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Why Soil Is the Key to Regeneration with David Montgomery
146 Plays2 days ago
If regenerative agriculture is about rebuilding the foundations of our food system, then soil is where that story starts.
Geologist and author David Montgomery has spent decades tracing how the health of our soil shapes everything else: the nutrition in our food, the resilience of our farms, and the long-term fate of entire civilizations. What he shows is both sobering and energizing. We have degraded our soils at an astonishing pace, yet we now understand enough about how they actually work to turn the tide.
In this conversation, David helps us zoom out. He connects the collapse of ancient societies to the vulnerabilities we see in modern industrial agriculture, and he lays out what farmers around the world are doing to rebuild soil faster than it erodes. If regeneration is the goal, soil biology is the map.
In this episode, we get into:
• How soil degradation has shaped the rise and fall of societies
• The real consequences of erosion, tillage, and synthetic nitrogen
• Why soil microbes are central to nutrient density and farm resilience
• What regenerative farmers are proving about soil recovery timelines
• Three core principles that can rebuild fertility at scale
• Why technology must complement, not replace, ecological understanding
• The policies and incentives needed to make soil health the baseline, not the exception
More about David:
David R. Montgomery is a MacArthur Fellow and professor of geomorphology at the University of Washington. He studies landscape evolution and the effects of geological processes on ecological systems and human societies. An author of award-winning popular-science books, he has been featured in documentary films, network and cable news, and on a wide variety of TV and radio programs. His books have been translated into ten languages. He lives in Seattle with his wife, and co-author, Anne Biklé. Their latest book What Your Food Ate: How to Heal Our Land and Reclaim Our Health was published summer 2022. Connect with them at www.dig2grow.com.
Agrarian Futures is produced by Alexandre Miller, who also wrote our theme song. This episode was edited by Drew O’Doherty.
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Transcript
Regenerative Agriculture's Role in Future Sustainability
00:00:01
Speaker
This could really be a pivotal turning point in human history. By 2200 or so, we may be sort of through human population peak. And that's where I think that the power of thinking about regenerative styles of agriculture that can rebuild soil fertility as a consequence of farming really comes into play.
Introduction to Agrarian Futures Season Two
00:00:19
Speaker
Because if we can come through the next 100 years with the farmland that we have already yeah on this planet, then that world of 2200 is going to be in much better shape than the world today.
00:00:30
Speaker
In season two of Agrarian Futures, we're starting with a simple question. How did we get here? Farms are disappearing. Land is getting harder to access. Rural economies are hollowing out.
00:00:42
Speaker
But there are people building better ways forward. Join us as we investigate what's broken in our food system and what it looks like to build something better.
Meet the Expert: Bridging Science and Communication
00:00:56
Speaker
David, thank you so much for being willing to join us on the Agrarian Futures podcast and have this conversation. I really look forward to having you here because you're one of the rare people that has a longer term perspective than I do. I usually think of myself as having a long term perspective because I work with trees and I work in the span of decades. But decades, they don't even register as a blink in your world of geology, right? It's fun to work with or to to read the works of someone who is thinking on the scale of thousands of years, millions of years, and even longer yet. I've also loved your books. Your writing is fantastic. And I'd say it does a really extraordinary job of being
00:01:41
Speaker
bridging really deep science and communicating it in a way that lay people can understand. i think the first book of yours that I read was The Rocks Don't
How Soil Treatment Shaped Civilizations
00:01:50
Speaker
Lie. And as someone who really does not care at all about rocks and doesn't understand rocks and doesn't know anything about them, I like the biology side. I like the plant side. I don't know anything about rocks. But the way that you told the story was fantastic and actually got me interested in understanding what is going on in the world around me in the rocks that tell a very significant story. So you're a wonderful communicator. And if I have any recommendations to people who are listening right now is to go out and get some of your books and read them because there's such fantastic lenses into understanding the natural world.
00:02:27
Speaker
Thanks for having me on. And, you know, I can't help but love to hear you say things like that. As a writer, you know, it it can be kind of a lonely experience. You know, you write stuff, then you put it out in the world. And, you know, hearing back from readers is sort of a shot in the arm to keep you going as a writer.
00:02:42
Speaker
And it's it's fun. I mean, that longer time frame is an interesting perspective on agriculture. I never thought, you know, and as an undergraduate student in geology that I'd be ah and eventually writing about yeah both the past and the future of agriculture. But that process of trying to understand the state of science and translate it into science.
00:03:03
Speaker
a fairly, not simplified, but a simple and meaningful conveyance of what we know and how that means we might want to think about interacting with the natural world. That's the kind of stuff that i really enjoy doing. It's a lot of fun. And it's sort of part and parcel of being a professor, but not everybody's inclined to do that kind of translation of science from the world of academe into the everyday world of how might we farm or how might we set up our agricultural policies. It's been fun getting into that and looking into that. You know, and naturally would recommend my books too, but I'm a little biased.
00:03:36
Speaker
Fully agree. There's a whole bunch of different books that we could draw from for this conversation, but I really wanted to focus today on a book that you wrote about 20 years ago called Dirt, The Erosion of Civilization. I think I got that right, right?
00:03:50
Speaker
Yeah, except it's plural. The Erosion of Civilizations.
