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When you deal with nature,
which is so complex,
you realize that everything is interconnected.
You have to think about the whole.
- Change is needed very desperately.
The world is beginning to see now
really just massive environmental degradation.
- We are seeing more of these extremes in climate.
Flash flood, drought.
And catastrophic fires in the Amazon and California.
There aren't gonna be any jobs.
There's no jobs, no food on a dead planet.
- There's an enormous amount of carbon dioxide
in the atmosphere today,
that wasn't in the atmosphere
prior to the industrial revolution
- We're facing some really huge problems
with our global climate system,
distorted water, nutrient, and energy cycles.
- Oh, pig pig pig pig pig.
- But there's a growing movement
of farmers and ranchers,
working with nature,
to repair our soils
and bring these cycles back into balance.
The solution is right under our feet.
- It's only recently that we understand
that soil is this living thing.
And then if we optimize the life under the ground,
we'll optimize life above ground.
- And this is a paradigm shift
of how we can increase productivity
for farmers and ranchers,
but also do it in a way
that starts to harmonize with nature.
- Does it smell like rain on a hot summer's day?
And it does.
When soils become healthy and alive,
it can remove a huge amount
of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
The way we grow food can right now
be a solution to climate change.
So if we get agriculture right,
it's a win, win, win scenario for farmers,
for society, and the world.
- Come on!
Come on!
- All you gotta do is wait for me to hook it up to there,
and then you can plug it into the hydrator
and we'll fill the tank again.
- Okay.
- You find the calf?
- No.
- We can to find it.
Right? - Yeah.
- This ranch has been in our family since 1900.
We've been raising hay and selling hay for so long.
My dad called me when I was away at my other job,
and said, I'm tired and I don't
Why do I always get teary?
I don't want to have to do this anymore.
And so, I got busy thinking of a way
if we could make this work.
And part of the impetus behind that was
not being able to hay,
not seeing the long-term gains
economically, environmentally.
People started talking to me a lot about
rotational grazing, holistic, planned grazing,
dung beetles, and everything else
you could possibly think of.
It really piqued my interest,
came back, mom and dad,
and talked about what I wanted to do.
Dad was like,
seems kind of nuts, but why don't you try it
on a piece of the ranch this next year?
We founded Barney Creek Livestock in 2016.
So we've gone from raising hay and selling hay
to raising cows and selling grass-fed beef.
- I work with my dad as often as possible.
We just took down this back fence that they were just in,
and set it up for half of a paddock,
because in this last little triangle
we're gonna do a little bit of
high stock intensity grazing.
To help the grass regenerate,
instead of letting them just eating bits that they like,
they're all put into competition,
so they just eat it all evenly.
And that will help the grass grow back
taller than it was before.
What we're really seeing
is diversity in our pasture,
different grasses we hadn't seen,
which is directly related to the soil.
I hope it's wet enough.
We can actually dig a hole.
Just having people like Nicole,
being willing to share knowledge and mentoring.
She's good, and she's a great resource and great human.
- So yeah, tell me a little bit
about what you've been doing here.
- Trying to get what you always talk about,
that living root,
really trying to get it to root down.
- So this is a rhizosheath here.
So see how soil is actually sticking to it?
We want these roots to look like dreadlocks,
because that's what's protecting you
against climactic extremes.
- Okay.
- Let's get massive Rastafarian roots,
and now we've got a system that's cooking with gas,
because that's gonna be supporting carbon draw-down.
- So you want that sheath to be all the way
on those longest roots, okay.
- So that when we dig these plants up,
see that lovely, those lovely aggregates,
and you see there's a rhizosheath down there, that depth.
Well, what's to stop it being 20 feet?
There's nothing.
Yeah, but everything about soil
is really about communication,
and this communication and exchange
is happening with carbon.
Carbon is sent out the roots of the plant,
to feed the microbiology.
Now that carbon is then taken by either some kinds
of bacteria or one organism
that's called mycorrhizal fungi.
It can expand that plant's ability way beyond the roots
to access water and nutrients.
When the first pioneers came into these grasslands
and broke them in to plant other types of crops,
as they drove that plow through the grassland,
it sounded like someone had a bullwhip,
cracking it from a mile away.
So people could hear those root systems,
just snapping and cracking.
And it was a huge, really, really loud sound.
Those are the systems that we've degraded and lost.
So one of the things that we know
about getting root systems down,
is they're gonna directly translate
to the quality of the beef product that you're producing.
So we start to grow beef
fit for human consumption.
So a lot of the practices of feeding grain
or using a lot of synthetic fertilizers,
we take out that quality aspect.
Now you're gonna have to eat this huge steak,
instead of better nutrition in a smaller piece of meat.
Nicole always talks about
when you've concentrated your operation on soil first,
you can taste it.
- It just has a more rich flavor.
It tastes like it should.
- We both have second jobs.
He's gone for six months out of the year.
He's a smoke jumper.
So he's doing that during fire season.
So it's the kids and I that are here with Cathy and Larry.
And we just keep things afloat.
Usually when Pete's gone, something happens.
Sometimes I'm so afraid to call you,
but I know that you'll always be there to help me.
And you guys jump right in,
but it was so much fun to watch you move those sheep.
I called Pete and I was like, man, I mean
your mom can just really move animals.
- So, when we started leasing the place from you,
you know, I wanted to do
some kind of weird things.
- Non-traditional.
- Yeah.
- You wanted to improve just like Dad improved.
And this was the way you felt you could improve.
- And just with the cost of equipment for haying and stuff,
and thinking about having to replace that in 10 years.
