised and pasture-raised meat birds.”

One of the key Angel Acres’ team members is Brandon Embree. Sarah and Brandon began dating in early 2022, and Ashley jokingly says she initially gave him a hard time, her duty as “a big sister” to make sure he was in it for the right reasons.

“And he was. He showed that early on when he just started to help out more and more at the farm and packing eggs, and then at some point we were like, ‘Why don't you just join the team?’” Ashley says. “Having Brandon come be a part of the team allows me to focus on my administrative role and I don’t have to do as much of the day-to-day farm tasks like moving the chicken coop and collecting eggs, which also freed up some time for us to be able to get the farm co-op started. He was meant to be a farmer and has done a great job around here.”

Brandon will officially become part of the family next year when he marries Sarah at their wedding venue at their farm, The Red Barns at Angel Acres.

A key Angel Acres partner, Brandon Embree, shown here, is leading the farm’s ventures into pastured, corn- and soy-free pork and chicken, among other projects. He also built the farm’s mobile milking station for the goats, mobile feeding stations for the chickens, led the chicken coop construction, and built the new shipping building.

Coming full circle

Although it seems like a big departure from a career in academia or in the mechanical engineering industry, Ashley says her regenerative farming life and career will always be positively influenced by her years of engineering studies.

“I have to take a step back and realize that my education and experience gave me a way of thinking,” she says. “And I think that way of thinking can be applied to so many things in life—especially related to what I learned in graduate school. I had to really learn how to read research papers, how to dig through the literature, how to criticize research papers, how to find research papers. And that process has benefited me a lot in our health and wellness business, but also in the regenerative ag space.”

Ashley says the value of her advanced engineering degree isn’t a result of the things she memorized or theories she learned in specific classes, but rather how that experience has allowed her to see things from a complete, context-based perspective. “What I appreciated about my mechanical engineering degree is it gave me more of a holistic picture of how things worked or how you should think about complex problems,” she says.

Ashley says her years of engineering study also provided the basis for finding her life’s passion. “I honestly feel so blessed to be even in this position because I am happy that I found purpose, my passion, my obsession,” she says. “I found that thing that made me tick. It’s the thing I just can't stop thinking about.”

Being able pursue her passion, and armed with a holistic engineering mindset, is what Ashley says fuels her from day-to-day. “I feel a responsibility to give as much of my life as I can to this area because it's given me so much,” she says. “And that's kind of what ultimately fueled my decision to pursue this because one of my mentors helped me to see it that way.”

While enjoying some quiet reading time, Ashley is visited by some of the farm’s pasture raised sheep as the sun sets on Angel Acres.

Prestige and pride in farming

Ashley says it’s ironic, if not perplexing, that so many people believe a career in farming is “less prestigious” than a career in academia or mechanical engineering industry.

“There’s a perception that farming is not something that we need to be a part of anymore,” she says, “because it’s industrialized and that food is taken care of by the big guys, so we don't need to worry about it anymore.” Some of her friends and family members have asked Ashley directly why she wanted to give up a higher-paying career in academia or the mechanical engineering industry to grow food because our food needs are “taken care of.”

But for Ashley, the answer is clear. “We are seeing the consequences of someone else growing our food,” she says. “A growing number of people in my generation are saying, ‘We are going to deal with it ourselves.’”

And she’s emphatic that being a regenerative farmer isn't a “lowly position.” “It's the highest, the most prestigious position there is, because health is wealth,” she says, “and if we can help create healthier food, prestige doesn’t matter.”

The regenerative road to health

With more than 90,000 social media followers and customers from nearly every state, the Armstrong sisters recognize there is an appetite for food-and-health related information—and for the access to regenerative food sources. By combining honest, effective communications with the production of regeneratively grown, nutrient dense foods, Angel Acres farm (and their farm cooperative, Nourish Co-Op) is providing nourishment to the bodies and souls of their growing following.

“Everything we do revolves around health and health optimization, and I think that we bring that perspective into the regenerative ag space,” she says. “Sometimes, understanding the connection between food and health is really hard to get across unless you yourself have dealt with health challenges and health problems. We are providing really high quality food, and showing that not only does the way animals raise matter, but WHAT they eat matters, too. Which is why we made our own feed for our layer birds, meat birds, dairy goats and hogs. We are what we eat, eats, and we’ve documented this by lowering the PUFA (specifically, Linoleic Acid, an Omega 6 fatty acid high in vegetable oils) content of our eggs by changing the feed.”

Having experienced the adverse consequences of consuming nutrient-deficient food themselves, the Armstrong sisters are uniquely qualified to communicate the connection between healthier soil and healthier food. “We know, first-hand, that the first step in refining your health is prioritizing where your food is coming from,” Ashley says.

For more information about Angel Acres visit www.angel-acresfarm.com and their farm cooperative, which delivers products to all 50 states, www.nourishcooperative.com.

*All photos courtesy Angel Acres.

The post Health and Wellness Through Regenerative Farming appeared first on Soil Health Academy.

Milking a Brighter Future – Part 3

ToriDean — Tue, 25 Apr 2023 02:59:33 +0000

In the two previous articles we have discussed what Derek has done on his farm to implement regenerative grazing and how he made that transition. In this article, we would like to take things a step further and describe some of the changes in livestock that he’s seen on his transformative regenerative journey.

Healthy soil, healthy plants, healthy livestock
Livestock fed highly diverse, high-forage diets grown in well-stewarded soils with a robust population of biology and vast mycorrhizal networks will be nearly problem free. I’m sure we can all agree that managing sickly livestock is the least favorite part of our profession. As an industry, we need to quit pretending that large veterinary bills, sagging reproduction rates and calfhood illnesses are a normal part of doing business. Nature’s default is health, and when we stray from nature’s template and act as if the rules don’t apply to us, we will fail every time.

Average annual veterinary costs on most dairy farms are over $150 per cow. But what if, by supplying phytonutrient-rich feed and building positive epigenetics, we could cut that cost in half? Or even by 90%? For a 100-cow dairy, that cost savings represents a nice winter vacation to somewhere with a beach and fruity cocktails, not to mention a better quality of life. We understand that most dairy farmers reading this are already grazing and housing their cows comfortably and have realized some of these benefits. However, many have not yet reaped these benefits.

Before Derek implemented adaptive grazing, he was content with his herd health costs and reproduction results, but only because he didn't know they could be significantly better. Other than instances of high milk urea nitrogen numbers (MUN) causing some hoof problems, everything seemed okay.

Once Derek fully understood the 6-3-4 and intentionally began practicing adaptive grazing, his entire operation was transformed into a much more enjoyable and profitable enterprise. For Derek, MUNs during the grazing season has dropped substantially and the cows are able to select a far more balanced diet from a wide diversity of plants. This has led to healthier animals, resulting in vet med costs dropping from around $60 per/cow/year to less than $5 per/cow/year. Hoof problems associated with rocket-fuel pastures and high MUNs counts that cause acidosis have completely stopped. Many people blame mid-summer hoof health problems on stones in the lane or on excess moisture, but these are usually not the causative culprits. These health problems are likely caused by excess nitrogen in the gut due to grazing too highly vegetative pastures at the beginning of the grazing season. This can lead to subclinical stress, resulting in health issues 4-6 weeks down the road.

