I have been guilty of scarcity thinking too, found myself looking at just about everything through a lens of scarcity. Lack of farmland, dwindling supplies of precious fossil fuels, a shortage of political heroes, inadequate access to clean water, not enough money or jobs or aid for Haiti or Syria--the list could go on and on. But this is exactly the thinking that caused our current predicaments--fear of terrorism that started wars that validated our fear, fear of dwindling commodity prices that made western farmers deepen their debt to grow ever-larger monocultures of wheat, soy & canola, fear of pests that made them spray and cause resistance, fear of weeds that made us organic farmers till until we were exhausted and the weeds had learned to set seed in two weeks. All of our anxiety about resources drying up has drawn the reserves down further and made our problems worse.
When we switch to abundance thinking, we can focus instead on building up the valuable resources we do have--like the soil.
As Dorn Cox (a Wall Street securities broker-turned carbon farmer) put it, "The soil here is like a bank to which I'm making a deposit of carbon that will create a natural form of compound interest...The true costs of conventional agriculture, which must include a full accounting of fossil fuel extraction and pollution, far exceed the biological rate of return. These costs deplete bank accounts by removing their carbon deposits. No-till, in contrast, builds compound interest and creates real wealth because it builds life in the soil."
Real Wealth
It may seem unrealistic to equate carbon with money in this sense - but if you consider that carbon makes up everything you work for, from the fuel in your car to the food on your plate, the walls of your house, the cells in your body and the dollar bill in your pocket, you realize that this is the real currency. According to White's book, A 2 percent increase in the world's soil carbon could absorb all of our atmosphere's excess within ten years. Such an increase would not only solve our climate change problem but would increase soil fertility, aggregate stability, water retention and the nutrient density of our food by orders of magnitude. (White points out that our food is much less nutritious than even 30 years ago; it is not uncommon to find oranges on the market today that contain zero vitamin C. You can eat yourself sick and still not get the vitamins you need from today's produce because our soil no longer contains these minerals in adequate amounts.)
Fortunately for us, farmers are uniquely poised to turn this whole mess around - they can literally mine carbon from the atmosphere and lock it underground, building fertility for generations to come while producing better-quality food. More fortunately, scientists, farmers and plant breeders are now working together to develop regenerative systems that not only produce well but also accurately measure and build soil carbon - real wealth. Thanks to a small group of revolutionary growers, we know how to grow no-till vegetables - but how do we sequester carbon while producing vast acreage of the bulk of our carbohydrate (energy) intake - grains?
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| The Land Institute's deep-rooted Kernza wheat (R), and annual wheat (L) |
For many years organic farmers have followed the work of The Land Institute, a group of researchers in Kansas dedicated to perennializing grains, eliminating the need for tillage while utilizing species with much longer root systems (and therefore water and carbon-holding capacity). Perennializing wheat may sound like a simple matter of plant breeding - but in reality it takes many, many years of work. The plant breeders of the Land Institute have a unique evolutionary challenge to overcome; namely, that perennial plants tend to produce fewer, and smaller seeds than annuals, which depend on large, abundant seeds for species survival. In spite of these challenges, the Land Institute has made progress and recently released their first perennial wheat, called Kernza. According to their website, the wheat seed produced is currently about 1/5 the size of commercial annual wheat, and is lower in gluten (less suitable for bread). But the new perennial wheat is getting people excited, and Patagonia Provisions is using exclusively Kernza wheat in its new Long Root Ale. The Land Institute is also breeding perennial sunflowers (Silphium) and sorghum.
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| Perennial polyculture at the Land Institute |
The Land Institute researchers know that nothing grows in isolation--a meadow or prairie must be comprised of a variety of species for resilience, and this is a powerful lesson for us humans. We have seen the weakness of industrial agriculture, how vulnerable monoculture is to severe weather, to climate change, disease and pests, how it scratched away the thick skin of prairie topsoil that once covered America and left a thin sheet of gray lifeless dust behind. We are finally becoming aware that it does not yield better than diversified systems, and that the combination of constant tillage, soil kept bare with herbicides and short roots of annual crops results in devastatingly rapid erosion...it's as though we learned nothing from the Great Depression. Fortunately, The Land Institute isn't stopping with perennial monocultures - they're now focused on developing combinations of perennial plants that grow well together. Perennial polycultures of long-rooted edible grains not only survive extreme weather better, but provide farmers with a kind of insurance protecting crops and the carbon bank. They both mitigate and prepare for the effects of climate change.
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| Rodale's Roller-Crimper |
As we await the arrival of more
perennial grains, there is a new system for growing no-till grains organically that we can embrace. Thanks to years of R&D conducted by the Rodale Institute, growers like Dorn Cox of Tuckaway Farm in New Hampshire have embraced a more carbon-friendly system for growing grains. Tuckaway is especially carbon-friendly because they produce their own biodiesel from canola, but the system would be an improvement even if they didn't.
They use an implement developed by Rodale called the Roller-Crimper, a large metal cylinder covered in a raised chevron (tractor tire) pattern that rolls in front of a tractor or behind horses, effectively crushing and killing weeds but leaving them in place to keep the soil mulched. The cylinder is hollow and can be filled or emptied of water to change the crushing pressure. Ideally, at the same time the crimper is being dragged over the field, a drill seeder implement is sowing the next grain or legume crop, which can then grow up through the crimped, dying mulch. Like any system dependent on complexity as opposed to herbicides, crimped no-till grains aren't without challenges; it's important to crimp at the right stage, and fields can become weedy if the crop germinates unevenly. But farmers like Cox are not only making it work - achieving yields comparable to conventional grain production - but seeing rapid increases in soil organic matter as they cease tilling and spraying, instead opting for a natural cover crop that keeps the soil covered year-round.
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| Oats and native grasses at Winona |
Farmers in the arid Western US are only now hitting a wall when it comes to resources depleted by climate change. Farmers in Australia, on the other hand, have been fighting this battle for centuries - and a few more recent ones have been winning, in spite of years of degradation caused by tillage. On his family's 2,000 acre Winona Farm in New South Wales, Colin Seis has been rebuilding soil and the farm's fortunes with pasture-cropping, an integrated system of growing both livestock and grains on the same piece of land. The system works because of the relationship between C3, or cool-season plants (like cereal grains), C4, or warm-season plants (like native grasses), and livestock.
Basically, the cereal crop (C3) plant is drilled into the native grass mixture (C4) in the winter, while it's dormant. The reduced competition allows the cereal crop to grow and mature before the native grass begins vigorous growth, and the removal of the cereal crop then frees more resources for the grasses to thrive. In the fall when the C4 grasses are one more going dormant, livestock are allowed to graze the grass and crop residue, fertilizing and removing weeds in preparation for the next seeding.
By using this pasture-cropping system, Seis has returned the family farm to profitability and the soil to native grasslands, increased the farm's sheep carrying-capacity, eliminated the use of fertilizers and plows, increased minerals and nutrients 150%, and increased soil carbon 203% in ten years. Perhaps most impressively, he is able to achieve the same yields as conventional cropping, with oat yields averaging about 2.5 tons per acre (in addition to the meat and wool products he produces).
These are just a few of the cutting-edge methods being used by regenerative farmers around the world, and more will certainly be developed. By shifting to these proven techniques for building soil fertility, we can begin to sequester carbon deep in the soil, rather than just on the vulnerable surface. By thinking about the abundance of carbon in the atmosphere as a valuable source of soil fertility that can feed the world, we can begin to address the challenges that we face as 21st century agrarians.
