Can Regenerative Agriculture Reverse Climate Change And Chronic Disease? | Allen Williams

It is the height of scientific arrogance and human hubris to think that we can design fertilizers or fertigation or whatever we want to call it that even comes close to mimicking what the natural microbiology of the soil can create and feed to these plants.

Welcome to the Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman and that's Pharmacy with an F, F-A-R-M-A-C-Y, a place for conversations that matter. and if you've been hearing about regenerative agriculture and wondering what the heck that is and what it means and why it's being purported to be the savior of mankind, this conversation is going to matter to you because it's with probably one of the leading figures in the world of regenerative agriculture, Dr. Alan Williams, who's a farmer, a scientist, was a professor, he's a recovering academic, and he's really been leading not just the theory of regenerative agriculture, but how to implement this across the country, helping millions of acres convert and thousands of farmers learn these methods in a practical way through the Soil Health Academy and Understanding Ag. He's consulted with more than 4,000 farmers and ranchers in the United States and other countries on operations going from a few acres to a million acres. He's pioneered many of the early regenerative agriculture principles because regenerative agriculture was kind of a new idea. We heard about organic, we heard about biodynamic, we heard about conventional agriculture, but regenerative is sort of a new idea. We're going to define what that is and has now been teaching these principles to farmers all over the world. He's a recovering academic, as I said, he served 15 years on the faculty at Louisiana Tech and Mississippi State University teaching genetics and physiology. He's authored over 400 scientific papers and articles. He's spoken at so many different meetings and he's just an incredible guy. He's been featured in a lot of movies, along with me, in the Kiss the we were both in Kiss the Ground together, which I encourage people to watch. It's a great soil, carbon, cowboy series, which I love. My favorite part of that movie was when one of the Saskatchewan farmers said, you know, it was so much work doing conventional agriculture. And if I had figured out this regenerative agriculture earlier, I'd had a lot more kids because I'd be at home with my wife. That was the best line in the movie. He's also been featured in the Farmer's Footprint with Zach Bush. and a new film coming out Sacred Cow, which also I've been in as well. And I'm just so excited to have you here, Dr. Williams. Thank you so much for joining us on the Doctor's Pharmacy.

Well, thank you. I'm very, very happy to be here this morning and looking forward to our conversation.

Well, you're one of a group of pioneers out there. Guys like Gabe Brown and Ray Archuletta and you and a few others are really leading the charge in not just talking about regenerative agriculture, but being on the ground, working with farmers, across America and across the world to help them implement this new concept of regenerative agriculture. So before we sort of get into the details of what it is and like how do we build them, what are the challenges with it, take us through, you know, your early experience growing up on a farm in Mississippi. We're in South Carolina, right?

South Carolina.

Yeah, in South Carolina. And how your farm was so diverse and had so many different plants and animals and it was a whole ecosystem. And then how it changed from that into more traditional, or we call it conventional farming. And now how did that happen? How did we go from doing things which seemed to be the right way to doing things the wrong way?

Yeah, you know, it's pretty interesting. I was lucky, privileged to have grown up on a farm. It's been in my family since 1840. so I represented the sixth generation as I was growing up there on the farm. And during my lifetime in, in the 60s and 70s, growing up there, we were very diverse, which in today's farming community and world is very unique. But we, we had multiple species of livestock. We had chickens and ducks and geese and pheasant, all of those types of things. We also raised pigs, we raised cattle, we had beef cattle, dairy cattle, we had sheep, we had goats, we had turkeys, and all of those were done on pasture.

Old McDonald's farm.

Old McDonald's farm. And then we had, because of where I grew up in the Piedmont region of South Carolina, it was also famous for its orchards. So we had an apple orchard and a peach orchard, and we had pear trees, muscadine vines, and all of those other types of things. And then we grew very large gardens, market gardens, and we had a general store. So we marketed a lot of the products that we produced through our own general store. So if you remember Barbara Mandrell, the old country music singer, she had a hit song out several decades ago called I Was Country When Country Wasn't Cool. I feel like that now, that that's how I grew up, that we were doing grass-fed and pastured raised and didn't know it. It's just the way we did it. We were doing direct marketing and didn't know it because we had the general store. So it was a unique one. Country wasn't cool. I feel like that now, that that's how I grew up, that we were doing grass-fed and pastured raised and didn't know it. it's just the way we did it. We were doing direct marketing and didn't know it because we had the general store. So it was a unique way of growing up and we were a true multi-generational family. So in growing up, we all enjoyed our meals together and we didn't have anything called lunch. We had breakfast, dinner, and supper. And they were all home cooked from scratch, big meals. And so I was used to that. And Mark, it wasn't until I went away to college that I started to experience what I now call bad food. I had this incredible eating experience growing up, but didn't really realize just how incredible it was because we were eating 80 to 90% of everything we ate, we produced right there on the farm. But I remember the first time I ate in the college cafeteria there and I went to Clemson University and I thought, wow, these folks don't know how to cook. But then I finally realized, no, it was a lot more than that. It wasn't, I mean, maybe that was a part of it, but the bigger part was the foods they were sourcing and the way that those foods were produced and no matter how you prepared them, they just never were going to be equal to the foods that I ate growing up. So that was my experience and that sort of formed my foundation. But then I tell people I went away to college and got educated. And so I started going back home and telling my family, not now.

And these are the agricultural colleges that are funded through land grants and often funded by large agricultural corporations, seed companies and chemical companies that then develop the kind of science behind everything and the curriculum. So you kind of get indoctrinated into a way of thinking that's very specific perspective, right? And it teaches what your traditional ways were wrong and this is the right way.

And that is exactly what I was taught. And so every time I would go back home, here I was, now never mind that my family had made it for six generations successfully on the farm, right? Here I was, this young wet behind the ears pup, my first year or two behind me in college, and I'm going home and telling my father, my grandfather, and my uncles, we're doing it all wrong. No, we got to start using these herbicides and these fungicides, and we got to start using all these pharmaceuticals in our livestock and everything else.

That's weeds.

Yeah. Exactly. So I became very entrenched and ingrained in the conventional in the commodity and convinced of the feed the world mantra that we've heard for decades now. And so that sort of colored and clouded my thinking for the next about 20 years of my life.

Wow. So you basically came out of a way of farming that most people would now call regenerative, organic, diverse ecosystem, working with nature to one that was more industrialized and you thought it was the cat's meow, right? And essentially, you mentioned that you're on your land, you grew, I stopped counting, but it seemed like dozens of different things when you were growing up.

Right.

And only 8% of farms in America today grow more than four crops.

That would be correct, which is actually pretty staggering, isn't it?

Yeah, it's pretty staggering. What's even more staggering is that, you know, we tell in America, we tell people according to our dietary guidelines to eat five to nine servings of fruits and vegetables a day. But the truth is that only 0.9% of teenagers, 2.2% of men, and 3.5% of women actually meet the daily recommended intake of fruits and veggies. Part of that may be because we're not growing that much. And you know, of the 300 million acres of farmland in America today, only eight and a half million are for fruits and vegetables. We call them specialty crops. And almost no research money is put in that. About 1% of the research money is put into these specialty crops from the USDA. So we kind of have this, cycle now where farmers have gotten caught in. And we had a conversation before, and I sort of like to sort of take me down the sort of experience of the average farmer today, because what we're seeing, it seems to me, is this increasing rates of farmer disenfranchisement, dissatisfaction, suicide rates on the rise, farmers losing money all the time, being stuck in this cycle of having to get crop loans to buy the seeds and chemicals and the inputs to grow the food and then get crop insurance to actually make sure that they get insured against any losses that they buy from the government, which the government sort of subsidizes. And the banks won't give them the seeds unless they have the crop insurance. So they're caught in this vicious cycle. And they seem to be the people getting squeezed in the system who are producing all our food, but are the ones who are almost the victims of the system. And they don't even seem to figure out how a way to get out of it. And so what you really kind of laid out for me is a way of thinking about this problem that I didn't think I understood. So talk to me about how these average farmers you meet and talk to, how are they feeling? What is their experience out there? What is the hunger for change? Because it seems like we're just locked into this big system that is very hard to get out of, which is the biggest industry in the planet, which is the food system. It's $15 trillion. How do we shift that? We're talking about these small regenerative farms. General Mills says a million acres is great. It's going to convert to a regenerative ag, but there's 300 million acres in America and there's millions and billions of acres around the world. So how do we get there?