Higher quality milk, healthier calves
Another major change in Derek’s operation has been an increase in components and milk quality. An increase of about 15% seems typical when farmers make the switch to adaptive grazing. Somatic cell count (SCC) typically begins to drop as the cows respond to the more balanced and diverse feed that they have access to. The added diversity and complexity that comes from adaptive grazing is key to allowing the cow to “self-medicate” through her plant grazing selections. With the improvement in cow health, reproduction has also improved significantly with first-service conception rates around 75% and pregnancy rates of 90%. This results in lower breeding costs, reduction in the calving window, tighter range in heifer age, and improved grazing efficiency.

When cows are in vibrant health, they have calves that pop out ready to take on the world. There are far fewer DOA’s and calves experience very little health issues. When fed high-component milk (it doesn’t have to be low SCC) these calves will be off like a rocket. This is especially the case when this milk is fed directly from “the tap.” The full potential of those calves will only be realized when they are fed on nanny cows or their own dams. There are huge lifetime epigenetic benefits when heifers live with, eat with, and interact with a herd.

The power of epigenetics
Epigenetics is defined as the study of changes in organisms caused by modification of gene expression rather than alteration of the genetic code itself. Most genes can have significant variation in the degree to which they express themselves. Environmental factors, including management, diet, dietary supplements, all types of pesticides, reproductive manipulation, climate extremes, etc. –all influence gene expression. These epigenetic influences start at the moment of conception for any individual. Epigenetic effects are also transgenerational, meaning they are passed from one generation to the next.

Every decision we make either positively or negatively affects the epigenetics of our livestock. Every time we use a “cide,” supplement heavily, or use excessive pharmaceuticals, we are negatively impacting individual animal epigenetics. However, when we raise our livestock in nature’s image, we positively influence epigenetics, producing generational impacts.

This impact can be observed in Derek’s herd where two full sisters were developed differently. One was raised in a group feeding situation, fed milk for three months and 4 lbs. of grain/day through 12 months. The other sister was fed on a nanny cow for seven months. Today, those two sisters are very different animals. The nanny-raised heifer has a lifetime higher body condition, is much more persistent in lactation, better overall health status and reproductive performance. Derek commonly sees this in his nanny raised calves.

As his regenerative journey continues, Derek sees that his cows and land “are becoming one.” The cows have become a part of the landscape, rather than just living on it, and this is because of what Derek has been selecting for in his herd. The cow that thrives best in the context of his system seems to weigh about 1,150 pounds and can handle the cold well enough in his northern environment to not eat him out of house and home. The careful use of A.I. (there are epigenetic stresses that happen with A.I.) has allowed him to incorporate the genetics that he has further developed by using home-bred bulls to “nativize” his cattle to his farm’s ecosystem. We would encourage other farmers to do this by selecting for truly superior grass-based livestock.

A system, a solution
Regenerative management and adaptive grazing are not a prescriptive approach. By systematically applying the principles and practices of soil health and adaptive grazing, it’s possible to milk a brighter, more profitable and enjoyable future on our dairy farms. The management approach Derek has used over the past several years, combined with his keen observations and soil health-focused adaptive grazing practices, has transformed his farm. We’re certain it can transform yours as well.

The post Milking a Brighter Future – Part 3 appeared first on Soil Health Academy.

Milking a Brighter Future – Part 2

ToriDean — Tue, 25 Apr 2023 02:57:12 +0000

Adaptive grazing is a system of grazing that allows the grazer to continually adapt and flex to the real-life conditions that we face on an ongoing basis. It is not a prescriptive or formulaic approach. In applying adaptive grazing rules and practices across a wide variety of livestock enterprises and environments, we have found it to be, by far, the best grazing system for making continuous progress, increasing SOM, biomass production and biodiversity, and optimizing net profitability.

In prior articles, we have explored the Three Rules of Adaptive Stewardship’s Rule of Compounding, Rule of Diversity and Rule of Disruption, and how the intentional application of these three rules within your farm’s context allows you to achieve the highest levels of benefits.

In the dairy world, most producers are using some type of prescriptive approach in their grazing strategy, even though they may not believe they are being prescriptive. This prescriptive approach results in a narrowing of plant species diversity, compromised cow performance, suppressed soil microbial activity, which leads to lower mineral and water cycling, grazing season limitations and hitting a production ceiling.

Implementing Adaptive Grazing, particularly with extended paddock rest periods, can initially seem pretty daunting on the surface, but we can assure you it isn't difficult and is a worthy practice. But it goes against many of the “grazing rules'' we've been taught for 40-plus years including, “Graze a paddock every 20-25 days to keep everything vegetative,” or “You have to have at least a 30% legume component to supply nitrogen to grass” or "Make sure you clip a few times a year because a seed head in your pasture is a sin.” Unfortunately, these practices are not helping us nearly as much as we think they are. As a matter of fact, they can be detrimental to our progress and profits.

How to Get Started

So, let’s talk about how we can effectively implement longer rest periods, why should we use them and what they can do for us.

Let's start with why we should use them. The fastest way to improve soil health is a well-managed, highly diverse perennial pasture. But, when we’re grazing too frequently, or don't leave enough armor after a grazing event, we seriously impede and squander our resources (the use of the term “squander” is intentional). The main importance of using longer rest periods is to promote far more diverse pastures. Diverse pastures with plants at various stages of maturity allow the livestock to intentionally select plants to balance their needs, which promotes rumen health, reproduction, and overall health.

The plants in those pastures have been allowed to develop deep and interconnected root systems with strong mycorrhizal connections and supporting biology to foster phytonutrient richness that just can't be replicated any other way. These plants supply our livestock with a wide array of health-promoting and milk and meat quality-enhancing nutrients in every bite they take. This is simply not possible in low-diversity pastures.

When soil health is improved, stockpiled forages hold on to their quality much deeper into the fall and winter. Derek farms in central Minnesota and has had double-digit brix readings on various forages well into December. Being able to harvest dairy-quality feed grazing into the winter, with cows fed little supplement, is a real game changer.

Derek has also observed definite morphological changes in forages including dandelion leaves as long as your arm, broad-leaf plantain as big as a dinner plate and fescue that is soft textured and more palatable. Longer rest periods and better soil microbial activity facilitated this morphological shift. In particular, Derek notes plant morphology shifts when the soil is significantly more aggregated, which only happens with better mycorrhizal fungi populations.

As one of Derek’s grazing mentors says, “We are in the hospitality business. It is our job to provide a welcoming bed and breakfast to our guests; the biology that lives in and on thin films of water that surround aggregated soil.” If we aren't working to build those aggregates, keeping our soil covered or intentionally working to advance the diversity and complexity of our pastures, we are being poor hosts and our guests will leave.

Building Resilient and Diverse Pastures

To effectively make longer rest periods work we need to have a broad range of grasses, legumes and forbs. Most pastures lack this diversity. The conundrum is it takes diversity to make longer rest periods work and it takes longer rest periods to have diversity so the first practical step is to graze less of the total biomass available.

