AgEmerge 2021 - Ray Archuleta

welcome to ag emerge 2021 i am excited to introduce our headline speaker ray archuleta i've known ray for several years and we've been at several conferences together focused on soil health and the impact that it can have for the future of farming and really the future of human health rae is a big picture thinker he's going to help you see things in ways that you've just never seen them before and he's not afraid to get down and dirty because i've been with him in several field demonstrations from soil pits to rainfall simulators to his famous slake test which i'm sure many of you have seen on youtube he is a incredible person who has had a wealth of experience across our country growing up in new mexico spending time in oregon spending time in the east coast and and now residing in missouri he's seen everything from a brittle environment to an arid environment to human environment everything that you can imagine this wealth of experience well equips him to be able to present to us just the overarching theme that we're so excited about the ag emerge conference and that is really looking at how can we scale up the soil health principles known as regenerative agriculture so sit back buckle up and get ready here's ray archuleta and welcome to ag emerge 2021 [Music] hi my name is ray archuleta i want to thank ag merge i want to thank monty and kim for having me speak to you today i'm so excited to share my journey my journey of soil health i'm going to start off by showing it from a pictorial way of doing this i'm going to show you that i started my 32-year journey i grew up in new mexico northern new mexico our family's been there for four or 500 years went to college at new mexico state once i graduated my first tour of duty was the boot hill missouri now think about that what an incredible shock from new mexico to the boot hill missouri and then from there after a year and a half i got promoted and became a water quality project manager in northern missouri then i went and became a district conservationist in oregon lived on the idaho side and i would cross the snake river every morning and then after five years in oregon i spent another 10 years in north carolina i became the soil health specialist or at that time they called it a soil quality specialist and then after my 10-year tour there i came and finished my career in missouri and i was responsible for arkansas louisiana and mississippi as a soil regional soil health specialist my incredible journey going through all those states i have been in every state uh two or three times from all the way from alaska to puerto rico through hawaii and i want to make it very clear every experience that you go through every person you come across have an incredible impact and if it wasn't for this incredible experience i would have not gone through this incredible mind shift and i want to talk about that my 32-year journey of of working with nrcs was started right here where we talked about how we were going to change and heal the land please keep in mind when you see this picture this is colorado in 2014. our agency started in 1935. if you see the color of that soil how dark that soil is that was done in an organic system we were experiencing many many problems all along and i didn't understand that context and what was going on as you can see even though we were spending billions of dollars as an agency trying to heal the land this was still occurring you can see here this is in texas 2019 ladies and gentlemen this is still occurring throughout the globe where huge plumes of soil are being spread throughout the globe and throughout the planet i did not realize that i did not understand after years and years of college i started to realize and down this journey that i was putting band-aids on the land that's why i call this the reductionist conservationist that's what i was as i started noticing that as a as a as an agency we would put grass waterways filter strips and yet a majority of the land was bare and the majority of the land was actually being tilled you can see through that slide that a majority of the land is spilling sun not capturing sun energy and water is running off the land because there's no aggregation because of the massive tillage and then the result of this is an infiltration problem not only nationally but globally i was beginning to see that as i flew across the whole country you can see the slide was taken from an airplane i took it with my own phone and i wrote this lakes and rivers are filled with nutrient and conservation plans but not crystal clear with understanding that slide got me kicked out of a state district conservation was very upset with me because you got to keep in mind our agency really touted conservation planning nutrient management planning please understand i'm good with planning but it's a process i'm more about understanding look at all the plans look at all the nutrient management plans and look at our waters also what happened in in idaho this really became very very personal this is why i put this slide i could see when i was a district conservationist in idaho that i could see that young farmers young daughters and sons could not come into the operation because there was not enough money i couldn't understand why can we not make a living on 500 prime acres in the treasure valley in idaho i just could not wrap my mind around that and it this next slide kind of sums up why i did not know even since the 1900s even now you can see that slide it shows that heavy inputs farmers have been paying huge amounts of inputs and their income is very low you can see the difference in the discrepancy i tell farmers farmers you are the poorest millionaires i know you are worth millions in infrastructure but very little money that you were able to keep and as i was traveling the whole country i would see the desiccation of small communities the drying up of small communities see the