- I go into the barn there every now and then sit there
and cry 'cause I'm not running it.
- And at the same time you moaned and groaned
when you had to do it all summer.
- When Pete first brought this up, what were your thoughts?
'Cause that's a leap of faith.
I mean, that is a leap of faith.
- It took about a year,
just to get used to it.
- But have you ever had a pasture
that looked like these pastures?
- No. - Okay.
- We know that agriculture started around 10,000 years ago,
somewhere in the Fertile Crescent.
The earliest farmers recognized
that planting in intervals,
creating cycles of weed control and pest control,
was a way to manage the landscape.
They harnessed plant diversity.
Agriculture looks nothing like that anymore.
We have become industrialized.
We've used the latest technology
to radically change the way that we produce food.
- What we've been doing to the land
over the long term is we've been clearing forests.
We've been plowing and monocropping.
And in recent decades we've been dousing
the landscape with chemicals.
Industrial agriculture has been a huge source of pollution,
and emissions of carbon,
because of all the machinery, all the chemicals,
and meat production puts cattle in feedlots,
where they then become an environmental problem,
because these cows are emitting methane.
In fact, over time, more CO2 has gone into the atmosphere
from faulty agricultural practices,
compared to the burning of fossil fuels.
We may get a lot of yield
when practicing industrialized agriculture,
but the quality suffers.
Food is actually less nutritious than it used to be.
For every one apple grown in the early 1900s,
you would need to eat five apples now
to get the same nutrition.
And a huge irony is that most of what we produce
isn't even for food.
Soy and corn are grown for animals to fatten them up.
- We've been on a chemical experiment for a very long time.
Now people are seeing the consequences.
By feeding animals grain,
we're actually impacting on human health
and in animals as well.
- But now a better understanding about the fact
that it's all a system,
and advances in how to use regenerative practices
allows us to move past those technologies
to things that will work better,
like no-till farming,
farming without plowing land,
planting cover crops.
The dramatic reduction in fertilizer and chemical usage
and putting animals on the land,
cows especially, act like bio processors,
eating crops then putting it back into the earth
in a way that really increases
the carbon content of the soil.
- Our soils are tired, they're naked,
they're thirsty and they're hungry.
They're out there uncovered and exposed.
They're tired because they've just been worked to death,
thirsty, because they can't store the water
that they used to be able to.
And they're hungry because they're no longer
getting the carbon into the soil
from growing plants for more of the year.
So we need to fix that.
That's where cover crops can come in.
- So these are small-seeded favas?
- This is a new variety
that I've got some contract production on.
- See a little bit of a difference.
- My brother, Brian and I farm here in Bladen, Nebraska,
south central part in Nebraska.
Is there an extra band of nitrogen you think,
right through there?
And we own and operate Green Cover Seed.
At Green Cover Seed, we provide
custom cover crop mixes
for customers all across the country.
Cover crops aren't cash crops.
We plant them in between what we call the fallow periods,
where nothing's growing,
and they're better for the farmers and for the environment,
because we're getting our system back
to a biologically-based system.
When our forefathers would have come
and started farming these lands,
most of it would have been five to 6% organic matter.
After 150 years of farming,
it's down to one and a half percent organic matter levels.
Cover crops put organic matter back into the soil.
Organic matter is 70% carbon.
The darker the color,
the more carbon it's gonna have in it.
Carbon is the main food source for the soil biology.
And so we need to bring that back,
because high organic matter soils
are so much more resistant to drought,
more resistant to insects and diseases.
That's good-looking soil.
- Yeah, you want it to look like chocolate cake.
- Once people understand the principles of soil health,
the only logical conclusion is that
you have to have something else growing out there,
and cover crops, they're just going to be more productive.
And that's a win-win for the farmer,
and it's gonna be a win-win for the environment as well.
When we first started, we went to a conference
that got us all excited about cover crops.
We were looking for a way to bring
some of the kids back to the farm,
and we decided to go this route
of trying to sell cover crop seed
rather than trying to greatly expand
the number of acres that we were farming.
So we started building, and we've been building ever since.
Really what we're doing
is taking all these raw ingredients.
What we do is try to design the mix
that will be best for the farmer.
We have over 120 different types of seed.
What they need for their fields to help improve their soil,
and to have more diverse crop rotations.
- Modern farming, we tend to monoculture everything.
We want to do a really good job of controlling one plant,
'cause it's very hard to control lots of plants,
but the more diverse we get in our rotations,
the less chemicals we tend to have to use.
- If I'm only growing corn and soybeans,
I can't have a really healthy soil,
because certain crops are always
gonna be pulling the same nutrients out.
But if I'm surrounded by plants
that have different root systems, different needs,
they fill different niches within that ecosystem,
and we see this huge influx of diversity
coming into the soil.
It's like my brother and I,
we have different talents, different interests.
You know, there's times when we maybe
butt heads a little bit,
but mostly my strengths will help his weaknesses,
and his strengths will help my weaknesses.
It's the same way with plants.
I need to have much more balance.
- That buckwheat you plant now
and that'll be harvested when?
- Right after it freezes.
- Wow, that's gonna be ready that quick?
- When we talk about farmers changing
the way they do things,
one of the bigger motivators is,
you know, show me the money.
- We'll walk out this way.
That's where things really come together.
And not only for productivity,
but also for profitability,
because now, without all the herbicides,
I don't have a lot of the cost issues.
Then in no-till farming, I don't have the erosion issue.
- Anytime you till the ground, you're opening it up,
and it allows for more evaporation, and more erosion.
