Gabe Brown | Regenerative Farming and Soil Health

[Music] what's up guys welcome back to the strong sisters youtube channel in today's video i have the great fortune to be able to talk with gabe brown so gabe brown is a strong proponent of soil health and he is a conventional egg farmer turned regenerative farmer so after a few years of hardships of freak storms losing a bunch of crops and animals he found himself implementing a lot of regenerative agriculture practices and so 20 years later he's improved the soil organic matter at his ranch and has really been a strong proponent and educator about soil health so gabe is now a farmer turned educator so he has experience he has the practical experience and then also the soil health knowledge and so he now spends a lot of time creating this educational content to help spread the word about regenerative agriculture gabe's book dirt to soil is actually one of the first books that i read when getting into the regenerative agriculture space so i would definitely recommend checking out his book and so gabe brown has a ton of things going on so it was really nice of him to be able to take time out of his busy schedule to talk with me today so i hope you guys enjoy this conversation thank you so much gabe for coming on the strong sisters youtube channel um i'm really excited to talk soil with you and i know that our audience will really appreciate it um so if you could just start with just a a brief overview of how gabe brown got into regenerative agriculture oh boy well thank you it's a pleasure to be with you today uh it's always good to talk regenerative agriculture so my wife and i uh moved back to her parents place in 1983 and then we farmed with them for a number of years and in 1991 we had the opportunity to purchase part of the ranch from them and immediately after doing that i had read and studied enough about no-till that just made sense to me in my environment so we sold all our tillage equipment 100 zero till in 1994 and then what happened to make a long story short the year 1995 we lost 100 percent of our crop to hail with no crop insurance 1996 we lost 100 to hail again 1997 we dried out never combined an acre and 1998 we lost 80 percent of a crop to hail and uh obviously after the first couple years of that the banker wasn't willing to own me money anymore for operating so i had to figure out how can i be profitable without all these added inputs and how can i stay in business and so it really took me on a learning path one that continues to this day as to how ecosystems function how do they function with uh with as little input from human kind as possible and so i just had the good fortune i've met a lot of good people along the way and i always tell everyone gabe brown's not very smart but i know a lot of smart people and and they've really helped me get to where we're at and you just pick up bits and pieces and you adapt and adopt them to your environment and the more i know the more i know i don't know and that's what makes regenerative agriculture so exciting is because we don't know where the upper limit is every year things just tend to get better now obviously nature can throw you a curveball in 2020 we had the second driest year ever recorded here in bismarck north dakota where my ranch is at but yet we were still very profitable and we still produced good yields and and had plenty of forage for our livestock so that's a testament to the power of regenerative ag so there's my life in a nutshell it seems like you came to regenerative agriculture after facing a crisis um do you really think that that's going to have to happen to farmers across the country in order for them to make the switch that's a great question and unfortunately that's what it takes for a lot of people now that being said we are seeing a major interest in regenerative agriculture from farmers from ranchers from business owners from the supply chain to municipalities to government agencies i i tell people you know there's a lot of us pushing this snowball uphill and we finally have got to the point it's going to start rolling downhill and there's a there's a major change coming and we're seeing that occurring right now so it's our hope and desire that farmers and ranchers don't have to wait till that point that they take the initiative and realize this is not only good for their bottom line their pocketbook but it's good for for long-term sustainability of the resource and for the ecosystem as well and i think what you guys what your group and your team is doing at understanding ag and soil health academy and putting on all these education resources i think that hopefully that can like at least get people interested and aware of it just in case some small crisis happens and they get interested but i really respect and admire how much education content you put out there and what i one of the main things that i learned from you is this idea that soil health is not degrading it's the biology of soil that we are struggling with right now i think that that's a huge misconception out there in conventional farming and in regenerative agriculture so on the conventional side um you know all these agrochemical companies push yeah we're degrading our soil we're degrading our soil so you have to put these fertilizers and nutrients back in because we're just taking out the nutrients um year after year and then i think in even in the regenerative ag space um the the idea is that people we need to implement regenerative agriculture because we've degraded our soil but what i really like about your message is no no we need to take step back the nutrients are there you've documented soil nutrients are there it's we've just destroyed the biology that allows us to tap into those nutrients can you talk a little bit more about that concept because i think not many people kind of talk about that all the time sure that that's an excellent point excellent question so my team and i at understanding ag we consult currently we're on about 22 million acres across the continental u.s so wide variety different environments virtually every state in the lower 48 and we've had the opportunity to compile data on a large number of farms and ranches over a wide area and what's amazing is one of the baseline soil tests we do is called a tne total nutrient extraction so we just simply take a soil sample to a foot of depth and have all the nutrients extracted and measured from that and what we found for instance the average pounds of nitrogen per acre in the top one foot of the soil profile is 9 000 pounds per acre okay now if i go tell any corn farmer for instance that figure they're going to say well that's ridiculous if i don't add anything i