blessing of the land would flow through the farmer and rancher that would supply the general foods the general store the local gas station was supported from the from the farmer and the rancher they were the con conduit of that blessing what i see now is death of communities why why is this occurring a lot of it is is our mindset it's the mindset that i picked up from years and years of going to college and the university what they had taught me they formulated a certain mindset to me the mindset i was taught inputs inputs as an agronomist prescription it's all about yield but the that was the wrong mindset the mindset should have been how do i have relationship and do biomimicry mimic life mimic the creation i wasn't taught that in school so then what happens is there's a social conditioning the social conditioning doesn't just come from the education that you get in college it's from the local community then it creates this incredible box i had to go through an incredible paradigm shift paradigm shifts are brutal some respond in a very positive way some respond in a very negative way the hardest surface to penetrate on the farming ranch is not the soil that's compacted it's the human brain that is the problem it's the way we look at the natural system it's how we were conditioned locally all of us had to go through an epiphany i had to go through that epiphany because i saw farmers go broke and the land was not being healed and i took it personally it really bothered me here are some of the things that i realize through time these are the pillars of learning and i'm going to tell you i have learned if the mindset is not correct if you are not willing to work very very hard to change the mindset you will never pick up the skills to learn how to use the tools i am not about tools it is all about the mind unless the mind and heart change the land will not be healed what makes the difference between one farmer or the other mindset you have to be incredibly committed very determined that you're going to pick up the skills and use the tools correctly it's not about no-till it's not about cover crops it's about understanding and mimicking nature this gentleman had a huge impact in my life race tires when i moved to north carolina this man was doing no-till and covers he's been rolling cover since the 80s he's been doing no-till since the 1970s look at that corn with no fertilizer no chemical inputs except one shot of roundup and i said ray why don't you go to a roundup it says ray can you imagine having both of us come saying ray ray ray we're both talking to him he's the shorter ray and the smarter ray and we'd be talking and said ray why don't you get away from the last chemical because you hardly ever need it he says ray i don't even buy bananas i might not even get to enjoy them that's how short my life is but he just recently passed away and he was a great mentor look at that corn how tall it is of course he's only five foot seven but that's not the point but imagine with no inputs look what he was doing in the 1970s what a brilliant concept the concepts of biomimicry and i'll explain that look at those covers he was rolling down look at his multi-specie mixes look at the elegance and the beauty of that and look at the equipment that he was using this man was not a wealthy farmer he farmed 155 acres his organic matter was six percent and the forest was three percent he lives in north carolina that's incredible to accomplish he rolled the covers look at his equipment not very expensive equipment and there i am getting very i was helping ray roll the cover crops down as you can see it was cheap undependable government labor to help him roll the cover crops down then another person impacted my life gay brown who's now my business partner i came to gabe's ranch in 2007 and i was incredibly perplexed what he was doing gabe was also impacted by another researcher adamir galigari he came to go speak in 2006 at the no-till plains what he learned they applied what gabe and the district conservationist and the district what they did is set up a bunch of plots and it blew me away what they learned from those plots when i saw the results of those plots what i did is i took all my graduate level wheat science books and threw them in the trash because what i was taught that nature was more competitive than she is collaborative does competition happen yes competition is to build integrity within the ecosystem but all of nature is more collaborative than she is competitive what you see is the results of the plots when they planted one seed and now keep in mind this was a 1.8 inch rain year in 2006 they only got 1.8 inches in north dakota when they put these plots notice when they only did one seed it produced that much 1232 but if you see to the right when they applied all the seeds in the last plot look what happened to the biomass now keep in mind just to give you a visual when you did one monoculture plant by itself 1.8 inches look at the result death not enough water look at the oil seed radish now notice when they put all the seeds in a collaborative way look how they all grew how in the world did that happen i thought plants steal water and nutrients the nouns to me did not know that there's a paper called the stress grading hypothesis when nature is incredibly stressed it does not compete it collaborates when you put all those species together you have this incredible collaboration people say well ray that's north dakota god loves north dakota but doesn't love the rest of the world that only happens in north dakota that's not true this is the same type of plots done in canada notice right next to it monoculture rye or triticale now notice when you put it in a mix what happened right next door the same plot this was the research researcher that did that what we are saying we don't even begin to understand the elegance and the beauty and the power of nature so i'm going to talk about three points that i