Transcriber: Rhonda Jacobs Reviewer: Ellen Maloney
How fitting it is that this event, which is titled "Roots to Wings,"
is taking place here in North Dakota,
for the motto of the state of North Dakota is "Strength through the Soil."
And that's what I'm going to visit with you about today,
it's about our soil resource.
Agriculture has been challenged.
How do we feed nine billion people by the year 2050?
With today's current production model, we can do that.
It is a model with which one tills the soil.
It's a model of monoculture production practices.
No matter where you go around this great state,
there's fields of wheat, fields of corn,
fields of soybeans, and many other crops.
It's one of livestock which are now in confinement;
whether it be poultry housed in poultry houses,
or beef cattle in a feedlot, for example.
However, these practices have come at a cost.
They have caused a loss of biodiversity.
Healthy native range land has hundreds of different species
of plants, and animals, and insects.
Monocultures have but very few.
This lack of biodiversity
has led to the destruction of our soil resource.
And that's what I'm going to visit with you about today.
I'll share some proof with you,
and this is statistics provided by North Dakota State University.
In Walsh County, North Dakota in 1960, the topsoil was 34 inches deep.
In 2014, that topsoil was only 15 inches deep -
a stunning 56 percent loss.
The organic matter level on that same soil had gone from over 8 percent
to less than 3 percent today.
Look at the ramifications of that.
The soil on your left was the soil that had not been tilled,
and had not seen monoculture production practices.
That's the same soil 17 years later on the right,
after 17 years of the production model
of tillage and monocultures.
It also destroys the pore spaces in the soil.
Those pore spaces are critical for the life in the soil,
are critical for water infiltration,
because if we don't have soil aggregates, we cannot infiltrate water.
I took this photo in a field less than ten miles from where you're seated today.
That shows a half of an inch of rainfall
can no longer be infiltrated into the soil profile.
If we can't infiltrate water, then what happens?
We resort to things such as tile drainage.
And you're seeing this all over the central United States today.
What happens when we put tile drainage in
and we do not have the soil aggregates to hold our soils in place?
That soil ends up in the watershed,
and unfortunately, along with it, goes all the nutrients
that may have been applied to those fields.
That lack of biodiversity also leads to lower nutrient cycling.
If we don't have adequate nutrient cycling,
we're going to have to add more and more synthetic fertilizers.
Those synthetic fertilizers come at a cost -
the cost of fossil fuel usage,
and, they also spur the decline of the soil biology.
We need to understand how soil functions.
How soil functions is due to that biology,
because the plants get their nutrients via the biology.
High synthetic fertilizer use also aids in the propagation of weeds.
Most weeds love nitrogen.
The more synthetic fertilizer we apply, the more weeds we get.
If we have increased weed pressure, what do we have to do?
Spray herbicides.
Now, unfortunately, many of those herbicides are chelates.
What is a chelate?
A chelate binds metals.
So any of the metals such as magnesium, manganese, iron, zinc, copper,
then become unavailable to the plants.
If the plant cannot uptake these micronutrients,
it's more prone to disease.
Because plants cannot ward off diseases on their own,
we need to spray fungicides.
Fungicides, then, are detrimental to what?
Soil biology.
Because plants are not healthy enough to ward off pests,
we then need to do what?
We spray pesticides,
on the crops which are meant for human consumption.
Because we spray pesticides, we have a decline in what?
The very predator insects which would take care of the pests
which we are spraying.
We also have a decline in pollinators.
You can hardly pick up a paper or a magazine today
without reading about the plight of our pollinators.
These pollinators are critical in our crop production.
The current production model is all about killing.
Whether it be weeds, a fungus, a pest,
our diversity, or our profit.
Take a look at these projections
just put out by North Dakota State University.
They're 2016 projections for some of the major crops in our state.
Every one of them projects a negative return.
What impact does that have
on the quality of life of those producing that crop?
But take it a step further:
What impact does it have on our schools?
Drive around this state of ours and you'll see a lot of small towns
that have fewer and fewer children attending the schools.
What effect does that have on our businesses?
And then on our communities?
What effect does the current production model have on our health?
Take a look at this.
The nutrient densities of the foods that we produce
have declined anywhere from 15 to 65 percent
in the last 50 years.
This has had many negative consequences.
The United States spends more on healthcare
than any other developed country in the world.
Yet look at this - we lead the world in the incidences of ADD,
ADHD, cancer, osteoporosis, Alzheimer's, autoimmune diseases,
and the list goes on and on.
This is not acceptable.
It cannot continue.
But the good news is there's another way,
and I'm going to share that with you.
It's nature's way.
Look at how nature functions.
In nature, there's no mechanical tillage.
Yet in our production model, we're tilling the soil.
In nature, there's always armor on the soil surface,
protecting that soil from wind erosion, water erosion, evaporation.
Yet in our production model, the fields lie bare.
Nature cycles water very efficiently.
It's able to infiltrate into the soil profile,
then, due to the large amount of organic matter,
it's held there, for such a time it's needed by plants.
By destroying our soil resource, we can no longer infiltrate the water
and store it for when it's needed.