don't get much of a crop we found that average phosphorus levels were 2 300 pounds per acre average potassium levels were at 11 000 pounds per acre and we also analyzed it for a lot of the micronutrients and our point with that whole thing is okay how deep do your root depths go uh most plants certainly send roots deeper than a foot into the soil profile okay so how much real nutrients do they have available much more than what i just quoted but that shows us then why don't aren't we able to get very profitable crop production immediately if we remove the synthetic inputs and the answer is of course that a lot of those inputs are in the organic form those nutrients see soil tests today only look at the inorganic fraction what's not bound to carbon molecule what's available right now but they don't look at what the organic fraction is well if you have adequate soil biology and it's working properly a portion of those nutrients will be made available throughout the growing season every time it rains you'll get a flush of biology biology lives in and on and films of water in the pore spaces of the soil ecosystem so if we change our mindset from one of writing checks and adding nutrients to one of working with nature and i tell people all the time the clients i work with the difference between me and many others is i try and think like a micro what does microbes what do microbes need to function well they need a home well the only home for them is between those soil aggregates those pore spaces so what can i do as a farmer to create more pore spaces and then what else do they need they need water because the biology lives in and on thin films of water and then they need the food source so they need the armor on the soil surface they need that crop residue and they need root exudates from plants so if we provide those things the biology of proliferate and then it will cycle the nutrients now how much of those nutrients will depend on the environment how much water do you get how many growing degree days do you have how much sunshine and the diversity of plants so once we start thinking that way this becomes very very profitable as we implement these regenerative practices and the beauty of this is we can do this you know on my ranch is 5 000 acres we can do it on 100 000 acres we can do it on a garden in the back of a city lot we can even do this on a flower pot on somebody's deck it's the principles work the same anywhere and so how do we implement those principles use them to cycle the nutrients for years i was told gabe yes you can get nitrogen by planting legumes and through rhizobia they're going to take atmospheric cannon and make it available but you'll run out of phosphorus potassium and all these other minerals no i won't i can mine my way right to china you know it won't in a trillion years i won't run out of nutrients and what's amazing is the clients we work with just how many dollars we're able to save them we do proper soil testing figure out you know what do they have in their soils what's in the organic form the inorganic form then how much biology do they have and then we start them on a process immediately of uh cutting back their synthetic inputs to the point where hopefully they're no longer needed down the road so i think just as a brief wrap up in summary correct me if i'm wrong um one of the main goals of regenerative agriculture is to foster this plant's root relationship so that way we can properly feed the biology through root exudates and so the biology and the soil and these mycorrhizal fungi those are what allows us to tap in to all these free nutrients in the soil that nature so beautifully recycles um in establishing making sure that that plant and mycorrhizal fungi have this symbiotic relationship that allows us to tap into these as soon as we start tilling and kind of destroying those mycorrhizal fungi and applying free nutrients to the plants we can't really establish that relationship and so we can't really house properly house and feed the biology in the soil that's correct it's simply following the six principles of a healthy ecosystem and those principles have a lot to do with that that a plant fungi and biology and a lot of people don't realize just how intelligent plants are plants have the ability to send off root exudates to attract biology to cycle certain nutrients and then those nutrients are transferred to the plant through mycorrhizal fungi now we have to as managers stewards of that land we have to make sure that our management of that land allows that natural system to happen do we have a living root at all times do we have the diversity of plant species do do we allow the insects and and do we have grazing animals on there do we have enough cover on the soil all of these things come into play and are part of that that's great um so one way that i like to kind of learn about a topic and dive into a topic is look at criticism on the other side and i have kind of found a few points that people point out as like regenerative agriculture is not feasible or it's not worth it so one of the claims um and there's actually quite a few quite a lot of people who who make this claim is that the nutrient density of food raised and grown in truly regenerative systems is equal to the current food that we grow in conventional systems and so we've got kind of two points here we've got the beef side so the grass-fed and finished beef the nutrient profile is basically the same as beef from feedlot what are your thoughts and responses to that i know you've been working on some research that isn't out yet and you can't really talk too much about it but just curious as to your thoughts well i will share with you for instance what we found on our own uh farm and ranch because we direct market the products that we grow and raise and do extensive testing on them and if they are going to compare protein levels something like that of beef for instance sure there's not gonna be a large difference now if they compare omega six to three ratios uh it'll vary in the the conventional model that will vary between 6 to 1 omega 6 to 3s all the way up to 55 to 1 if they're fed high amounts of distillers grain whereas the omega 6 to 3 ratio on our beef is down under 1.3 to 1 which is i mean we're getting omega 3 levels getting close to those of wild caught salmon okay so there's huge differences but beyond that if you really understand human health it's not proteins or carbohydrates it's these phytonutrients that really that really drive human health and work with dr steven van vliet at the duke university medical center uh by using a mass spectrometer which has the ability to measure over 2500 of these different phytonutrient compounds