By no-tilling, you're keeping the residue on the soil,
protecting it.
The no-till drill will slice through the residue,
plant a seed, and then close the soil back up.
And so we keep the structure of the soil intact.
Then you get better infiltration.
So when it does rain, it soaks in versus running off.
- The thing that affects us the most
is our rainfall events are less frequent,
but they're more intense.
I may have to catch my rainfall in April
for what my crop needs in July.
So I need that soil to be able to hold
as much water as it possibly can.
I can't do that unless my soils are really healthy.
Every time I can increase 1% of organic matter.
If I was at 1% and I went to 2%,
I can hold an additional 25,000 gallons of water
in the soil per acre.
And that's huge.
- There are 1.8 billion hectares
of cropland around the world.
And if you would convert a lot of those areas
to these practices of not tilling,
of planting cover crops,
more diverse crop rotations,
it would make a meaningful change
in the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
- If we want to pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere,
we really only have one mechanism to harness,
and that is photosynthesis.
Plants left to their own devices
would do exactly what we want them to do.
They'd pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere
using chlorophyll and sunlight, and feed life in the soil.
- And we can think of a plant as a pump,
because it's pumping carbon down,
and it's also bringing water up,
and that's through the process of transpiration,
which is actually another huge
unrecognized factor in temperature regulation.
Transpiration is a cooling mechanism.
The more plants we have, the more cooling.
So when people are working to restore ecosystems,
the first thing they do is create a scenario
where they can hold the water on the land.
And many of the most successful regenerative projects
have taken place in the harshest environments.
- You'll see it's drier than three hours ago.
For me, regenerative ranching,
first of all, is hope,
hope that things are gonna get better for the community,
better for the owner, by working with nature.
We are in a typical place
in the middle of the Chihuahuan desert in northern Mexico,
very close to the southern US.
We only get rain a couple of months the whole year.
With the rain that you get,
you have to produce enough grass to go all over
the other 10 months.
What we see here is that the water cycle
is completely broken.
We have a lot of overgrazing on the same pastures.
When we start holistic management in my ranch,
most of the place looked like this.
So it's sometimes hard to believe for ranchers
that we can change this.
They think, well, this is a desert, you cannot change it,
but we have to go back to 400 years ago,
where this was grasslands.
The call for this land is grasslands.
We'd be spending so many years fighting nature
with really no results.
So I think it's very important for us
to understand the water cycle, the soil,
so we're just trying to help nature, help us.
The name of my ranch is Las Damas Cattle Ranch.
Las Damas has 30,000 acres.
After spending some time in Mexico and the US,
working in information technology,
my father talked to me and he said,
you want to go back and work on the ranch?
And I was actually waiting for the moment.
The Carillo family was a rancher family,
starting from my great-granddad,
and then my granddad and then my dad.
And he asked me to take the reins.
I told him, you know, we're gonna try this new approach,
holistic management.
My father was a little bit reluctant,
but he said I'm gonna support you
because I also have the love for the land.
- So we're to trying fix this bare ground
with cattle that is under certain control.
500 years ago, in this particular place,
there were hundreds of bison,
thousands of bighorns.
They worked the soil pretty hard, and they move on.
We concentrate the cattle in just one spot,
mimicking the bison patterns of many years ago.
When you put your animals together,
there's much more impact on the soil.
We're putting the manure so close together.
We have these incredible dung beetles.
You see the holes there?
66% of the manure is gonna get into the soil,
thanks to the dung beetles.
That will help us infiltrate more water.
That will help the grass to get better nutrition,
and to promote new grasses.
The way we understand how to fix the water cycle
is by having more ground cover.
The more rain we have across the year,
the better for the micro herd,
this little herd that we have
under the ground that we don't see.
This is nice, because you have the ants working,
and also the termites.
If we were going to do this herbicide,
we're gonna kill all life.
See all the fungi here?
Why trying to kill this insect,
if it is part of the whole life cycle?
We need to understand that better.
When we started holistic management in my ranch,
only very few people were practicing regenerative ranching.
So I was very fortunate to have these regenerative ranchers,
like Jesus Almeida, who said it can be done.
Jesus, we're seeing a lot of that happening
right now at the ranch.
They were my mentors.
When I got into trouble, I just grabbed the phone and say,
Jesus, I'm seeing this.
Okay Alex, do this, this, this,
and you will solve what can I say.
Well, he was right.
So you have been working,
getting nice results for so many years.
- Well, the thing is that is very difficult
for humans to change their minds.
- How, how do you change their minds?
- Well, I change it because I was broke.
- Ranchers change because they're broken.
- Yeah.
- When I moved from IT, into the ranching,
I came with a mentality of individualism,
of competitiveness.
But, when the first town is 40 miles from your ranch,
you have to rely on your neighbors.
Then you start opening your mind and your heart as well.
I think we all can regenerate this land,
we can create a microclimate that will really help us
with the whole water thing.
- And then in these tough times, right now,
we're coming out of our third year in a drought,
but we're still good.
- Imagine if we were not doing this.
- Oh no, I can't, I can't imagine.
- There are a few things that are very important
in holistic management grazing.
First is the mindset.
If you have all this conventional mindset,
you have to let it go.
So you open some room in your mind,
and then you let the new things coming in, then water,
because we can grow a lot of grass,
but water has to be ahead of the grass.
You can see, we have this water storage,
and it has a trough on the outside.
In this area in the Chihuahuan desert,
we get the water from wells.
