A Geological Perspective On Regenerative Agriculture with David Montgomery

Hi friends, this is John. I'm passionate about developing regenerative agriculture systems that improve soil health, produce crops that are completely resistant to diseases and insects, and produce food of such an exceptional quality that we can have a legitimate conversation about growing food as medicine. I've been fortunate to meet many people with incredible knowledge and information about soil and plant systems. However, much of this knowledge and information is scattered all over the place. There are many incredible stories and a lot of knowledge that have not been widely shared. I founded Advancing eco Agriculture in 2006 to bring this knowledge together in a more coherent fashion and incorporate it into products and growing systems that growers can easily put into practice. It's my personal mission to have these regenerative agriculture systems become the mainstream globally, the status quo against which all other growing systems are compared to to achieve this goal, I want to share the knowledge that we have learned in the last decade and make it available to everyone. These concepts and principles about regenerative systems can be applied anywhere and when they're properly applied, they will increase farm profitability and resilience to climate stress. If you have any questions, suggestions, comments or topics of ideas that you would like for me to discuss, please connect on social media or email me. JohnGenerativeAgriculturePodcast.com Be sure to sign up for our email list@regenerativeagriculturepodcast.com Hope you enjoy and thank you for listening. Because AEA produces this show, that means that we do not have to sell ads and we're not beholden to advertisers. This gives me the freedom to host anyone that brings value to the community and to gift free promotional space to organizations that help impact the regenerative agriculture movement. You'll notice that this season we're airing short messages from organizations that are doing great work in the sphere of regenerative agriculture and food Part awareness spreading, part thank you, part community impact service, we realize that this show is a great platform to offer a wide audience to folks that we want to support. We hope that you'll check them out and get involved and support them as well.

This is Jerry Hatfield. I'm the director of the National Lab for Agriculture and Environment in Ames, Iowa. AARS is the research branch of usda. We conduct research across the nation on behalf of agricultural producers and our focus really is to look at how soil changes relative to management. How can we improve our soils not only for production efficiency, but how it influences all ecosystem services in terms of environmental quality, habitat for pollinators, water quality. This intersection between agriculture and the environment. If you want to work with us on on farm research, contact us at www.ars.usda.govnlae.

I'M excited to be here with David Montgomery, who's published several books that have led him to the regenerative agriculture movement. And David doesn't come from an agronomy background, but instead has been approaching this from a geology and a GE morphology perspective. David, you've written a couple of really great books. You've written Dirt and the Hidden Half of Nature, Growing a Revolution, your most recent book, which I think has been very widely acclaimed in the regenerative agriculture space. What brought you to this pathway? How did you get started researching agriculture?

Oh, thanks, John. You know, it's. I actually came to it because I'm the kind of geologist that studies erosion. I studied what shapes the surface of the earth. And so when you, when you think about what shapes hillside or mountains, you're really talking about erosion. So I've studied erosion for decades, but mostly from a very long term perspective, you know, how it shapes the surface of the world that we know and walk around on. And I came to thinking about agriculture really by that first book, the Dirt, the Erosion of the Civilizations book, the first book I wrote that dealt with soils. It was an attempt to try and bridge my interest in landscape evolution and how erosion works, my training and background in that with thinking about the way that soil erosion had affected ancient civilizations, you know, and I thought it would be a great way to visit places around the world that visit ancient societies and bring my training to bear on what I thought would be an intellectually interesting story. And it turned out that as I was writing that book, I ended up writing a book about the history of farming because that's really where the connection between erosion, soil erosion, soil degradation over the long term connects back to human societies. The story really was one of how farming practices had affected the fertility of the land over millennia and generations and how that had affected human societies. So I started, you know, from this big picture, long term perspective, looking at how agriculture has influenced people in sort of a slightly different way than we normally think about. And that started me on the road to where I've eventually ended up today is thinking about regenerative agriculture as a way to solve the problems that I was talking about and identified in the dirt book. So I came at regenerative agriculture kind of from a different angle than I think most people come to it from. But it's been a very illuminating journey for me. And, you know, and I Hope for readers along the way that have sort of shared in my growth and education as I've looked into this.

David, you're speaking about erosion as being a primary problem. And I heard a data point a couple of years ago that really caught my attention, that the state of Iowa loses 2 pounds of topsoil for every pound of corn produced.