start to realize when i talk all over the country these are three major points that i feel that farmers have a struggle with how do i know that i had a struggle with it i didn't understand these three basic concepts and it made it very very difficult for me to be able to have relationship and understand the natural system the first one is i'm going to go through is the soil is incredibly alive if you do not understand that if you do not have that basic concept you will not change the way you have relationship with that soil and you will not cut your inputs you will not save the farm and wrench number two it's all about relationship ecology is relationship and connectedness all is one and number three there's nothing more frustrating is not understanding the goal i'm going to tell you when i was living in idaho and i was at district conservation and i had my little small 11 acre farm i didn't know what the heck i was doing if all these years of college and my thought process was fragmented and i did not even understand the goal this is the goal biomimicry emulate life if i would have one professor one mentor and say ray focus this is the goal emulate the incredible intelligent design mimic life follow its principles and patterns understand it changed my whole life but here's what i learned in college in our western education system create distinction it is powerful we need distinction you have to delineate while is that a mountain lion chasing me am i going to suffer some harm we need that as a human but here's the problem we also have to understand relationship let me tell you the problems with distinction if we're not careful to think think things out a majority of farmers tell me ray we can't do this here we can't do no-till we can't do covers here it's too cold it's too dry it's too wet i hear that all the time from every producer this is what we've created we have created a people that look at distinction delineate but they don't understand the power of relationship let me build on that we are doing no-till in canada we are doing no-till in afghanistan in the humid south louisiana no-till is occurring cover crops what do all these systems have in common all of them capture and run on light energy they all have a water cycle yes even in the desert even though it's a diminished water cycle they all have a nutrient cycle driven by soil biology and they all have diversity the life of this planet is driven by diversity of organisms it is the diversity of organisms doing their function doing their job that keeps this planet alive that separates us from the moon and from mars diversity of organisms transfers dna energy water flow carbon from organism to organism to organism so the more diversity the more powerful your system is when i'm talking to producers i say you know growing up in in the northern mountains of growing up in new mexico it was not uncommon to see this picture that is a tree growing in a rock i said now farmers that is a compaction issue how do you solve how's that plant surviving that most do not realize look at the power of life that tree has our biscuit mycorrhizae excreting powerful enzymes breaking rock down they release co2 create carbonic acid break rock down please understand without life this planet would be just a rock life is powerful so once you understand the power of life the way you want to approach your soil is through life i tell producers this is what you are destroying when you over spray you over till this is a water bear a moss piglet that lives in the soil column every organism serves purpose so the moment you start looking at your soil as a living organism it changes everything the way you manage and how careful you are with your tools how powerful is life ladies and gentlemen i was born in 1961. i was 25 years old when chernobyl blew up when that happened i'll never forget when that happened huge plumes of radiation spread millions of people died they told us that was going to be a desert if you go and google now there are plants and living vegetation but more powerful and awesome that little picture in the left shows a fungi scientists just recently found a radiotrophic fungus that eats radiation that's how powerful life is ladies and gentlemen here is a picture of a farm in australia look at that soil calcium gypsum seabed how come it's dark on the top the power of life we don't appreciate or understand the powerful power of life so if i want to approach my soul how do i approach it not with death tools of death but tools of life that facilitate life this is the most powerful tool out for a farmer it is an animal and plant the soil only wants two or three things from you it wants plant diverse plants and diverse animals and for you to understand it and have a relationship so the living plant is the most powerful thing that we can use on our farm or our ranch managing the plants here is a wonderful beautiful elegant picture showing liquid sun you're taking light energy and the plant converts it into this beautiful chemical energy that feeds a myriad of billions of organisms without this happening there would be no life on this planet this is how you build nitrogen this is how you get phosphorus and minerals out of the rock it is these elegant collaboration mutualistic relationship between plants and microbes that take the minerals out of the geology this is what is occurring it's not only those organisms but these other organisms on top of that soil surface those leaves from a forest that is the skin this is what we're trying to emulate so the more you bury that skin the more you spray those organisms the more you over fertilize the more you damage the more you have to write a check that soil is a life look at that we want to preserve that we want to protect it these organisms serve purpose without these organisms again there would be no life on this planet you take soil is this it's geology sand silt and clay all of us have geology under our feet but