That's a very good question, Mark. And I had to take my own personal journey, obviously, back. I call it circling back to how I grew up. And what I've noted over these intervening decades since the time that I left the farm, went to college, became a research scientist and so forth, is that we became increasingly reliant on inputs and on products that what I now call band-aids on a gushing wound. That's all those products are. the vast majority of our research, the vast majority of the things that we, the practices that we implement in agriculture today and the products that we utilize and apply never address the root cause of the things that are truly impacting us from the diseases to the pests to the lack of fertility to the soil degradation to the animal health. They never really address it. so again it's putting a band-aid on a gushing wound. And here's what's happened over the last several decades in farming. Farmers have been encouraged and led through federal policy, through crop insurance programs, subsidy, and many even lenders and everybody else to become more and more specialized to the point that today and Mark, this may be very surprising to a lot of consumers, but today the vast majority of farmers do not eat anything that they produce on their farms. They go to the grocery store just like everybody else. Now, how sad is that? We're not as farmers, we don't even know. Now, obviously I do because we're very different. We're regenerative in what we do. and we produce a lot of what we eat today again, like when I was growing up. But the vast majority of farmers today, they themselves have no clue what really good nutrient dense food tastes like. They are also entrapped and ensnared in the same food cycle in this highly processed foods and so on and so forth that every other consumer is ensnared in as well.

And you said that, you know, farmers when you grow up with skinny and now they're all overweight.

Right, right. Well, they don't do any farmers today because of our highly specialized equipment, GIS, you know, GPS guided equipment and so on and so forth. Basically, they're very, they're like a truck driver. They're very sedentary. So their butts are seated in the seat of a tractor, a combine, a sprayer, whatever the case may be. you know, for long hours every day. And they're not even having on many of these tractors and combines today, not even having to physically steer. They're just listening to podcasts or... On autopilot. There you go. Or, you know, listening to the radio or whatever. And so, the honest truth is, I found that god-awful boring, okay? And mind-numbing. to think that you have to farm that way now because in almost all of them have consultants that are provided by major agribusiness. They're called crop consultants. And so what we find is farmers today are making fewer and fewer of their own decisions. Those decisions are made for them by their lenders, by their suppliers, by their consultants. and their ability to think and to reason about what they're doing and why their whole decision making capability has basically been co-opted and their decisions are being made by others. So even though they take all the risks, they own the land or they lease the land, they have to own the equipment, they have all of this incredible debt, what's happening is that they still are not the key decision makers on their own farms. They may think they are, but in reality they're not. And so what we're seeing, and I wrote an article about this last year relative to the significant amount of depression and suicide in the farming community. Again, what a lot of consumers may not realize is that depression is rampant in the farming community right now because of the significant financial stress and even environmental stress that's on these farmers. The suicide rate is among the highest of any profession in the world, not just in the US, but in the world.

And it's also from a health point of view, it's one of the most dangerous professions. Parkinson's rates are extremely high. We know that it's very much linked to pesticide and agrochemical use. So there's a lot of health consequences from dealing with all those agrochemicals as well for these farmers?

Oh, you know, the cancer rates have skyrocketed, neurological disorders have skyrocketed, and then of course all types of inflammatory disease due to obesity and just their diet, their daily diet, you know, because again, they're not eating any better than the average consumer. So the very things that you deal with on a daily basis as a medical doctor, with a lot of consumers are the very things that the farmers themselves are dealing with as well. And the most discouraging thing is the lack of hope that we experience and encounter out there among the farming community. And that is why we do what we do, because we want to restore that hope and we want to give them an opportunity to not only be much more viable and profitable in their farming operations and be able to remove and separate themselves from all of these dependencies, but we also want to restore their quality of life. And that's what they're really missing today, Mark, is quality of life sucks for many of these farmers.

You know, it seems like they're very similar to what I do. You know, I see patients come in, their health is so degraded, just like the soil and the farm's degraded, they're stuck in the pharmaceutical trap, as opposed to the agrochemical trap, with diabetes on piles of medications. And they feel hopeless. And yet within a very short time of people changing their diet, they can unhook from the medical industrial complex, get off the medications, use food as medicine, lose tons of weight and reverse their diabetes and all kinds of chronic illnesses pretty quickly. and it gives them hope. So I think, you know, you're offering the same message. I think of what you do is sort of regenerative agriculture and what I do is regenerative medicine. I mean, functional medicine is ecosystem medicine. It's about treating the whole ecosystem and creating health within it as a way of creating a healthy person. We don't treat the disease, we treat the person's own constitution using natural principles to help restore function. And you do the same exact thing with agroecological systems and restore function. And as a side effect, you don't need the agrochemicals, you don't need the specialized seeds, you don't need the fertilizer, and you have all these beneficial side effects. So the side effects of eating healthy and fixing these diseases are all good ones. And the side effects of doing this agriculture are all good ones, right? You can conserve water, you restore soil carbon, you increase biodiversity, you increase the phytonutrient and density of the plants, the mineral content of the plant. I mean, it's just all these beneficial ripple effects and the farmers make more money, they're happier. But it seems to me there's this barrier we have to overcome where people who are farmers don't see the situation that they're in. They're sort of locked in it and they can't see over the horizon to go, there's a different way and how do they unhook from that incredible burden of debt and loans and crop insurance and their way their farms are set up and sort of the scale of it is so big. And I would love you to talk about, you know, how you work with these farmers to get them to one, see the light and two, have the confidence to actually start to transition and what you're experiencing out there in the field. Because with your Soil Health Academy and Understanding Ag, you are actually out there running around the country meeting with farmers in rural communities, helping them understand that there is a different way. And, you know, you shared with me before that, you know, 10 years ago you couldn't get 10 people in a room and now your rooms are filled with 60 or 70 farmers looking for a different way. So how do you get them to cross that barrier? And what does that look like for the average farmer?

Yeah, so excellent question. And the first thing is always education. You cannot implement and practice what you don't know. so they have to learn. And that's why we created the Soil Health Academy as that vehicle through which they can begin to get that education. And the academies are designed specifically to be able to help farmers go back to their farm, to their ranch, and implement these practices immediately. So our schools are designed, they're multi-day, number one, because there's a lot of ground that we have to cover. Secondly, they're very hands-on. Third, we always host them on a regenerative farm or ranch so that those in attendance get to see these practices actually being implemented and they get to see and experience the results. of what happens and obviously be able to interact directly with those regenerative farmers and ranchers so that they can learn from them. So the educational process and that component is critical. And so we do a three-day school initially for these farmers and ranchers with half the day in the classroom each day, half the day out in the field. I often say that all farmers are inherently from Missouri, the Show-Me State, They always want you to show them, right? And farmers are very visual, very hands-on, so that practical component is critical. But when we get them in the field though, we reteach them how to be keen observers. As a medical doctor, you have learned that observation of your patients is one of your key tools. to be able to properly assess and diagnose and treat. And we have found the same thing in working with the soil and working with repairing ecosystems, that observation is absolutely crucial. So we teach them how to observe and we actually go through observational exercises with them each and every day. And you would be amazed at what happens here. It's almost like the cartoons where you know, people have an idea and you see the light bulb above their head in the cartoon, you can almost see that, you know, in them. You see their eyes light up and get big and, and they're like, oh, my God, I get it now. I get it now. And, and these are people that are, that have been out on the land their whole life, okay? But yet their, their eyes are open, their ears are hearing, and their noses are detecting the aromas. It's like, for the very first time in their lifetime, these are things they've never observed. But then the second thing that we do, we started at the school and continue it afterwards, is we develop a network. We provide a network of support for these farmers because often what happens, their local communities do not support them because peer pressure in the farming community is far worse than it is in any elementary or Junior high school. I promise you.

What's that weird stuff that Joe's doing down the road on his farm? That's kind of weird.