the difference is pretty remarkable between grass finish for instance and grain finished between pastured land hands and confined laying hands and we see the same thing in vegetables grown in regenerative soils versus growing in a conventional model so yes they can make that claim but they're not looking at at the big picture you know it's simply a matter of narrow focus only looking at what they want to and i'm excited to say that there's going to be a lot of research that is coming out in the very near term that's going to be addressing this and and that will really bring delight and one of our goals then is to educate the medical community and show them look when you're when you're out there working with your clients we need to really understand that food is health and not all food is the same so our goal is not to pit one facet of agriculture against another that's not our goal at all our goal is how do we move everyone forward for the betterment of all yeah that's a great point stop focusing on the macronutrients and really dig into the micronutrients and i'm really excited about all these studies coming out that you're talking about that really display the difference in the micronutrient content because honestly it's i feel like it's sometimes hard for farms to advertise hey my beef is a little bit more expensive because it's better for the environment i think that that's kind of a hard push to sell all the time because a lot of consumers can't really see that day-to-day they're really looking more towards their own health which which makes sense and so if one is really able to say like our beef is better for the environment and for your health that's a much better story and that's exciting that a lot of you you'll be with this research you'll be able to help so many farmers market their product across the country um and encourage more consumers to support regenerative agriculture so i'm really excited about these and i think people lose sight of like the micro news they don't think that beef has micronutrients i i have beef liver every day so that's my multivitamin so that's nature's multivitamin and i know i know that i am sourcing my liver from a grass-fed and finished regenerative farm and i know that it has more micronutrients than liver from the confinement let me give you a couple of examples here that you you raise very good points and for instance one day this is a true story my son and i were at the farmer's market selling our product and a gentleman come up was next in line came up to the concession trailer there and he looked over the prices and he said man your your beef is high priced before we could say anything the gentleman behind him said excuse me i just had triple bypass i'm here because their beef is truly reasonably priced because i know what happened when i ate the other and we thought wow is that great or what uh another case in point and i really think we need to to consider this as human beings now i'm not i'm not saying anything against vegetarianism veganism that's a person's choice but uh there was one time they asked me if i would have a a civil debate with a vegetarian and so i said sure i'm game but i said as part of that i get to ask them a question they can ask me any question okay so we went through debating the finer points of of eating meat versus not and then at the end i got to ask the question so i asked that person i said how many plant species did you consume yesterday and they thought about it and they said well 14 or 15. and i said okay they all have different nutrients correct yes i said okay the beef animal that i consumed yesterday ate over a hundred different plants the last day of its life who which had more nutrients then well that was the end of the argument because they know and that's the whole point and and the whole idea of bioavailability like the beef versus nutrients in a lot of plants that have to be cooked a very particular way in order to get those nutrients out of it yeah and in a case in point if you would do a uh reading from a mass spectrometer comparing uh grass finished beef versus the impossible burger and the impossible burger always touts oh the same as beef no only 13 of the phytonutrients overlap beef has way way more phytonutrients much higher quantities of them so it's not it's a lack of understanding you know and that's why my partners and i named our firm understanding ag is because we farmers ranchers and consumers all need to understand the whole story yeah i'm gonna share my screen really quickly so um we share our story and like we share about our passion relatively new especially compared to you of regenerative agriculture on social media channels and we receive a lot of pushback and i enjoy seeing where this pushback is sourced from and a lot of people have commented on some of our posts and they re they refer to this study it's from 2017 mineral nutrient composition of vegetables fruits and greens the context of reports of apparent historical declines and i think just they really hold on to this idea that no mineral nutrient composition of vegetables fruits and grains is not declining and so what this study does is it kind of just goes through all of the reports that are in the literature that talk about hey our nutrients are declining and it says no this this measurement technology was outdated and they they talk about a lot about the dilution effect and this is i think the main study that a lot of people provide pushback on regenerative agriculture but the way that i kind of see it correctly if i'm wrong is science is evolving science is changing our knowledge is changing and regenerative agriculture the term even though it was coined by rodel many years ago it's relatively new and there's not that much science documenting the changes and differences between conventionally raised vegetables and regeneratively raised vegetables are grown um and so that's kind of my understanding is there's not enough science out there yet curious as to if you've ever been shown this study before things like that yes i have and uh in general terms that study is partially correct let's put it that way because what's the key word there they're using mineral composition they're not talking about phytonutrients they're not talking about all these phenols alkaloids terpenes all these compounds that truly drive human health and that's where the big discrepancy is because soils have a mineral base and that varies accord according to where you're located so if you grow for instance a carrot on my farm in north dakota and you grow a carrot down in florida their mineral composition will be different okay their phytonutrient composition will be different but if you if you the minerals