We take the water from the well to a water tank,
then distribute the water by gravity, to the troughs.
Our herd is over a thousand animals.
They walk no farther than a mile.
After they drink,
then they go back to water on the next day.
One thing we've been focusing a lot on these emissions,
but in reality, water regulates almost 95% of the climate.
- I think it's really important in this whole focus
of greenhouse gases and water quality,
and all of these issues that we're talking about,
is to really, to step back and look at the big picture.
Ever since agriculture began,
we've been exporting carbon.
Either we're sending it up into the atmosphere,
or out into the waterways.
And the biggest driver for greenhouse gas emissions
is water vapor.
Excess water up in the atmosphere
is creating these catastrophic conditions.
So how do we get water back into the soil where it belongs?
Well, when we start to pull carbon down,
we're also pulling water down.
These grasslands are net sinks for greenhouse gases.
- The grasslands are very important as a landscape,
because they are vast,
around a third of our terrestrial landmass,
and they have deep soils, great carbon syncs,
great water regulators.
They really provide stability to the planet.
- So we need to be really looking
at how do we ensure that that grassland is being managed
in a way that restores cycles.
How do we start to build resilience into these landscapes?
- The most massive perfect storm
is bearing down upon us.
Now, this perfect storm that we are facing,
is the result of our rising population,
rising towards 10 billion people,
And of course climate change.
But fossil fuels, carbon, coal, and gas,
are by no means the only thing
that is causing climate change.
Desertification, is a fancy word
for land that is turning to desert.
You can look at it from space,
and what you see in green is not desertifying,
and what you see in brown is,
about two thirds of the world.
Now we know that desertification is caused by livestock,
mostly cattle, sheep, and goats,
overgrazing, leaving the soil bare,
and giving off methane.
In Africa, where I grew up, I loved wildlife.
And so I grew up hating livestock,
because of the damage they were doing.
Well, we were once just as certain that the world was flat.
We were wrong then, and we are wrong again.
We've discovered we can use much vilified livestock,
bunched and moving,
to address climate change and desertification.
- Mara is a special place.
With the game, the landscape, the scenery.
To me, it's a paradise.
The Maasai is a tribe that lives in the Mara.
We cover most part of southern Kenya,
all the way to Serengeti.
They are a welcoming community,
with a beautiful culture.
We love wildlife.
And Maasai really love their livestock.
I've been working as a guide in Enonkishu Conservancy
for the last seven years.
And it's been a wonderful job.
- Enonkishu is a Conservancy that we started about 2013.
My father came to Kenya and started farming in this area.
Then we bought 1500 acres,
right in the Mara ecosystem if you like, on the river.
You are smarty pants.
When we were farming, things were not going terribly well.
And we started to think we could take a leap of faith,
and and scrap all the farmland,
and go on a massive rewilding project,
to try and make profits from the land,
through wildlife and tourism.
Take the community with us,
and regenerate the land and wildlife around here.
- When we started the conservation project,
it was a very different scenario in this conservancy.
It was very much barren land.
There was very little grass available for the cattle,
and there was very limited wildlife habitats.
Poaching was all over the place.
People were cutting trees down for charcoal.
- What we've managed to do with the community
is to reverse that,
and see a huge shift from intensive agriculture,
back to wilderness and open range land.
- When I realized that we could use livestock
to reverse climate change,
I found there were planning techniques,
and from those I developed what we call,
holistic management and planned grazing.
- We didn't know how to do this at all.
We stumbled across the Savory Institute,
an organization which promotes grass growth,
through using cattle as a tool.
- When the Savory Institute came to Maasai Mara,
I was one of the first conservancy members,
to attend their first training,
about the holistic management.
And we were lucky to be trained by a legend,
the founder of Savory Institute,
Doctor Allan Savory.
- Finally, they plot the movements of the animals.
- You want to bunch your cattle together.
You want them to be one moving animal.
We decided to train the communities on that.
The way it was happening before,
is that there would be several different herds,
and they would be racing for the greener pastures,
and never really leaving the land
time to recover or rejuvenate.
So we got everyone to put their cattle into one herd.
We could then move that around
in a much more systematic way.
- A mobile boma is a corral
that you can move from one point to another.
They put the mobile bomas in the most degraded land.
So by the time they leave there,
already that land has got all the requirements
for it to regenerate.
Seed from the grass,
it's got dung, which is manure.
They keep on moving around in the bomas,
and in the end, those places are brought back to life.
It's beautiful.
The mobile bomas, they're predator proof.
The cows are squeezed in there,
so when the lions or any predator comes,
the animals don't have the space to push in there.
Nothing goes in there.
- I got a call from Michael,
from our predator conservation program.
- Mara Training Center is a Savory Institute hub.
It trains people on sustainable rangeland management
using a holistic management approach.
The herders within the Mara,
they really liked the approach,
because the approach is just the same
as what our grandfathers used to do.
When we started doing the grazing in 2015,
the level of the grass was 20% cover.
And within a year of planned grazing,
we had a 75% cover, or more.
As soon as you have grass,
you get the best wildlife.
You get your small antelope, you get your zebras.
Now that all the predators have come back.
- We have a pride of lions that have recently moved in.
We've got big herds of elephants.
We have a resident cheetah called Kisaro.
She's been a wonderful mum,
bringing up six cubs,
and she's come over
because of the abundance of food in Enonkishu.
And people are coming
from all over the world to see our animals.
It's the wildlife, which brings the tourists.
The tourists bring the money,
the money goes to the landowners.
The landowners look after the wildlife.