this is what is very different in every one of our operations is this it is the byproducts of life and death how many organisms do you have converting the geology and creating those super biotic substances people call organic matter the coat the particles that is driven by management how much carbon flow and how much are you managing the animals correctly or the plants so geology plus the byproducts of life you have soil look at this producer here on the left from india illinois bare soil in the fall millions and millions of acres spilling sun leaky nutrients look at the landowner on the right from pennsylvania which producer is feeding their soil and protecting it it's the producer on the right very critical what we need to do and then this is california when we drove through california this is what we see this is the california buffer strip there was only four bees on that on that field we saw millions and millions of acres spilling sun leaking nutrients that is not a regenerative system why are we there because we don't understand the power of connectedness what i'm going to talk about it's the power of relationship our relationship and our connectedness to the natural resource to the planet to the earth to every one of the organisms we are all intimately connected let me show you here and give you a concept of of the left here the producer on the left has no relationship with the soil he does not understand it is a living dynamic ecosystem with a producer on the right understands relationship where he's planting and creating that skin and doing biomimicry and mimicking the forest and planting his corn his soybean and we're doing that all over the country now keep in mind which approach of science the science on the left or the science on the right look at our our planet our look at our country we are making nature like a machine no relationship grouping the animals and theirs animals are not able to express their beauty and their design the science and the right biomimicry mimic nature these animals are expressing life their design look at the animals on the left they cannot express their design the animals on the right do and that is infecting our health it is impacting our medical system which system do we want keep in mind as an agronomist this is what i was taught control the weeds control the past control the disease let's approach her chemically and physically wrong approach finally the goal mimic life it took me all these years to understand the goal i evaluate every research paper paper i evaluate everything that comes out of anybody's mouth to the design and to the template i judge it that way this is my design this is what i teach farmers this is what we teach them how to mimic the elegance in the architecture of the prairie and forest please keep in mind science only tells you about the physical world college does not teach you wisdom wisdom comes out from above look at the design look at the creator's design it's elegance that is the way our agriculture always was intended i use this ancient scripture to show that biomimicry has been around for a long time ask the beast and they will teach you the birds of heaven observe watch what do i notice about all of our regenerative farmers they have become incredible observers incredible biomimicrs my job is to mimic the forest and the prairie notice our multi-specie mixes how they look and the architecture and the design diversity look at the skin that we once we plant that cover we roll it and terminate it and mimic the skin of the forest and the prairie we got these principles they are not our principles we got these principles from nature themselves from god's creation we added one called context when i deal with producers i deal with their cultural their social their spiritual context if you do not have context the other five principles mean nothing you're dealing with human beings who impact the natural resource context is everything without those principles without the principle of context the others don't mean anything those principles the other five will happen without us what we're trying to do is inject it into our system it's called agroecology using the principles of biomimicry and putting them into our cropping systems we want to emulate that structure this is how our cover crops look farmers are getting it once we educate them once they understand the goal they'll build these pieces of equipment here's a producer dropping cover crop seed and standing corn look at that beautiful machine how it's designed not just to be a sprayer but to drop cover crop seed for this purpose so when you harvest the corn you don't leave the soil hungry naked and thirsty it'll start building that cover and so that you're capturing nutrients and capturing sun in the wa in the fall in the winter we are planting green it's those power points that i was pushing around with race tires that has promoted this movement we were teaching this back in 2007 and 2008 and has spread all over the country look at that skin suppressing weeds we're doing it on cotton we're doing on vegetables tomatoes we're doing it pumpkins here's another regenerative farmer adam chapel who is growing no-till cover crops feral irrigated rice 150 bushel 50 to 60 percent reduction in seed chemical inputs and water use adam is in cotton plant arkansas biomimicry what changed atom they were going broke they were going broke how about las cruces new mexico where i went to college this is what they taught me in school you got to leave the ground bare you cannot grow any vegetation under those pecans because they'll compete and they'll steal nutrients boy that was a mistake it actually elevated the temperatures on that poor soil and hurting the microbes and diminishing the two potential the true potential of those pecans now we teach this this is jo this is josh bowman in las cruces that is a new mexico pecan orchard where the rolling cover crops amazing rolling cover crops now he