Could This Practice Be Our Saving Grace?

Agriculture is the single biggest impact that humans have on the planet. Farming and ranching, food production is the thing we do with the greatest impact on the planet.

Soil degradation is a global problem and the implications are pretty massive. The balance of our climate, ecosystems, food security and health are all on the line. In this mini episode, Dr. Hyman sits down with bestselling author, Miriam Horn, as she shares one farmer's efforts to rebuild the ecosystem of his soil using regenerative agriculture.

And you really, in your book, Rancher, Farmer, Fisherman, you really kind of made the connection between the food we eat and the environment, which a lot of people don't make that connection. You found an extraordinary farmer, a multi-generation farmer, who had an awakening, Justin Kauf, and he changed his whole way of practicing agriculture in the Midwest in basically the grain belt. Tell us about him and how he had his awakening and what he's done and how it's transformed his farm and those around him.

Well, so Justin is a fifth generation farmer and he went to college just when there was this explosion in soil microbiology, when people were really starting to understand the complexity and the importance of the soil microbiome. So that was the focus of his study, was understanding this incredible what one of the farmers calls a little city underground where everyone's working together, where fungi and bacteria are working together to nourish the crops, to hold the soil, to build carbon in the soil, to trap water, to protect human health, to protect plant health, to do all these critical things. So Justin came back from college understanding that his most important job was to take care of those microbes. That that's what he was really farming was the soil microbes. And that the way to do that-.

He wasn't a plant farmer. He was a soil farmer.

He was a soil farmer. And that the way to do that was to farm as much like the prairie as he could be, to emulate the native ecosystem that he lived in, this now lost prairie, this prairie that had been ripped up by the sod busters, to make his farm as much like the native prairie as he could. So that meant never plowing the soil, you seed by blowing the seed into the soil, it meant leaving everything on top of the soil, the residues, the living plants, dead plants, you just leave it there as a kind of armor.

It's almost like a mulch.

Yes, exactly. But at a huge scale because when he harvests his weed or his soy, he takes the grain out and he leaves absolutely everything else in the field. So it's like a 10, five foot tatami mat. So there is no erosion, there's no wind erosion, there's no rain erosion. It keeps his soils cool even when it's blisteringly hot in Kansas. I mean, one of the greatest things about it is that these soil microbes that are his most important charges, when you plow soil and you fold that residue into the soil, it's like a big gulp, basically, for those microbes. You are delivering them with a hit of nutrients that totally screws up the balance of microbes. You get a huge overgrowth of bacteria. at the expense of fungi. The bacteria eat through all the organic matter and respire it as CO2. Your fungi, which are the ones that are really doing all the hard work, they're the ones that put out these beautiful silvery fingers that bring nutrients to the plant. They get choked out by the bacteria.

Which are so important. The mycorrhizome in the soil is like a vast network of fungi that actually is so critical for maintaining the soil health and even fixes methane, which is pretty interesting. The bacteria, right, there's methane fixing bacteria in the soil that help protect against the off-gassing from the cows, right?

Well, that you know more about. You should tell me about that because I don't know a lot about methane.

A lot of people say, well, if you grass-fed cows, you're still going to have methane. It's still going to cause climate change because it's far more dangerous, turns CO2. But we know now that when you have rich grasslands, that actually there's methane fixing bacteria and fungi in there that hold back the methane. That's why we had 60 million buffalo and no climate change.

