The Journey of Regenerative Agriculture and Soil Health

Regenerative agriculture revitalizes ecosystems, restores soil health, and combats climate change through sustainable practices.

### Regenerating Soil: A Journey from Conventional Farming to Regenerative Agriculture
* 🌱 My journey in agriculture began in 1983 when I joined my in-laws' farming operation, influenced by various **educational and industrial factors**.
* 🚜 By 1993, after purchasing a ranch, I committed to no-till farming, transitioning to **100% no-till** by 1994, which initially seemed successful until a **devastating hailstorm in 1995** wiped out our entire crop.
* 💔 The following years brought more challenges, including a drought in 1997 and another hailstorm in 1998, leaving my family **$1.5 million in debt** and questioning our farming choices.
* 🌾 However, amidst the struggles, I began to notice **signs of life returning to the land** through cover cropping and livestock integration, marking the start of a **shift towards regenerative practices**.
* 🌍 I learned that "**30 to 75% of the carbon that was once in our soils is now in the atmosphere**," contributing to climate change, lower water quality, and health issues related to degraded resources.
* 🌿 Regenerative agriculture, defined as **farming in harmony with nature**, involves six principles: context, minimal disturbance, soil armor, diversity, living roots, and animal integration, which together **restore ecosystem functions**.
* 🐦 Our ranch now boasts **over 150 bird species** and can infiltrate **over 32 inches of rainfall per hour**, with organic matter increasing from **1.7% to nearly 8%**, demonstrating the **profound impact of these practices**.
* 🥗 The benefits extend to food quality, with studies showing that foods grown in healthy soils are **significantly richer in nutrients**, illustrating that regenerative agriculture can **combat climate change and improve human health**.

Let me take you on a journey, a journey of regenerating dirt into soil. My career began in 1983 when I moved on to my in-laws' farming operation. I was influenced by college, by land-grant universities, by the current Farm program, by years of tradition, and by the large agrochemical industrial mindset. In 1993, immediately after my wife and I purchased the ranch, I started down a path of no-till. I bought my first no-till drill, sold all tillage equipment. I was committed. 1994 came along, we had switched to 100% no-till, we had a pretty good crop, and I thought, Boy, this is easy. Well, 1995 came along, the day before I was going to start combining 12,200 acres of spring wheat, we lost our entire crop in a hailstorm. That was pretty devastating for a young family starting out. We weren't able to pay the bank back the operating loan. 1996 came along, I started to diversify the rotation.

little bit lo and behold, we lost 100% of our crop to hail again. Things were starting to get pretty strapped financially. My wife and I took off farm jobs. We had a young family to feed. Obviously, we had a mortgage to pay. I had to figure out, well, how am I going to do this without borrowing money from the bank? They weren't willing to loan me any more operating money. 1997 came along, and it was a devastating drought throughout Central North Dakota. Nobody harvested a single acre. By then, things were looking pretty lean. You can tell by that middle picture what happened in 1998. We lost 80% of our crop to hail. Those four years left us $1.5 million in debt, unable to borrow any money to buy expensive inputs. I was really starting to question my choice of careers. My wife was starting to question her choice of husbands. But I started to notice some positives, realized that 1998 hail storm occurred early enough in the year where I was able to plant the cover crop then.

not having the money to be able to put that cover crop up for forage, we simply grazed our livestock on that cover. We were integrating them back onto the landscape. What I began to see was life returning to our ranch. We suddenly had earthworms in the field. We suddenly had pollinators. We suddenly had greater bird populations. The soil, the ecosystem was healing itself. And it was then that I really began to realize that what I had been doing when I farmed conventionally was I was degrading the resource. You see the dust coming up behind that piece of tillage equipment. The thickness of one sheet of paper is the equivalent of one ton of topsoil per acre. Wherever I travel now, I realize that we're all farming and ranching degraded resources. I have the good fortune today. I'm on hundreds of farms, ranches all over the world. I can tell you I have never ever stood on a single one, including my own, that's not degraded. 30 to 75% of the carbon that was once in

our soils is now in the atmosphere. What does that lead to? That leads to climate change. Climate change is really about degradation. It's about lower water quality. It's about flooding because we're no longer able to infiltrate water into our soil profile. It's about the loss of income. We're losing our rural communities. We're sucking the life out of them. We're sucking the profitability out of them. And it leads to the degradation in human health. What we call food today has but a fraction of the nutrients in it that it once did. I know this for a fact. In March of 2022, I was diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis. I was given two to four years to live. You see, one of the things we need to realize, ALS, the known cause of it, is exposure to toxic chemicals. The same toxic chemicals that I was exposed to when I farmed conventionally now has become my death sentence years later. But realize there is hope. The hope lies in regenerative agriculture. Many people ask, Well, what is the definition?

