Collaboration, Spirit and Change, Perspectives from Ray Archuleta

Hi, friends, this is John, and this is the Regenerative Agriculture Podcast. Welcome back. I know you find our conversations enjoyable. I do as well. You're going to find the conversation today particularly enjoyable. I'm here with one of the leading evangelists of the Regenerative Agriculture message, Ray Archuleta. Ray, I'm delighted to have you here.

Thank you, John, for your gracious opening. I'm delighted to be with you also, so I'm excited to have a good dialogue.

Ray, you've been preaching the message, so to speak, and become quite widely known, particularly in the last few years. For our listeners who aren't familiar with your background and your story, can you tell us about what brought you to this point today and the pathway that has brought you to the work that you're doing right now?

Thank you, John. Yeah, I've had a real interesting journey. My journey started years ago. As you know, John, I've worked with 32 years with natural Resource Conservation Service. I just retired about three years ago. And it was my journey really started, I think consciously and notice how I use the word consciously, because I think the majority of my career was unconscious about the current industrial ag model. I kind of imbibed and was raised under it. And I thought everything was fine because, you know, I went to, I went to college for about eight years, two years in livestock science and six years in, got my degree in agricultural biology and then soils and went to graduate school for a while and coming out of there and then I started my career with nrcs working in New Mexico, working in Missouri and then Oregon and Idaho. Lived in Idaho and worked in Oregon and finished my career in, in North Carolina and putting two more years in Missouri. But that whole journey, it was really, I guess what happened to me was about in 95 to 2001, really interesting things started to happen. I got to hear Ellen Savory speak one time and I'll never forget the first time I heard him speak. It made huge amount of sense, but of course, I wasn't a grassland specialist, so they were very frustrated with the message. But he made a lot of sense to me. And so what the reason I'm bringing this up, John, it was kind of like, I think all of us go through what you call progressive revelation. You go through a journey and there's certain points in your life that are very critical. And I think my first point was that not only listening to Ellen, but It was around 2001, 2002, I started asking very probing questions to my peers. Why are farmers going broke they get a lot of help from the government. We have spent billions of dollars. And yet sediment is still the number one water quality problem in the nation, according to the epa. Why does it take so many acres to. To make a living? Why can't a farmer make a living with 4 to 500 acres or less? Why can't they bring their son into the operation? It was those things, those, those. Those thoughts converging at that point. And me reading Alan Savory's book started having my first aha moment, and I started really, really questioning the model. And then when I finally moved to North Carolina and got a promotion and started becoming, there was a job with a soil quality specialist, and I started learning about soil health. It was that and then finally coming to Gabe's farm in 2007 that I finally, really had a great epiphany, a great moment of saying, like, oh, my gosh. Well, Gabe did all this without any chemicals, and he came out of almost going broke to completely regenerating his ranch, and he was going down this journey. Some of the results and some of the trials them in the district did make me start questioning everything I learned in graduate school and in weed science. And it just completely turned me around. And I finally realized, oh, my gosh, I missed the most important part of my education. It was the soil ecology. Anything with ecology was not really given me or taught to me in proper context. So I think that's where my journey started, really. I started questioning, why are we still having these problems?

What were some of the highlights that you saw on Gabe's farm that really caught your attention?

You know, as an agronomist, what caught me it was no nitrogen, no chemical fertility, that they did it with plants and animals, that they were able to regenerate their whole farm and ranch, gradually getting away from the chemicals. In other words, it didn't happen instantaneously because Gabe used to use fertilizer, because Gabe also went through a journey. And I think a lot of people forget this is a journey. You may start at one point, you may start, well, using chemicals, but then you gradually work your way out. It's like you gradually take an addict. You don't terminate their addiction right away as the body goes into shock. Well, same thing with our soil ecosystems. You gradually work your way out. But I think the thing that stuck out to me was the elegance of how diversity works and how beautiful and how competition is not really the overarching umbrella for nature, but it's collaboration. Collaboration is really how nature works. She's more collaborative than she is competitive. And I think that really stuck out of my mind how powerful diversity is and how Gabe did this without. I mean, how he was able to wean himself of nitrogen and all these other things, all these other inputs that we think and as I was taught that we need to do all the time if we're ever going to get a crop.