How is that going to last? Right? Yeah. And we've already degraded something like a third of the world's agricultural land to the point where it's not really being used commercially for agriculture. And we're on the path to do another 30% or so this century, according to the UN's 2015 Global State of the Soil Report. We're basically losing the soil through the ways that we grow our food. Then we're effectively mining the soil to feed ourselves today. And I mean, one of the most amazing things about the soil as a physical entity on Earth is that it's naturally renewable. It's a very renewable resource if we steward it and shepherd it and take care of it. But it's also mineable. If we use it faster than we're regenerating it, we can quite literally run out of it. And societies in different parts of the world have done that in the past. And as your story from Iowa illustrates, we're on track to do that again with erosive farming practices today. Yet we've made great strides as well. And I've turned from something of a pessimist into something of an unrepentant optimist on this issue. I think we can actually solve this problem. That's what the whole Revolution book was about. But yeah, those statistics like you were just citing are those kind of things that slap you in the face and go, wow, something's got to change here.

When you think about shifting from a pessimist to an optimist, one of the questions that comes to my mind is how big is the problem really? Isn't the problem inflated?

Well, there's actually sort of two dimensions to the problem, and some people will have. The problem in the public sphere has been inflated to some degree. There's a series of articles that made the rounds, I think, a few years ago where someone was saying, someone at the UN said we're going to totally run out of soil in 60 years. That's not going to happen. But we are on track to degrade enough of it that it will impact our ability to feed people. That part's true. But there's really two dimensions to the soil degradation problem. One is the Actual erosion and loss of the soil. And that's a bigger problem in some parts of the world than others. But the other part is the degradation of the fertility of the soil, the loss of soil organic matter. Whether you look across the US As a whole or globally, the estimates are we've degraded something like half of the soil organic matter from our agricultural fields. And if you understand soil organic matter as the sort of the lifeblood of the life in the soil, if you will, the currency that keeps that whole underground biological economy going, that's real cause for concern. Because once you degrade the soil through loss of organic matter enough, you basically become hooked on relying on agrichemicals to maintain agricultural production. And if that production is tied very much to fossil fuels, all these problems compound in terms of the challenges we face this century. So, you know, in some areas, the soil loss problem has been somewhat inflated, but it's a very serious problem. And that a really key problem to why it's been so difficult to solve is that it happens relatively slowly. It's a problem that plays out over decades and centuries. And sometimes, ironically, it's the slower things that are kind of harder for us to deal with and stop because they don't always rise to the crisis du jour.

When you describe the scope of the problem, David, it is, I mean, thinking about losing half of our soil's productive capacity over the last several centuries, it's quite intriguing to consider that you've become an optimist in thinking that we can correct it. What's the pathway to correcting the problem?

Boy, yeah. If you'd asked me 10 years ago when I was finishing the dirt book, if I'd become unrepentant optimist on this issue, I might not have believed it. I struggled really hard with how to write the last chapter of that book. In fact, the version that ended up in the book was my third attempt because the first two were too depressing for me to want to actually put out there in the world. And what I came down with in the dirt book is I recommended essentially trying to figure out how to get no till farming and organic farming to work together, which was a real challenge in terms of weed control and organic systems and how to use no till systems without the herbicides that 10 years ago were so essential to most people's use of that. And what really turned me into an optimist was actually going out over the next five years or so after that book came out and speaking at conferences where farmers are speaking. And I'd be asked to give a talk on this sort of the history of soil erosion and the backwards looking view of a geologist. But I would also then, you know, attend the conference. And I had started seeing talks from people like Gabe Brown and Duane Beck, people who were farmers who had restored fertility to very degraded land. And they did it through intensive agriculture, through practices that were growing a lot of food, but that were rebuilding the health and fertility of their soil. And I started thinking, oh, I need to go visit some of these guys. I need to, you know, look at their farms, dig holes in their farms, dig holes in their neighbors farms, think about what's happening to the soil and find out what are the real sort of tricks and secrets behind what they're doing. And part of what catalyzed me into going off and taking six months to travel around the world and interview farmers like that was at the same time as I was finishing the dirt book. My wife was, who is a gardener. She's a biologist and a major league gardener. We had bought a house in North Seattle and she took on a project to restore the soil in our yard. And, and she did it far faster than I could have guessed that it would have happened. You know, within four or five years of her intensive composting and mulching and returning organic matter to the soil in our yard, we're starting to see the soil change color. The soil came back to life. Animals started coming back to our yard in what turned out to be pretty much the same order in which life evolved on Earth, from microbes to arachnids to worms to pollinators and different styles of plants, all the way up to an eagle that ate the baby crow that was eating the worms that were eating the organic matter that Ann added to the yard. And finally the drunk that came and added the human cherry on top. But you're seeing our soil in our yard come back to life so fast, you know, in less than a decade, going from less than 1% organic matter up to about 8 to 10% across the yard, and just the transformative effect that it had on the above ground.