uses no more insecticides no more fungicides no more fertilizer nature self-healing self-organizing self-regulating look at some of the cover crops look at dan unruh in california walnut orchard we buy his walnuts because they taste different from the typical walnuts there is a difference look at cornelio in an apple orchard in mexico they came to our school and look at this doing mixes in their apple orchards we're doing this in southeast arizona chili plant chili farmers are now doing strip dill and doing it into their mixes now i'm going to share a most very beautiful elegant presentation done by jason miller because a lot of times people tell me about ray this won't work in federal irrigated systems i'm here to tell you that is not true let's go to idaho and let marcy to marston idaho and let jason miller show you his journey to regenerative agriculture two years ago jason miller embarked on a journey towards soil health to solve issues he faced on his farm with a sloping field and surface irrigation miller was losing topsoil to erosion he was also looking for ways to keep his cattle feed costs down during the winter miller wondered if the soil health principles of cover crops mob grazing and no-till farming could address those issues and be profitable he decided to do a field by field comparison first he would plant and harvest his entire field in barley then he would plant cover crops and mob graze them finally he would till half the field and plant it in corn on the other half he would plant corn with a no-till drill miller hoped to measure the health of the soil while tracking the economic and environmental impacts of making the change from tillage to no-till my name is jason miller my family has farmed and ranched in the marshing area for the last 60 years so some of the challenges i'm facing with this field here are soil erosion the first couple of irrigations every year are pretty challenging to keep the ground stable and to keep sediment from running off the end of the field it's been conventionally tilled for the last 25 years it's furo irrigated and it has a slope of about seven percent it is estimated that 15 million tons of soil are lost to wind and water erosion every year in idaho like many farmers miller is trying to figure out how to keep his most precious resource topsoil on his field so right now we're in the middle of my cover crop mix that i planted in a barley stubble and what that means is is this as you can imagine was a field of barley that we harvested with the combine and coming in directly behind the combine we planted this mix with a no-till drill this right here is a hunter hybrid turnip miller planted a multi-species cover crop forage mix that would germinate in the heat but stay green until a deep freeze this ensured soil coverage and diversity in cattle feed while capturing nitrogen breaking up hard pan and reducing water and wind erosion today is december 29th we're standing in the cover crop pasture again as you can see see there's still a lot of green left in the field which is pretty uncommon for this time of year to have green feed for the cattle to graze these cows have a really high nutritional requirement so to have something like this to graze is just is just huge and and not only that but it's it's very economical for us too we're not having to to feed hay which obviously costs money or provide protein supplements which also get get fairly expensive and so by by using cover crops we figure we saved last year roughly around twenty thousand dollars in what we would have had to feed in hay and so that's that's huge for our operation being a smaller family farm the less we feed hay the better and for us having having this green lush feed to come onto in the winter is is huge for us and i know the cows love it too comparative soil tests of miller's conventionally tilled and no-tilled fields revealed surprising findings the overall result showed that miller's cover crop and mob grazing regime had begun to build a healthier soil ecosystem one of my main goals with this field is to do everything consistently and evenly i want to be able to say that they're the no-till practice versus a conventional practice there should be no difference in and the corn's ability to yield the process begins as far as planning is concerned we came in and on the conventional side we dissed it twice we moldboard plowed it and then we culture packard or groundhogged it basically just the way um most farmers do it in this area uh just basically preparing that to be planted from there we came in and we put our fertilizer down and then we had a better come through and then how we did it on the no-till side of things we just went through and sprayed out the what little bit of cover crop was trying to come back this spring and then we applied our fertilizer and then we went back and re-throwed those existing core gates to prepare it to be planted no-till farming can be a paradigm shift for many farmers a clean freshly tilled seed bed with no residue has long been considered the ideal blank slate for planting but no-till farming proves that residue is healthy while bare soil is missing biological diversity one concern i have and a fear that i have is i'm a little bit of afraid that that corn and the no-till side of things might not come as as uniformly several different reasons one is is it's a little firmer over there i don't know if in places where it might be a little more compact if that's going to inhibit root growth and and that plant's ability to to grow another concern i have is the the residue that was left in the field so today we are checking the water in a no-till system you want some residue but you don't want too much in a furrow irrigated field like this because the only way for water to get from point a to point b is down the core gate and so i i don't know if i slept very good last night but i was concerned that we might have too much residue and those rows might