Historical Farming Practices and Soil Degradation
00:03:53
Speaker
Even worse. Yeah, because the lesson is that basically the way people have treated land in the past, time and again, has affected the longevity of civilizations. And that's the book that, as a geologist, got me into thinking about soils.
00:04:06
Speaker
So if listeners wanted a a mental picture of what the progression looks like to go from, let's say healthy, intact ecosystems where we're building soil year over year to, in the extreme cases, the desert or degraded landscapes, it seems like it would be first you have the axe that chops down the trees and then you have the plow that comes in and churns over the soil year in and year out and leaves it bare.
00:04:33
Speaker
leaving it open for erosion. And then when there's no more farmland left or no more soil left on which to farm, then you have grazing livestock come through. And in our dry regions of the Middle East or Greece, you're talking about goats and sheep. And those in particular, goats in particular, can be very, very destructive to the landscape. Any kind of vegetation that wants to grow there will be chewed down to nothing. Delete it all, right? Yeah. eventually all you have is the desert. Is that a fair assessment of the progression of things and how it's happened in the Fertile Crescent and in other places throughout the world?
00:05:12
Speaker
Yes and no. And the yes part is that, yeah, that's a pretty broad progression. But the no part is that it really depends on the geography of where you're talking about. And that model that you just laid out certainly does apply in some places in the past. Libya be an example. Syria is probably an example too. Places that have been massively desertified by human actions over the last few thousand years.
00:05:32
Speaker
But in the more sort of temperate regions like Western Europe and North America, that last phase hasn't been so much of a deal. And so the way I like to think about it is that you've got two basic components of how farming practices degrade soils.
00:05:50
Speaker
One is the loss of the soil itself, and that's the erosion part. And that's where that first part of the of the cycle that you were looking at is, yeah, that's been happening. That's happened time and again all over the world where the native vegetation is cleared, farming comes in. And then if you lose soil faster than you're remaking it or that or faster than nature can remaking it.
00:06:11
Speaker
then it's really only a matter of time before you either run out or deplete it so much that it starts to impact harvests. And there's a subtlety to the geography there as well, in the sense that if you're on a big river floodplain, say like i along the Nile or along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in the Fertile Crescent,
00:06:29
Speaker
Out on those floodplains, you can plow the crap out of soil for thousands of years and still grow food. Why? Because it floods. And what does the flood bring? It brings in new soil to replace the soil that ran off when the rain that fell onto the freshly plowed fields. So there's that basic erosion problem, the loss of the soil, which certain geographies, like Big River floodplains, are kind of immune to.
00:06:49
Speaker
But then once farming spreads up onto the hillsides where they don't flood, that clock starts ticking you when you start plowing hill slopes. It can take a few centuries to a thousand years to really sort of lose the soil itself, but you don't have to lose all the soil to lose its fertility. Why? Because the best stuff is on top.
Modern Farming Challenges and Solutions
00:07:08
Speaker
And so your topsoil is where a lot of the native fertility of a natural soil is. And if you lose the topsoil, which is often only about six to 12 inches thick, you know it doesn't take that long for a few generations of farming to do that, if it's farmed in a way that leaves the soil vulnerable to erosion by water by wind.
00:07:28
Speaker
And so that's their one style of land degradation. The other style land degradation is the loss of soil organic matter, because that's essentially the fuel that drives the biology that helps to cycle nutrients in the soil and keep soils naturally productive.
00:07:43
Speaker
And both tillage, plowing, and also synthetic nitrogen fertilizer use. are big impacts on organic matter in the soil. And why is that? Well, tillage, if you basically stir the soil up with a plow, you've basically oxygenated it and you stimulate a whole lot of bacterial degradation of the organic matter that's in the soil. And also the application of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers, it's a little counterintuitive, but there's good science that shows that Those tend to accelerate the loss of soil organic matter because the nitrogen fertilizers stimulate bacterial activity that then attacks the soil organic matter. And that's the stuff that ends up getting into the crops more so than some of the nitrogen in the fertilizer. It's it's sort of an an interesting connection there.
00:08:28
Speaker
So you have these two different mechanisms for degrading land that both relate to tillage, to plowing, but some of them are more related to modern agricultural techniques like the nitrogen fertilizers. And you have this wonderful history of traditional farming and indigenous practices that have developed ways to try and minimize the loss of the soil or or minimize the loss of organic matter, whether that's through cover crops or companion cropping or crop rotations. There's a lot of these sort of old ideas.
00:08:58
Speaker
that made a lot of sense for trying to combat that combination of erosion and degradation of organic matter. And yet still, there's plenty of societies around the world that plowed themselves out of business as the dirt book got into. And that was the eye opener for me is that This is like organic agriculture that did this them. I mean, the Romans didn't have on set, right? Classical Greeks did not have bear.