aren't going to vary near as much as the phytonutrients will because of the biology and because of all these other things so i would just i would just say to to them yes you're partially correct but here's the rest of the story and it's that rest of the story that truly drives plant health animal health human health that's great i like that answer i'm going to write that down um to put in my toolbox next time so um i think it's a great transition into you just talked about like different soils so what is your recommendation for soil testing we talked about this earlier a lot of studies right now is are only measuring the inorganic nutrients can you touch on what if someone had a new piece of property and they wanted to assess their soil health and monitor each year what tests would you suggest yes and this is the same for all of our clients now once we get into a large scale fruit vegetable production some of the high-end crops will tweak it just a little if irrigation water is used we'll definitely test the water but anyone with soil we do three tests we do the tne total nutrient extraction test down to 12 inches we do then from zero to six inches we take a and and pull samples and do what's called a haney test h-a-n-e-y however at this point in time there is only one lab in the united states that we're recommending be used for that test and here's why and what we did so because we're on such wide landscapes all over the continental united states we pulled samples and then we sent virtually the same sample you know it came out of the same uh five-gallon bucket so to speak you know you can't send the same exact sample so it'll vary just a little but we sent it to multiple labs and then we sent it to dr haney himself and we compared which lab closest was the closest match and believe it or not we found differences from 10 to over 90 percent so we only feel confident with one lab at this point in time that's regen ag lab based in in nebraska that's the lab we're using so we have them do a haney test and then we have them do what's called a plfa test plfa stands for phospholipid fatty acid and what we're testing for there is we want to know what percentage of is the bacteria component in that soil the fungal component and then also how many of the how much of that fungi is arbuscular mycorrhizal and we want to know nematodes and protozoa and things like that now that plfa test we only have to do about once every three to four years the the total nutrient extraction test we only have to do once the haney test we are doing every year it's done soil temperatures have to be 55 degrees fahrenheit or above otherwise the biology is not going to be active so we have to wait till soil temperatures reach that but you give us those three tests and we can get you a baseline and a template as to where to start here's where your biology is now here's a plan for moving that forward and a plan for how do we make your soils more biologically active that's great i know that one of our followers stephen is going to be like you i think you know stephen as well um he's going to say i told you so i did a soil we acquired a piece of property uh at the end of last summer there was just too much going on to start anything last fall so we just decided to wait until this spring but i took soil tests and i did a cash soil test so i sent that to cornell lab they're a little bit behind right now so i still haven't gotten those results back but i wish i would have done the plf at plfa and the haney um i'm gonna try to do those as soon as i didn't know about the soil temperature so i will do those as soon as i get the soil temperature back up yeah because when you're in a colder environment those pla those those uh bacteria and fungi you know they more or less hibernate spore late in that and we wait until temperatures rise and moisture conditions are favorable before they become active so we want them active when we take those tests and those really are not very expensive tests plfa is going to be the most expensive that's going to cost you 100 approximately and the haney and tne are just over fifty dollars each so it's not like it's a huge amount of money i should i should have done that steven's gonna like i said steven's gonna say told you so uh there's still time so um we have a lot of followers who are interested in starting a farm um and so i like i said we acquired a property last fall and it was very much used for conventional corn and soy crop rotation for decades um i'll just show you a brief i'm sure you can already imagine what it looks like but i'll for the audience as well um this is just some drone voted footage of top down it's about 22 acres so this on the left is 20 acres and then there's about one and a half or so on the right you can see um right here this part has hasn't been used so it's great soil right there but yeah most of this is just um conventionally corn soy crop rotation and so my goal is to convert this to beautiful perennial pastures i know that it's going to take a long time and it requires a lot of patience but i was wondering if we could talk about some tips that you would have i almost view you as kind of like a land flipper so rather than a house flipper you flip land yeah well i try and regenerate land there you go i'm not going to sell it though okay yeah okay so this is something we run into on a daily basis and and this is a lesson i learned the hard way i took uh cropland that had been farmed conventionally for years heavy tillage synthetics and i seeded it back to perennials and i got a beautiful catch as far as germination but not much production and now then as i learn more i began to understand okay i know my mistake and here's what i tell people is we've all seen the municipality the highway department whatever build a road okay so they disc everything up and they put this road down and what comes first on the side of the road it's always your annual forbes right many people call them weeds those forbs are there nature shows up you don't put them there they just show up because nature wants to heal that soil it's compacted because it was dissed it has no soil aggregation has very little biology it has poor aggregation and nutrient cycling so those annual forbs show up first then what comes the annual grasses you know you may see foxtails things like that the perennials are the last thing that shows up besides trees and shrubs of course but see that's nature's way of preparing the soil so what we do and we do this very often in our business is we have uh farmers who say okay i need to advance soil health how do i do it well we go in there with multi-species cover crops now i'm not saying you need 20 species in the mix one of