Exactly.

I don't know his field. It looks terrible. You know, it's kind of a mess.

Right. So if you're not doing everything like your neighbors, they're gonna let you know it. And they're gonna say, what in the heck do you think you're doing? And even your own family members will do that to you. And then, of course, everybody that sells you something is doing that as well, right? They're telling you you're an idiot for making any changes. And so we have to provide these farmers for them to be successful. They're being bombarded with that all the time. So we have to provide for them a brand new network, a network of support and encouragement and mentorship. And so that's the other thing that we provide through the Soil Health Academy and Understanding Ag. and then the third leg, we call it the three-legged stool, the third leg of what we provide to help them be successful is that ongoing mentorship and consultation. Because as they start down this path, down their journey to regenerative agriculture, they are going to hit some roadblocks and some issues and challenges just like anything else that you may change in your life. And they're going to need that a little bit of ongoing support just like you support your patients on an ongoing basis.

So take like, you know, farmer that you met who's got 5,000 acres of a soybean field who's tied into Monsanto now, bare, full on fertilizer, agrochemicals, tillage, big equipment locked in the banks. He goes home, he goes, here's your course, you get so excited. He's like, I'm gonna do this. What are the barriers and obstacles and how does he go from a monocrop or maybe two crops to a diversified, resilient, regenerative organic farm?

Yeah, so excellent question.

He might want to do it. I just imagine there's a lot of barriers that are set up within the system that prevent him from doing that. And they don't support him with financial supports on the back end like crop insurance that make him feel secure to do it because as a farmer, you're not making widgets in a factory. You can do any day, any night, 24/7, you deal with Mother Nature and weather and droughts and storms and floods and fires and all kinds of stuff. So how do they make that transition? Because I think that seems to be the biggest barrier.

Well, the very first thing that they have to understand and then start implementing are what we call the six principles of soil health. And obviously they get that sort of drilled into their heads during the academy. I'll give those to you and your listeners very, very quickly. The first one is context. You've got to understand the context of your farm. That includes goals and objectives, profitability, targets, quality of life, even spiritual aspects, the whole bit.

And location.

Absolutely, environmental, everything.

If you're growing in Saskatchewan or Mississippi, it's a little different.

That's exactly right. that's exactly right. So you have to understand your context and believe it or not, because of the constraints and the influences that many farmers have, you'll find that they truly do not fully understand their own context and you have to help them with that. The next is we teach them to minimize disturbance. So one of the first things, the very first steps they can take when they go back home is to start significantly reducing the amount of tillage they do because the vast majority of farmers are still what we would call full-till farmers. In other words, they're going out there and they're doing multiple rounds of plowing, you know, moldboard plowing, they may do chisel plowing, you know, disking, those types of things. So they're steadily churning up the soil and creating a lot of bare soil, releasing a lot of carbon. so the second step beyond understanding context is to transition them from full tillage to no-till. And that's actually a relatively easy transition and most farmers can make that transition even within their first year on the vast majority of their land. So we teach them how to switch from full tillage to no-till. that minimizes disturbance in the soil. And that's absolutely critical. The third thing is we teach them to keep that soil covered or armored. So again, the majority of farmers only have plants growing in their soil and covering that soil an average, believe it or not, of only about 120 to 140 days a year. And the rest of the year, that soil is bare and that's creating enormous problems that we can talk about here in just a moment. But we teach them to keep the soil covered. So you're keeping it covered when you have your cash crop in the ground, but after the cash crop you've got to follow that with a diverse cover crop. And that cover crop then grows and keeps the soil armored and covered. So and that's easy enough to accomplish as well. So we can help them in their very first year identify their context, minimize soil disturbance, and then plant cover crops to keep the soil covered or armored. And that allows us to keep living roots, which is the fourth principle, living roots in the ground year round. So that allows us to accomplish that. Now what that does is that starts them down the path of reducing their reliance on synthetic fertilizers and on all of the chemicals, the fungicides, the insecticides, the herbicides and so forth. Because the living roots are the thing that stimulates and feeds the microbes in the soil and then allows those microbes, it fuels those microbes to be able to recharge the nutrient cycle, that mineral cycle in soil so that we can then start gradually reducing these required inputs. The fifth principle is diversity. And so we teach them to increase the diversity of their cash crop rotations and to also have highly diverse cover crop mixes that they're planting in between their cash crops. Diversity of plant species is critical. The work of Dr. Fred Provenza yeah.

It was on my podcast. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. Fred's wonderful, Lindsay, and I love him. His book nourishment is just fantastic. So I'd recommend that for all your readers as well as another book to read. But Fred's work is, has highlighted the critical importance of diversity and producing this broad array of phytochemicals, phytonutrients that are, that are vital to soil health, plant health, ecosystem health, animal health, and ultimately our health. And then the final principle, the sixth principle is integrate livestock. So we teach these farmers, you know, the vast majority of row crop farmers today no longer have livestock. And for some of them, it can have been decades since they've had livestock. So we teach them to reintegrate livestock into that system to more quickly recharge and re-fertilize that system in a natural manner. And when you combine all six of those Mark together, that's the magic. You combine all six of them together and now they're making very rapid progress. So we start them on these six principles, going down those steps. We encourage them to do their own farm research and we help them with setting that up and doing that. It can be very, very simple. and I'll give you one quick example. I can give you many more, but one very quick example of how rapid this can be and how impactful it can be is a farmer by the name of Adam Graddy located in eastern North Carolina, the coastal plains of North Carolina. They're Adam's 10th generation. Their farm has been in their family since the 1780s. In 2017, that was their first year of regenerative agriculture. And they dove in with all six of these principles. In 2018, Hurricane Florence hit them, and they ended up with nine feet of water, flood waters, covering their farm. In just two years of regenerative agriculture, the resiliency, biological resiliency created in just two years is what saved Adam and his family's farm. All of their neighbors' farms were just completely destroyed. All the crops, all the pastures, everything turned completely brown from the flood waters. Adam's green back up immediately. He was even able to get back in his fields two years after the flood waters receded and plant diverse cover crops. He was the only farmer in his region that was able to graze his livestock actively through the winter. Everybody else was feeding hay and feed supplements and everything else because they had nothing to graze. And so, but also in 2018, in spite of the flood, okay, in spite of Hurricane Florence, they still saved on 12, on a 1200 acre farm, $200,000 in input cost in just their second year. At the end of his third year, at the end of 2019, right after Thanksgiving, and I still distinctly remember this, Adam called me up all excited. He said, Alan, I just came back from my bank. I want to share something with you. I said, what is that, Adam? And he said, I just paid off all my loans at the bank. And I just bought another farm paying all cash.

Wow, bought another farm paying all cash.

Exactly. So he and so let me tell you what's happened.

Farmers are afraid of the economic status of transitioning because it'll cost them more, they'll lose money, there's a risk to it. But you're saying that the risk is just more theoretical. It's not actually true that if farmers follow these principles and are assiduous about it, they can actually quickly turn a profit even in the first year.

That is exactly right. This does not this is not a prescriptive or formulaic system that causes you to have to experience losses in the first one, two, and three years. You still have all the tools available. You just learn to use them much more judiciously. And what this system does is it's adaptive rather than being formulaic prescriptive or like a recipe. it's adaptive, so you're constantly flexing and changing according to conditions. And just like with Adam, so he transitioned from all genetically modified crops to now he's planting all conventional seeds, so no more GM seed. He completely cut out all seed treatment, so no more neonicotinoid treatment on any of those.

Those are pesticides.

Exactly. And, you know, and just so your listeners know, there's enough, according to the work of Dr. Jonathan Lundgren, there's enough neonick on a single kernel of corn to kill 100,000 honey bees.

Wow.

Yeah, it's amazing.

Not on a cob, but just a single kernel.

A single kernel, a single seed of corn that you would plant. Enough neonict to kill 100,000 honey bees. So Adam's been able to totally do away with seed treatment. So that's no longer an issue. He has been able to reduce his fertilizer use by 75% in just three years. He's reduced his fertilizer requirements by 75% and continuing to reduce that. He has done away with all fungicides, so no more fungicide treatments, no more insecticide treatments. so all of that has gone by the wayside. And so everything is improved. And we've done a lot of tours, and he's even hosted two soil health academies. And the benefits are just incredibly experiential. When you go there, you can see, smell, hear, taste the differences.