00:09:20
Speaker
I sort of wrestled hard in writing the dirt book. If the way that we have farmed has undermined the stability of societies in the past, and yet we're able to do it on steroids now. What does that mean for the future of how we farm and how we think about it? And where I ended up in writing the Dirt Book was that, oh, well, we need to move to no-till and we need to move to organic because we need to basically stop the erosion and we need to stop the degradation of soil organic
Diverse Practices for Soil Health
00:09:46
Speaker
matter. I'm much more comfortable now arguing that what we need are farming practices that build soil health rather than sort of identify two specific techniques of no-till and organic
00:09:55
Speaker
What we need are practices that maintain the integrity of the soil as a physical object and maintain its fertility as a biochemical reactor. And that's basically maintaining its organic matter content. And there's a lot of different ways to do that, it turns out. It's not just as simple as organic versus conventional or biodynamic versus, you know, your favorite other kind or agroforestry versus this or that. There's lots of different labels we could put on soil health building farming practices.
00:10:22
Speaker
But unfortunately, they're almost all what we would now call alternative farming practices because they're not the mainstream practices which do degrade, result in the loss of the soil and the loss of soil fertility over time. So we're kind of at an inflection point in human history and the Dirt Book took me up to the present in terms of thinking about the the kinds of mistakes people have made in the past and the kinds of things that have worked for a while, at least in the past. But there's a a lot to think about going forward. But yeah, the story of past societies is is a rich one in terms of how people have treated their land. And the basic story is pretty simple.
00:10:55
Speaker
Societies that did not take care of their soil did not last. Can you explain the mechanism of that a little bit? And you give a lot of examples in the book that i would encourage people to get into. The simplistic way that I think about this is that but so long as you're farming on the valley bottom, you're you're pretty much OK. And then once your population gets to the size where then you get pushed up and up and up the hill, you're OK for a little while, whether that's a couple of decades, couple of hundred years, however long that that is. And your population continues to grow, but your resource is getting depleted all the while. Now you're producing food and so it looks fine for a long time. But at a certain point, the the degradation of the resource that's supporting you outstrips your population growth. And then you really get into a problem, whether it's a big rain event or a big drought.
00:11:44
Speaker
There are things that knock the the society off balance and people get hungry because there's too many people being supported by a land base that is not rich or strong enough anymore. And then you get lots of problems when you have a lot of people who are hungry and then they start to fight amongst each other.
00:12:01
Speaker
They want food, so they they go and find someone else to take the food from or whatever that looks like. is that roughly what the progression seems to look like?
Impact of Erosion Rates and Sustainable Techniques
00:12:08
Speaker
Grossly, yeah. That's sort of ah a reasonable sort of rough approximation where any particular part of the world is going to have exceptions to the pieces of that. But that's essentially it. If you think about the time frame once farming practices get out of valley bottoms up into erosion-prone terrain, the UN's Global Soil Database records that native soils around the world tend to be about a half a meter to two-thirds of a meter thick, so roughly two feet thick-ish.
00:12:32
Speaker
or one to two feet thick. You then look at the sort of average rate of soil erosion in the world today from conventional agricultural practices, and it's about a millimeter a year on average globally. ah published a paper in the Proceedings of National Academy back in the same time DIRT came out, because i did the research at the same time. so I was looking into the scientific literature and then writing this popular account, and then I would publish the results in the scientific literature and then the popular account as better storytelling. Yeah. You're allowed to use more interesting language in a book than you can in a journal.
00:13:04
Speaker
But that one millimeter average rate of soil erosion off of conventionally plowed fields today sounds like a really slow rate, right? A millimeter a year, your fingernails grow faster than that. But when you think about it over time, that's where you start to get concerned because that millimeter a year translates into it only takes 24 years to lose an inch of soil.
00:13:23
Speaker
So a couple decades to lose an inch of soil. And if the world's soils are an average six to 12 inches thick, You're dealing with decades to a couple centuries of intensive farming to actually degrade the land so much that you might actually burn through the topsoil.
00:13:38
Speaker
And this has happened in places. Normally, you don't like completely run out of dirt, right? And and I'm not arguing that the world's going to run out of dirt in 100 But it's that balance between the ability to grow food on the land and how many people you have to feed that is the issue. And right now we're looking at you know the human population growing by, what, 30% or so in the next century. And so this is an issue that really should concern us all, even if the time frame for that soil loss is fairly slow.
00:14:05
Speaker
Fortunately, there are ways to farm that not only
Innovations in Soil Sustainability
00:14:07
Speaker
reduces the rate of loss, but turn it around to soil building. But again, they're they're not what we would call conventional practices today. I think the slowness of this degradation is what is so challenging because we don't see it in any one of our lifetimes.
00:14:22
Speaker
If you do, it's by the time you're old and you're not the one running the land anymore and your kid wants to get the full productivity out of the land. And that's where your lens as a geologist comes in very nicely because you look at things that are much, much longer and these soil erosive practices are happening relatively fast. from that perspective. And so you're able to to see that and highlight that in a way that a lot of people might not otherwise.
00:14:47
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, the kinds of changes that farmers can see on their soil can take your lifetime to really kind of notice. I can't tell you how many elderly farmers in the American Midwest I've interviewed and talked to who basically say, i don't have my grandpa's soil. They were farming a different landscape, same place, but a different landscape couple generations back. And, you know, if you notice it, you know, something that changes a millimeter a year, a grain of sand,
00:15:10
Speaker
level thickness a year or in the degradation of soil organic matter. Soils that go from deep, rich, black, fertile earth over time to essentially lose the organic matter and go light brown and khaki over decades.