the challenges for many people is you don't know what chemicals were used on there many of these chemicals nowadays has a carryover now if it was corn ground we're pretty safe that that that corn ground was not treated for much grasses it was treated more for broad leaves so you can kind of use that to your advantage as you figure out the mix but we're going to go in there with a cover crop a series of cover crops for at least two years after obviously we're going to take our our three soil tests there that'll tell us where we're at fungal to bacterial ratio how much much predator prey relationship do we have in those soils then if we have the ability to integrate livestock we're absolutely going to do that and here's why soil is about 11 parts carbon to one part of nitrogen okay so that needs to balance and the biology in the soil needs that fungal component as you talked about earlier to to move the nutrients okay what else has a really good fungal component the stomach of a rumen and what we're finding as we integrate animals we you know if you look at succession you really want your fungal to bacterial ratio to be about one to one okay most soils that have been tilled will be 10 bacteria to one fungal up to 20 bacteria to one fungal by planting very diverse cover crops a series of them you know not the same ones but we'll plant a spring seeded cover then a fall seeded biannual then a spring and summer the next year grazed with livestock and that livestock being out on there grazing defecating urinating will help move that fungal to bacterial ratio in the right direction through our testing that's when we come back after three years take another plfa if we're seeing that has changed and we're getting we're not going to get in depending where you're at to one to one but if we can get down to you know even two to one or less okay then we can start talking about seeding our perennials you may be able to seed the perennials the first year but you're not gonna get a productive stand and it's not gonna be what you want so let's take the time plant the covers integrate some animals then seed the per you know get our soil health right then seed the perennials so from from my understanding with these type of fields you'll have to do annuals probably two times in the first year all annuals and then maybe the following year you can maybe do a mix of annual perennials another mix of annuals and perennials and you're saying use that pia plfa test to know when hey it's i'm the the fungal bacterial ratio is at a place where i can now just fully see perennials and it will be successful yes i don't know usually that second year we don't put in a whole lot of perennials with it all depends on where you're at though and the plfa test will show you that so use that as a guideline one of the reasons is you look at the cost of these perennials you know you get some into some of the forbs and that and you're talking literally hundreds of dollars per pound i don't want people spending that kind of money unless their soil is is ready uh for that that's a good point um okay so you would suggest no-till seeding but i've heard you talk a lot about how using chemicals on land is kind of like a person who uses drugs and you can't just pull the drugs away from that drug addict you have to slowly wean off so if you're looking at like a two to three year timeline of annuals two times year one annuals two times year two how do you suggest leaning off those agrochemicals yep yep and and i'll use this as an example a very large client of mine they were actually organic certified for years but they were going backwards soil health was destroyed and and you know the tests we did showed nutrient cycling was to very poor they were in a a semi-brittle environment low moisture and i after walking on the land taking the proper soil test spending time i had to ask them the hard question how bad do you want that organic certification and their answer was it's more important we're going broke this way and i'm in no way bashing organic but in that circumstance they wanted to move down the regenerative path more than they were worried about the organic certification so i told them okay here's what we're gonna do you're actually going to use some herbicide right away because due to the heavy tillage they had such a wheat infestation there that whatever cover crop was seeded would just would lose out and it wouldn't amount to much i said let's use a herbicide let's no till in a cover crop let's use a small amount and just a small amount of nitrogen because we need to grow some biomass to pump root exudates to feed biology we did that one year one time is all but that was the jump start the system needed you know then we're able to start pulling back now they're not growing they're mostly a grazing system so they're not needing high cash crop production so it'd be a little different there other areas we could certainly uh eliminate the herbicides but you're going to have to put a a cover crop such as cereal rye or something and roll it down and then no-till your diverse cover crop into that you know so there's ways it's all goes back to the principle of context you know you've got to fit your context what's your environment where are you at your moisture etc so there's many different ways to address this issue but you just don't take soils that are for lack of a better term addicted to these synthetics and pull them off just cold turkey i mean it can be done but boy it's it's not it you know you better be ready for what happens because it's going to take some time yeah so it will planting these annuals will require fertilizer and herbicide herbicide use no may depending on your context okay if you're an organic producer i would never recommend well i'm not going to recommend if if they want to stay in organic gr production whether it be vegetables grains i'm not going to tell you no you can't do that we'll work in that context then you're going to have to substitute some cover crops rolled down you might have to uh substitute some manures etc you know organic type amendments okay the soil tests will dictate the rate at which we wean these people this soil off of those of those synthetics i see so i've heard of some farmers who have struggled um with no-till seeding they had a hard time getting the seeds to germinate and successfully uh out-compete some of the other things what is your best suggestion or best tip for no-till seeding this cover crop cocktail have you not yes and again it comes down to context where are you at you know in my semi-brittle environment in central north dakota we don't get enough moisture for broadcast seeding to work we have to put that into the soil the seed into