Ray, the one comment that you just made I think is incredibly important and it's something I've been thinking a lot about. The idea that nature and natural systems are inherently competitive really emerges from this survival of the fittest mindset from Darwin. And yet when you really begin looking at ecology closely and the interactions of all these organisms, we discover that in reality, nature, natural ecosystems aren't competitive. They're intensely collaborative. And I think we require a different perspective about these agriculture ecosystems rather than coming from this Darwinistic perspective.

I totally agree with you, John, because it was that those plots that were done in 2006 by the Burleigh District, and it was amazing how, how they had a bunch of several plots laid out and they put this monoculture, one plot and another monoculture, different plants, and there were several of them, but everywhere there were monoculture where they only had 1.8 inches. And the plots were all treated the same, which I'll never forget. It was just amazing to watch the picture because if you look at that context as 1.8 inches, very, very dry, you would expect it to dry up. And it was interesting everywhere there was a monoculture, John. It was about desiccated, almost death. But where you threw all the seeds together, six or seven of those seeds together, taken from each of those individual plots and you threw them to the last plots. It was like amazing. The biomass was four or five times more. And I was like shocked because the biomass under the same amount of rain, the same soils, the same resources. It shows me that nature is absolutely collaborative, that's under incredible stress. Case in point, when even humans under incredible stress, like right now we're talking about the coronavirus. But if you go back several years ago where the in Houston where they had this massive hurricane and you think that humans are totally competitive against each other, and that does occur, but under that incredible stress, every race was helping each other, there was collaboration. But to your point, is beautiful point that you're bringing out is that I was taught competition, it's all about competition. And so we had to kill everything. And notice how I use the word kill through herbicides, till and everything just to lessen the competition. And it doesn't mean that you and I are saying there isn't competition. Competition does exist in ecosystems, but it's nestled. Competition is needed for building integrity and bringing health. But the overall principle of nature, she's collaborative. She's collaborative more than she's competitive. And so you're right.

Thinking of prior conversations we've had and in the context of the comments that you just made, at one point in a conversation you mentioned that competition versus collaboration occurs differently in stressed environments versus non stressed environments. Can you expand on that a little bit?

Sure. There's a great study done by, it's called the stress gradient hypothesis. It was done by Dr. It was done in Brown University, done by Dr. Bertness. He was talking about how he did a meta analysis globally and he looked at all the meta analysis means that he looked at all the research and he found out like in reality is nature is more collaborative then she's competitive. When it's under very stressful situations, it'll share resources, not compete. And most of us have seen it walking in the fields and you've seen it too, John. You can see if you have too many weeds that competition does occur, that they all share up the same resources and they run out of resources. But we're finding out now with new science, new technology, that Arbus comicrrhizae fungi, they share water resources to each other. They can transport organisms, can transport water, DNA, material, energy, nutrients from organism to organism, and this incredible underground network called arbiscomycorrhizae fungi. And there's hundreds to thousands of species of that, that particular fungi. And Also I've heard Dr. Chris Nichols also mention that even under stress that microbes will be able to give water to the plant. So we're finding out there's much more collaborative activities going on than there is competition. And so that's why we're talking about how nature is incredibly collaborative through diversity. And I think that's a very key thing. So the more diverse an ecosystem, the more of these functions you're going to have occurring. And through diversity, I call it through diversity, you get more redundancy of activities. And let me give you an example of that. When people were engineering airplanes, they wanted redundancy. And redundancy means they wanted safety systems that were redundant. So in other words, if one system went down, the other system picked it up. So that's why we have such little failures with airplanes, because of redundancy. Well, nature's the same way. There's many organisms can do redundancies of function and so the more diverse the organisms you have and the more plants or bacterial or the diversity of species that can carry same particular functions, you have redundancy. And when you have redundancy, you have resilience in an ecosystem. So that's part of that why it's exciting to see what, when systems are incredibly stressed, there are other safety mechanisms through redundancy.

You know what occurred to me when you were describing collaboration versus competition and that organisms become more collaborative in a stressed environment. What occurred to me was the interactions that we observe with farmers and growers who have started the regenerative agriculture journey versus those who may not yet have. And there's also variations in different parts of the country with different types of crops. There are regional areas and certain crop types where growers are quite resistant to sharing information. They have this intense competitive spirit that one blueberry grower is competing with another blueberry grower and they do not want to share information because that is their competitive advantage. And then in general, where our observation and my experience so far has been that generally when you have growers who are passionate about regenerative agriculture, they're very open to sharing that information and really collaborating with others to a much greater degree. Have you observed the same.