Yeah.

He's experiencing on his farm.

I mean, you know, you think about organic, it always seemed like a fringe movement, kind of elite, nice to have, but not really scalable and not a real solution to our problems. Regenerative is a very different concept. It includes the concepts of organic, but it goes far beyond that. And the six principles that you just outlined, the context, the no disturbance in the soil, no till, the keeping roots in the ground, the covering the ground, the diversity, the integration of animals, these are principles that are founded in ecosystem science that are about restoring the natural functions of nature. And they do it in a way that actually creates a whole series of benefits that counteract all the harms of our current agricultural system. Hey, everybody, it's Dr. Hyman. Thanks for tuning into the Doctors Pharmacy. I hope you're loving this podcast. It's one of my favorite things to do and introducing you all the experts that I know and I love and that I've learned so much from. And I want to tell you about something else I'm doing, which is called Mark's Picks. It's my weekly newsletter. And in it, I share my favorite stuff, from foods to supplements to gadgets to tools to enhance your health. It's all the cool stuff that I use and that my team uses to optimize and enhance our health. And I'd love you to sign up for the weekly newsletter. I'll only send it to you once a week on Fridays. Nothing else, I promise. And all you can do is go to Dr. Hyman.com/picks to sign up. That's Dr. Hyman.com/picks, P-I-C-K-S, and sign up for the newsletter and I'll share with you my favorite stuff that I use to enhance my health and get healthier and better and live younger longer. Now back to this week's episode. So take us through quickly, what are the major harms of our conventional agricultural system in terms of One, the soil, water, biodiversity, the effect on our watersheds through the nitrogen fertilizers, and even the nutritional quality of our food. And how does regenerative agriculture address all of these? Like what has happened in all those areas? If you can go through that, it's a lot, I know. But I think it'd be good for people to understand why this is important, because it's not just, oh, we want nicer food for farmers markets, and this is not really gonna feed the world. This is a very different framework.

Yes it is. And one of the things that consumers need to realize today is that we do have a serious and significant soil degradation problem, not just in the US but globally. And that is created directly through farming. There's been a lot of pushback against livestock agriculture and so forth. but what I want consumers and your listeners to understand is that we have just as serious a problem with any kind of crop agriculture today as well. So any type of thing, anything that we're growing, we are, we're experiencing significant degradation issues in the conventional ways of doing that. So it doesn't matter whether you're growing fruits and vegetables or nuts or whether you're growing row crops, corn and soybeans and wheat or whether you're growing livestock, we're doing a lot of that wrong in every one of those sectors and we're doing it in a way that is steadily eroding and degrading our soils and our ecosystems and our climate. And so that's what I want people to first understand is don't think that you can pick on just a single phase of agriculture. If you're going to pick on anything, you've got to pick on every phase of agriculture. because every phase is contributing to this. So no phase is safe to our ecosystems and our environment. That's why regenerative is so incredibly important no matter what type of agriculture you're doing. So what we're seeing is an incredible amount of soil loss due to all of the tillage that's occurring due to the the bare soil that is existing two-thirds of the year on the vast majority of our soils globally. Again, not just here in North America, but globally. So we're experiencing an incredible amount of carbon loss, number one.

Yeah, we've lost about a third of all the carbon in the soil over the last 150 years, which is- Yes, we have a third of all the carbon in the atmosphere right now and it's one of the biggest contributors to climate change and people don't understand that.

Right, and the vast majority of soils around the US, again, whether they're being used for orchard production, whether they're being used for vegetable production or row crop, whatever it may be, we're averaging anywhere from three to six tons of topsoil loss per acre annually. That's just absolutely untenable. And, you know, I'm down here today in Gulf Shores, Alabama. So I'm looking out at the Gulf and in every year, Mark, in the Gulf of Mexico, we have the several thousand square mile dead zone. Yeah. And that's due to all of this harmful runoff. So nitrates, phosphates, sediment, topsoil, all of those nutrients that are leaving farms and ranches throughout the midsection of North America. You know, the Mississippi River drainage basin, which feeds the Gulf of Mexico, drains two-thirds of the land mass in North America. And so we're in, and of course, the vast majority of that is what we call the bread basket.

Yeah.

Of the US, the Midwest and the upper Midwest. And so all of those nutrients, as well as those chemicals, like glyphosate and others, or dicamba and all of that are rapidly moving down, being concentrated and moved down the river and into the Gulf of Mexico and creating this anywhere from five to over 8,000 square mile dead zone depending on the year. We're seeing the same things in our lakes and our bays, our estuaries, all of that where we're seeing tremendous harmful algal blooms of blue-green algae, cyanobacteria, all of this and as you're well aware, these algal blooms like that can create serious and significant neurological problems in human beings. Anything from Parkinson's to Alzheimer's to ALS, all of those types.

Neurotoxins, right.

Exactly, they're neurotoxins.

And it kills all the sea life, hundreds of thousands of metric tons of fish every year in the Gulf of Mexico. you know, you're in Alabama, where's your gumbo? You know, it's like killing all the shrimp and the fish out there.

Exactly. And that's precisely what's happening year after year after year. And, you know, so what we're seeing, obviously, are, you know, significant alterations in our climate and much more severe weather events. So we're seeing When it's raining, we're seeing a whole lot more heavy rainfall and flooding events and massive flooding events that are impacting again all of our gulf lakes, bays, estuaries, all of that.

And the repetitive agriculture practices actually allow the soil to hold so much water that it mitigates those flood problems.

Well, see it's the same solution. So what we're experiencing right now are the extremes, either flooding events and extreme flooding events or droughts, and they tend to be more extreme droughts. Well, guess what? The same solutions cure both of those problems. So if we rebuild the biology in the soil, in that biology in the soil, like mycorrhizal fungi and so forth, they create biotic glues that aggregate soil particles and create pores in the soil. and turn our soils into what they should be, what they were intended to be, giant sponges. That'll allow the soil to be able to infiltrate all of this rain and retain that. So if we're getting a lot of flooding, then, or we're getting heavy rainfall events, excuse me, then we have far, far less flooding because our soils can absorb and hold and retain that water. for every 1% increase in organic matter in the soil, an acre of soil can hold another 25,000 gallons of water. Now think about the impact that can have on mitigating flooding events and that harmful runoff going out into the Gulf of Mexico here. But the same thing occurs during drought conditions if we can significantly hold and retain more water than even when it turns off hot and dry. The droughts are far less severe and we're seeing that. We're even noticing that, for instance, in the deserts. Our work in the deserts of the Southwest US and Mexico, like in the Chihuahuan Desert, has shown us very clearly that we can significantly alter these arid conditions and we can even change the microclimate. We have direct evidence now, Mark, of that. And we are on the ranches that we're working on down in the Chihuahuan deserts in Mexico. The climate has actually physically altered all those ranches and they're actually getting far more rain than they ever got before. whereas their neighbors are not. Literally rainstorms are popping up and occurring directly on these ranches. Why?

Because the plants actually create moisture in the air, right? So rainforests aren't rainforests because it rains, the forests actually create the rain, right?

That's exactly right. I have a good friend of mine, Dr. Doug Gillham. He's a meteorologist with the National Weather Service. And Doug and I have talked often about this. and what Doug says is that Alan drought breeds drought and moisture breeds moisture. So if you can keep the ground covered and you can protect and preserve moisture in the soil, and as you get these systems passing over, you can attract the rainfall. But where these systems are passing over, these very arid climates, this very arid soil, They're just, they're just going to keep going until they hit moist soil or they hit a big body of water before they drop their rain. So it's not like clouds and, and, and storm systems don't pass over deserts. They do all the time.

Yeah.

The problem is that the, the dry arid conditions prevent for the most part that rainfall from occurring. So in the desert where we're recreating this biology and we have this, we're recreating these seas of grass, now it's attracting the rain and they are getting more rainfall. Yeah, it's amazing.