the soil place it there and get good seed soil contact uh with the no-till equipment that's out there today that's not at all difficult to do okay now now if you're limited as to the equipment you have we'll have to look at at best options then but so often people um farmers are that will say well i tried no-till but it didn't work well tell me the rest of the story okay why didn't it work you know was it was it improper equipment was it improper seed placement were was there a perennial root established there and you were trying to seed annuals into perennials you know that doesn't work too well so i need a lot larger context before i can can talk about a specific situation oh yeah um okay so back to like animal integration and how important it is to get that fungal to bacterial ratio going um what would you suggest so for someone with like a small plot of property like mine 22 acres um what animals would you suggest putting in there as of right now our kind of plan is to get a large block of egg layers out there relatively soon because they don't need a perimeter fence they don't necessarily need a bunch of forage right now and we were thinking that we'd be able to move them around to get some chicken manure and then once the annuals established and we get some grasses out there we were going to put lamb because we only have 22 acres so they've had they would have a little bit less harsh animal impact what are your thoughts on that kind of plan and what would be your suggestion for a smaller 20 20 to 30 acres and it's all context it is all context and in your context now now you know with egg layers etc you might want to go with a a mesh type portable fence to move something like that confinement if not you certainly need a livestock guard dog with them sheep and laying hands are a perfect fit broilers would work i i tend to shy away from ducks and geese when you're trying to establish new seedlings because they will grub it right down to the ground i shy away from horses also there is a possibility if it's in an area where you have a neighbor somebody who has some cattle that you know with today's fencing technology uh polywire that's easily fenced in just a matter of an hour or two and and you can get some some larger animals on there if that's possible okay if not then then leave the the cattle out and go with sheep and laying hands that's a good plan yeah you're gonna need a lot of them to cover 22 acres and not so much sheep but but the laying hens oh yeah um but what about so there's five principles of regenerative agriculture and then like we brought up you've brought up a number of times in in this interview so far you bring in the sixth which is context um and i think that you talk about this like rotational grazing so i think most of my audience is familiar with this um you move your livestock so that way the manure is more spread out they don't pull all the grasses out so take 50 lead 50 um and we want to be able to allow that land to rest and to you always talk about context in terms of that resting period and so i know that it's it's really hard to just like prescribe these like general principles but for 22 acres how do you and you split it up into different paddocks and you get lamb where do you even begin with like a grazing plan or how how many lamb would you even suggest for that type of property yup so a number of different things when we talk context we're talking about your historical ecological context in other words what was that land like a thousand years ago now none of us know obviously but we can imagine and one of the things we're seeing in agriculture today is that that we're not farming or ranching within our context i'll give you a few examples so i was consulting in eastern colorado very brittle environment 10 inches of moisture and they're trying to grow corn that's out of context corn should not be grown in that brittle of environment i was up north of edmonton canada and they're trying to grow soybeans soybeans are a warm season crop it's out of context there you know there's a reason gabe doesn't grow bananas in north dakota it's out of context not going to survive so we have to farm our ranch in our context now how many animals in the recovery time fits into context what's your average rainfall there excuse me uh approximately i'm in southwest michigan oh okay southwest michigan you'd be you know uh 25 to 35 inches easily okay of the average annual rainfall yep so so uh where i'm at we only get about 12 inches of rainfall and then another six inches of moisture from snow i can't grow as much biomass here as you can okay excuse me so where you where you start is okay i know my rainfall i know my frost-free days i can measure my biomass production and then it's just a simple mathematical formula okay an animal let's just use beef animals for simplicity's sake eats about three percent of its body weight and dry matter per day so if you have a thousand pound cow that's 30 pounds per cow per day we measure the above ground biomass we take half of that we know for every inch of above ground biomass we're going to have about a hundred pounds of above ground forage so if you have 20 inches of forage at 100 pounds that's 2 000 pounds per acre we want to take half leave half and i know i'm going rather fast here but they'd have about a thousand pounds of biomass a cow needs 30 pounds you divide 30 into into a thousand you know you can run 33 approximately cows on that acre for one day and and and okay so that's where you start and you figure out okay here's where i'm at always always though air on the conservative side the number one thing well there's two things that we really see and i'm i'm you know besides tillage okay besides tillage because that's just so detrimental to soil health the next two critical factors are number one you have to have a living plant out there as long as possible throughout the year most farmers and ranchers they grow a crop harvest that crop but then there's nothing growing there they'll go out and either chemically spray it or till it you know and and what's feeding biology the biology is what's going to cycle nutrients what's going to make you money why won't you have a growing plant there and then the next thing is they don't have enough armor or residue on that soil surface nature's always trying to cover the soil you should never want to see bare soil on any of your property or your garden you know gardeners what's the first thing they do they go out and rototill that's absolutely the worst thing they could do especially when they're going to consume those vegetables you just don't want to do that that that lowers nutrient density so we have to look at those things and then