Oh yes, John, you bring up an excellent point. Among the human realm that does occur. Every person that I've seen that's doing well and they're much more in a. They're actually. Their quality of life has changed, their, their perspective has changed, their outlook of farming has changed, their life has changed because now they have hope. I think there's nothing more frustrating, John, of not knowing what the goal is. I remember when I had a small 11 acre farm in Idaho and I used to look at farming as I started looking at farming as a drudgery. I would come from work full time, working for the government. Then I come and do my farming part time. And it was getting to a point because I didn't know what I was doing and didn't, didn't understand how the system worked. I started to look at the farm as a drudgery, as a chore. It wasn't fun. I didn't understand what the goal was. And then that affects your attitude and affects your attitude towards your, your family, towards your neighbor, towards your fellow peers, to other farmers. And it makes it very, very frustrating. But once you understand what the goal is, is to mimic God's creation, emulate it, to understand its synergies and complementaries, and then it starts to work and you start to enjoy the process and you start to have a relationship with it. And what this is really based is, John, is relationship based agriculture, where you not only start falling in love with farming again, but you start falling in love with the relationship of all the creatures working together in synchro. And that you're the central part and you work and you're also facilitating in that relationship and that you're part of that relationship. It affects your outcome, it affects your attitude. And you can see it because those who practice this type of agriculture are very giving of their knowledge of their time. And there's a joy to it because they're having fun. John I can't tell you how many times farmers have told me, ray, I love farming. Now their attitude completely changes. I'm glad you brought that up, Ray.

You've been evangelizing this message of regenerative agriculture a lot over the last, particularly over the last few years, but for more than the last decade overall. When you consider all of these relationships and the conversation we've just been having about falling in love with the beauty and the relationships, the interactions, building those relationships with the living organisms, with your family and so forth, one of the questions that I often think about is what is it that limits us as people from adopting the things that we obviously know are better for us? And I'm asking this question from the perspective of a grower. I was a grower, still am on a much smaller scale. And in our consulting work and the conversations that I have with growers, I very often find that there are obvious things that people know that they know they could improve and do differently and perhaps do better, but they chose not to. And so I'd love to hear from you and your perspective, what are some of the limitations that hold people back from making the changes?

John I've been doing this for quite a bit of years. I've been in every state two or three times from Puerto Rico to Hawaii to Alaska. I've traveled many, many millions of miles. And I finally come to the conclusion, unless the mind and the heart changes, the land will not change. Your field will not change. Gabe Brown and I had the saying, we changed the field one heart, one mind at a time. It's really the understanding. Because I see a lot of times people get excited about COVID crops or they get excited about a particular tool. Maybe they'll go to no till. But it's never was about no till. It was never about organic. It was never about COVID crops, about tools or process or labeling or name. It was about understanding. Do you understand the relationship. Do you understand what you're dealing with? Do you understand that you're dealing with a living, dynamic ecosystem that reacts to you? The soil is alive. You'd be shocked, John, how many people have come across that didn't realize that that soil is a living creature. It's dynamic, it respires, it breathes, it reacts, it bleeds, it takes in water. It's alive. And I think a lot of people don't realize that the power of life and how you have to harness it and you have to understand it, and those are the biggest limitations I've seen dealing with people is that their lack of understanding. And when you have lack of understanding, you don't have the commitment and you don't have the mindset to ferociously learn to be absolutely committed, to not give up to work and accept failures as you. Because farming on a daily basis, you lose animals or plants die. And one doesn't understand that that's part of that natural system. And until you wrap your mind in that, producers are not going to spend the energy, the money and the commitment to, to be a student. I think that's where the biggest problem is. And I think one of our biggest failures, from my perspective, when we first started the soil health movement, we had five principles, four to five principles, though we added one just recently, and that's the first and most important principles of soil health is understand your context. And understand context means you have to understand the economic context of the human being, the cultural, the social and the spiritual context. And we tend to separate that out. And that's horrible because we need to understand it's the way the human perceives their environment, is how they work in that environment and how they treat their environment and the way we react to it is like the same two headed coin. The environment responds to us and how conscious we are about it. And I think we need to understand.