It's a great big circle,
and it's very holistic, and it's good.
- We're making amazing progress,
considering you've got two new insights,
the use of livestock being not optional,
but essential to save civilization as we know it.
And then the second,
which is we need to develop a holistic concept
of how we want our lives to be,
based on our deepest values.
- This looks to me like a piece of soil.
- We had a dream.
After we got married,
raise a large family in a rural setting.
That was our dream,
and our dream's come true.
- We went through commercial cattle business.
Couldn't pay the taxes with that.
And the values of the purebred business
didn't fit our values.
We said, we've tried so many things,
what do we do?
And at that time, holistic management,
and grass-based agriculture came into our experience.
We went to so many conventions and seminars.
Our learning curve was huge at that point,
but it was exciting.
And we quit doing the herbicides, pesticides,
chemical fertilizers.
- Who would have thought of such a thing,
that you can finish animals on grass?
But you can,
and where you're trying to build a case
for sequestering carbon,
cows'll save the world,
but it's because of grass.
- I spend probably about three hours a day
making sure the grass grows.
Look at that.
What a toss!
While we are growing great grass,
we're also very interested
in making sure that we grow soil.
- And if you think about grass-fed beef.
Here we go.
It starts with the soil.
We're gonna take the Hereford, Dave.
- I think you can do better.
- Healthy plants give you healthy animals.
Healthy animals, treated well,
end up being healthy people.
See that little red one.
- Yeah.
That really deep body one right there?
- Yeah.
- Boy, it's a good one.
I know it's a great one, but he's wild.
- My parents had five children.
We are co-owners of the James Ranch.
My parents always invited
all of their children to return.
Well, first they kicked us out,
and told us, go away,
travel, go to school, do whatever,
but you need to experience what else is out there.
That way, if you return,
it would be on your own terms.
And we've all come back.
We all had to figure out a way to make a living here,
and we decided to do dairy, and cheese-making.
And why did we do that Becca?
- Well, it was because of the grass.
The resource that we have on this property
is really beautiful, cool season grasses.
So we looked into how do we take that resource
and convert it into something nutritious and salable?
- I mean, I grew up here on the beef cattle ranch,
but I had never milked a cow or made cheese,
and Becca doesn't come from an agricultural background.
You know, we came from Seattle during the dot.com boom.
We had friends that were getting
ridiculously wealthy like overnight.
But when I see my kids tromping through the pasture
with their fishing rods over their shoulders, you know,
that's just stuff you don't buy.
We'd take on one or two apprentices every year.
- Lots of curd.
- Yeah.
A good batch. - Yeah.
I just came wanting to make cheese,
and then it evolved into this,
If you're gonna make the cheese and milk the cows,
why not also be a steward of the land and learn
how to care for the soil,
and also make good food for people.
- Ricotta cheese, you can eat it right then,
still warm, with fresh peaches and just amazing.
- Oh, pig pig pig pig pig.
- The whey from all of our cheese-making
goes to the pork operations.
Gunther, my nephew, runs pastured pork.
And so he'll take all of that whey
and give it to the very eager, and happy to receive, pigs.
- What are you doing out of the patch, dude?
What you doing out of the patch?
I knew I wanted to get into farming and I said, dad,
do you have a piece of ground that you don't graze?
And he goes, oh, oh yes I do.
It's right over there.
It's above the ditch,
and jumping my full weight on that shovel,
got me an inch into the ground.
I couldn't even break the soil, it was so bad.
And I think we tried
75 varieties of things growing in there.
And we learned that sweet potatoes
don't like 6,800 foot elevation.
But we also learned that sugar snap peas
have become our little farm's
favorite thing to grow.
Our local community recognizes
that each one of those pods
is picked personally, by these little fingers.
And so, and his little fingers.
- Yeah, just trying to keep the body limber.
We do a lot of pea yoga out here.
- Hang in there, back.
And we now have the reputation
of being the people who grow
the best sugar snap peas in Colorado.
- It starts with quality of life.
That's the first thing.
- That's the why.
And then you say, okay,
how are we gonna create this lifestyle
that we really, really, really want?
And then you say, okay, well we could raise chickens.
- I got involved with the chickens
mostly through indentured servitude to my mom.
So my mom started the chicken business,
probably 20 years ago now.
Right now we just have about 300 chickens
that we have year round.
Sorry.
- Even though we each have our own businesses,
if there's anything that impacts the land as a whole,
then that has to go before the whole family
and be decided upon by everyone.
- And this meeting process is so wonderful
as a way to give everyone responsibility,
because we looked around, we said, look at our kids.
They're all really bright people.
Why can't they just go ahead and run it?
- My parents for so many years
felt that heavy decision-making.
I think it was such a release
that they could invite their adult children
to come and help make those decisions.
- We respect each other's viewpoints,
don't always agree, but we respect them.
- We work really hard on communication around here.
We live and work on a ranch with five different families,
and we all have our own businesses.
We have a restaurant that takes
all of the food that we produce,
and people can come and enjoy a meal.
- The restaurant is our baby.
We were the last to return,
and everybody had all these amazing products.
You know, my brother's cheese, my sister's vegetables,
that had such great flavor,
because the soil has been tended and loved,
and my parents' beef.
And we didn't know what we were gonna do
when we came back.
We didn't have any agriculture-
- Or restaurant.
- Or restaurant background,
but then we're like, oh we need a restaurant here.
And they're like, great.
Go for it.
This is the ciabatta roll that they're gonna make
in a better shape for me,
but just tell me what you think of the ratio with bread.
- That's a beauty.