Rather than taking 50% or more on a grazing pass like on a 30-day rest period, Derek only takes about 30%. This provides a better-balanced diet for the cows. He may have to buy a little more feed the first year, but the longer-term benefits are worth it. You cannot immediately switch to 60-day rest periods so plan on gradually increasing the average rest period. You can skip some paddocks in the rotation and allow a longer rest for individual paddocks in a grazing season so you will not be grazing every pasture at 60-plus days rest every time. Derek’s rest periods typically vary from 40-80 days but does include some full-season rest as well.

Caution: If you practice a set-rotation pattern, grazing paddocks every 60 days, you are prescriptive and no longer adaptive which will reduce diversity and will lead to stagnation. Depending on the current stocking rate, you may have to slightly de-stock, add grazing acres, or be willing to use a little more feed. However, it will be worth it as you build more diversity and resilience into your farm.

Options for Increasing Diversity

Option 1: Inter-seeding complex mixes of perennial and/or annual forages into your grazing platform. This can be a great way to jumpstart your system but take it easy on the legumes. Native prairies were much lower in the legume component than many of our dairy pastures. Typically, these prairies were only 10-12% legume component, with a 30% or so forb component.

Option 2: Alternating a long-rest paddock with a shorter rest paddock. During the day, the bossies head to the long-rest paddock to take advantage of the cooling effect of the tall forages and shaded soil and in the evening they head to the less-rested shorter forages.

Option 3: Implementing leader-follower grazing. For example, you can have the lactating cows come through and “cream” the best 20% of the forage and then bring in the clean-up crew of heifers and dry cows to take another 20%+.

Option 4: If you are unsure and need to see what may happen, consider making an “exclosure.” An exclosure is a fenced-off area (using temporary fencing) that will not be grazed for an extended period of time during the active growing season. Be sure to make the exclosure large enough to be meaningful, at least 0.5 acres to several acres.

These practices may require higher-stocking densities than you are used to. We constantly vary stocking rates depending on pasture needs and weather conditions. Stock densities range from 100,000 pounds an acre up to 1.5 million pounds an acre at points throughout the grazing season. The yearly average on Derek’s farm is about 250,000 pounds/acre, which promotes competitive grazing and trample. Higher densities necessitate more frequent moves, but with today's grazing technology, this isn't difficult. Derek uses a combination of manual moves and solar-powered fence lifters to move the cows 3-8 times a day, usually in rectangular paddocks (long and narrow) to promote a higher degree of trample.

You may want to experiment with a field on “the back 40.” Derek picked a poorer field on his farm to give a 90-day rest and was pleasantly surprised when he found 10 new species there this fall, including several native warm-season plants. A few weeks after grazing, following the 90-day rest, plant density in that field improved dramatically and it looks better than it ever has.

Summary

Give Adaptive Grazing a try. It is well worth your time. You don't have to experiment right along the main highway (though we encourage you to do so to give neighbors something to talk about). This grazing approach is something we have repeated many times before on many different farms and the results are always worth the effort. In our next post, we will discuss how planned, purposeful disruptions, such as longer rest periods, improve livestock health and performance and livestock epigenetics.

Having enough forage is no longer an issue.

The post Milking a Brighter Future – Part 2 appeared first on Soil Health Academy.

Milking a Brighter Future – Part 1

ToriDean — Tue, 25 Apr 2023 02:44:23 +0000

Our path to regenerative dairy management was not a straight line, though that would have made our lives much easier. We are grateful for what this experience has taught us along the way. I am a firm believer that the regenerative path is a journey, and that there is no “regenerative destination.” We will never arrive at a perfect resource, and that is okay, but the changes we have made in a few short years are nothing short of astounding. Here are the top four changes in our operation that have changed our business and our future.

1. Financials

I wish I could say that our journey was perfectly planned from the beginning and that every decision was made after deep discussions and financial planning. Unfortunately, we just had to rip off the band aid and take a leap of faith.

When the feed mill is breathing down your neck because you haven't paid the last concentrate bill and you're calling for another load just so you can maintain that high-herd average, you realize that something needs to change. When we got rid of that bill, it was a huge weight off our shoulders. Don't think that we haven't fed anything from a feed mill since then, because we definitely have, we just make sure we are buying what fits our low-input context. A rule I have adopted is that when I spend money on something like feed or any kind of supplement, I want to see a $5 return for every $1 spent. This doesn't mean I never try anything new or follow that rule perfectly. It just means I have plenty of cushion built in for when something I try doesn't work and it makes me take the time to be intentional with my spending on inputs. Not having the feed mill crutch always there has also improved my grazing, which I will address later in the article.

One of the most refreshing things about our experience has been being able to step off the treadmill of conventional dairying. Today, we don't have nearly as many checks to write out as we once did. The vet, nutritionist, feed mill and “foo-foo dust” salesman bills are few and far between.

Derek and Taylor Schmitz with children Olivia and Wren at their farm near Cold Spring, Minnesota.

Diverse well-rested pastures are a cornerstone of regenerative dairying.

2. Cow Health
Cows fed a high-forage diet of highly diverse feedstuffs that are housed and managed in a low-stress environment are simply more healthy animals. We don’t need expensive dry-cow minerals or copious amounts of calfhood vaccines when we feed and manage cattle in nature’s image. Anyone would agree with me that healthy cattle are much more economical and enjoyable to work with. We were not entirely sure what to expect when we headed down this path regarding cow health, but we have been very happy with the results.

For example, mastitis cases are down over 60%. Now, we only have a few cases a year and most of those go away with minimal intervention, in less than a week. No displaced abomasum’s, no ketosis and only 1% of cows or heifers have needed assistance calving since we started our journey. When we raise calves on their dam or a nanny cow, they’re also much healthier. No more scours, respiratory issues or expensive milk replacers and calf starters with questionable ingredient lists. Why not take that cow with a somatic cell count issue or undesirable udder attachment or bad attitude and let her feed calves? Most cows will gladly do it. There is one week of training and then your calf chores are practically done until that calf is weaned 5-10 months later.

A perfect fat and sassy calf with positive epigenetics, ready to thrive on a high-forage diet, is a pleasure to work with. Promoting positive epigenetics is essential on this journey and will only make your job easier. We have cows that were raised on nanny cows in their third lactation now, and we are still discovering benefits. Above-average body condition, better forage conversion, higher components, a longer and more persistent lactation curve are just a few of the many changes we have seen.

3. Grazing and Management
The switch to adaptive grazing has been very positive for soil, plant and cow health. We used to graze what we thought were longer rotations ranging from 25-32 days. We were constantly plagued with pastures lacking effective fiber resulting in having too much protein which drove up our milk urea nitrogen numbers and negatively influenced cow health. We would seed 15-species blends of grasses, legumes and a forb, and after a few years of these rapid rotations and overgrazing, we would be left with two or three grasses and two legumes. So much for our high-diversity pasture that we seeded initially.

A simple portable watering system, polywire and tread-in posts make high-density grazing a breeze.