That when we think about context and understanding the context of where the grower is, where we are coming from as growers. You described that people don't have a desire to learn. And I wondered how often that lack of desire comes from a combination of two places or two significant contributing factors. One, one being not really understanding the implications and the opportunities for what regenerative agriculture, agronomy, really can contribute and what it can mean. And the second coming from a place of perceived economic difficulty or hardship. We started this conversation when in your introduction you were describing how you asked the question, why are farmers growing broke? When we think about the context, is it that growers are economically stressed and under duress and don't feel the bandwidth for education. And then beginning to farm differently combined with not really understanding the implications of what farming differently can mean for yields and overall profitability.

I think you've seen when people have dealt with that, when any creature that's caged in and you're trying to do it, show it some kindness. Like if you've ever been around an animal like a dog or anything, you. And it's been caged and it's been beaten and it's been mistreated for years, and then you're trying to handle it, it'll bite you. Well, I think agriculture since the 1900s or even further along, ever since the beginning of history, farmers and ranchers have been.

They've been the beaten dog.

They have. They've been that demographics for a long time where they work very, very hard, take all that risk, and then they get very little in return. And you can see the stress levels now with the suicide rates and just the anxiety. And then when you're trying to communicate and you're trying to bring a new concept like this, whether somebody's already stressed and have already had years and years, fixed filters and paradigms, it's hard to change. You got to remember that generation to generation, this information has been passed from generation to generation, and rarely is it ever. Good question. Because you get it from your grandparents or from your friends. And then also our school systems do not help either. We may, through reductionist science, has not helped the whole situation. And that's what our universities teach, that you can break nature into tiny little compartments and make it a machine. It doesn't work that way. It's a dynamic living system and doesn't work that way. And so we had many contributing factors to why our agriculture looks the way it is and why farmers are stressed.

The way they are within that context. Ray, where is the opportunity in agriculture today? Where is the opportunity for farmers to begin managing differently? That can bring farmers to a different place internally and also relieve the economic tension so that they're no longer the dog in the cage.

I think one of the first things I do when I deal with a producer that's very stressed. In fact, I had a producer come up to me after a talk. He says to me, ray, I don't even have money to pay for cover crops. And so I looked at his context and I said, you don't? I said, but you put potassium and you put phosphorus out on your soil all the time, don't you? That cost you Money. He goes, yes. I said don't put them. Let the COVID crops and the biology cycle those nutrients and make them available. If you're that poor, one thing you do not inhibit is those living plants because they, they are the mouth of the soil. They're the ones that transform the energy of the sun and cycle the nutrients made available by the biology. So I said, you get rid of those and do the covers. My point is there's very low hanging fruit and one of the first things I can do very quickly when I work with a producer is back them off on the nutrients and they're putting way, way too much nutrients. And now we have a new soil test. We use the Haney test to help us use that kind of as an indicator. And that's only one indicator. But we do infiltration, we look at the aggregates we use with off the shovel. We do many, many use many, many indicators and walk the field with the producer and help him back off. One of the key things that we can do to help our producers right off the top of the bat is back them off on nutrients. That is a great way to start and release some stress because I think producers think that they have to keep putting nutrients in the soil and that's not necessarily true, especially when they start going into using cover crops.

I get really excited by conversations I have with growers who sit down and closely evaluate what they are doing and why they're doing what they're doing and come up with novel solutions for farming differently that turn out to be immensely profitable. And there's this one story that I've been thinking about quite a bit, came up in several conversations last few weeks about a young dairy farmer. So today you mentioned the suicide rates that are present in US agriculture, not just in the US but around the world. Particularly in the US though. And one of the more intensely struggling sectors of agriculture for the last few years has been dairy farming. In the middle of this dairy economic crisis, there's a young farmer in central Pennsylvania that I've known for several years. He started out when he was 23 years old with his savings, he did not inherit a farm. He is at this moment, he's now 30 years old. Seven years later, he's paying for his third farm and with no off farm income, milking 70 cows and producing more than 200,000 a year in income for the last several years. Obviously to have that level of economic success you have to do many things well. But the foundation of that success is that he is 100% grass fed. He's not selling grass fed milk, it's going into the bulk tank. He is organically certified, so he's getting an organic premium. So it's organic, 100% grass fed. And his message that he shares with other farmers over and over again is you can't afford to grow corn. You can't afford to grow and feed and harvest and store corn. It costs too much. His cost of production is less than five dollars, a hundred weight where the current mainstream cost of production is $13 plus. I get really excited by stories like that and I'm using him as an example. He's one unique example. But there are many examples of farmers who are growing very similar crops. Other people are growing, but they take a completely different approach and as a result they have completely different economic outcomes. And what you're describing by eliminating fertilizer inputs is along the same lines, foundational to that.