- I was born and raised in Newfoundland, Canada.
All I ever wanted to be was a fishermen.
You know, they have the pride of feeding their community,
and feeding the country.
I dropped out of high school when I was 14,
and headed out to sea,
and I fished on the east coast doing lobster, tuna.
And then I headed to the Bering Sea in Alaska,
and fished cod and crab.
But then the cod stocks crashed.
In the 60s, 70s, and 80s,
the harvestable northern cod dropped 82%.
- And it is amazing to see an economy devastated overnight,
because of ecological collapse.
30,000 people laid off.
Boats beached, canneries emptied.
And then the salmon farming
was supposed to be the great answer
to overfishing, it's gonna employ everybody.
But instead it took all of the bad things
that were happening on land,
and industrial agriculture,
and moved them out into the sea.
Using pesticides, antibiotics.
You know, I was working at the height of
one of the most destructive forms
of food harvesting on the planet,
and producing some of the most unhealthy food on the planet.
And that's when you begin realizing,
if we don't protect the oceans,
there aren't gonna be any jobs.
There's no jobs, no food on a dead planet.
Over time, I picked myself up,
and started trying to figure out
what would it look like to do agriculture under the ocean?
And I started diversifying the crops,
growing both shellfish and seaweeds together,
in this sort of 3-D underwater garden,
for the kelp, oysters, mussels, clams, and scallops.
A lot of what we do is really taking the lessons
from regenerative land-based agriculture,
and bringing them out into the ocean.
Like year round growth and polyculture.
And so one of the things we do
is just find a species for each season.
Kelp is a winter crop,
so it's harvest season.
This is when we're just up lifting the kelp
out of the water.
Beautiful, huh?
It's amazing to see these walls of vegetables come out.
Cut it there and that's harvested.
We're cutting it off, put it in barrels,
and then it was off to the processor.
This year we're drying everything in old tobacco farms.
- We're just trying to thin it.
The outside will dry very nicely,
but then the inside will kind of,
the moisture will get locked in.
So, when we're done with separating it,
it'll be just much more likely to fully dry.
- Kelp is this incredible crop because it is delicious.
Cook it up for about 30 seconds here.
You can turn it into noodles,
and plant-based burgers, all sorts of things.
And I can hand it to a chef,
and they make beautiful kelp cuisine.
But it also is a climate crop,
in that it soaks up carbon, nitrogen,
and it creates this whole canopy underwater,
where fish and different organisms come and thrive.
The way we seed kelp is we go out
and we get a couple blades of kelp that's reproductive.
We bring it back to our hatchery,
and we release those spores into fish tanks,
and in there is string,
and the kelp's little seed sticks to the string.
Give me this one.
And then we wrap it around our ropes.
There's a seed spool there.
And it's that simple.
The kelp then transfers from the string to the ropes,
and grows vertically downwards.
And it grows incredibly fast,
one of the fastest growing plants on the earth.
There are a couple of reasons why
regenerative ocean farming is important now
during the climate crisis.
One is our crops capture
a huge amount of carbon and nitrogen.
Think of them as the sequoia of the sea.
I think one journalist called it
the culinary equivalent of the electric car,
and the impact is significant.
According to the World Bank,
if you farm 5% of US waters,
you can sequester 135 million tons of carbon.
All with zero inputs.
That means no fresh water, no fertilizer, no feed.
A percentage of our crop goes to fertilizer and compost.
- The nutrients from the kelp
will transfer over to the water.
And then regenerative land-based farmers
put that into the soil.
There are 1.5 billion cattle on the planet.
If we feed them a small percentage
of their feed in seaweeds,
we can reduce their methane output by 60%.
And in sheep, we can reduce it by 80%.
And then we can also take our kelp,
and turn it into compostable plastic alternatives,
like straws, packaging.
And that is stunning.
Petroleum-based plastics are the things
that are just ruining our oceans, right?
So here's this amazing loop,
where I'm growing the seaweed
it's being turned into plastics,
and the pollution stops.
But the most important piece is that
it only takes 20,000 dollars to start a farm,
20 acres and a boat, that's all you need.
And this is the secret to fast replication,
minimal capital requirements.
And that just lets farms sprout up all over the place.
Too much thinking stops at the water's edge.
That's why our collaboration with land-based farmers
is where all the possibility is.
It's not really about seafood and fishing.
It's really about,
how do we think of ourselves as farmers,
and weave these two industries fully together?
- I own and run Harborview Farms with my family.
We're typical, large-scale corn, wheat, soybean producers,
but we have a strong focus on sustainability.
We're on the larger side.
We're a little over 10,000 acres,
scattered out over about 45 miles.
One thing we've looked at as a farm,
is how do we grow corn and beans,
but not do it in a conventional manner?
How do we add diversity to the mix,
and still be able to make a living?
20 years ago,
I was probably just getting out of school, coming home.
The farm looked very much the same.
We grew corn, soybeans, and wheat,
so that part hasn't changed at all.
A lot of it was still being plowed.
We didn't do any cover crops, we didn't believe in them.
So the fields that we planted into were always brown.
So our farm's located right on the Chesapeake Bay.
Living here, it's very personal to me,
because my family and I, we fish, we water ski,
we swim in the rivers and the bays.
But years ago, we had a huge fish kill,
that was caused by a toxic algae.
They were blaming farmers for all the pollutants in the Bay.
So there was a lot of animosity.
That wasn't my goal, to work with the environmentalists.
I thought that was crazy.