of regenerative agriculture. In my mind, regenerative agriculture is farming and ranching in synchrony with nature to repair, rebuild, revitalize, and restore ecosystem function, beginning with all life in the soil, moving to all life above the soil. And the way we do this is simply by following six time-tested ecological principles. Briefly, those six are: number one, context. You have to farm and ranch in context with your environment. The second principle, least amount of mechanical and chemical disturbance possible. Realize that one of the reasons we have so much carbon in the atmosphere and not in our soils is because we've tilled those soils to death. We've applied way too much caustic chemicals, herbicides, fertilizers, fungicides. The third principle, armor on the soil. You should never see bare soil. Walk into a forest, walk into native prairie. Do you see bare soil? No. Bare soil is prone to wind erosion, water erosion, evaporation. The soil temperatures rise when we have bare soil. The fourth principle is that of diversity. Where do you see a

monoculture only where mankind has put one or where M. Mankind's actions have caused it to appear nature abor a monoculture. It thrives on diversity. The fifth principle is that of a Living Root in the soil as long as possible throughout the year. Take a look at the agricultural production model being used today. A farmer plants a crop, they harvest that crop, the soil sits idle without a living plant for the greater part of a year. Nothing pulling carbon out of the atmosphere, nothing feeding soil biology. We need to change that, and the final principle is that of animal and insect integration. Ecosystems do not function properly without animals and insects. If we follow these six principles, we then can drive the four ecosystem processes, and these ecosystem processes are constant all over the world. It is sunlight, the energy cycle, a diversity of plants photosynthesizing. Those plants then put root exit dates, carbon compounds out into the soil to feed biology along with micro risal fungi. They build soil.

Aggregates that improve the mineral cycle and the water cycle. It all starts here beneath our feet. We have to realize there are more microorganisms in a teaspoonful of healthy soil than there are people on this planet. Think about that. Yet how many of us, when we go to our garden, when we go out into our fields, understand that? They don't understand that what drives life above ground is that life below ground. It's up to us as land managers, whether you own a garden, a small landholder, a large landholder. Your management, or as I prefer to call it, your stewardship, makes all the difference. So what did I do on our ranch to drive life? For one thing, we no longer plant monocultures. You see by the photo in the upper left, that's a diverse polyculture cash crop. We're growing several species together. We're then able to separate those. We get the benefit that diversity adds, collecting more solar energy, putting more carbon into the soil. In the lower left, that's one of

a picture that was taken in one of our native prairies. We have documented over 144 different plant species in those native prairies. That's the diversity that natural ecosystems have. And then we've integrated a lot of animals. Animals simply add another dimension to the building of soil health. That's what our soil looks like today. We now have deep, rich topsoils, and we do this with a variety of animals and plants. Life is returning to the operation. We now have over 10 times as much wildlife on our ranch as compared to when we operated conventionally. We now have insect species returning. Renowned entomologist and agroecologist Dr. Jonathan Lundgren taught us that for every insect species that's a pest, there are 1,700 species that are beneficial or indifferent. Why in agriculture do we spend all our time and energy killing that pest? Why not provide the home habitat for those beneficials? Besides that, we've seen bird species return. A bird survey done last year on our ranch showed 105 different