Yes, John, most people don't realize that one of the most energy intensive things we do in agriculture is applying nutrients. It takes copious amounts of energy to make chemical nitrogen. And if people knew that, and that's why it's so expensive, it's very energy consuming. And I agree with you, John, I just marveled, why not let the cow do all the work? Cow and the grass. And it's amazing how much energy people put into growing a crop. And a lot of it's not necessary.

Ray, as we are on this journey and pathway, we develop different perspectives and different ideas. And this is a question I really like getting people's perspective on. What is something that you believe to be true about mainstream agriculture? That is many others don't believe to be true. That's completely different from the mainstream perspective.

One of the things, John, that comes to my mind is that I really believe that a majority of us, and I even include myself at times, God's creation will not take care of us, that the natural system won't work. It's called, you know, having faith in the system that it actually works. I think that we are absolute control freaks. We want to control every aspect. We think that we control every molecule of nitrogen that's going to go to that plant. We want to control the nutrient cycle, we want to control the pest cycle and we're horrible at it. And I think, I think we think as humans that we can do that and it's ridiculous and we can't and we're not good at it and we're suffering for it. So I think one of the biggest thing is that farming takes a lot of Faith in believing in the system and trusting that the natural system actually works for us. It collaborates for us, it's designed for us. That's what I think, that if you go back into history, we either have this thought that nature's out there to get you, or we have the concept in the early 60s and 70s of Bambi theology. I mean, ecology, where man is bad and all the creatures are good and we're not part of the ecosystem. That's ridiculous. I don't believe that we have that. We actually believe that the system works for us. I see that very evident in all of us.

That's powerful, Ray, because if we don't believe that the system works for us, then the implications of that are that we do need to control it. We need to kill everything that is antagonistic to us. I've heard many people, and I myself have pointed to the warfare mentality that consumes much of mainstream production, agriculture, that we need to search and destroy, identify what is causing problems, and then figure out a way to kill it. But what you're identifying is actually the foundational ethos that is behind that of not believing that the system works. I really enjoy studying the science behind agronomy and plant physiology. And what I've come to realize is that we can make it sound incredibly complex. There's so many moving pieces and parts that it can become overwhelming. The information is impossible for any one person to fully understand all of it, because it's simply so broad in scope. But in reality, at the end of the day, it was designed to work, it can be made, could be gelled down to that simple principle that it was designed to work. And all that we need to do is give it the things that it needs to work and get out of the way. That's the concept that is sometimes hard for us as humans to do, is getting out of the way.

Our goal is to emulate the creation, emulate nature, emulate its structure, its architecture, its function, and understand that's the goal. The templates had already been there for. For a long time, but we thought we knew better and that we could make it more efficient, like a machine. I'll never forget it's yield, yield, yield. That's what I was taught in agronomy school. And kill, kill, kill. I got to kill all them weeds because my goal at the end is I got to have yield. I got to get bigger. That's been an absolute disaster to us. It's been an absolute failure for us. And a lot of producers have gone broke over that thought process, right?

When we think about the potential that regenerative agriculture has, I think anyone who has observed some of the success in the field, whether that's a grower or a consultant, has a desire to spread that good news and share it with more people. And all of us have a desire to see significant change happening in agriculture so that sedimentation no longer is the number one problem in our river systems. How can we produce that change most effectively and quickly? If there was one thing that you could change and impact the entire system, what would it be?

John, you ask an incredibly difficult question. I mean, it's a wonderful question. I always come back, how do you change the human mind and heart? How do you change it? And I've come to quickly realize I can't. I can't change it. All I can do is be an example and drop seed of this incredible message like the gospel of soul health. I can't change the mind and heart. If we want permanent change, and I seek for permanent change that. A change that we will teach our children and our children's children, and it'll go from generation to generation and that we're no longer dealing with symptoms, but we're getting to the root cause. And the root cause is we all have to look in the mirror. We're the problem. It's the way we think. It's the way we look at the whole system. So if I was to push one thing, that would be education, teaching, illuminating the heart and mind, but also create community. It all comes back with a loving type of community that we start educating and teaching each other and being mentors to others that are going down this journey and be patient with those who don't have that thought process. It all comes back to us as to building those solo health communities to be catalysts of change. And that change starts with us individually.