Well, they certainly, I mean, that's fantastic. They certainly hold carbon. I mean, you look at Justin's soils now, and again, his model is the prairie, so his metric is the prairie. So it's how close can you get to the levels of carbon and organic matter and the diversity and vitality of the microbiome in the native prairie? And we do still have some, so you can go measure it and say, and Justin is, his family had farmed since 1865 the old way. He's been farming the new way for about 20 years. In that 20 years, he has rebuilt half the carbon that is in the native prairie. He's fixed that carbon in the ground because again, it's all this organic matter, it's this kind of goo that holds nutrients in the soil, and these fungi, they actually wrap their arms around the carbon and hold it there. The other really important thing in an ecosystem like Kansas, is some of the most extreme weather on Earth, the Great Plains, and becoming more extreme all the time, is that if you don't plow the soil, you know, when you plow, it's like when you rip steel through soil, it's like a tornado and an earthquake at the same time. You scramble these microbial communities, you rip apart these symbiotic relationships, and you completely collapse their world. The healthy soil looks like a coral reef. It's full of air and and space for water, plowed soil is just a hard pan that nothing can permeate. So because Justin doesn't plow, if he has a plant, if he grows a plant like a radish or an alfalfa plant that puts down a big old tap root 10 or 20 or 30 feet down, that channel stays there. And so water can get into his soil all the way down.

The beauty of this kind of farming is that it actually allows us to save the water and complete the cycle of carbon so we don't create emissions that lead to climate change. Very powerful.

And Justin doesn't irrigate. He's able, because he farms in this way, that keeps his soils cool and that captures every drop of rainwater. He has no irrigation on his farm.

That's extraordinary, right? And so you think about these farms that use massive amounts of irrigation, and then what happens is when there's drought, you know, they can't grow food. And when there's rain, the soils can't hold the water because they're depleted soils. And they leads to floods, which is why we see this cycle of dRuds, dRuds, flouts, flouts and dRuds, droughts and.

Flouts, that are mixing the whole world up. And I, well, and carrying a ton of pollutants into the water, which you don't want, you know, when soil is eroding, so is everything else, like nitrogen that you don't want in your waterways. And, you know, and it's a global issue. I mean, there are a lot of people who think who can trace, including the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who trace a lot of social instability in the world and even terrorism back to the depletion of soils and to drought. If people are starving, if their soils are depleted and they can't grow anything and they're displaced off their farms, they are extremely susceptible to radicalization. And Tom Friedman writes about once a year he writes that column. And I think there's a lot of legitimacy to it.

I think it's true. You know, I remember reading this book that that we had 60 million bison, we killed them all to basically deprive the Native Americans of their food supply. And then fast forward into the 30s and we had the Dust Bowl. And they were connected because we protected the soils with the bison and now we had none of that. And then there was a scene in the book called Kiss the Ground where the Dust Bowl was rolling into Washington, DC, into Congress while the guy was testifying about what we need to do about it and it forced the to actually do something about it.

Well, and Justin's family, there are people who still remember it, who remember this wall, you know, 10,000 feet high and 200 miles wide of dust rolling across the prairie.

10,000 feet high.

10,000 feet high and 200 miles across. It's stripped 10 million acres of soil. Soil is essentially non-renewable and it destroyed millions of livelihoods. And so that memory, Justin lives in that Dust Bowl region. He lives in the area that was depleted in that way. And that memory, you know, it's what led to the creation of the Natural Resource Conservation Service, the soil conservation service in the US government. But also it really was planted the seeds for this revolution away from plowing because plowing was had really set the laid the groundwork for that disaster.

Stripped and eroded land produces less nutritious foods and less overall yield. Over time, it also causes the land to become barren and desolate. Revitalizing old farming methods could be our food supply and our planet's saving grace. Incorporating agricultural animals also plays an essential role in creating a productive and successful regenerative farm. When cattles are raised outdoors grazing on pasture for the right amount of time, over time, they force the planet to draw more carbon into the soil as they regrow. As the cattle move to new pastures, the process continues. These practices have been found to hold major potential for turning agriculture into a climate solution rather than a key source of the problem. Farmers who are practicing these methods need our support. Engage with them by going to your local farmers market. And support them and our future by buying foods grown in nutrient-dense soil. Thanks for tuning in to this mini episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy. If you enjoy this episode, please consider sharing it with a friend. Until next time.