I read the Rodell Institute Farming System Study showed that 35 to 90% higher yields were found during droughts using these practices in corn and soy. So, when you're in a conventional farm, you're doing things wrong, you hit a drought, you're screwed. When you're doing this, your farm's resilient, you're growing food when no one else is growing it, just like your friend in North Carolina was able to come right back after the flood or people can grow during a drought. Very, very powerful. So you've got soil loss and erosion, which is preventing our ability to actually grow food, produce nutrient dense food because you touched on it briefly, but I think it's important to emphasize that the way in which our plants get nutrition is from the microbiology of the soil, literally the microbiome of the soil, extracting that nutrition and giving it back to the plants. And the way the plants help the microbiome is by feeding it carbon, basically carbohydrates, that's where you get carbon from, goes into the soil through the roots and they eat that and then it creates this virtuous cycle, just symbiotic cycle where everybody's happy. And then we as humans get to enjoy the nutrients that come in those plants. And we've seen over the last 50 years nutrient density decline in plants dramatically in six key nutrients. protein, calcium, phosphorus, iron, B2, vitamin C up to 30 to 50% lower. And at the same time, we're seeing a much higher carbohydrate content because the carbon is in the environment making these plants more carbohydrate rich, which is the last thing we need, and lower in protein. I mean, think about, you know, we're seeing up to 30 to 50% lower protein contents in, in things like wheat, barley and rice. So we're really, by the way, we're growing food destroying quality of food as a doctor, I'm seeing this, my patients, these widespread nutritional deficiencies, even if you think you're eating healthy, the food, if it's grown in the wrong way, isn't going to be extracting the nutrients from the soil. And the other thing I would love to sort of talk about is, you know, why the soil microbiome is so important. You know, we talk about the human microbiome and they're intimately connected, but, you know, it turns out the soil microbiome is a source of 95% of our food, our clothing, our building materials, antibiotics. I mean, the think about our antibiotics, but 78 of antibiotics developed over a bunch of recent decades have been from the soil, 60 new cancer drugs. And, and, and, and from 1989 to 95, 60 of all drugs developed were from the soil microbiome. And it's like the rainforest of the prairies were literally killing it. We don't even know what's in there, you know, in a handful of soil. You have so much life. If it's good soil that has all these compounds in it that we haven't really figured out what to do with yet as, as humans, it's incredible resource that we're destroying.

Yeah, absolutely it is. And if we destroy that soil microbiome, which is clearly what we've been doing, we are ultimately destroying ourselves. And what people have to understand is that the way that nature functions is the microbes are the vehicle that cycles the nutrients in the soil and feeds them to the plants. and without that vehicle occurring, the only way that those plants have access to any nutrients is for us to physically apply those nutrients. And that comes in the form of something that's very inferior as a nutrient source to human beings, either synthetic fertilizers or these animal manures that are far, you know, that come from lagoons and pits. and in compost piles and so forth that frankly are far inferior to the natural manures that come directly out of the rear end of an animal.

Yeah.

Yeah. So there is a difference. There's an absolutely huge difference between the two in terms of the micro, even the microbiome and those manures. The microbiome that is being dropped out of the rear end of an animal, as nature intended, back onto the soil.

Call them cow pies.

Exactly. It's the exact same microbiome that's in the soil to begin with. Okay, so that's the micro microbiome. We want going back to the soil. But when we have these manure pits, the lagoons, whatever you want to call them, they become highly anaerobic in nature, and that totally changes the microbial profile. And so when you apply copious amounts of those types of manures, you actually have a totally different microbiome that you're applying back to the soil. And in many, many instances, that microbiome is antagonistic to the natural microbiome in the soil. So you end up with all of these little wars or battles going on in the soil between all of these microbes trying to see who's going to win out. And so the only way to have truly nutrient-dense foods is that we must work regeneratively. We must work to restore the microbiome in that soil and its ability to be able to function at full capacity. Without that, there is no other way. We. I'm just going to be very honest with you, Mark, as a science. And I'm speaking both as a farmer and a scientist when I make this statement. But as a scientist, it is the height. of scientific arrogance and human hubris to think that we can design fertilizers or fertigation or whatever we want to call it that even comes close to mimicking what the natural microbiology of the soil can create and feed to these plants. It is not the same. And for us to think that it is again is the height of arrogance.

Absolutely, you know, and I think the other thing that, you know, people don't realize is that all those manure lagoons, the things they use to put on the soils, they're giving the animals tons of antibiotics.

So there's antibiotics and all of that.

Which they- and other pharmaceuticals. And other pharmaceuticals, and they're putting that on the soil, and it's like a human taking antibiotics. It destroys our microbiome. It has the same impact on the soil, destroying the microbiome of the soil. and on top of that, you've got the glyphosate situation, which is also an antibiotic in a sense, kills the microbiology of the soil, which is on 70% of our crops, it's in 70% of our water supplies. It's in our food, even we think healthy food, you know, everybody should eat hummus, it's healthy, right? There's this great brand called Sabra, which actually tastes really good, made by Pepsi, and it's there trying to get into healthier foods, which is awesome. But, you know, they're not producing the food, they're not producing the chickpeas. but 100% of Sabra products have glyphosate in them. And who would think, you know, we think soybeans, but chickpeas. And so we've got this real big problem where it's destroying not only the soil microbiome, our microbiome at the same time. You know, I just, I get these little science updates. And this morning I got a little paper that popped up in my email showing that, you know, people who take pre and probiotics can help treat depression using probiotics. taking all these antibiotics and all these things that destroy gut microbiome affect our mood and our health in so many different ways. That's just one small example. But I think what you're talking about with these six principles is a way of holistically addressing all these problems, right? Soil health, soil carbon, climate change, water conservation, resistance to droughts and floods, increasing biodiversity. We killed off 50% of our bird species on farms in the last 50 years. And now you're seeing bird species coming back on these regenerative farms, the Audubon Society wanting to partner with you guys. It's just amazing. It's like all these side effects and you've got pollinators coming back and bees and butterflies. And it's just, and it's not, you're not doing it to get the butterflies to come back or the bees to come back, but it just as a natural consequence of restoring an ecosystem. I always say, you know, if you create health, disease goes away as a side effect.

Right?

I don't treat disease, I create health. And I often say functional medicine is like being a regenerative farmer instead of putting chemicals on the human, like we put chemicals on the plants, we put food and whole nutrients and basic principles of ecosystem science, and it works the same. And I think, you know, farmers and doctors and healthcare systems and agricultural systems need to start to work together to really solve these big issues because whether it's the health care and chronic disease epidemic we have, the economic consequences of it, the environmental and climate consequences, the food insecurity issues we have, all of it. It's really one problem. And I think that we really haven't come to understand that as a society. And your work is so central to that. And I think, you know, if we maybe could figure out a new way to bring farmers and health care systems and doctors together to solve this, it would be pretty awesome.

I totally concur with that. And here's one of the huge benefits that these farmers are finding. We have conventional scientific wisdom, which is the vast majority of our agricultural research wisdom that we have today. And then we have what I call regenerative agriculture wisdom, and they are actually two very different things. And even as a scientist, I have discovered that and had to come to grips with that within my own way of thinking and doing things. But what we have found is, first of all, when you utilize regenerative practices and you're farming far more in synchrony with nature, okay? You're using the six principles to repair, to rebuild, to revitalize and restore fully functioning ecosystems. then what happens is that we create this incredible resilience. And that's one of the major things that farmers and ranchers are lacking today. They're lacking resilience. Whenever they hit a disease challenge, a pest challenge, or any other type of weather challenge, it really shines a light on the lack of resilience. Their farms fall apart. And so our regenerative farmers have far greater resilience when they're hit with any of these challenges. they're much more able to withstand those challenges. But the other thing that happens is that when you are farming this way and you have far more diversity, it actually turns conventional wisdom on its ear. What we thought we knew is no longer what is reality in fact. And that's what a lot of scientists right now are still struggling with because scientists are still people too. and they're still subject to the same biases and skewness as anybody else and even their own prejudices. And that's exactly what we're finding, is that many scientists are fighting this not because they've ever really experienced regenerative agriculture, many haven't, but they're just automatically throwing up skepticism and barriers to it because it flies in the face of all of their conventional scientific wisdom. That's why they can't believe that it's true. And so once you do this, and this is why the changes can occur so rapidly, is because we're literally dealing with biology rather than chemistry. And that's the big problem, Mark, over the last seven decades, agricultural science and the way that we farm has been all related back to soil chemistry only. That's all we've been thinking about and we have totally ignored and forgotten soil biology. And we've operated from the standpoint of chemistry drives biology. No, it is exactly the opposite. Biology drives chemistry.