We were stumped. When I heard Dr. Allen Williams speak about how most pastures don't get enough rest, and that rest periods should be 60-plus days in our area, I was pretty skeptical. I assumed that I would end up with lignified and mature pasture with too-low protein and way too much fiber. Also, I was convinced I would lose production because I wouldn't be making as many grazing passes per year. But I gave it a try and was pleasantly surprised by how well it worked.

We aren't losing our forage diversity anymore, and we're gaining more diversity every year! Our seedings of 15 species have blossomed to well over 60 species and we’re growing that number every year. With such a wide array of plants available to the livestock, they are much better able to balance their own needs, making our job much easier, more enjoyable and more profitable. When we provide a longer rest period we are allowing the established plants to fully express themselves, giving new, young plants the ability to firmly establish themselves. If you're grazing every 21 days routinely, that just isn't happening.

A seed is dropped during a grazing event, and let's say it takes six days to germinate. It gets eight inches of growth in 15 days and you're grazing that sward again. That tender new seedling will be one of the first things livestock will target and the new plant will be ripped from the ground or seriously setback. You wouldn’t graze or hay a newly seeded field at that delicate stage, so we probably shouldn’t be routinely grazing our paddocks that frequently either, and putting our young plants at risk. This is especially true with native plants as most of them are very sensitive during the establishment stage.

My worries about production in both pasture productivity and milk production were also unfounded. Today, we are making more pounds of milk, and more importantly, more pounds of components per acre. I attribute the gains we've seen to the increased diversity that has allowed the cows to have more options in the sward. The longer rest allows them to select from plants at various stages of maturity, to balance rumen health needs and supply a wide array of phytochemicals, tannins, etc. from the apothecary at their feet, provided by the diversity of forbs, grasses and legumes.

4. Considerations and Conclusion
We are now several years down the regenerative path and enjoying ourselves way too much to quit. Rather than worry about a calving cow or whether the TMR tractor will start, we are free to pursue other passions and dream of ways to add more diversity and complexity to our farm. Dairy farms are notorious for being bovine monocultures. Maybe an addition of a few beehives is in order, or possibly some holiday turkeys? The possibilities are only limited to our imagination and context.

We used to think we had to squeeze a living out of the land and battle our way through every day. The only question now is, how far will we allow the journey to take us?

Seen here in the milking parlor is Taylor and baby Wren. Derek says regenerative dairying is family friendly, which is one of its most valuable benefits.

The post Milking a Brighter Future – Part 1 appeared first on Soil Health Academy.

In This Year’s Garden, Don’t Dig It. ‘Regen It.’

ToriDean — Tue, 28 Feb 2023 03:17:59 +0000

I can still recall all of the hours spent in my grandparents’ garden like it was yesterday. It was a sacred place to them, but it was just a place to burn off energy and get dirty for me. It never really seemed like work because they made gardening rewarding, educational, and challenging.

Both of my grandparents are still involved and instrumental in the garden planning every year, even though they are in their mid 80s. Now I believe it's my turn to make gardening rewarding, educational, and challenging for them. My years of rabbit-hole diving and hands-on experimenting in the garden have taken me on a new path regarding how I would like to see our garden managed for the most nutrient-dense product, using the least amount of manual labor, all while improving the plot of land it is on. This is important to me as I now have children of my own and I want them to have a connection with where their food comes from and how it is produced.

Because some might say I’m “just a hobby farmer” or suggest “you can't feed the world with that approach,'' I would like to point out that the practices we are implementing are no different than the thousands of acres we consult on. But it is true that I don't want to feed the world. I'd rather focus on my family and local community first. Yes, production yield is important, but so too is the quality and nutritional component of the end product.

I firmly believe that the quality of the soil aggregate is a true sign that good soil health practices are being implemented. Excessive soil disturbance seems to be a standard practice in most gardens. Maybe it's the desire to have a silky-smooth surface left after a roto-tiller pass, or perhaps it's just the fear of neighbors passing judgment on a sloppy or lazy gardener. The reality is the amount of tillage done in most gardening systems starts a huge ripple effect, resulting in extra work for the season and for years to come.

This is a photo of my uncle helping my daughter Clara plant tomato that we start and grow ourselves. This lets our children be apart of the full cycle of a plants life cycle. As you can see in this picture the ground had been worked. That particular year we immediately added a layer of mulch over the row to hold on to moisture and reduce weed pressures. Those were green beans coming up through the mulch.

Routine tillage passes completely destroy the home for soil microorganisms, reducing their ability to properly function. Tillage also results in a reduction of soil hydrologic function. Heavy tillage breaks up soil aggregates and the pore spaces in the soil that are created by soil microorganisms. The result is a reduction in the soil’s infiltration rate and its water-holding capacity. Tillage also creates a compaction layer at the bottom of the tillage layer, creating a “shallow flowerpot” that will be in a critical state without the frequent tendering of water by man or rain.

Here we see the rhizosheaths of the rye indicating a great coating and formation of aggregates. This shows a biological/microbial association that is helping soil hold together with its biological “glues“ excreted.

What pairs well with the minimal soil disturbance is allowing “soil armor” to remain on the surface. Putting a proper roof on a house with vents keeps its inhabitants comfortable and healthy. By leaving food on the surface and doing little-to-no disturbance we begin to allow the biology to feel at home, create an environment where temperature swings are not a drastic, and allo nutrients from the residue to be recycled back into the soil for future plant needs. When we do get rain, the armor also provides a great shield against those raindrops traveling in excess of 30 miles per hour. Those drops can quickly erode unprotected soil and also serve as a way for diseases to spread. The other obvious reason why soil cover is so important, especially for those who like to see a clean garden, is to help protect against “weeds’’ or forbs. The hours spent pulling the unwanted plants can be drastically reduced by applying a layer of mulch or hay source between the rows once or twice a year.

Two additional soil health principles are maintaining plant diversity and keeping living roots in the soil throughout the year. Plant diversity also stimulates diversity within the soil as well. Think of how each different plant producing a different root exudate can create a welcoming smorgasbord for the soil life which in turn feeds the plants back. Never miss an opportunity to capture sunlight through plant life.

We know we are working with a living system, so it needs to be fed, not rested and starved in a fallow season. To improve pollinator and beneficial insect habitat, consider bringing in more flowering species in an area and rotate those spots out each year. Build a home for beneficial insects, as we have data stating that there are 1700 beneficial insects for every one pest.

Soil health can also be improved through animal impact. We integrate chickens and sheep into our garden, but proper adaptive stewardship needs to be implemented or you could go backwards. What the animal can bring to the table is “the cherry on top,” so to speak, but if that option doesn't fit your context, your focus should be to create the best possible environment for your below ground livestock to flourish.

There’s a catchy phrase that states, “Life’s a garden. Dig it.” But what I have concluded from my regenerative gardening journey is more aptly stated, “Life’s a garden. Regen it.” My grandparents have witnessed what’s taken place in just a short period of time in my garden, prompting one to say, “Your garden soils are much healthier looking.”

We have found it very important to add in many flowering species to help establish an environment for beneficial insects to thrive. This is a milkweed plant shown here with a monarch larvae. The plants were established with seed we gathered from the farm.