nesting species of birds during the time throughout the whole year. We have over 150 species of birds that use the ranch. What has this done to the soil? In 1993, when we bought the ranch, we could only infiltrate a half of an inch of rainfall per hour. Scientists today have measured we can now infiltrate over 32 in of rainfall per hour. Bismarck, North Dakota has never received 30 in in a year, let alone 30 in in an hour. What have it done to the carbon levels organic matter? When we started, we had 1.7% organic matter in our soils. Today we're bumping close to 8%. Over four times as much carbon. This equates to an astounding 396 tons of CO2 equivalent per acre. Look at those two soils. What you show there. See, look at the difference in them. One epitomizes death. I tell people I used to 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 fungus? I was going to kill something. Now, today, I wake up every morning. How do I get more life on our Ranch? One of the things we have to realize is what built those deep top soils. We now have topsoil, well-aggregated soil, deeper than 4 feet, where I started with 3. In what built them was the integration of animals. Animals are awfully vilified. Oh, we need to get rid of the animals. Let me ask you this question: In the world over, where are the richest top soils? The richest top soils are found where large herds of grazing ruminants moved across those landscapes. Look at Central Plains of the US. Look at the Serengeti. What do they have in common? Grazing animals. You see, you may not want to eat that animal. That's your choice, but you can't deny the facts. The animals help develop those deep top soils. Take a look at what else we see, which of

those eggs. Do you want to eat the egg on the right? It was from our ranch. The egg on the left is from the current factory model. Groundbreaking studies done by Dr. Stefan van Vet, Dr. Fred Provenza, and Dr. Scott Cronberg are showing that foods grown in and on healthy soils are up to 64% higher in vitamins, 200% higher in essential fatty acids, and 67% lower in oxidative stress markers. In his book What Your Food Ate, Dr. David Montgomery writes about a study he did taking our grass-finished beef and comparing it to wild salmon. What he found is our grass-finished beef is higher in Omega-3s and higher in fatty acids than is wild salmon. If you truly care about your health and about saving the environment, putting carbon back in the soil, perhaps you should choose the grass-finished beef. The beautiful thing about this is we can do it all over. We can address climate change. We can use less fertilizer, less pesticides, less fungicides. We can revitalize our rural communities. We can have a positive

impact on nutrient density. We're doing this world over. Anybody can do it because the tested ecological principles and processes are the same. So, it's going to take each and every one of us. It's going to take us as consumers to know where our food is grown and raised. We need to source regeneratively grown and raised food. We need to support school programs to put those foods in our schools. We need to support nonprofit prophets who are educating people as to these regenerative practices. You can also grow a regenerative garden for you. See, if we all do this, we truly can realize the hope that is in healthy soil. Thank you. [Applause]

How Regenerative Agriculture Brings Life Back to the Land | Gabe Brown | TED

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Regenerating Dirt into Soil: A Personal Journey

The speaker's farming career began in 1983, influenced by traditional practices and the agrochemical industry.

After facing multiple crop failures and financial struggles, they transitioned to 100% no-till farming and began integrating livestock, leading to a resurgence of life in the soil.

The speaker now realizes that all farming and ranching operations are working with degraded resources, emphasizing the need for regeneration.

The Impact of Soil Degradation and the Promise of Regenerative Agriculture

Soil degradation has led to climate change, lower water quality, flooding, loss of rural income, and poor human health.

The speaker's personal experience with ALS, linked to toxic chemical exposure from conventional farming, highlights the urgent need for change.

Regenerative agriculture, based on six ecological principles, offers a hopeful solution by synchronizing farming with nature to restore ecosystem function and build healthy soil.

Improving the Mineral and Water Cycle through Soil Health

Healthy soil is teeming with microorganisms, driving life above ground and crucial for ecosystem balance.

The speaker's ranch management focuses on diverse polycultures, integrating animals, and promoting natural ecosystems to enhance soil health and increase wildlife and beneficial insect populations.

This holistic approach has led to deep, rich topsoils and a significant return of wildlife and bird species on the ranch.

The Impact of Nesting Birds on Soil and Carbon Levels

The ranch hosts over 150 bird species, leading to a significant improvement in soil health, with rainfall infiltration increasing from 0.

Organic matter in the soil has also risen from 1.

7% to nearly 8%, resulting in an additional 396 tons of CO2 equivalent per acre.

The integration of grazing animals has been crucial in developing deep, well-aggregated topsoil, highlighting their role in building rich soil profiles.

The Impact of Regenerative Farming on Food Quality

The egg on the right, from a ranch, is shown to be nutritionally superior to the factory model egg on the left.

Studies reveal that foods grown in healthy soils have significantly higher vitamins, essential fatty acids, and lower oxidative stress markers.

Choosing grass-finished beef over wild salmon can provide higher Omega-3s and fatty acids, while regenerative farming practices can address climate change and improve nutrient density.