we can determine and uh on our understanding ag website we can we have the formulas as to how to measure biomass production and then plan accordingly but the important thing is you have to what's your resource concern and what's your goal your goal is to have a living plant have armor on the soil be capturing sunlight you want to err on the side of caution you don't want too many animals on there that's a good especially year one and it'll save costs a little bit i want to circle back to something really quickly because this is applicable to uh our plans on our property you mentioned horses um would you advise not having horses how many years would you advise not having horses on a piece of property such as i showed you that's been conventionally corn in soy yeah and the reason for not having horses not having ducks geese right away is simply they can really inhibit a plant from its roots getting established reaching perennial status as that new seedling starts to grow it's easy for a horse or a duck or a goose to pull that whole plant out then you have nothing so once it's established after a couple years it's no problem as long as we're moving them okay don't leave them on the same place well i think that's something that we kind of missed to touch on so there's annuals and perennials ideally your grasses have a ton of perennials because perennials have larger root systems which means we can sequester more carbon more stable carbon in these fields but like you mentioned they take longer to for those roots to establish and so annuals can jump start the field and getting that carbon sequestration going and so you're saying like horses would really be able to pull those roots out for all the annuals that you're pre printing so uh planning so maybe it's a a good like once you can get perennials growing then that's probably a good place to put horses on okay that's right and realize there will always be at least there should always be some annuals in a perennial system in a healthy ecosystem there is some annual plants but i think it's important to mention here another thing is that diversity within a perennial system what we're seeing is and this is rough ballpark you're going to want about 60 to 65 percent grasses about 20 to 25 uh forbes in other words your broad leaves and only a small percentage 10 to 15 percent legumes too many people put way too much legumes in the mix that throws off carbon to nitrogen ratios it lowers wa infiltration lowers aggregation because of the lack of carbon yeah because they need to balance that we see so often in production agriculture people plant way too many legumes in the system yeah and so is that one of the reasons why you advise being careful about spreading a bunch of chicken manure out there too yeah and what we're seeing we work a lot and it seems we get called in in problem situations where you know in the current production model there's a lot of feedlot or confinement manures doesn't matter whether we're talking dairy beef swine poultry that's totally different than what falls out of the back end of an animal when it's out on pasture what falls out of the back end of them is full of fungi and active biology which are healthy yeah what's composted or has been in lagoons etc is actually it accumulates salts it goes anaerobic it is not fungal dominant and it's actually negative to the ecosystem now i am not saying don't go apply those you know they have to go somewhere but just be very very careful of over application of those okay that's i think that's important to consider just don't don't overdo it because it can have negative consequences especially when you're re-establishing that uh bacteria to fungi ratio okay um kind of a pull out of the like bigger picture question a little bit um where do you see regenerative agriculture going with the current force of plant-based agenda and these 3d printed meats you've got the cultured meat which honestly scares me a little bit because they're actually using like cells from these cows how do you advise these regenerative farmers to best set them up set them up for success in this current climate and plant-based agenda and anti-carol movement yeah and what i tell them is that you need to educate yourself you need to educate yourself how ecosystems function you need to educate yourself how these nutrients are moved through the soil profile and we spoke a little bit about that here today and then you need to do what you can to advance the health of the ecosystems on your farm or ranch as you do that you will increase the amount of these phytonutrients in the products that you produce and then do testing you know it amazes me how many people i talk to they may be direct marketing but they've never done a nutrient test on any of the produce that they grow on any of the pastured proteins that they raise you need to do that and then you need to arm yourself with the knowledge that hey i don't have to worry about plant-based diets a plant is one plant okay an animal consumes many many things we should be eating both plants and animals you know but these these uh all these uh lab based proteins they will never ever come close to competing with with animals plants that are raised grown in a healthy soil because it takes soil it takes that biology to provide those phytonutrients and all those other compounds that will come out more and more in the near future as science begins to understand this the beautiful thing about that is too i get calls and emails almost on a daily basis from members of the medical community who are looking for this knowledge they realize that that human health is directly related to what we put in our mouths and that's directly the result of what's in the soil at least it should be most of what people consume today are food like substances they're not real it's not real food and so we're seeing you know for all the bad that kovid did and is doing it's brought uh real awareness and to this top that you know you look unfortunately those who are succumbing to covet it's a large part goes back to their unhealthy immune system and our gut health is directly related to the biology in the soil and we can only improve our health when we consume plants and animal proteins that were grown and raised in healthy soil yeah i think that that's one of the reasons why we have like an obese and malnourished nation um we're missing a lot of like we talked about at the beginning of the conversation like those phytonutrients the micronutrients that we're just not getting in lab-grown food or uh conventionally raised produce um there's these benefits exactly but then also i think a missing piece in the plant-based movement is there's also the environmental benefits