We always take the time to get our kids out and dig around to get them exposed to what healthy soils should look like. Start them young and tend to them so that they start to question what the “normal” practices are. It is our goal to instill in them the concept that regenerative management is enjoyable and also beneficial to our environment and to our future.

I didn’t take this compliment as a head-swelling moment, but rather as a lesson that the way we have always done things can change—for the better. The principles and practices of soil health can be applied anywhere, at any scale. As you thumb through the pages of the garden seed catalogs many of us receive in the mail this time of year, I encourage you to think about applying as many soil health practices and principles in your garden as you can, starting this spring.

It’s always rewarding to garden. But it’s even more rewarding when you garden regeneratively. Reach out to us if you’d like to further discuss what options and opportunities there are to rebuild, restore and revitalize your soils.

Explore further insights on no-till gardening in Jessica's comprehensive guide at Little Green Yard.

The post In This Year’s Garden, Don’t Dig It. ‘Regen It.’ appeared first on Soil Health Academy.

Mycorrhizal Colonization

SHA Team — Wed, 08 Feb 2023 16:03:39 +0000

At Understanding Ag, we have looked at tens of thousands of soil test results that combine the Haney, PLFA, and TND (Total Nutrient Digestion) tests. The Haney Test is similar to a traditional soil test that also supplies us with a 30,000-foot view of soil health by testing for soil microbial respiration, organic carbon fraction (WEOC), microbially active carbon (MAC), and the carbon to nitrogen ratio (C:N). The PLFA test is a pure soil biology test that looks at parameters such as total living microbial biomass, total bacteria, total fungi, mycorrhizal fungi, saprophytic fungi, and protozoa. The TND test provides a look at the complete mineral composition of the soil at sampling depth.

This article is not going to go into detail about these tests and how to interpret them. Rather, I will use the results from tens of thousands of these tests over the breath and depth of North America to show what the vast majority of our agronomic soils are missing. This includes both cropland and pastureland.

Time after time, when we look at the results of this suite of soil tests, we find one thing in common, all too often. The vast majority of our soils are deficient in one thing. Not nitrogen, not phosphorus, not calcium, not another element (B, Cu, Zn, Mn, Mg, Al, etc.). Not what we would suspect is the “usual” culprit. As a matter of fact, the deficiency is not an element (mineral) at all. It is not organic matter or carbon. It is actually a soil microorganism: mycorrhizal fungi.

That’s right. The biggest deficiency that we see in almost all cropland and pastureland we have tested is a microbial species that plays a very large role in soil health. Mycorrhizal fungi are often found to comprise less than 3-4% of the total living microbial biomass in our soils. Greater than 90% of all the soil samples we look at are bacterially dominated (85 – 95% bacteria) and terribly deficient in mycorrhizal fungi (MF).

Benefits of Mycorrhizal Fungi

Why is this so alarming? The answer is because MF control a number of key functions in the soil. Since this is not an article about MF, but rather how we correct the situation, I will list only the top key functions of MF in our soil.

- Interconnect all plant roots in a continuous field and even between fields.
- Sends signals to all plants when plants in one area of a field are being preyed upon by pests.
- Produce biotic glues that stick together tiny soil particles to form much larger soil aggregates for significantly improved water infiltration and retention.
- These same soil aggregates relieve soil compaction.
- Capture nutrients in the soil and feed them to the plants.
- Act as the plant’s principal immune system against fungal disease.
- Move nutrients in a field from an area of higher concentration to an area of lower concentration.
- Greatly extend the reach of an individual plant’s roots.

How do we know what highly mycorrhizal soils look like? First, they will have significant soil aggregation (Picture 1). Additionally, the roots of the plants will be surrounded by a soil coating (Picture 2).

Picture 1. Highly Aggregated Soil with moderate to large aggregates.

Picture 2. Rhizosheath Coating.

Building Mycorrhizal Populations

With all of these important functions, it stands to reason that we would want to encourage and facilitate a far better MF population in our soils. The question is just how do we accomplish that? Following are some of the management strategies and practices we can implement to encourage greater mycorrhizal colonization and population growth.

Focus on growing plants that have strong mycorrhizal associations. This would be grasses and certain forbs (or plants we call weeds). Most of the grasses we grow have good-to-great MF associations. If we rank them in their ability to form strong and vast MF populations, we rank warm season grasses (C4) ahead of cool season grasses (C3). Both have good MF colonization ability, but the C4 grasses even more so.
Focus on perennial species, as much as feasible. In comparing annual species to perennial species, the perennial species take the upper hand. It is not that annual grasses cannot form MF associations, because they do. Rather, it is because the perennials form much stronger and longer lasting MF associations.
Woody and brushy plant species tend to have very strong MF associations, so strategically incorporating them into our pastures and into mixes can help forge stronger MF populations. So, rather than hate those areas where you have blackberry, buck brush, sumac, and other woodies, use them strategically in your grazing to spread mycorrhizal populations across your pastures. This holds true for many weedy species as well. For example, dig beneath thicker patches of thistle, cocklebur, or mare’s tail and you will see soil that is fairly well aggregated.
More mature plants carry greater amounts of MF spores than highly vegetative plants. Most grazers strive to keep their grasses as vegetative as possible during the active growing season. Vegetative grasses will not be as mycorrhizal-rich as more mature grasses. So, by allowing our plants to gain greater maturity before we graze them, we can spread MF populations.
We can use our livestock as a tool to spread MF colonization by grazing them, from time to time, in more mature paddocks and then moving them to paddocks that lack good MF populations. They spread the MF spores in their manure.
Avoid all forms of tillage as much as possible. Think of your mycorrhizal fungi population being like a giant roll of gauze. If you unrolled a giant roll of gauze on your pasture or field and then used any form of tillage, what would happen to the gauze? It would be cut to shreds. All forms of tillage damage mycorrhizal fungi and it takes a long time for repair to occur.
Frequency of mowing and/or grazing in any one pasture or field significantly affects mycorrhizal populations. The more you mow, the lower the MF population will be and we see this in hay fields. The more frequently you graze a pasture, the lower your MF population will be. Too many grazers come back too soon after a previous graze, hitting a pasture every 30 days or 40 days. Do not expect good MF colonization when that is the case. Here's why:
- Too frequent mowing or grazing keeps the grass short, and the soil is more exposed to heat from the sun and to moisture loss. Hot, dry soil is not conducive to MF.
- Grazing or mowing too frequently causes root growth stoppage. The MF live in association with plant roots. Lower the percentage of living plant root mass and you lower the active MF population.
- Mowing or grazing a field too frequently lowers plant species diversity. This lowers MF species diversity and critical biomass.
- Too much disturbance stimulates soil bacteria, causing them to voraciously consume carbon sources of food from the soil. This includes the biotic glues produced by MF that aggregate the soil particles. As the biotic glues are consumed, the soil aggregates disappear and the soil collapses on itself.

Summary

Mycorrhizal fungi are the key microbial species lacking in most of our crop fields, hay fields and pastures across North America. Because they perform so many vital functions, this creates serious issues in soil function including a reduction in the ability to infiltrate and retain water, reduced nutrient cycling, and diminished plant resistance to fungal disease and pests.