When you think about changing hearts and minds and education, what is something that you wish all farmers knew and understood? What are the really important pieces that are often not considered?

Well, nobody really likes to talk about this, John. It's really the spiritual aspect of farming. It makes people uncomfortable. It makes. Even when I started bringing word of mentioning God into the whole context, people got uncomfortable. But, you know, like I was in one of my slides I had in job 12, biomimicry, which is. I'm a big, huge fan of biomimicry. Mimic life. There's a whole first there. Mimic the birds, the trees. The template's been there for a long time. I think that for me personally, that goes and teaches all over is having that theological and ecological framework has been very, very helpful for me in encouraging other landowners and producers. One it gives me the patience to deal with. I'm a human that has a lot of flaws. So it helps me deal with the fact of being patient with other people that are going down this journey. And I think it's very, very critical. I think that a lot of people don't want to talk about the spiritual context of what we're dealing with. Farming is a spiritual journey. The Native Americans, they look at the land very, very from a spiritual perspective. The Amish community, the Mennonite community, the Hawaiians, to them, the land is a very spiritual thing. There's a spiritual connectedness. And I think that we need to understand that and remember that.

I would suggest not only do we need to understand and remember it, but we actually need to live it. We need to experience it for ourselves and live it. And I know that for myself personally, this is a very important part of who I am. And what has brought me to the space where I am today is the spiritual connection to a creation and being out in the fields and feeling that connection, actually being connected to plants, being connected to the field, and in one sense, having heart communication to what is happening and what is going on. And I've observed this over and over, that there are, in many times, producers who are the very best at what they do, almost universally have this deep connection. They will walk out into a block or walk out into a field, and they'll say something like, something doesn't feel right with this block. They can't quantify it. It's not logical. It's this intuitive spiritual heart connection that they know something isn't right. This has become accepted as being common and normal. When we talk about livestock producers, many livestock producers will be able to say, the better ones at least will be able to say something isn't right with this cow. They know it, even though they can't point to something observable that they know why. It's just an intuitive gut hunch. And the better growers also have that same type of connection with their plants and with their fields out in the field.

I totally agree with that, John. It's not only intuitive, but also when that intuition is so critical. You've been around animals, John, and I have been around my sheep. And I can tell you when you're very tense and you want to get something done, the animals sense it. My dog senses it. The natural system also responds the same way. I think we have Now, John, and I don't think we've had in a long time. We can look at indicators, in other words, a function. In other words, I can pull out my shovel through the powers of observation and the intuition you just talked about, and having the right framework and the right approach, you can start looking at your soil and say, oh, this soil is not very well aggregated comparing to this forested area. How come the colors are different? How come the plants aren't as tall? What am I doing in this particular area? And then my other fields, they're doing. They're thriving, but this particular area is not. We now have tools that can help us kind of monitor that empirically to a degree and kind of match that intuition that we were talking about. But you hit on something very, very powerful, John. You have to have a conscious observation and knowledge and understanding of what you're looking at first. It's called relationship. You know, you and I are both married men. We can talk to our wives and we know their inflections or how they respond or the way they body movement and inflection of voice. You can tell a lot. Well, the same thing with the system, what you're saying. It's very similar. But I think now I'm excited about it. I think that with technology and proper context, we're able to be able to sense and have a better way of observing and also being empirical at the same time.

This conversation about the spiritual connection, I believe, is a very important and powerful one. And you prefaced it by saying that it's a conversation that makes many people uncomfortable. Are there any other topics that are important topics that you don't often speak about because you sense that it makes people uncomfortable?