be breaching and traveling into the second row there and coming here this morning it was a good sight to know that almost all the rows had gone through on their own one thing that we're trying to measure here is what's the difference in the sediment loss off of these two fields is there a noticeable difference in the no-till portion we think there should be but but that's what robin hadler with nrcs is going to come out here this morning and help us test that okay i'm robin hadler i work with the canyon soil conservation district and we're out here today doing some water samples on this field we will be sampling the water coming into the furrow and we will also be sampling the water coming out of the furrow on the no-tilled side of the field the sediment was significantly less than the tilled side of the field you could visually see the difference in the waist stitch at the bottom of the field because the the waist stitch on the tilled side was completely full of sediment compared to the no-tilled side which had very marginal sediment and that all directly enters the snake river so it's it's pretty obvious that we saved at least 68 percent one key observation i made during this project was while we were irrigating as the water was going down the core gates i noticed that the water on the no-till portion of the field subbed across the bed meaning the water came up to the seed significantly better on the no-tilled side than it did on the conventional tilt site so some of the observations i made as the corn was growing last year between the two different fields was the uniformity that was the main thing i saw so by adding cover crops mob grazing and no-till farming i put another 163 dollars per acre in my pocket that i wouldn't have had if i would have left that field fallow and conventionally tilled it so i had a couple favorite parts of this project one being you know after planting the cover crop and seeing it grow putting the cows out there and seeing how excited they get always makes me smile one of my other favorite parts of the project was planting the no-till portion of the corn and seeing the corn come up and you know all those days that you didn't get much sleep and to see that it was a success and at the end of the project showing that and proving to myself that i actually made more money on the no-till side of the corn makes me happy and makes me more willing to try it again and try new things more often because the only way you're going to find out if it works or not is if you try excellent you can see that jason became a farmer scientist he searched and did his own design and he followed the principles of biomimicry and he checked them for himself now notice how he subbed up more water that was because more aggregation i i worked there five years and it was it broke my heart to see how much sediment got into the snake river and just by putting covers and doing less tillage and in doing mimicking nature made a huge difference for jason and saved him a lot of money so i was very excited to share his journey now i'm going to talk talk to you about grazing real quick and you know growing up in the southwest and i would drive to go see my parents and i go from missouri because i live in missouri now i got a small farm i i raise sheep and cattle and we drive to my parents and i see millions and millions of acres of degraded land and said how in the world are we going to restore all that rangeland again the principles of biomimicry if you looked at the buffalo or the serengeti this is how nature does business this is the way she functions this is her patterns when we look at grazing animals they move quickly it's not about numbers it's about density it's about timing that has always been the issue if you watch how grazing animals function they're always looking observing predators we are now using the hot wire fence as the predator and we control the movements of these animals i want to take you to a case study to mexico where alejandro and the grazers down there how they are healing the chihuahua desert to give you perspective again i was born in 1961 i did not realize if you see that that little metal post there and look at the grassland that is in las cruces this is what i grew up seeing i deny in other words this was in 1961 this is what i grew up seeing go back that was 1961 that's the way the rangeland look at the university that's the way it looks now now let's take you to northern new mexico this is chaco canyon where the anasazi indians native americans that used to be a pine forest yes even the native americans after 50 years of drought and overusing the natural resource look what happened to that system so let me take you down to mexico uh jesus and there's gabe brown and alejandro myself and and and juan pablo um these are the leaders down in chihuahua mexico alejandro look at alejandro's statement he says we want to mimic what nature does not fight nature let's see what those grazers did in that beautiful part of mexico to give you perspective that is the chihuahuan desert and again i went to college in the southern part of it let me give you a little bit of ecological context alejandro's cows he has a 600 cow calf operation their average reign is 6 to 11 inches and he's a fourth generation rancher keep this in mind it is very very hot very brutal down there high deserts but let me give you some context about the area this is the way it used to look this was a picture from alejandro those are the apaches down there look at the grass in that system it used to be like this it used to be a prairie let me show you through this interesting video created by alejandro and his group to show you the great transformation i'm telling you i've been down there twice and never in my life i have gotten so much encouragement so much hope if we can do this in a very brutal environment i know that we can heal our planet let's see how alejandro and their group is healing their part of the world