Our focus needs to be on first restoring our mycorrhizal populations, then building them to a highly functional point. If we implement management strategies that build mycorrhizal populations then we get to enjoy the many benefits that they confer.

The post Mycorrhizal Colonization appeared first on Soil Health Academy.

The Heat Is On

SHA — Thu, 13 Oct 2022 20:16:07 +0000

Without Education, the Promise of Climate-Smart Farm Practices Will Wilt on the Vine

By Allen Williams, Ph.D.

The digital screen displayed 162 F.

I pointed my infrared thermometer and squeezed the trigger again. No change. The readout showed 162 F, which just happens to be the safe food preparation temperature for ground beef and sausage.

But I wasn’t pointing the thermometer at my dinner. I was pointing it at a conventionally tilled, recently harvested wheat field near Gordon, Nebraska. Regrettably, I would discover that field wasn’t an anomaly.

During a weeks-long trip in August, I visited farms and ranches in Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, South Dakota and Nebraska. I consistently measured soil temperatures topping 150 degrees. With the ambient air temperature ranging from 97-102 F, I measured soil surface temperatures on a variety of fields, including mowed hay fields (alfalfa, grass) that had temperatures consistently above 150 degrees. Any temperature above 140 F essentially pasteurizes the soil microbiome and kills the essential soil microbes that play a critical role in the photosynthetic process—the process that enables all terrestrial life.

Anywhere the soil was even somewhat exposed to direct sunlight, soil temperatures were 150 F and above. But the high ambient air temperatures aren’t the only factors producing soil surface temperatures that can literally cook eggs.

Conventional farming practices, including our stubborn addiction to tillage, are increasingly creating micro-to-macro climates across large swaths of our heartland, further disrupting the normal water cycle of transpiration, evaporation, condensation and precipitation. Sadly, the fields I visited are representative of hundreds of thousands of fields and millions of cropland acres throughout the nation.

Facts can be stubborn things. So, too, can our habits. Despite what we see and experience on our own farms and ranches, the conventional farming mindset of tillage, fallow fields, and monocultures of corn and wheat have rendered our soils lifeless and less and less able to capture and retain water—and to be part of a functioning water cycle.

The conventional mindset persists in because of status quo bias, tradition and fear of the unknown. A key antidote to this mindset is education.

The recently enacted Inflation Reduction Act provides roughly $8.5 billion to pay for projects and practices that restore the ecosystem or reduce emissions on farmland through USDA’s Environmental Quality Incentives Program. The program provides funding for cover crop seeds and incentivizes farmers to implement other climate-friendly, regenerative practices.

Despite this good news, USDA’s emphasis on financial assistance, absent accompanying soil health education and training, will inevitably lead to wasted funding, farmer frustration and climate-smart practice failures. And once a farmer has a bad experience with a practice, there’s little chance he or she will ever try it again.

That’s why education is critical to the success of this important investment. And while government agencies are not well equipped to provide regenerative farming education to farmers and ranchers, there are proven non-government organizations that are already conducting farmer-to-farmer regenerative ag learning sessions. Programs like these need to be scaled up to reach many more farmers. Combined with on-line training options, these efforts can help ensure the successful implementation of soil health-focused, climate-smart, regenerative agricultural practices.

Finally, it’s also important that USDA examine the “not-so-climate-smart” elements in its existing farm programs. The so-called “safety net” of crop insurance programs, for example, continues to enable and perpetuate ag practices that are undeniably contributing to the climate crisis and reducing our food security—offsetting the overall positive impact of the climate-smart effort. Likewise, farm programs that subsidize monoculture commodity crops also provide financial disincentives for climate-smart practice adoption.

As it stands, the farm fields I referred to in my introduction will be tilled and planted again, using many of the same conventional practices and the same costly synthetic inputs that continue to degrade our soil resources and our collective futures—all thanks to taxpayer funded crop insurance and support programs.

For climate-smart farming to truly succeed, USDA must couple its climate-smart farming funding with education and eliminate the long-standing policies that continue to perpetuate and climate-damaging conventional agricultural practices. If it does not, the promise of a climate-smart future will quickly cool and the temperatures in our farm fields will rise well above 162 F.

The post The Heat Is On appeared first on Soil Health Academy.

The Future of Food

ToriDean — Wed, 01 Jun 2022 02:35:05 +0000

Part of my role as a partner in Understanding Ag is to keeping up to date on the trends in agriculture, staying abreast of what is “new” in agriculture—and what the industry and investors are focused on. I spend a lot of my time talking to the boards of directors of food and agriculture companies, attending events where they congregate to share the “latest and greatest.”

Recently, I attended such a gathering where I was asked to sit on a panel discussion titled, “The future of food.” I found the comments from the other panelists and attendees very interesting. Here were their most prominent views:

1.) We must produce more food on fewer acres to feed an ever-growing population.
2.) Agriculture, as we know it, is killing us because it is accelerating climate change.
3.) Cattle are evil. We must stop eating beef and dairy and instead consume “plant-based” proteins. This is necessary to “save the planet” and our own health.
4.) Meat made from plants is the answer.

It will come as no surprise that I take exception to these statements and here’s why:

1.) We already produce more than enough food to feed the world. The latest published figures show that we produce enough food to feed 10.2 billion people. There are approximately 7.8 billion people on this planet. Is a 24% excess not enough? And this only takes into consideration reported food production. Most of the food produced in the world is done so on farms that are fewer than 10 acres in size, the production from which goes largely unreported.
2.) Yes, some forms of agriculture are accelerating climate change. Extensive tillage and the excessive use of synthetics (fertilizers, pesticides and fungicides), along with monoculture cropping systems, accelerate the degradation of our resources. However, farms and ranches using regenerative principles are accomplishing just the opposite. By increasing diversity and integrating livestock, they are taking massive amounts of carbon out of the atmosphere and putting it back into the soil where it will be cycled.
3.) The problem is not the cow, it is the how. When we take grazing ruminants off the landscape, it leads to a degradation of that landscape. Estimates are that there were up to 60 million bison roaming the great plains, pre-European settlement. Add to this the numbers of elk, deer, bighorn sheep, pronghorn antelope and other ruminants and you have a total that approximates the 125 million ruminants we have grazing this continent today. If ruminants are the cause of climate change, which many believe that they are, then why were the ruminants that grazed this continent centuries ago not causing climate change?
4.) I believe that we should all eat a wide variety of foods, including fruits, vegetables, whole-grains, dairy and pastured proteins. But to think that a diet should omit meat and dairy without having negative consequences does not make sense.

How did we get this so wrong? Why do we ignore the fact that nutrient-dense food must be based on soil or the oceans and lakes?

By using a mass-spectrometer, which has the ability to identify over 2,000 different phytonutrient compounds, researchers Stephan VanVleit, Ph.D., Fred Provenza, Ph.D. and Scott Kronberg, Ph.D., have discovered that the phytonutrients in food is directly related to soil health and the biology within that soil. Their research also shows that animals grazing diverse plant species have the widest array of those phytonutrients in their proteins.