00:15:21
Speaker
You don't notice it in any given year. And yet every year you've got to pay the mortgage. you got to you know You've got financial constraints and people need to make a living. And so the incentives are to maximize the return this year.
00:15:33
Speaker
And yet, at the end of one's life, one can look back and kind of go, wow, there's have been real changes here. And so that long-term perspective, when you start thinking about, you know, throwing the word sustainability around, you've got to think more than this year. And you've got to think more than a decade. We're talking, really, if we're talking about how to sustain feeding a 10 billion person planet,
00:15:54
Speaker
You've got to do it over centuries. And sure, technology is going to help as people invent new ways of doing things. At least I hope technology will help, but it doesn't always. But you can't burn through the basic resource you depend on and expect it to find a substitute. There is no substitute for soil.
00:16:11
Speaker
Unless you invent a certain technology that can grow stuff hydroponically. And there are substitutes being sold, but they're not going to do us. They're not going to do us very well. Well, then also for like hydroponics, say you're looking at the full like nutritional complement of food grown in it, you need to actually provide all the micronutrients and the minerals and so forth. And where do those come from? Rocks on the soil.
00:16:31
Speaker
mean, you got to get them out of the rocks to begin with, and that's a job for microbes. And the best way to do that is to cultivate beneficial soil life. And you can do that on a farm and grow a lot of food at the same time.
00:16:43
Speaker
If we went as a species to 100% hydroponic production, Where are we going to get everything other than the carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen that goes into food? I mean, we can get those from microbes in the air and plants that photosynthesize.
00:16:56
Speaker
But where do you get the copper? Where do you get the zinc? Where do you get the iron? Hydroponics is going to be like a really good way to feed people on spacecrafts and on long space journeys.
00:17:07
Speaker
But it's not a great way to feed a planet. So it seems that we have certain upsides, even though we have downsides where we are able to destroy land much, much faster because we have large tractors and we have nitrogen fertilizer. We have all of these toys that did not exist a thousand years ago. We also have some things that are they're buffering us maybe from the effects of the soil erosion that we are causing. And some certain technologies are allowing us to reverse it maybe a little bit faster, maybe build soil faster. So i wonder if you could talk to that. What are some of the differences that we face compared to someone who lived a thousand years ago, 10,000 years ago?
Progress in U.S. Soil Conservation
00:17:48
Speaker
Really, there's not a whole lot of technological progress that happened from between 10,000 and a thousand years ago. where they were, i imagine if I'm someone in the Fertile Crescent, I only have hand tools and maybe I have oxen or donkeys.
00:18:00
Speaker
My energy is really limited. If I cannot produce food within my own valley or region, I can't transport it from somewhere else. I can't go buy that food and just ship it in. So if my region has ah an ecological collapse, it has an erosion of the the carrying capacity of our area, that's it for me. I have to move and go somewhere else where there is still agricultural land. And those are some of the things that we can get around today. We can move. We have fossil fuels. We have transportation. We can move stuff. We can move chemicals. We can move food. We can move people all over the world. And it probably reduces our risk, but then probably also allows us to keep degrading resources longer without noticing it until things get worse and worse.
00:18:50
Speaker
Yeah, and the scenario you just spun, we can you know we can move stuff around the planet so you can have you know far-field regions supporting you know a core of higher population density, shall we say, and do that for longer. you know And there's examples of that in the ancient world, too. you know Egypt fed Rome by the end. But you know there's a couple key technologies and ways of thinking that sort of go beyond the our ability to move stuff around that I think could really help us turn the situation around. And one of those is the idea no-till farming. I mean, the idea that we don't have to actually plow the land to generate high yields of crops, or that there's other like systems of farming, like agroforestry, that can actually really sort of help derive a living from the land without leaving the soil surface itself bare and vulnerable to erosion. So there's some technologies that have really helped with that. you know And some of them are intellectual technologies, different ways of thinking about how we treat the land.
00:19:44
Speaker
And that's where, you know, like a diverse poly multi-story polyculture with grazing underneath, for example. It's like, that's a really different way of thinking than like conventional farms in the Midwest or or Roman farms or the late stage Roman farms. Because early stage Roman farms were diverse polycultures. They didn't run into problems till they went to large scale monocultures.
00:20:05
Speaker
Sound familiar? And they needed more commodities. Yeah, exactly. But there's also the world, the whole understanding of microbial ecology that, you know, the Romans and the Greeks did not have access to understanding that. They didn't know why soils were fertile or about how it was that the process worked. In fact, ah we didn't know about that in the Western world until very recently. In fact, that the whole understanding of the role of microbial ecology in soil fertility and its utility in farming really post-dates the early days of what we now call conventional agriculture in the 1930s and 40s, because some of the original organic proponents saw the connections to soil life, but the understanding of microbial ecology was embryonic. There were pests and pathogens. Like, why would you promote life in the soil? That was bad, right?
00:20:52
Speaker
We now have a very different understanding and a more sophisticated understanding, and yet a very incomplete understanding of soil ecology and its microbial
Principles of Regenerative Farming
00:21:01
Speaker
basis. But you start putting those things together And we've got the intellectual and the technological resources to actually think about treating the land differently and still derive a living from it.