That's right.

And if we alter the biology for the better, then we automatically alter the chemistry for the better. And that again, just totally changes the dynamics.

Well, I want to talk about a couple more things. One is, is the science behind this, because a lot of people argue, well, this is working, farmers are doing it, but, you know, where's the evidence? And before we up, up upturn our whole agricultural system, you know, don't we need better science that proves this model? Because people say, well, you know, sounds good, but, you know, how much carbon can you really store? And, you know, there's a carrying limit that'll happen. And, you know, it's not really something you can scale. What do you say to those people who challenge the science of this? Because, you know, you hear a lot of challenges and go, well, sounds good, but, you know, where's the evidence?

Okay, so first of all, what I would say is that there is far more science supporting this than people might realize. They're just not looking in the right places. And it's very true. A lot of this is in ecological journals because the vast majority of the traditional agricultural journals refuse to publish this science. and there's a big reason it flies in the face of what they've been publishing in their journals for several decades now. So how do you handle that? If you're a reviewer and you're the editor and owner of these journals and all of a sudden you're printing articles that completely fly in the face of what has been printed in your journals for the last 40 years, it's a little hard to swallow that pill. So that's reality, that's a fact. So you have to look in different journals. So there is quite a bit of science available on this and for many different countries around the world, you just got to look in the right places. The second thing I would tell them though is that we do have many, many ongoing research projects globally right now. For instance, one of them is we have a research project that is doing paired comparisons comparing neighboring regenerative farms to conventional farms. And we're doing this all over North America. It's out of what's called the Soil Carbon Project. And there are, we've had several years into this research now. It'll be ongoing for many more years to come, but in 2021, there'll be an array of peer-reviewed articles that will be published. And we're measuring everything, Mark, from the microbial population and carbon and all of that beneath the soil surface to diversity above the soil surface. We've got flux towers out that are doing 24/7/365 monitoring of greenhouse gas emissions and weather fluxes. That's exquisite data. and that's going to be available. That's absolutely a game changer. So all of that data is coming available. But the other thing that I will say as a scientist, what is one of the things that we look for the most to be able to validate and verify the results of anything? Well, it's repetition, right? Replications. Replications. We talk about reps, a replicated experiment, replicated trial. Well, we're replicating it, but very differently than conventional science. You know, conventional science has small plot replicated research in a greenhouse or on a university research station. It's all very static. But what we're doing is we're replicating this farm over farm over farm over farm across region after region. So we've got multiple farm replications and multiple region and even multiple country replications. So, Mark, I'm going to contend that that science and those results are far more valid than the results of a university research station trial that's located in a very static area, under a static environment, under a static climate, and under a set number of years. And I'm actually working on an article right now titled All Research is Ultimately Anecdotal. And what I mean by that is this. The typical research that is done in the agricultural field and even in your own medical field today is done through what we call the reductionist model.

Yes.

So what we're trying to do is we set up trials to specifically control all variables except for the one variable that we want to examine, right? And we're doing it again in agriculture, it's all done at a very specific location, very specific soil type, climate on and on and on, right? Well, that means ultimately that those research results are only applicable under the exact same conditions that the research was conducted under.

Same thing with medicine. You've got, you know, this one drug for this one problem in a 70 kilogram white male from Kansas, and it's relevant to that person maybe, but not everybody else. Right.

Exactly. But, but what we're doing with, as scientists, which ultimately makes all research anecdotal, is that we're taking those results and then extrapolating them. Right.

Yeah.

And in, in the medical field, you're trying to say that well, just like you said, you got a 70 kilogram male and now you want to extrapolate them across all countries, all diets, all ethnicities, all sexes, all on and on, right? Well, we're doing the same thing in agriculture. We're trying to extrapolate it across all different types of farming conditions and biological situations and climates and so forth. and say this holds across all of that. So the moment I take any research, any reductionist model research and extrapolate it, I have immediately made it anecdotal as well. And so when we often, and the reason I bring that up is because we often hear scientists say, well, Alan, that's just anecdotal. Really, I've got hundreds of farms that this has been replicated over. across every region of the US. And you're saying that's anecdotal. I got far more reps, far more data, far more validity across all of these than any of your controlled reductionist model trials. So how in the world are you saying that's anecdotal compared to yours?

It's true. So I think it seems to me that, you know, maybe if we can get a hearing at the next session of Congress in 2021 and bring together the scientists talked about this, that there's plenty of evidence that this works, that it's economically feasible, that it's profitable, and it creates a win-win-win all across the board, except for a few of the big players who are going to be really against it, the seed producers, the agrochemical producers, the banks are going to be against it because they're not going to be needing to provide all these crop loans for people. Everything is going to be a whole fallout of resistance. It's going to be hard to overcome, I think. I think that, you know, the, the imperatives are just so great now, and I think the dots are connecting, and I feel like it's this moment of convergence, which is very, very exciting for me. Okay. So science, I think, is there. And we, you know, people can, can go to understanding ag and the soil health academy website and learn more about the science. I, i'm in the rabbit hole. I love it. I'm a doctor, but it just, it makes sense to me because all about thinking about ecosystems and as a functional medicine doctor, that's what I am. I'm an ecosystem doctor. And, but I want to spend the last little bit of time talking about a very controversial subject, which you're an expert in. You studied animal science. It was your level of expertise. And, you know, there's a sort of a concept around that in order to really address climate change, we need to eliminate animal agriculture. That the EAT-Lancet Commission, which was a very robust scientific report, report, said that we need to reduce our animal consumption by 90% in order to reduce the environmental impact and climate change impacts of our agriculture. And I think that, and that even if we did regenerative agriculture with animals, that it would not be enough to reduce the carbon in the environment to make a difference. that really isn't scalable in order to feed the world. So these are the memes out there that people are talking about. And I think, you know, you are probably more experienced and knowledge about this than anybody. And I remember reading an article when I was writing my book, Food Fix, that you wrote about the math of scalability in America alone of regenerative agriculture. Can you talk about, you know, why the idea of being vegan or eliminating animals from agriculture, I mean, even if you're even if you're vegan, you still need to have animals as part of the cycle, even if you don't eat them according to your six principles. So can you explain why we think that and why it's so important and how do you argue the side that actually, no, maybe not only are animals not to be eliminated from agriculture, as we were talking about, for example, with the Impossible Burger, Pat Brown says his mission statement for his company is eliminate animal agriculture. why is it not only not a good idea, but why is it important to actually have it in order to solve the problem?

It's a very, very good question again, Mark. You know, so I start always with what we call the historical ecological context. And that means that we have to go back and look at how this world functioned naturally. prior to all of our intervention. And if we take a look at that, we'll realize that across this globe on virtually every landmass that we have, no matter what continent we're talking about with the exception of Antarctica, that we had very, very large numbers for many, many thousands of years. of foraging, grazing and browsing ruminants. They have always existed and they must exist. If they don't exist, then you cease to have intact, fully functioning ecosystems. Every one of these ecosystems evolved through the interaction of these grazing, browsing and foraging ruminants. the other thing that we have to realize is that they've, they've, they were around in literally hundreds of millions in the numbers and for many, many thousands of years. Now, we, we don't go back in a historical ecological context and subscribe a methane issue.

All those Buffalo, they were all causing climate change.