Yeah, one of the things is that it's the sensitivity issue. In other words, I think we forget that we need to understand the context of where producers are at right now. Let me give you an example. I did a talk years ago. There were some water quality issues. It's not important for the location because it's really not important. But I can remember walking into that room. You could see that the room was segregated into the farmer sitting on one part of the room and the urbanites sitting on the other part of the room. And they were both very frustrated groups because the water was very polluted. There was dairy affluent. You turn on the spigot in the local news and dairy affluent would pour out. And there was a great amount of tension in the room. And I remember walking in there with my soil demonstrations and within 15 to 20 minutes showing the soil demonstrations, both sides of the room calmed down. Because I tell you, if I would have said one word wrong or said anything and phrased it wrong, the room would apply blowing up. That's how tense it was in that room. But when they saw the soil demonstration, they both realized they didn't understand how the soul worked, the whole demeanor of that room. And at the end of my talk, somebody yelled, but it's the farmer's fault. And I said, no, it's not. It's all of our fault collectively as a society. I remember nrcs extension. A lot of us in the scientific community said, we got to get bigger, bigger, bigger. Remember the seventies, you're going to. In fact, Sonny Perdue made that similar comment months ago in Wisconsin, get out. If you're not going to get big, get out. Which was a ridiculous statement. But my whole point was that we created that context. We're the ones that created that environment. So I told the group, it's not the farmer's fault. We as a society wanted cheap food. We pushed him down this direction. All of us went down this direction unknowingly. Why am I bringing this out? Because my point is that we need to be very sensitive and very cognizant of where the condition of the producer is. And it becomes very, very sensitive. Some of the people that we're trying to work towards a regenerative direction may have CAFOs, large animal confining operations. One of the ones, like a dairy guy, a particular buddy of mine from Pennsylvania, won the environmental dairy of the year, and he's got a large dairy, but he's doing no till and covers. He's doing a lot of things right. But I think that people forget that we have to remember that we have this construct, this model that's wrong. And there's still producers that have that regenerative mindset as to how do they work themselves out of that model, that they have invested millions of dollars of their own money, their own family, their own blood and sweat and tears of creating that construct that society promoted. So how do you get them out of that? What. How do you deal with that very sensitive issue? And I think that we need to remember that as we work for the new model, that we have to remember that a majority of us came from that model and we have to deal with the producers in love and consideration and baby steps, and how as a society, we're going to get ourselves away from those models without losing the family farm. Because a lot of some of these family farms do have CAFOs.

Right. This has been incredibly powerful for me just listening to it. I'm sure it'll be for our listeners as well, because it has been a challenge of mine to observe that many growers and producers are heavily invested in infrastructure and may not have any alternatives but to continue to recover that investment from their infrastructure. They're locked into a system and I believe that there are many producers who have a desire to change, but who feel trapped, who feel stuck, and they're not clear on what the first steps are and how to get to the promised land, to where they want to go from where they are today. How do you offer encouragement to those people? Where do you begin?

One of the things, when I work with a large dairy like that, I start with a cropping system. That one is an easier way how to back off the nutrients, how to do better nutrient management, going to more covers, disturbing the soil, doing less tillage. Those are easier ways to start, especially when somebody has an incredibly huge infrastructure. My dream would be able to see that more of the dairy animals would be out there grazing on the land and the cropland. And mostly a lot of the times we have a lot of these nutrient management problems is we already have a land restriction problem. The biggest problem to our industrial model is we have a human and animal distribution problem. We have too many animals aggregated in certain spots and too many humans aggregate in the same spots. Cities are no different called cities. Human confined feed operations.

They really are.

We have way too big of farms. This is another sensitive issue nobody wants to talk about. And not enough farmers and people will throw this in my face all the time. Well, Ray, we got to feed the world. I said no, no we don't. We got to teach everybody ecological farming, agroecology and soil health and they can feed themselves. Right now we're transporting nutrients and water all over the world. And I can tell you as an ex Peace Corps volunteer that lived in Guatemala for a couple of years, I would argue that our system is creating more hunger because in more financial distress for farmers all over the world, like the people that own three or four or five acres. And yet most people don't realize that 70% of our food is grown with when five to seven acres and less small acres is producing 70% of the world's food. It's not these big mega farms. But it's always interesting how politicians and those who are selling you the tool, the tool makers, the chemicals and the equipment are the first one to tout that on the top of the roof. We got to Feed the world?

Yeah.

And yet make the farmer feel good in their slave. Dom, that's ridiculous.

They are enslaving producers economically. And when you sit down and do the math and you look closely at the actual sources, the information, it becomes obvious very quickly that one, we don't have a food production problem today. Two, we're unlikely to have a food production problem once we have a 50% greater population than we do right now.

That's the future that everyone is pointing.

To is saying we won't be able to produce enough food to feed 9 billion people. In reality, the pathway to doing that is, is very easy. We already have the knowledge and the information. We don't have a food production shortage right now and we're not likely to have one in 20 or 30 years.