can you just briefly touch on the benefits of good grazing so neither of us here are proponents of confinement operations or over grazing where people keep their cows or livestock in the same plot of land and are destroying root systems we're talking about adaptive multipatic raising we're leaving time for rest can you talk about some of the benefits of these type of and why it's beneficial to add animals into for example cash crops and other farms you know right now of course large talk about carbon and how we're going to take carbon out of the atmosphere put it in the soil there is nothing that can come close to sequestering or moving carbon out of the atmosphere into the soil and it's really a cycle you're not sequestering it it's in a cycle but as can grazing so what happens an animal grazes a plant that plant just how it evolved knows boy i was injured i need to regrow so i gotta send root exudates out into the soil to attract biology so i can regrow well that's going to take more carbon out of the atmosphere then because that plant has to photosynthesize more has to slough those carbon compounds into the soil so that speeds up that process while it does that you're getting much greater biodiversity in the soil you're feeding more biology that biology then is bringing more nutrients and a varied amount of nutrients to that plant you're building soil aggregates soil aggregates are critical for the home of biology and for a water infiltration so you're helping with clean air clean water you're helping the carbon cycle you're increasing nutrient density of the plants what we're seeing over and over again as we do case studies on these regenerative farms and ranches and this past year we did a number of them where we we tested the same type whether a variety whether it was vegetables or grains or pastured proteins on a conventional operation and then on a regenerative neighbor the differences in these phytocompounds were significant and the studies that are being done that show carbon sequestration significantly more multiples higher and so what i tell people is i don't care where your interest lies if your interest is in climate change if it's interested if your interest isn't is including water if it's in clean air if it's in farm profitability if it's in revitalizing rural communities if it's in human health regenerative agriculture can play a role in all of those so why can't we all come together even though our specific interests may be a little different we can all come together for the greater good let's not worry about the 20 of things we don't agree on that'll work itself out let's all come together for the greater good and that's why regenerative agriculture is such a buzzword right now i don't care where you go and and what circle you're talking in that's what they're talking about and that's the reason why because it addresses so many concerns yeah that's great so anything you would have done differently with what you know now flashback to when you started implementing regenerative agriculture practices so any kind of like best advice for someone starting from scratch such as myself yeah yeah and realize i was already a no-tiller and and so i was 100 zero till the next thing i would have done without a doubt is add diversity and by that i mean diversity of plant species rather than just growing two or three species in a cover crop i would have made sure it was seven eight or ten species in a cover crop and have that living root in the soil as long as possible throughout the year but then also make sure there's armor on the soil surface never ever allow bare soil on your farmer ranch because if you do it's negatively affecting biology it's negatively affecting the nutrient cycle the water cycle it's just critical to always have that soil covered those are a few of the keys right away that i would have done differently okay cool one thing i want audience to know is where can they find your resources so understanding ag and soil health academy how can they get you have a consulting surface surf service right you work with farms to help them implement these practices where can people find out about this information sure they so they can go to understandingag.com or soilhealthacademy.org org and i would also mention that we just released an online course on regenerative agriculture and so you can go online you can take the course it's a nine module course uh just full of lots of uh information is professionally done and that's a very good basis for anyone wanting to move down the regenerative path okay thank you all right so as a concluding question um we share about regenerative agriculture but we're also huge in health and wellness and um i'm a big proponent of nose-to-tail style eating where make usage of the whole animal and some of those organs and off parts are some of the most micro nutrient dense like i said liver so if you could choose a cut from any animal what would that animal be and what cut what is gabe's favorite piece of meat or organ yeah it would have to be it would have to be liver that is i enjoy liver of all species uh beef lamb pork uh and and uh eat chicken uh i really like cuts like uh beef cheek yeah shank you know oxtail i really like it where there's a lot of collagen and and things like that uh yeah i'll still eat a ribeye steak but but you're gonna have a hard time not getting me to eat bone marrow and things like that those are all on the top of my list babe you get it you're optimizing your muscle meat and collagen intake proud of you those are some great choices those are honestly the top of my list i'd say beef cheeks are my favorite like muscle meat cut even though it's still an offal and then liver every day i love liver so much yeah that's great that's great and make sure it's grass-fed yes absolutely all right well thank you so much gabe i really appreciate you taking the time to come on our channel i i know that our audience will enjoy this conversation so i appreciate it very much thank you it was a pleasure being with you

Channel: Strong.Sistas

Views: 9,028

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Keywords: gabe brown, regenerative farming, regenerative agriculture, soil health, climate change, first generation farmer, new farmer, regenerative farmer, farmher, regenerative ag, regenerative agriculture gabe brown, regenerative grazing, cover crops, no till farming, save the soil, female farmers, holistic management, savory institute, perennial pastures, carbon sequestration, farming, rotational grazing cattle, rotational grazing, regenerative agriculture cattle, polyface farm

Id: l3YChuM4e58

Length: 63min 7sec (3787 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 27 2021