Exactly. The Buffalo, the L, the you know, or the bison, you know, here in the US technically, I guess, but the bison, the elk, the deer, the antelope, the caribou, on and on and on, you know, they existed, the majority of them, with the exception of the caribou, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, south of the Arctic Circle to the Gulf, and then of course we have the caribou, you know, in the Arctic Circle. So in look at many other countries around the world, many other continents around the world, the exact same thing. so when we look at the historical ecological context or perspective and we realize that we've had hundreds of millions of these wild ruminants roaming the earth for a very long time, they all digest the plants the same way that our domesticated livestock do. And that meant that they also release methane just like our domesticated livestock did. So if the methane lease itself due to natural digestive processes from these wild ruminants were an issue, then it's been an issue for a very long time and it's nothing new. So to say that this is some kind of new phenomenon and something that's seriously impacting us, we have to take a look at, okay, if methane is a serious problem in terms of greenhouse gas emissions today, why? why? Because we've had these ruminants around again for a very long time. They've been emitting methane for a very long time. So what has changed? Well, let's examine that. The thing that has changed is the way that we raise those livestock and what is not happening biologically in the soil. So when we move to, you know, more of these catho type situations, and we're raising livestock that way, rather than out on the land as they existed for millennia in the wild ruminants, then we are altering the ability for nature to be able to process that methane. There are methane digesting microbes in the soil. One whole class of those are called methanotrophs. But there's also other, a whole host of other methane digesting microbes in the soil as well. So when we destroy our soil biology, we're destroying its ability, and row crop agriculture does this as well. It's destroying the ability of our soils to be able to process that methane through a very natural process. again, this is nothing new. It's just the way that we're doing things. So if we alter the way that we produce our livestock and we go back to what we call regenerative or adaptive grazing that mimics, we call it biomimicry and eco-mimicry. The way that we're managing our domesticated livestock is mimicking the way that the wild ruminants foraged across the surface of this earth. And that actually restores the methanotrophs and the other methane digesting microbes in the soil. So that now it's not a problem anymore. The problem with the vast majority of the studies out there, again, as we talked earlier, Mark, you know, is they've been very limited in nature and very controlled.

Yeah.

And they've been studying the CAFO centered animal agriculture. Well, that's not what we're talking about here at all. And the truth is, again, to have fully functioning intact ecosystems, and I think that's what most people want and they desire, then we need to have domesticated ruminants on the scene to again create this biomimicry and eco-mimicry through regenerative grazing practices because we're not going to have particularly here in the US, but many other places globally, we're never again going to have the massive wild roaming herds of bison and elk and antelope and deer. We've got cities and towns and roads and fences and everything else, and that just can't occur again, unfortunately. So the only way to recreate and rebuild these ecosystems is to use domesticated ruminants for to do that. They are our tool to be able to accomplish that.

Well, there's another thing, facts, you know, as a doctor, I test my patients who have stomach problems for methane. I actually give them a breath test. I measure the amount of methane they produce. So actually humans can produce methane too. And it's usually because of an imbalance in the microbiome in their gut. And I remember reading Fred Provenza's stuff talking about how Certain plants, if the animals are grazing in a diverse forage with all these different plants, for example, more tannins, that their methane production is far less. Or feeding cows seaweed reduces methane production. So you can both on the front end reduce methane production by giving them diverse diets and changing their microbiome, and you can increase the soil's capacity to store methane or extract methane from the air. and also people don't realize that, you know, cattle produce about five percent of the global methane, but fracking, which is used to produce fertilizer, fertilizer production, which is enormous energy cost, it's a very energy intensive process to extract nitrogen from the air and make fertilizer, that produces three times as much methane as cathodes. So that fertilizer is being used on all your plant crops that you're eating if you're eating vegetables or corn or all these things. And people don't understand that it's actually three times as much of a problem eating a lot of plant foods as it is the CAFO animals. So it's a complex story and people get all emotional about it. And I think we just have to look at the facts. You know, you don't have to eat animals if you're morally opposed, but you need to understand that in order to create a thriving agricultural system, to create a nutrient dense food supply that animals have to be part of that cycle and done in the right way. I think it was Russ Konsler said it's not the cow, it's the how. You know, that really sort of stuck with me because it speaks to what you're talking about, which is really the intelligent use of animal agriculture in a way that actually solves the problems rather than creates the problems.

That's exactly correct. And, a lot of people may not realize as well. You talked about the production of synthetic nitrogens, which yes, produces a very, very large amount of methane that's released into the atmosphere. And then of course those nitrogens are applied as fertilizers to our crops. But the other thing that happens, anaerobic soils release huge amounts of methane. For instance, swamps release large amounts of methane. Our oceans can release large amounts of methane. thing if they're not very healthy, but also all rice fields. So all of the rice production that we do, those rice fields are releasing large amounts of methane and in any other type of crop production. If we're degrading those soils and creating anaerobic conditions in those soils and inability of those soils to infiltrate water, then what happens is that water with rainfall and all that ponds and pools and exasperates the anaerobic conditions. And then every one of those fields is now releasing methane up into the atmosphere as well. So animal agriculture is by far not the only producer and releaser of methane. All forms of agriculture create methane release if we're doing it improperly and wrongly. But the other thing you're exactly correct. We can use animals, domesticated livestock as a tool by grazing and foraging regeneratively. And we actually use multi-species Mark, so that's what's so wonderful about this. We not only can use cattle, but we use sheep and goats and pastured pigs and pastured poultry, chickens and turkeys and all of those types of things. to help restore this whole microbial balance in the soil and therefore restore the ability of the soil to be able to function properly relative to methane and carbon and all of nitrous oxide, all of the other greenhouse gases. Now one other thing I want to point out, we've talked about methane and we now know that if we farm regeneratively and we reintegrate livestock, that we can actually resolve the methane issue and not make it worse. It's all just like Russ Consor said, it's not the cow but the how. It's how we do it that's critical here, biomimicry, eco-mimicry of that natural system. But the other thing I want to mention is the carbon. Okay? And a lot of people have a false concept of carbon. they think that all we need to do to resolve our problem here is just if we could create some giant shop vac and suck all of this carbon out of the atmosphere.

-Capture technology, right?

-Right, right. And sock it away in some giant reservoir beneath the soil surface, never to be touched or utilized again, then that's what we want to do, right? Boy, that'll solve our carbon problem. no, absolutely it will not. What I want people to realize is that carbon exists in many, many different forms, and the vast majority of the carbon that is in our atmosphere actually is meant to be continually cycled. That's how nature has done it for eons. And so the vast majority of this carbon is actually not static carbon to be just socked away forever. it's liquid carbon. And that liquid carbon is supposed to be constantly cycled back and forth from the atmosphere into the soil, utilized by the microbes and the plants and the animals and back out again. And it's a cycle. That's why we call it the carbon cycle, not the carbon linear, you know, right, it out and put it into the soil forever. So. again, the way that we do that is through regenerative agriculture and implementing these six principles. If we do that, then we heighten the functioning of this liquid carbon pathway and we no longer have a carbon problem. And can we solve our carbon problem simply through regenerative agriculture globally? Of course we can. And for those that are denying that or saying that we can't do that, they have not looked at a lot of the data that's out there relative to the carbon cycle itself.

Yeah, I mean, a lot of people are talking about the, you know, the need to reduce fossil fuel use, to reduce emissions as a strategy, focus on renewables, and those are all important things that we need to do. But, but I heard people argue that, you know, using regenerative agriculture principles, we could literally draw down all of the carbon that's been released since the Industrial Revolution. Other people say, you know, 30%. Some people argue maybe not at all. Where are you in the science of that? I think it's an interesting conversation because, you know, what do we really know and what can we say definitively that that will be the contribution of regenerative agriculture? Because if it's true, I mean, I think the UN said this, that if we took two of the 5 million degraded hectares of land around the world, spent $300 billion which is essentially less than we spend on diabetes with Medicare every year, that we could stop climate change for 20 years and draw down enough carbon to really give us a chance to solve this problem more. What is your sense of where the science is on this?