Nature has living plant-root networks;
there's things growing at all times throughout the growing season.
Not that way with production agriculture.
So often we hear about the production model that we have today
as the "conventional model."
I would argue that nature's way is the conventional model,
because it's been around for eons of time.
Think of it this way: what did this land look like 400 years ago?
You had a lot of diversity.
There was diversity of plant species: forbs, grasses, legumes, trees.
And then also you had a diversity of animals and insects,
and all these worked together to build a healthy ecosystem.
So there's five principles that we must follow
in order to follow nature's model.
They are, number one: least amount of mechanical disturbance possible.
On my own ranch, we have been 100 percent zero till since 1994;
we have not tilled the soil at all.
The second tenet of soil health is armor on the soil surface;
we always have the soil covered.
That's a picture of one of our fields following seeding.
That field is no longer prone to wind erosion or water erosion
because we're keeping armor on the surface.
Third tenet of soil health is diversity.
My son teaches range land management at the local community college.
He brought his students out to one of our paddocks.
They counted over 140 different species of grasses, forbs, and legumes.
Why don't we have that in production agriculture today?
On our operation, we're trying to mimic it.
These are just some of the cash crops that we grow on our operation.
We don't just grow one cash crop, we grow many.
Along with that, we do not grow cash crops as monocultures.
In the upper left there, that's oats with three types of clover growing in it.
In the upper right is a very diverse cool-season broadleaf mix.
The lower left, that's corn with hairy vetch growing in it.
The lower right, that's sunflowers
with over 19 species of covers growing with it.
A tremendous amount of diversity feeding soil biology.
We also have orchards on our operation.
These orchards, besides providing us with the fruit,
we're able to have livestock grazing underneath them,
thus stacking enterprises.
We have five acres of vegetable production,
but it's not as monocultures.
In between each of those corn rows is rows of peas, beans, squash,
zucchini, carrots, pumpkins, and a variety of other species
so that we get the benefit of diversity.
Fourth tenet of soil health
is leaving roots in the ground as long as possible.
You don't have to drive very far around this state
to see that there are monocultures growing for only a short period of time,
and then the land lays idle.
These are just some of the cover crop species which we planted
on our operation this past year.
We actually planted over 70 different species.
From the time the snow melts in the spring,
until the snow stays in early winter, we have a variety of species growing
on our land to feed soil health.
We're optimizing solar energy collection.
Because how the system works is, we take sunlight through photosynthesis;
it makes carbon; that carbon is transferred down to the roots,
where it's leaked out as root exudates, that's what all the biology feeds on.
We need that biology in order to get the nutrients to the plant
to nourish animals and people.
For you see, if we have healthy soil, we're going to have clean air,
clean water, healthy plants, healthy animals, and healthy people.
We have to focus on feeding biology.
Along with this, then, we're able to feed
all of the wildlife that's on our operation.
We also feed a myriad of different insects.
Insects tend to get a bad rap.
We like a wide variety of insects
including all the predator insects which take care of the pests.
We want to address our problems through biological means
not through chemical means.
Dr Jonathan Lundgren, one of the world's foremost entomologists,
told me this:
For every insect species that's a pest, there's 1,700 that are beneficial.
Why in production agriculture do we aim at just killing that pest,
when we should aim at providing habitat for all those beneficials?
The reason producers have a pest problem is because of a lack of diversity.
We need to think biologically.
Fifth tenet of a healthy ecosystem is animal impact.
On our operation we run a herd of 350 beef cows.
We also grass finish that beef because we know it's healthier,
both for us and for the animals.
We have a flock of sheep and raise grass-finished lamb.
We have pastured pork.
We have broilers which are out on pasture.
And we have a flock of 750 laying hens which are also out on pasture.
We also have bees.
Those bees, besides pollinating our crop,
provide us with honey.
Here's what we've done on our operation.
When we started in 1993 on the left, we had very shallow topsoil -
1.7 percent organic matter.
We could only infiltrate a half of an inch of rainfall per hour.
We then went no-till.
We started to diversify the cash crop rotation;
we noticed an improvement in soil health.
From there, we started to add cover crops -
another improvement in soil health, our organic matter levels rose,
our infiltration improved.
We then started integrating all of these livestock species
on top of it -
another marked increase in the health of our soil ecosystem.
Now in 2013, we actually have a plot of land
which is now over 11 percent organic matter.
The same soils that in 1993
could only infiltrate a half of an inch of rainfall per hour,
can now infiltrate over 15 inches of rainfall per hour.
We've done this without the use of any synthetic fertilizers,
pesticides, or fungicides.
We've done it by following the principles of nature.
This has led to a ranch that is profitable every year, regardless of price.
And we do this without taking part in any government subsidies of any kind,
whether it be a crop insurance, EQIP, CSP,
or any other form of government payment.
Thus, we are not a burden to society.
The stacking of enterprises has allowed us
to produce many more nutrient dense calories of food
at a lower cost as compared to the current production model.
Yes, we can feed the world,
and we can do it in a way that regenerates our resources,
thus, healing farms, families, and communities.
Thank you.