It just makes sense, because grazing animals are the original “plant-based” meats. Every one of us should take the soil health -plant health- animal health-human health connection into consideration when selecting our diets.

If, as farmers and ranchers, we focus on what is best for the ecosystem, we will also be focusing on what is best for human health. We have a human-health crisis taking place worldwide and we need to realize that food can, and should be, our preventative medicine. For this to happen, we MUST practice regenerative agriculture.

So, what is the future of food? It’s impossible to know definitively, but one thing I do know is that the way we grow our food must follow nature’s principles in order to heal ecosystem function and ourselves.

The 19th Century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, “Sometimes people don’t want to hear the truth because they don’t want their illusions destroyed.” The “illusions” reflected in the misperceptions of the panelists I referred to previously, underscore the need for regenerative agriculture—and a greater understanding of its many benefits.

The future of food lies with nature. Nature is always, self-organizing, self-regulating and self-healing. We just need to be smart enough (and patient enough) to let her do so.

The post The Future of Food appeared first on Soil Health Academy.

The Beauty of Working With Creation, Not Against It

ToriDean — Mon, 09 May 2022 03:20:35 +0000

One of the true joys of getting to work with so many farmers and ranchers as they move down the regenerative path is watching as they learn how to work in synchrony with nature. It’s especially gratifying when they send along letters that describe their regenerative experiences, like the one I recently received from Daniel Flanagan:

Hi, my name is Daniel.

When I was a kid, we had small swimming pool in the backyard one summer. It sat there unused, filled with water. We had created a void in nature. Nature of course filled that void.... with mosquitoes and algae. Then one day my brothers and I caught some crawfish, one of which was carrying eggs. So, we took that crawfish home and tossed it in the pool. We took a couple of goldfish and threw them in as well. We found some pollywogs and tossed them in too.

It was fascinating to watch how the little ecosystem evolved. The fish ate all the mosquitoes, the crawfish ate the waste, moss and anything that died, the pollywogs did their thing as well. It all came to an end we added a turtle as the turtle ate absolutely everything.

Every hunter knows it would be ludicrous to burn down a forest and stock the land with White Tail deer. Every fisherman knows it would be crazy to pour chlorine into a lake to kill everything so you can stock the sterile pond of water with trophy bass.

Everybody knows what the food chain is. Everybody has an idea how a lifecycle roughly works.

Yet when we farm, we cut everything to the ground, destroy everything in the soil all so we can plant a single crop. Somehow, we completely forget everything we know about the natural world as soon as we put a plant in the ground.

I did the same thing myself. I moved to a little piece of property, cut down a section of forest, ripped out every plant, covered the ground with a 6” layer of wood chips and planted a tiny little orchard. I then started down the swirling toilet of doom by spraying chemicals.

I sprayed trees for aphids. While the spray killed the aphids, it also killed everything else on the trees—almost everything that is. What it didn't kill was spider mites. The spider mites, of course, were completely stoked as the spray that killed aphids also killed anything that ate spider mites. On and on the cycle went. I was growing trees in a relative biological desert underground and a toxic wasteland above ground.

Then last year I saw one of your videos and it clicked. All those lessons I learned in school, in nature and in that little pool in the backyard. Nothing in nature functions in a vacuum. I had forgotten all those lessons, abandoned them for conventional wisdom.

So last year I quit spraying my trees and I planted a cover crop in my tiny little orchard. I sat back, I started watching and learning. My orchard turned into an unruly jungle of plants, my wife saw the jungle, watched me standing in it staring at leaves and "weeds." She looked at me like I was crazy when I told her I was trying to learn about the bugs and plants by observing them.

Last year I learned about aphids and lady bugs. The aphids showed up like they always do. But this year I didn't spray them. I just watched. After a couple of weeks, the lady bugs showed up. Which was nice, but lady bugs don't do @#$ in terms of putting a dent in the aphid population. But then I started finding the eggs that the lady bugs laid. The eggs hatched and the ladybug larva went to work. Those larvae just destroyed the aphid population. They swept through every branch inch by inch like crazed killing machines. By the time I started finding the eggs from lacewing flies, the aphid population had been wiped out so I don't know what the lacewings ate when they hatched.

I am excited to see what my little patch of ground has to teach me this year. Will the flowers I sowed attract more helpful insects? Will the healthier soil make my trees more disease resistant? Or will some plague wipe them out? What will the influx of bugs do? I don't know. What's exciting is that I get to observe and learn.

Great job of observing and understanding Daniel, welcome to the world of regenerative agriculture!

I then received this email from our good friend and longtime regenerative practitioner John Meyer who ranches in southeastern Minnesota.

When one observes, you can’t help but begin to recognize and understand that the fully functioning soil as created by our loving God was in essence intentionally designed to be a true “perpetual motion machine.” As the organisms (people, animals, macro-biology) that are dependent upon the functioning soil for their life and livelihood gradually increase, so too does the biological activity of the microorganisms of the soil, and the incorporation of carbon of all forms, AS LONG AS THEY REMAIN IN SYMBIOTIC BALANCE WITH EACH OTHER.

What we have done in “unconventional agriculture” (and even societally) is to “force” the system artificially, by introducing concepts that artificially destroy that biological symbiotic balance, instead of incrementally working together to enhance it, thereby functioning in harmony with it. We initially learned (but didn’t make the scientific connection) that IF we increase the bacterial decomposition and release of stored carbon from the soil through heavy tillage, MORE nutrients become available to the growing plants… generating “more yield.” We corresponded that “higher yield” with being a “good farmer” so the more we tilled, for example, the “better farmer we viewed ourselves as.” The same with chemical fertilizers, and all the other “enhancements” that have been developed. We didn’t even register that we were working against the very thing that was designed into the created natural system to sustain us!

As is ALWAYS the case in natural systems, changes/disturbances that come incrementally allow the biological system to adjust and compensate. Catastrophic changes and disturbances to the system will inevitably bring catastrophic results, even if those catastrophic results aren’t’ immediately apparent to the unobserving eye (i.e. Gradually over the course of 100-150 years for example, but in the scope of created time, catastrophic loss of soil organic carbon levels, and “topsoil,” etc.). We can’t simply dump excessive amounts of one element or nutrient into the system without upsetting the proper natural self-regulating, self-organizing, self-healing balance, thereby causing a negative consequence: “For every action…there is an equal and opposite reaction.” (Isaac Newton’s Second Law of Motion).

As long as the changes we make are small and play out gradually over an extended period of time, the “system WILL adjust automatically.” Drop a bomb on any part of it though, and it doesn’t have enough time or capability to adjust just as quickly. The good news is, if we leave it alone, and get out of the way, this marvelous creation WILL once again rebuild itself!

I like to quote the nursery rhyme, “Leave them alone, and they’ll come home, wagging their tails behind them.” I know, too, it ISN’T necessary to understand every minute detail of the science. It’s all about those essential, inescapable, underlying basic principles that apply universally.

Well said John, well said.

These are two examples from our regenerative colleagues that beautifully describe the elegant symbiosis of nature—and how it is possible, by implementing regenerative principles, to enable nature to heal our soil, our ecosystems, our food and ourselves.