Yeah, so from the data that we've collected, and again, a lot of this is getting ready to be published, and from data that we've collected on our own farms, what we know is that we have been able to sequester as many as 7.4 tons of carbon per acre annually. And it can range anywhere from about three tons per acre annually to over seven tons per acre annually. Now, you multiply that across the number of acres that we have both here in North America and globally, and that far, far exceeds the target goals that we see most scientists posing far, far exceeds that. So we already have been able to clearly demonstrate Mark that we can sequester significant amounts of carbon. And here's the game changer. So it's both plant, it's a combination of diversity of three things, diversity of microbial species, diversity of plant species, and diversity of animal species. So when we combine all three of those in the same environment on the same acres, which is exactly what we're doing, then it rapidly speeds up the functioning of this liquid carbon pathway and the sequestering of carbon into the soil. The problem is the vast majority of the trials that have been conducted and therefore the research that is presented out there there has been measured using far more conventional methods in far less diverse environments. So they're assuming that okay if I grow corn then I can draw down X amount of carbon per year and that's it. So boy we can never change things if that's what we're doing or even a forest. You know if you look at pine forest for instance, we have a bunch of those here in the Southeast US. Well, your typical carbon drawdown in a pine forest annually per acre is going to be maybe 1 to 1.5 tons per acre annually. But that pine forest is a very, very low diversity environment. It is not what nature would have put there normally. And we put it there. We're the ones that put it there, but yet we're basing our assumptions and all of our science on that. And that's where we're going wrong. We have the wrong assumptions, Mark. We're measuring the wrong thing. We've got to measure regenerative operations that have high levels of diversity, micro, plant, animal. That is where we get the numbers that support being able to substantially alter this situation.

So I think I'm going to nominate you for the next Secretary of Agriculture. You can see you're cringing, by the way. Maybe you could be an advisor. How's that?

That would be my worst nightmare to have to go to DC and reside in DC and deal with that every day.

Well, at least we'll get to speak in and whisper in the right ears.

I can do that.

This is so important. I think a couple of hopeful notes to finish on. One is you've been working with a group called Understanding AG. which is, I think was driven organically out of the interest of big food companies to address some of the challenges they saw coming down the pike, not out of some moral responsibility or ecological consciousness or any Green New Deal vision, but out of the economic imperatives of being a giant food company looking at your supply chain and saying, it's under threat. And that's why General Mills has committed a million acres of regenerative ag and is funding farmers, is funding conversion, has given money to all sorts of groups like Kiss the Ground and working with you to actually make this happen. And that to me is really a heartening thing to see these big food companies stepping in where the government is slow to enter. What is your experience with working with these companies? And is this just window dressing? Are they in it? for the long haul and for the real reasons and the right reasons?

Well, what I would have to say is that we have had an incredible experience working with companies like General Mills. I can vouch for the fact that they are very serious about what they're doing and their commitment to regenerative agriculture. And evidence of that is the fact that within understanding AG, they have given us freedom to do what we do. We have not been censored by them in any way. We have not been told what to say, what to do, how to teach farmers, anything like that. And we weren't very upfront with them, you know, initially as we entered into this work with them, that we have to have that freedom. And they fully granted that to us. And they have proven that to be true as we've gone through the last two to three years of our project with them. them. They have not interfered in any way whatsoever. So they, and they continue to fund and to commit to helping us to teach and educate farmers and to further train farmers. And so I would have to say that, you know, those are the types of commitments that we need, because those are the companies that can be game changers out there. They influence other companies of their ilk. And they also have a heavy influence on farmers and ranchers out there that are supplying them and obviously over the consumer because they sell food to literally billions of consumers a year. So by them making this commitment, it's a huge, huge move in the right direction. And, you know, Mark, one of the most impressive things is they were very honest with us upfront in saying that, look, we serve billions of people annually and we know that this change is not going to be made overnight, but yet we're willing to invest in the time that it takes to get us there. However long it takes, we're willing to do that. So we've had a great relationship. It has been hugely productive and I can tell you that the response from the farmers that are producing for General Mills has been overwhelming. It's been very surprising to them. We have had far more farmers respond positively to this than they anticipated. We continue to look forward to these types of relationships and building these relationships with other food companies as well. So, yeah, that's the way to move forward and to make real progress.

That's so exciting. Danona is also doing this. So, a last question is, if you were president, Secretary of Ag, you could waive a wand. What would be the policy things that you would implement to help farmers make this conversion? What do they need to do to make this easy for them to go yes?

Well, as we opened our session today, I'm going to close it with saying the very first first thing that needs to happen is that the farmers have to be educated. Again, you can't implement or practice what you don't know. So we need policy that funds education of farmers. And if, in my opinion, if they're going to be eligible for things like federal crop insurance and so forth, then I think it needs to be a prerequisite needs to be that they have completed a course in regenerative agriculture and need to be able to document that they're implementing regenerative practices. You know, any other- yeah, if you.

Want to get the money, you gotta learn how to do it right.

Right, right. And what does any other insurance company do? You know, they want to make sure that you're low risk, right? In the way that if you're funding crop insurance, well, the way to make sure that you're low risk is to make sure that you're educated. So that will be one of the very first things that I would put into place.

It's like a safe driving course. You get a safe farming course.

Exactly. Exactly. And then for any type of crop insurance or other subsidy, you need to be able to verify that you have ongoing education credits in regenerative agriculture practices. A farmer, if they're going to apply chemicals, herbicides and insecticides and fungicides for instance, they're supposed to do ongoing training and get licensed as a chemical applicator. Well, how is this any different? Let's have them ongoing education and licensed as a regenerative practitioner. And that allows them, I guarantee you, once they start down this path, things will absolutely improve for them, and they will significantly reduce, as we've discussed earlier, they will significantly reduce their Reliance on all of these synthetics and chemicals and everything else. And basically, the issues, including their financial issues, will resolve themselves over time.

That's amazing. So in a world of bad news of economic collapse and COVID-19 and chronic disease and climate change and environmental destruction, regenerative agriculture seems almost too good to be true, but I think it actually is, right? Think about it. We change the way we grow food in a way that restores soil, that draws down carbon, that conserves water, that increases biodiversity, that restores ecosystems, that produces more nutrient dense food in a way that's more resilient to droughts and floods and climate change, that produces food that actually creates health for people, saves money for the healthcare system, and makes farmers more money. why wouldn't everybody sign on to this? So it's almost one of those things where you go, wow, why haven't we thought of this before? And when you think about regeneration as a concept, whether it's regenerative agriculture, regenerative health, regenerative healthcare, it really is a solution to so many of our global crises. And it's such a hopeful message. And essentially what it comes down to is respect Mother Nature. listen to Mother Nature and do what she tells you to do. It's that simple, right?

It really is. That's the bottom line. And what I often tell people and what I would tell anybody listening today is that if you're skeptical, if you have doubts about how well regenerative agriculture works, and if you've heard people say that, well, I tried that regenerative agriculture and it, and it just didn't work for me. The first thing I would say is come visit those of us who are doing this. Come visit our farms. Come see for yourself. Don't just automatically dismiss it. But then secondly, what we have experienced is whenever this is, quote, failed, it failed because they have not implemented all six principles. They pick, they cherry picked out of the principles and were only implementing maybe one or two or three at the most and then claiming that it failed. Well, it failed because you were not implementing all the six principles of regenerative agriculture. So come visit us, come see us. Our farms are open. We're transparent. We welcome visitors and we would love to have.

I'm gonna come. I'm gonna close with a quote from one of my favorite human beings, Wendell Berry. He said, People are fed by the food industry, which pays no attention to health and are treated by the health industry, which pays no attention to food. And I think for my own personal work right now, as an ecosystem doctor, is to kind of converge back to really bringing together healthcare, agriculture, food, all of it together as one solution that can save so many of our humans from dying and save our ecosystem from collapsing. And, you know, we may not survive, humans may not survive this all, but, you know, we got to try. And I think this is such a beautiful, hopeful message. And I thank you so much for being on the show, Dr. Williams. You're just a beacon of light, and I can't wait to meet you in person. I encourage people to check out his work, go to understanding AG, as well as so healthy. Academy. He's written a number of books. You can check it out. And please share this podcast with your friends and family on social media. We'd love to hear from you. Please leave a comment, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and we'll see you next time on the Doctor's Pharmacy.