00:21:12
Speaker
When I put my optimist hat on, it's thinking about how we could integrate the sort of the new advances in modern technology and understanding of science with some of these old ideas on practices that became traditional because they worked.
00:21:25
Speaker
the empirical basis of traditional and indigenous farming, things became traditional practices not because they didn't work. They became traditional because farmers could rely on them to produce healthy harvests from the land, even if over the long run they were running it down with too much tillage because they didn't have access to no-till technology or or that was the way they were just thinking about it. So what's exciting to me today is trying to integrate some of these sort of modern technologies and new understandings of science with some thinking about how do you update some of those traditional practices? How do we take advantage of reintegrating them into more modern styles of farming to leverage the microbial basis for how they worked so that farmers can engage trillions of tiny farmhands that'll do a lot of work for them simply for doing things like providing them with organic matter in the soil?
00:22:16
Speaker
Can you give us a pulse for where the U.S. is at this point? What's the status report of agriculture in the U.S.? We went through the colonial period. We went through issues like the Dust Bowl. And it seemed like the Dust Bowl was one that really gave a big push for us to get our act in order. And U.S. government established what became NRCS, if I remember correctly. And so we turned around to a degree. We're still not at the point where we are building soil. We're still losing soil at an unsustainable rate. So can you give us ah a sense for where we're at in the U.S. in agriculture at this point? And maybe what are some of the things, if you keep your optimist hat on for a little bit, that you think you'd say we're going in the right direction with this or we could be going in the right direction with a little tweak or two?
00:23:06
Speaker
The simplest statement for where things sit today in terms of soil erosion is something where I can point out this spring, there were some big dust storms that blew into Chicago. They came off of tilled fields in the surrounding areas.
00:23:20
Speaker
The problem is not solved. If you've got big dust clouds growing into cities off of farms, that's a symptom of soil erosion. it It's the kind of stuff I was writing about in dirt. It's the kind of thing that drove the Dust Bowl. Now, we don't have as much acreage exposed at any one time as they did in parts of the Dust Bowl in the same kind of way.
00:23:37
Speaker
But we're still doing a lot of tillage in the U.S. with conventional farming. And we get the the highways in eastern Washington every few years get closed down for dust storms, and and as they do in the Midwest and places. That's a symptom anyone can see, that something is wrong with the land.
00:23:51
Speaker
In terms of where we are totally as as a nation, in terms of trying to rein in soil degradation, and if not turn it around, what I came to the conclusion of in Growing a Revolution, the sort of the third book that wrote on on soil stuff, a treatment of what is regenerative farming and how are regenerative farmers around the world actually treating their land, one of the things that I recognized is that farmers who had been very good at rebuilding the fertility of their land, whether on small subsistence farms in Africa or large technology,
00:24:21
Speaker
driven farms in the U.S. was that they were doing three things at least. They were minimizing disturbance of the soil, both physical and chemical. They were keeping the ground covered physically with cover crops so it wasn't bare earth in between cash crops. And they were growing a diversity of crops. They weren't just growing one crop in the same field over and over or even a two crop rotation. They're growing three, four, five, six more in a rotation.
00:24:43
Speaker
And that recipe is basically a recipe for building soil life. And the farmers who had been very successful at restoring fertility and profitability to their farms had engaged practices based on all three principles.
Global and U.S. Farming Practices
00:24:56
Speaker
Some of them were also reintegrating animal husbandry. Some of them were doing sort of silviculture and having ah an upper canopy and a lower canopy in the tropics. know There's lots of variants on this.
00:25:06
Speaker
but that they were all had those three basic elements. So if you look at the US today, what's the proportion of farms that are no-till? That's about a third of cropland. When I was born, it was about 1%. So there's progress. And to a geologist, you know our lives aren't that long. That's real progress. It's maybe a little slow from a policy end, but it's real. You look at cover crops, I think about 7% to 8%, if I remember the last numbers I looked at across the U.S. And if you look at sort diverse rotations, well, it's fewer than that. You're looking at a small proportion of U.S. farms are using practices that are based on the principles that would turn soil degradation into soil building.
00:25:46
Speaker
If you look internationally, i think it's more like about 15 to 20, 25% of land around the world is now farmed with what's called conservation agriculture, which has those three characteristics as its defining characteristics of minimal tillage, cover crops, and diversity. What's driving a lot of that? lot of it's South America.
00:26:06
Speaker
They've really gone in on no-till. But still, it's the minority of farmers that are doing all three practices based on all three principles. And if there's one thing I'm convinced of after diving headfirst into the scientific literature on this, is it's really the combination of the three that works to rebuild soil fertility. It's not just going no-till. It's not just planting cover crops. It's not just diversifying one's rotation. It's It's basically a system.
00:26:31
Speaker
It's a stool with three legs. And those are the three legs. And, they and you know, the minimal disturbance, if you think about it as an ecological system, you know stable habitat, food, and other organisms to interact with, those are the three requirements for a healthy ecosystem. And applied to a farm field, that means don't disturb it, cover crops and diversity. So it makes ecological sense.
00:26:53
Speaker
But the minority of farms around the world are practicing all three principles. In terms of where we are historically, we're at an inflection point. We know now enough how to do it better.