i still get very emotional when i see that presentation it was life-changing for me because i've been there twice what it taught me is we if we mimic the natural system if we mimic god's creation and follow its pattern we can heal the whole planet we can change people's lives we can change the climate issue we can change the health issue it will change our community why does alejandra and then put so much energy in the fencing and the structure and moving the cows like buffalo for this very picture right here ladies and gentlemen that is a cow pie on that desert floor look how powerful that manure in that urine and that hoof action breaking the crust keep in mind that that was not a desert but it was a prairie saudi arabia northern africa they were not deserts they were elegant grasslands and that's what we've done to our planet we can heal this planet but it only happens when we change the heart and mind again you saw examples of biomimicry if we were to wear a t-shirt farmers and ranchers they should say i mimic life i'm a biomimicr that's what that's what we do sometimes i get very concerned thinking that humans thinks that technology will save them i love this albert einstein quote i fear the day that technology will surpass our human interaction the world will have a generation of idiots what we have ladies and gentlemen we're so enamored with information with technology but we have become so ignorant and so fearful about our creation and what we interface with we are coming to a movement now where the mantra will be let thy food be thy medicine look at the difference between farmed salmon versus wild salmon the way the creator does business the way we do business does that impact our bodies absolutely it matters how we do business what has changed what changed on that farm and operation from alejandro to adam to rick clark to all these regenerative producers in my mind what changed what changed was the way i saw things i love this quote from don campbell if you want to make small changes change how you do things when you want to make major changes change how you see things and it's that's just not enough you have to be so committed so intentional if you're willing to do that it will change your life it'll producers your farm your ranch is a reflection of you it is a reflection of the understanding please keep in mind i don't care what race what tribe what where you came from if you look at the journey of mankind it has been a journey of destruction a journey of mining not a journey of reverence and respect and love for the natural system it is very critical if your heart and your mind does not change the land will not change in this last slide i want to share with you and i thought to me this was one of the most powerful slide that i ever saw anybody give is by dr gus speth and i love what he said he says we scientists don't know how to do that and the reason before i read this i think what concerns me is a lot is that we put so much um focus on science and please keep in mind i went to college for eight years so i love science but i think we forget the other sciences but we also forget that we tend to look at things very reductionist it's not just about science it's about having a correct spiritual view of the land and so let me read this to you he said i used to think the top environmental problems were biodiversity laws ecosystem collapse and climate change i thought that with 30 years of good science we could address these problems but i was wrong the top environment environmental problems are selfishness greed and apathy and to deal with those we need a spiritual and cultural transformation and we scientists don't know how to do that i want to leave you with this last thought i was impacted by many people down my journey everything was planned i will tell you that my journey had divine providence the hands of god himself to help me through the whole journey the people i came across people like gabe brown rick clark all these were not excellent but the most beautiful thing that we've done that we started building community community i'll share a quick story about an australian farmer where a majority of the australian farmers do not get government help they do not get cost share they form these groups together they build these communities it's like these churches of regenerative agriculture and what they do is they everyone that goes to that group have to be committed to learn and they have to be committed to share their information to the other farmers and the head consultant asked them to be very committed and he says to them are you committed to do things timely and he says if you are not he says i want you to go home go look in the mirror and call yourself a taxi driver because you are not a farmer ladies and gentlemen don't do this by yourself farmers ranchers build community because nature is incredibly complex she is elegant but if you build a community of 10 can you imagine if all 10 of you did experimentation you could propel your learning 10 times but if you do this by yourself you will spend the rest of your life trying to figure it out work as a community build community so again i want to thank you for this incredible opportunity and i hope that you all together will enjoy your journey of regenerative agriculture

Channel: Ag Solutions Network

Views: 4,076

Keywords: regenerative ag, agriculture, regenerativeagriculture, soil, paradigm, livestock, science, agemerge, farm, cover crop, sustainability, cropdiversity, regenerativefarming, notill, soilcarbon, sequestercarbon, changeclimate, irrigationefficiency, nutrientuptake, soil science, scientist, biomimicry, conservation ag, natural resource conservation service, NRCS, agroecology, ag biology, water quality, underground ag, soil health academy, ag solutions network, ray archuleta, gabe brown, rick clark, carbon

Id: 4HvwvEadCYM

Length: 57min 11sec (3431 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 01 2021