But as I started working with them, saw their passion,
saw their desire to have cleaner water,
and wanting to be part of that solution,
rather than part of the problem,
it really opened my mind up,
and convinced me that I needed to change the way I farm.
So over the years we've transitioned.
So now we plant these cover crops as soon as we harvest.
So those plants are always growing.
And then in April and May,
when we begin to plant our cash crops,
the corn and the soybeans,
we plant directly into those fields that are still green,
often have flowers.
They're pretty.
So you're going from this completely brown field
that's been tilled,
to now planting into what appears to be chaos,
you know, in stuff up to my chest,
seven, eight, tons of this green matter.
You still have your mono crop in the summer,
which is your food production,
but all through the fall and winter after harvest,
you build this diversity.
You get the diversity of insects up,
you get the diversity of microbes up,
and that gives us all kinds of benefits.
See the corn coming up?
- No.
- You don't see it yet?
I talk to my kids about farming.
What do you think it is?
- I don't know.
- They're not exceptionally passionate about it now.
Look at all the bugs.
You see 'em all?
There's a little spider.
But what we do talk about is climate change.
We talk about solving the problems of the world.
This one's purple top turnip pods.
It tastes like turnips.
Tastes awful right now.
As the talk about climate change grew,
we started to realize that what we were doing
was sequestering carbon,
and putting it into our soils.
I got in touch with a company
that was trying to start a carbon market
to solve climate change.
They found that the best solution
was to get farmers to practice regenerative agriculture.
The easiest way to get farmers
to change to this style of farming
was through getting them paid.
So I jumped on board.
We sent all the data from our fields,
harvest dates, lack of tillage,
nutrients, all these different things.
And then it spits out how much carbon
we would have sequestered this year.
This is some of the fun stuff we're getting into.
Got the rapeseed flowers, radish.
Last year, we made over 100,000 dollars
selling carbon credits.
Obviously barley.
With margins as tight as they are,
that's a lot of money.
I'm not sure what the purple one is.
- This whole idea that the environment and the economy
are at odds, is not true.
If you look through all the scientific literature
it doesn't stack up.
It's when we work with the environment, and the economy,
that actually now we're really making some money.
- At Indigo, our goal is to help farmers
be more profitable, and produce healthier food.
It seems reasonable that if we're gonna ask farmers
to perform this societal benefit
of pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere,
we should be willing to pay them to do so.
- This is probably around 30 days.
- But carbon credit represents one ton carbon of dioxide
that has either not been emitted,
or has been sequestered.
So farmers represent the supply side of this.
They create the carbon credits
by storing carbon in the ground.
Companies create demand for those.
- There's a lot of industries, including parts of mine,
where you have to burn fossil fuels,
in order to survive,
like an airline.
To run the airplanes pretty much you have to burn jet fuel.
So I think that in time we can improve the way we farm.
I can start to sequester more carbon,
and that may be an offset for someone else
that's forced to burn it in order to run their businesses.
- Emissions reductions are necessary
for a long-term solution,
but it's not sufficient,
because we also have to undo the damage
that we've already done.
Today, as we realize the urgency of the problem,
we just need to do everything,
but changing agriculture,
arguably the most important industry in the world,
is a really important component in fixing our problems.
Not everybody we talk to
believes in human-caused climate change,
and we find that's not necessary.
Farmers may speak a different language,
but they're the most sustainability-focused people I know.
And so the fact that more carbon in the soil,
means healthier soil,
and that means increased value on the farm.
That's something we can all talk about.
- Over the last decade,
we've realized just how important the management
of agriculture and fresh water is to our overall mission.
The use of water is increasing around the world.
Agriculture is the largest use of fresh water in the world.
We're now looking at several parts
of east Africa and southern Africa,
working to establish water funds.
We work with a city
to raise funds to go upstream,
where the source water is impaired.
Whether it's from pollution,
or overuse of the water,
we found the return on investment is better
when we put those dollars upstream
and let nature do the work.
- This is my farm.
I live here with my husband.
I have a few livestock,
two cows which I milk.
I have goats, chickens.
In my shamba, which is not very big,
it's just an acre,
I planted some bananas, some green vegetables.
I do the crop rotation.
They came along to teaching the farmers,
and I started developing this mixed farming.
- The Nature Conservancy
work with farmers in Upper Tana,
on how they can practice sustainable agriculture.
Upper Tana River is one of the largest rivers in Kenya.
This river supplies 95% of the water to Nairobi City.
Nairobi has a population of over five million Kenyans.
They've been able to conserve this river,
helping the farmers improve on rainwater storage
and minimize pumping of the water from the river.
- The Water Fund targets every farm
that needs to make some improvement to reduce soil erosion.
And our target is to reach 50,000 farmers.
- This one is needier. - It's the large one.
We were able to design some nice, simple,
rainwater harvesting pans
that each farmer would have.
- The farm has a lot of water from the roof.
So I collected the water from the roof
and put them in some water pans.
So I use that to water.
- And whenever they need water to irrigate
they would use the water in this pan
to irrigate the crops.
- Is this another water pan?
- I'm not very near the river,
would not survive without the rain.
So the water pans, they have helped me a lot.
Before, you could just plant it and then you see it whither.
- Now, Grace is able to do different field crops.
- We have planted, all this Napier grass, all over.
- So she's able to feed her livestock
from these cover crops and at the same time
control soil erosion within her farm.
- What used to happen, is that all the water raining,
most of it would just wash off.
And we used to have big floods.
There was a lot of landslides.
But with more people doing conservation in their farms,
the water doesn't just run off.
There's much more infiltration.