00:27:04
Speaker
And I don't think we have to compromise yields to get there. And it can be more profitable for farmers to spend less to grow as much, even if they grow
Accelerating Regenerative Agriculture Transition
00:27:13
Speaker
a little bit less. If they're spending a lot less to do it, that could still be more profitable.
00:27:17
Speaker
We're really at an inflection point. That was the revelation to me in the Dirt book, is that we can't afford to run the experiment again at a global level that we've run on regional levels. There's nowhere else to go. As much as Elon Musk would like to go to Mars, and as much as I'd love to see him go there, humanity's future is not simply in the stars. If we don't have a vibrant, healthy, ecologically-based technological civilization on Earth, we're not going to colonize the stars.
00:27:44
Speaker
You mentioned that we're at an inflection point. Significant progress has been made towards conservation agriculture, relatively slow as it has been from a perspective of policy and wanting it to move as fast as we can in order to avoid more degradation and start to turn this thing around. What are some of the levers that you think are most valuable, most useful for us to pull in order to accelerate that transition and get a more complete transition moving from maybe just no-till to all three factors?
00:28:15
Speaker
I'm sure policy is part of it. I like to think around around businesses that can help really mission focused, mission driven businesses that can do like like what we do is helping farmers do silvopasture. Because if it wasn't for someone holding their hand to the process, probably 95% of the projects that we've done would not have happened. And there are other businesses out there helping people transition through the regenerative transition or the organic transition or They're helping people plant windbreaks who wouldn't have windbreaks otherwise or whatever it is. So i see a lot of opportunity for businesses that are really focused on having an impact. But I'm sure that there's also a policy and other levers that you have looked closely at.
00:28:58
Speaker
One of the key things that can accelerate the adoption of regenerative practices are teaching more farmers how to do it. People want to see an example of something that worked and they could use instruction. It's like when people show up at the University of Washington to get a PhD here, we don't just say like, you know, go out and figure it out for yourself. You know, you mentor them and guide them through it. Why? Because some of us who've gone through that process understand it and kind of there's a way to do it and make sure that you're going to get through it. And then a transition to regenerative farming kind of similar.
00:29:27
Speaker
i think that there's a major educational component and the kind of businesses that you're talking about where people are helping to teach people how to do something in a different way. That's really valuable. And that comes from a very different perspective than someone who's trying to sell someone a product to keep doing things the same way. Right.
00:29:44
Speaker
And so it's a fundamentally different business model. And you know as a teacher, I like the teaching model. It may not be as good a business model from a pure profit perspective, but it doesn't mean it's not a good business model because there's other purposes for which you apply business acumen.
00:30:01
Speaker
Outreach to farmers in the educational component that I think is huge. And NRCS has embraced the idea of soil health and soil health building in the last few years, and they've revamped some of their programs in major ways around that.
00:30:13
Speaker
I'd love to see them get a lot more support to do a lot more of that and shift the agency's focus from soil conservation to soil restoration.
Policy and Consumer Impact on Agriculture
00:30:22
Speaker
you know, it's a higher bar. It would take a lot more to do that.
00:30:25
Speaker
And their agency came out of, the know the Soil Erosion Service, the Soil Conservation Service, out of the Dust Bowl. And the idea was to stop erosion. And, you know, erosion hasn't been stopped in the U.S., but they've made huge progress since the Dust Bowl.
00:30:39
Speaker
We should not underestimate how much they've cut down soil erosion in this country. The problem is is it was way off the charts to begin with. Now it's just off the charts for what nature can keep up with. So there's that component. There's also a consumer-driven component. The most recent book that Anne and I wrote, What's Your Food Ate?
00:30:57
Speaker
looked at how regenerative practices translate into the nutritional components that are in the human diet. Whether it's more nutritional or not, you know, that depends on how you define nutrients and the nutritional world is full of arguments about that. But the key thing is that there are reasons to think that foods grown with regenerative practices actually have a different nutritional profile.
00:31:18
Speaker
And I think it's better profile from everything I've been able to research. It's usually a better profile, sometimes not by much, sometimes by a lot. So there's a consumer what you want in your body kind of preference that I think can really help because, you farmers will ultimately respond to consumer interests and companies will respond to consumer interests. And I've talked with a number of highly placed boards and individuals within some major corporations about, you know, their interest in regenerative agriculture.
00:31:45
Speaker
And to be honest, their interest is all over the map. Some of them are interested in securing their supply chain. They want their cacao farmers, for example, to be profitable and be able to stay in business because it's it's hard for them. if If their farmers go broke, it disrupts their whole thing. Right. Others are really interested in lowering their carbon footprint.
00:32:04
Speaker
Some of them are interested in reducing their outlays on the front end for agrochemicals and turning a higher profit by saving money there. There's lots of different motivations, but the consumer-driven one, I think, is one that could be fairly effective.
00:32:17
Speaker
The one that I've seen used least effectively so far is the policy lever. Our policies are all totally backwards. We subsidize conventional practices in a huge way. The new book that I just finished and I'm sending off to publisher, I'm arguing that we've got our subsidies on backwards. We're paying people to degrade the land.
