As the year comes to a close it is common to sit down, reflect and take stock of what has happened and think about how we can do better in 2020. Here’s my thoughts.
Weather would be the first thing. We had no precipitation in March, April, May and it was late June before it started. The last four months we received the entire year’s worth. When you look at the year in total, it was normal for precipitation. The other weather-related mention was cloud cover. Through September, October and November, to see the sun was a rare occurrence. All of these events resulted in one of the toughest harvests ever recorded. There are still thousands of acres of crops lying unharvested in fields across the prairies.
It seems every year has its challenges. My observations are that they are becoming more frequent. No one can predict what is going to happen, weather wise. All we can do as farmers is make our land and finances as resilient as we can, so we can manage through these weather events.
The second observation I would offer is we are close to becoming mainstream. When I began this
journey over twenty years ago it was lonely. Today, when you pick up a farm paper or listen to a farm show, you usually read or hear the word holistic or regenerative every time. This wasn’t always the case. Congratulations to all of us for being leaders on our farms and in our communities in getting the good news out.
The corporate world has caught the bug too. Early this spring General Mills announced a regenerative oat pilot project in Manitoba and Saskatchewan. They selected 45 farmers they wanted to work with. A series of soil health studies were done as well as insect and bird counts. These studies will be repeated at the conclusion of the project, to see if soil health and biodiversity have improved. Soil health consultants are working with these growers helping them to develop more diverse, longer rotations and integrating livestock if possible. One of the metrics is farm profitability. Keep tuned to see how this project works out.
Since this announcement, General Mills has set up another pilot, working with Kansas Wheat Growers, and more recently with a large CAFO dairy in Michigan, looking at how the cows can be raised more regeneratively. Other large multi-national corporations are looking at these projects and investigating how they could become involved. This is going to make regenerative agriculture mainstream.
I believe part of the motivation for these large food companies to change is that they receive many complaints about the quality of the food. They know they cannot fix this in processing; they need us to make the food more nutrient dense. How all of this will shake out in the market place is unknown.
The third issue is fake meat. There are fads and there are trends. There is such a pervasive view in society that eating meat is bad for your body and the environment. One CEO of a fake meat company has boasted that there will be no more animals in food production within the next 10 years. This is a worrisome issue for those of us in the animal agriculture business. (A fad I hope)
We need to be shouting out our good news message at every opportunity. Just as over the last 20 years we have brought regenerative / holistic agriculture to the main stream we must now work on this issue. Some of the messaging to use:
Your own story and what you observe on your operation
80% of the agricultural land is too arid, hilly, and rocky for crop agriculture. Animal agriculture is the only option for these areas. If animals are removed it will desertify, and many more people will be deprived of a healthy source of protein.
Grasslands are wonderfully diverse. Grass and grazing evolved together and area natural phenomena. In our part of the world, the glaciers melted about 9 to 10 thousand years ago. What was left was glacial till. Over the last 9000 years of grass and grazing animals the soil organic matter went from 0% to 12%.The tremendous diversity that we so value and are trying to protect was caused by grazing. There is no natural system on earth that doesn’t use animals.
Monoculture is unnatural and very expensive to maintain. It loses carbon into the atmosphere, requires ever increasing quantities of synthetics to prop it up and is producing less nutrient dense food than ever before as soil health declines.
Cows do emit methane. On healthy soil is a type of bacteria called methanotrophs. These bacteria directly consume methane. Photo oxidation is another process that breaks methane down very rapidly. No one ever mentions these facts. 200 years ago there were approximately 100 million bison and other grazing animals on the plains of North America. Most of that diversity has been replaced with 100 million cows. If you look at a methane curve over the last 500 years it stays very constant until the mid part of the last century. There is zero correlation between methane and the number of ruminants.
For more information on this subject check out:
Dr. Peter Ballerstedt. He has written several books and has some you tube’s to watch. He is a forage agronomist in Oregon and is very passionate about the importance of ruminants in our diet.
Diana Rodgers is a nutritionist. She has a website called sustainable dish and has written a book called Sacred Cow.
Read Joel Salatin’s Meadow Talk in the December issue of The Stockman Grass Farmer
7. I hope we can keep this to a fad and not a trend
We have a number of people taking the holistic educators course this fall including Lydia Carpenter & Wian Prinsloo, Dana Penrice, Bluesette and Mark Campbell and John and Deanne Chuiko. This is very exciting to get new, more energy into our ranks. If you see them wish them well on their journeys. If you have an event coming up, ask one of them to come and speak at it. They need opportunities to practice their skills.
The time you need to do something is when no one else is willing to do it, when people are saying it can’t be done. - Mary Francis Berry, American history and law professor