The most important step in regenerative agriculture is regenerative thinking. Just think of what changes would be made if we would just learn to work with the creation, instead of against it.

The post The Beauty of Working With Creation, Not Against It appeared first on Soil Health Academy.

How Does Your Garden Grow?

SHA — Mon, 02 May 2022 01:17:53 +0000

Understanding Ag works with a significant number of gardening operations around the U.S. and has developed several helpful tips for regenerative gardening that you and your garden can benefit from, too.

I hope you’ll consider incorporating many of these regenerative principles and practices in your garden this year. When you do so on a planned, purposeful basis, I’m confident you’ll grow healthier soil, plants and vegetables in a garden that will be a haven for beneficial insects and for your gardening spirit.

Following is a list of principles, practices and plants that will help you grow your garden regeneratively…

Incorporate the Six Principles of Soil Health as much as possible in order to optimize the Four Ecosystem Processes. The Ecosystem Processes are free to us each day. https://understandingag.com/resources/fact-sheets/
Use the Confusion Principle to significantly lower fungal disease and pest insect pressure and susceptibility. This can be accomplished several ways:Make certain each planted area (including high tunnels) is rotated to a different cash crop at each planting. It is best to change crop species. Repeated planting of the same crop in the same high tunnel or block will encourage fungal disease development and pest activity.
1. Make certain each planted area (including high tunnels) is rotated to a different cash crop at each planting. It is best to change crop species. Repeated planting of the same crop in the same high tunnel or block will encourage fungal disease development and pest activity.
2. When possible, plant additional companion crops with each cash crop. For example, this can be rows of tomatoes with herbs planted on each side. To protect asparagus from asparagus beetles, plant them with tomatoes. The addition of companion crops builds significantly greater soil microbial activity and diversity that helps to confer immunity in the plants to fungal disease and discourages pests.
3. Plant complex (diverse) cover crops in each area in between cash crops. Make certain the cover crop mix contains plant species from at least three functional plant class groups (brassicas, grasses, legumes, grasses, etc).
4. Plant species that naturally repel pests. These include:

Aster – Deters a host of pest insects that impact gardens. More than two dozen pest species are repelled by the scent of Aster.
Basil – Deters flies, carrot fly, whitefly, asparagus beetle, and mosquitoes.
Bay Leaf – Deters flies, ants.
Borage – Deters tomato hornworms and cabbage worms. Excellent pollinator attractor.
Calamint – Deters cabbage worms, cabbage loopers moth larvae.
Calendula – Deters asparagus beetles and tomato hornworms and possesses powerful antimicrobial and antifungal properties.
Castor Bean Plant – Deters moles, voles and armadillos.
Catnip – Deters flea beetles and potato bugs.
Chives – Deters Japanese beetles, aphids, mites, carrot flies, rabbits
Chrysanthemums – Deters many pest insects such as aphids, fleas, ants, silverfish, Japanese beetles, spider mites and harmful nematodes. They contain natural pyrethrums that have been isolated for use in synthetic insecticides. Caution: Do not plant near lettuce plants.
Dill – Deters spider mites, squash bugs, aphids. However, it will attract tomato hookworms, so do not plant near tomatoes.
Fennel – Deters slugs, snails and aphids.
Garlic – Deters Cabbage worms, cabbage moths, codling moths, aphids, slugs, stink bugs, spider mites, earwigs, caterpillars, carrot flies, and rabbits.
Geraniums – Deters many harmful species of pest insects, especially leafhoppers and mosquitoes.
Lavender – Deters caterpillars, moths, fleas, flies, rodents, no-see-ums, mosquitoes and spiders.
Lemongrass – Acts as a deterrent for mosquitoes. Doubles as an herbal tea.
Lemon Thyme – Deters mosquitoes and attracts pollinators.
Marigolds – Deters aphids, mosquitoes, rabbits, as well as other pests.
Mint – Deters many species of pest insects (aphids, cabbage moths, whiteflies, flea beetles, squash bugs, ants) and contain beneficial essential oils.
Nasturtiums – They will deter, by trapping in their leaves, pests such as aphids, cabbage moths, squash bugs, white flies, striped pumpkin beetles and others. Particularly effective when planted near beans, cabbage, and cucumbers.
Onions – Deters cucumber beetles, cabbage worms, flea beetles, carrot rust flies, aphids, potato beetle, rabbits.
Oregano – Deters cabbage moths.
Parsley – Deters several species of pest beetles, including asparagus beetles. When they flower ,they attract parasitic wasps.
Peppermint – Deters flies, ants, rodents and earwigs
Petunias – Tomato hornworms, aphids, asparagus beetles, squash bugs, leafhoppers, and a number of other pests. Great for protecting beans, squash and potatoes.
Radish – Deters squash bugs, cucumber beetles, cabbage maggot. Plant 3-4 radish plants around each cucumber plant and let radishes mature.
Rosemary – Deters mosquitoes, cabbage moths, fruit flies, carrot flies, Mexican bean beetles, slugs, snails, and many other pests.
Savory – Deters Mexican Bean beetles.
Tansy – Deters Japanese beetles, cucumber beetles, moths and potato beetles. Works well for protecting squash and potato plants. Do not plant near greens.
Thyme – Deters corn earworms, whiteflies, tomato hornworms, cabbage loopers, stink bugs, cutworms.
Wormwood – Deters ants, cabbage loopers, cabbage maggots, codling moths, flea beetles, whiteflies. Plant in pots around gardens.

Include actual soil from the gardens in the greenhouse starter soil. When you do this, you expose the germinating seed to the actual soil microbes that they will then be transplanted to. This helps significantly as plants adjust from the seeding beds to the gardens.
Building soil health with frequent rotations of cash crops pay big dividends. As soil health increases, plants form more complete proteins and have fewer free amino acids. Pest insects are attracted to plants to have lots of free amino acids and are NOT attracted to plants that form complete proteins.
Plants that are healthier have complete proteins that create an electromagnetic frequency that wards away pest insects. They also communicate through these frequencies to warn other plants of invading pest.
Be very careful about over-applying any sources of nitrogen (even natural ones). Over-application of N results in a host of negative compounding factors:
1. Lowering of soil pH
2. Loss of soil aggregate and increasing soil compaction
3. Release of N2O into the atmosphere
4. Negative feedback mechanisms in plant-soil-soil microbe interactions and nutrient cycling.
Plant species that attract free-living nitrogen fixing bacteria.

Summary:

There are multiple strategies for successfully implementing regenerative principles and practices in market garden production. Combinations of the above practices typically result in significant improvement in soil health parameters, reduction in plant disease and pest issues, and enhanced profitability. Implementation of the Confusion Principle (based on the Three Rules of Adaptive Stewardship – Rule of Disruption) on a routine, planned basis has proven to be key in making progress in regenerative applications.

In addition to producing garden vegetables with few (or any) synthetic inputs, by gardening with regenerative farming principles, you’ll also be growing healthier and more nutrient-dense food for you and your family.

The post How Does Your Garden Grow? appeared first on Soil Health Academy.