00:32:35
Speaker
And that's idiotic as a social strategy for any kind of long-term continuity of a civilization. There's policy levers that need to be fixed. And the big one there is the farm bill, right? I mean, that's where most of it comes to into play. So anyone out there who is really interested in reforming agriculture in the U.S., get engaged with the next farm bill revision.
00:32:54
Speaker
That's a big task to take on. It seems to me that the way that our farm policy is built right now is more or less just outdated. It was built in a time when we had a scarcity of food and we needed more food. We needed more calories. We needed more reliability. We're also using food in the war effort and as a part of our global dominance strategy in order to be the one that others relied on. So the the goal was let's pump out calories. Let's put out more and more food.
00:33:28
Speaker
And we weren't looking at the quality of food. We were looking at the quantity of food. And that's what our policy has been geared towards for the last hundred or so years. And we really just need a policy realignment towards what we need today. We have plenty of food. We need better quality food now. And we need to make sure that our land can sustain us for the next generations and dozens, hundreds of generations.
00:33:55
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, that's basically it. The systems that we put in place in the aftermath of the Dust Bowl in the Second World War were intended to maximize yields. It's important that people get enough calories to eat. No doubt about that.
00:34:06
Speaker
But what we didn't understand fully at the time are the compromises that were made with quality to achieve that result. And with the benefit of hindsight, we can now see that, yeah, there's some tweaks to conventional agriculture that we should do if if we really wanted to nourish the world as opposed to feed the world.
Commodity Grains and Public Health
00:34:24
Speaker
There's some tweaks that we would do to try and bring in all that we've learned in the last 80 years to basically up our game a little further in terms of agriculture. The other dimension to that is that you know the kinds of quantity that we went for in the aftermath of the Second World War was essentially commodity grains. It was basically growing a lot of very few crops.
00:34:48
Speaker
A very interesting study that came out, I think it was last year the year before, is one of these things I've integrated in the research for the the forthcoming book, was that there was a global study of, you know what kinds of farming actually produces the most food per hectare.
00:35:02
Speaker
Not the most corn per acre or the most soybeans per acre, but the most food. And it was small scale, diverse polycultures. So if you really wanted to basically, you know, struggle with the idea of how do you feed 10 billion people down the road,
00:35:17
Speaker
it's going to be smaller, more diversified farms. And that's not saying everybody has to have a farm in their yard. But that's where the data shook out. By focusing on growing a diversity of crops, one can actually get more out of the same land and sustain its fertility. We've had a focus on not only on quantity of food and calories, but a specific subset of calories that really drove the processed food industry. And then if you look at you know the state of public health in the westernized world of the U.S. today, you know, chronic diseases have absolutely exploded in the world of processed food. Some of that's due to the food choices that we make and the processing.
00:35:55
Speaker
And we argue in What Your Food Ate that some of that's actually due to how we treat the land and what's getting into our food or what's not getting into our food, as the case may be in terms of vitamins and minerals. a lot of inexpensive and very shelf-stable, storable calories is what we went after. Things that we could put in a grain bin and it's going to be good for the next five years.
00:36:15
Speaker
There's a reason why grains became the foundation for civilizations. And it's that storage element right there. It allows a few farmers to feed the rest of us. And that's really important for those of us who live in cities and make their livings writing books instead of farming. But we have the opportunity now to rethink the overall shape of our food system.
00:36:36
Speaker
And that's not to say that we need to get rid of large farms or or stop eating grains. I think that would be idiotic to argue both either of those things. But it is to say that we should be supporting people who want to grow, to work on smaller, more diversified farms better
Critique of Agricultural Policies
00:36:51
Speaker
than we do now. We subsidize the large grain producers.
00:36:54
Speaker
We're not doing that to some different styles of farming that might be able to provide urban dwellers with a different suite of potential foods, you know more fruits and vegetables in particular, grown in different ways. It's one of these things where I think that we should keep our eye on the future in terms of how we treat our land and tailor our subsidies and our policies in farming to try and make sure that we end up with a food system that's able to provide people with what they need. If you look at the current recommendations for fruit and vegetable consumption in the U.S., U.S. farmers do not grow enough vegetables for everyone in the country to eat what the government recommends we eat.
00:37:34
Speaker
That's a misaligned policy. And they also can't get crop insurance for fruits and vegetables. Yeah. Whereas there's all kinds of supports in place for commodity grains like like corn and soybeans and wheat.
00:37:47
Speaker
Right. That's a perfect example of a backward subsidy. Now, maybe we keep some subsidies for corn and and soybeans and wheat. Right.
Future Challenges and Hopes for Agriculture
00:37:54
Speaker
But why are we subsidizing the crops that are undermining essentially the healthfulness of our food system and not subsidizing the crops that everybody thinks that everybody ought to eat more of?
00:38:05
Speaker
just makes no sense. Oh, I'm sorry. It does in certain ways, but that's a different. Dollars and cents. big dollars and cents David, I know that our time here should be wrapping up soon. One maybe final question for you, and that is to pick your brain again on ah really, really long timescales.