I think people forget that the Creator make the system nature and the whole globe is self healing, self organizing, self regulating. Well, it's been shown that the population rate is going down and so in. And then all the other issues you talked about is that we lose a lot of our food through spoilage and waste. A lot of the times food and starvation is political and power control and corruption and greed. It's not about the quantity that the earth cannot sustain as it can, especially if it's done ecologically.

Yeah, we don't have a production problem, we have a distribution problem. Ray, this conversation has been an absolute delight. What final thoughts would you like to share with our listeners?

Well, John, first I want to really thank you for interviewing me. I really enjoyed talking to you because you're a kindred spirit. I say this, I want to leave your listeners with this thought. I have hope, I tell you, I've never seen so much hope in my life, especially in agriculture. But if you had asked me this 15 years ago, I didn't have hope. I had no hope for agriculture. All I could see is destruction and farmers going broke. And when I would drive from the west to the east, I could see huge amount of acres just uncovered, desertification kicking in more and more and more, all these disruptions from the weather. But I would tell you, especially these last two years, I have absolutely changed the way I view our future. I think humans have an incredible future. I think the whether most people realize now realize this or not, but I think we're bringing in kingdom reality. The new kingdom that changes starts with changing our hearts and mind and it reflects with the natural system. I see healing of the land starting to occur. John, when I came back from Mexico a couple of years ago and saw what the ranchers are bringing the desert back into a prairie and just doing it with animals. I was so excited. It gave me much more boldness and confidence and encouragement that we can do this and that cover crops is growing just in the average. Last year I think it was 2019, it grew by 77% that more people are applying cover crops now. May it be completely healed by the time that I assume room temperature and get eaten by the microbes? Probably not. But you reminded me in your exuberance and your positive attitude. Yeah, but we can do it in the next 10 or 15 years. Yeah, we can do a lot. You know, if you looked at the word Soul Health about 2006 and 2007, you can find a couple of hits. The other day I did a Google search with over 677 million hits just with the word soul health.

Wow. Yeah.

Millions of YouTube videos on soil health and ecology. The word ecology is no longer becoming like a coined hippie word, but it's becoming like ecology means relationship.

Wow.

About connectedness and about the souls alive. I have seen 71 year old men that have come to our schools, come to a soul health academy and they, they completely change their whole operation. 71 year old John sell all their tillage equipment and go into covers and go to no till and I come back and visit them. They said, man, Ray, I love farming now. Man, that is growing everywhere and I'm seeing it. I have young people come up and give you a hug and say thank you so much. And I said, for what? I said I didn't do anything. He says, no, it's this message. This message now allowed me to work full time from my house. I can farm full time. I don't have to work outside the farm anymore. When you get encouragement like that and all of us, you've experienced that too. It's changing.

That is, that is changing and that, that is hope. My personal mantra for some time has been providing inspiration to the point of action. And that's really what we're doing, is sharing information and hope and inspiration.

Yes. And see. And that's why Simon Sinek's work says leadership inspires. It's not about promoting a conservation plan or a tool. It inspires. That's what leaders do. They make you feel safe, they inspire you. And I think that's what we do. That's what our calling is, is to inspire and to encourage people and say they can do this and it works. I think a majority of my time I spend is to inspire and to encourage and I think that's what I do most of the time. And you'd be surprised. I know Gabe does and Dr. Ellen Williams and Shane Yu and all of us, you yourself, I know you do that often. And it's not just us. There's a huge collective that are doing this and that. I think of my friends and some of our employees in nrcs that are nestled in nrcs and they still have to deal with the bureaucracy, but they also see it. So there's this movement that some of our government has changed too. And there's soil health bills all over the country that are passing. There's so health coalitions. So it is growing.

That is incredible. Ray, thank you so much for sharing your message of hope and inspiration insights. We're all very grateful.

Thank you John, for having me today and I appreciate you and thank you for your work and what you do.

The team at AEA and I are dedicated to bringing this show to you because we believe that knowledge and information is the foundation of successful regenerative systems. At aea, we believe that growing better quality food and making more money from your crops is possible. And since 2006, we've worked with leading professional growers to help them do just that. At aea, we don't guess. We test, we analyze and we provide recommendations based on scientific data, knowledge and experience. We've developed products that are uniquely positioned to help growers make more money with regenerative agriculture. If you are a professional grower who believes in testing instead of guessing, someone who believes in a better, more regenerative way to grow, visit advancingecoag.com and contact us to see if AEA is right for you. Thank you for listening and we look.

Forward to working with you.