00:38:25
Speaker
Again, I like to think several decades ahead and maybe in my lifetime, maybe my kid's lifetime, but I really don't regularly think beyond that. And in that lifetime, I'm optimistic enough that we can turn some things around and that we can, that agroforestry in particular can expand and other conservation practices can really expand. But when you look maybe 500 years out, which is, again, just a blink of an eye in terms of geology, the kind of timeframes that you're looking at. What gives you hope and what maybe what gives you trepidation? Because I think of 500 years and I have mostly trepidation because I can hardly imagine us not making a mistake as a human species where we wipe ourselves off the planet, or at least where we have a very, very significant bottleneck in our future. And it's maybe not a very hopeful way to to end, but I think we we have also the possibility of becoming a wise species. Depending on the news cycle and what day I'm watching, I don't have a lot of hope for us becoming a wise species that is able to sustain ourselves long term. What is the perspective of a geologist who thinks in much deeper time than i do?
00:39:41
Speaker
If you look back through human evolution, we've already been through a few bottlenecks where we went down to a few thousand people. That is in our past. Fortunately, it's a long time in our past.
00:39:52
Speaker
I can put on my optimist hat. I can put on my pessimist hat. The pessimist hat is pretty simple from the perspective of soils, geology, and farming. And that is the business as usual will lead to greater regional food shortages, greater conflict.
Speculating on Agriculture's Sustainable Future
00:40:05
Speaker
And in conjunction with climate change, there could be a major disaster unfolding in the future in terms of our ability to feed everyone on the planet. If I put on my optimist hat, one of the things that gives me great cause for optimism is that if you talk to demographers about how many people they really expect to be on the planet 200, 500 years out, you know we're basically projected to rise up until about 2100. And then if you look at it, demographic projections for 2200,
00:40:33
Speaker
it starts to fall down to about where we are now or fewer people. And why? it's It's something known as the demographic transition. If you look at the population growth in the westernized world, take the U.S., for example. If it wasn't for immigration, it would be negative.
00:40:47
Speaker
People are not having kids at the replacement rate. Once they get to and a level of economic prosperity where they don't think they need a lot of kids to then care for them in old age,
00:40:57
Speaker
birth rates tend to go down. And so the only place on the planet right now, as I understand it, where the fertility rate, the birth rates exceed death rates is Africa. That's where the population growth between now and 2100 is projected to happen. And there's real issues with how we're going to be able to feed Africa, how Africa will be able to feed itself.
00:41:17
Speaker
and so on. But if you just look at globally, by 2200 or so, we may be sort of through human population peak. What that suggests to me is that we have this next hundred years to think about how we get through this.
00:41:30
Speaker
We turn it into a bottleneck, or do we turn it into star trek do we turn it into sort of a sustain more sustainable way to actually keep everybody on the planet not only not only fed but healthy and prosperous and that's where the i think that the power of thinking about regenerative styles of agriculture that can rebuild soil fertility as a consequence of farming really comes into play because if we can come through the next hundred years with the farmland that we have already on this planet and come through with either it's the fertility it has today or even better, its full native fertility, if we were to restore it to its productive capacity, then that world of 2200 is going to be in much better shape than the world today in terms of its ability to feed itself going forward. But, you know, I can put on my pessimist hat and argue for all kinds of crazy things that could happen between now and then that would derail that vision.
00:42:23
Speaker
But I think it's almost incumbent on those of us who would like to think that humanity has a prosperous and happy future, as far out as we can see till the sun supernovas, to think about how we can get through this bottleneck of the next one hundred years. Because this could really be a pivotal turning point in human history.
00:42:40
Speaker
And if you look at the pace at which we might be able to adopt more regenerative farming practices, you know, we've got the next couple decades to really try and push and to spur that ah adoption.
00:42:53
Speaker
Hopefully it will accelerate. I'm a bit of an optimist. It's an example of where both ecological and economic incentives are lining up. If farmers can actually profitably adopt regenerative practices, there's a case to be made for more of them doing it. And I think that that's a very real case.
00:43:09
Speaker
Well, thank you for putting on both your optimist and pessimist hats and giving us perspective of what things can look like beyond the range that we typically think of. I don't think I've ever really thought out to 2,200. can't even say it. Let's call it 2,200. 2,200. I can't even say the the name of the year because I really don't ever think that far into the future.
00:43:33
Speaker
Yeah, I keep calling it 2020 and going, oops, no, that's five years ago. Yeah.
00:43:38
Speaker
Well, David, thank you so much for coming on and having this conversation with us. And this has been a real delight. And again, I encourage everyone who is at all interested, or maybe not even not interested, if you don't think that you're interested in soil biology, in geology, and how all of this works, and because you you had a a bad experience in science class when you were in in middle school, I'd say go and check out David's books because they are fantastic. ask that He does a wonderful job of communicating not only in the importance of this, but also the making it relatable and making it easy to understand. My eyes have been opened up to a lot of things around me in a way that they never were before. So I want to thank you, David, for all of your work that you've put into all of this writing. to communicate these very thoughtful scientific matters to us in a way that we can actually get and I can wrap my my non-scientific brain around. Thank you for for joining today.
00:44:38
Speaker
No worries. Thanks a lot. Awesome. It's pleasure to talk to you.
00:44:43
Speaker
Agrarian Futures is produced by Alexander Miller, who also wrote our theme song. If you enjoyed this episode, please like, subscribe and leave us a comment on your podcast app of choice.
00:44:53
Speaker
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