- You can see these trees,
the water has really helped us.
- Very healthy crop there.
- We're planting millions of trees
in the river riparian areas.
Avocado, macadamia, and other trees
ensuring that there isn't too much
run off when it's raining.
So we're seeing much more water flowing.
That means there's more water flowing to the city every day.
So what we're seeing in the city of Nairobi now,
they we're getting good quality water
all through the rainy season.
And when it is not raining, they're getting much more.
Some of the people actually never got water in their taps.
And they were having to rely on water
that is ferried with jerrycans.
The price of buying water from jerrycans
is 20 times more than it would have been
if you had water from the city water company.
Now, many households are able to get water
direct from their taps.
And they can have a clean house,
they can have a bath and be fresh
and they can bathe their children.
Seven years ago, some big companies in Nairobi
were projecting that within 10 years
they would actually leave Nairobi
just because they are too much water dependent
and the amount of water supply was going down.
So it's interesting to see that within five years
after developing the Water Fund
and they're now getting much more stable supply of water,
they are no longer thinking about moving out of the city.
It's good for jobs, and is good for Kenyan economy.
And that water is only being made possible
by the conservation effort happening in the watershed.
- From the time I started saving that water,
my soil has improved.
Bananas, I used to harvest very few and smaller ones.
These days I harvest these big ones,
which help me to get something in my pocket.
I'm always having food to feed my family.
And at the same time, I sell.
And we're seeing many, many farmers
who are now getting much more income.
And we've seen that transform people's lives.
- We're all sharing the same atmosphere.
We all have an equal interest
in pulling carbon out of the atmosphere,
and it doesn't really matter where it's pulled out of.
About 70% of the calories in the world
are created by small holder farmers
who are growing food primarily for their families.
But those farmers are equally capable
in participating in carbon sequestration.
It may actually represent
the most interesting cash crop
for a small holder farmer.
And so that represents
a significant potential around the world.
- What I love about this place is we are
in the greater Yellowstone area,
is the second most bio-diverse grassland,
after the Serengeti, in the world.
So we have 30 to 40 grizzly bears
that will actually come through this property.
There are packs of wolves.
We have antelope and elk.
I mean, you look around and the diversity here
is just extraordinary,
and that is being fostered
by good management practices by ranchers out here
that really are committed to,
how do we work with landscapes?
And how do we work with animals, including your wildlife?
See how how tight that is?
That's what the caraway is trying to open up.
- So this is the caraway.
- The bears eat this.
- So he ate that down, right?
- He ate it down.
So the bears come out at specific times of the year?
- Yep, they come out in mid-August to mid-September.
I grew up conventionally ranching.
We had a cow calf operation.
We ran sheep.
We had horses.
My family's ranch, historically, it was my grandparents'.
My dad has four brothers,
so there's a lot of masculine energy on this ranch.
But over the years, it's shifted.
And here I am now with my husband
and our two little girls, helping manage it.
Because of the changes in the ecosystem,
and the grizzly bears came down further,
we were having challenges with our cattle.
We worked with Nicole for the last few years.
She's helped us tremendously
with information on the landscape.
Now we're looking at what it means
that the caraway has come into the soil,
and why the bears are here,
so that we can keep the conflict at a minimum,
so that we can all enjoy it.
- The cattle are actually safer in a lot of ways,
because there's this really, really rich food source.
Now the bears can eat this, and then go and hibernate,
instead of eating your cows to hibernate.
- Yeah, exactly.
One of the things that we are experimenting with
on the ranch right now is our range riding program.
People out there who are very good horsewomen and horsemen,
you know, if you have vulnerable cattle that are scattered,
the horse and the rider are coming up on the edges,
making it part of the cattle's choice to come together.
And then we just sit there for awhile
so that then they take it on as their own behavior.
- Animals actually moving together as a unit,
is not just predator protection,
you're really getting this massaging process.
You're really getting those soils enlivened up,
and we're building that structure through that process.
I mean, it's how grasslands evolved.
We need to have livestock with grasslands.
You can't have a grassland without livestock.
One of our strengths as ranchers
is that we can share our discoveries.
- The other day we were at the ranch,
and we found a bunch of worms.
I'd never seen them like that, never.
That means that we're improving the land a lot.
- One of the most important indicators
of the health of your grasslands,
is the diversity of your wildlife.
The day we decided to work with nature,
I would say it in just one word, abundance.
We were excited this year to find the golden eagle,
because the golden eagle represents top of the chain.
You have this pristine free-of-toxins environment.
For me, holistic management was the perfect fit,
to do the cattle ranching business that I love,
and also to protect and to grow
this wildlife that I really love.
- The Savory Institute,
we have currently around 50 hubs in all continents.
It's very exciting.
We believe that by influencing the management,
little by little,
the new emergent science points to
an increasing carbon sequestration in grassland soils.
But it's not just the carbon, it's your healing land,
you're supporting more biological diversity, more wildlife.
- In the Mara,
we are already seeing the fruits of it.
Because our cows are healthy,
and we have grass throughout the year.
We started with 357 cows,
and now we headed to 700 cows.
- Enonkishu Conservancy has been a very good model.
We have around 16 conservancies in Mara.
Most the conservancies
are really interested with our approach.
- I come from Lemek Conservancy,
which is a nearby bigger conservancy.
The Lemek members have been going
to the Mara Training Center to get training,
on how to implement the holistic management.
- And we sit down with the herders.
Well you can just teach even under the tree.
You just go step by step
on how to do the planned grazing.
Now they are doing the block grazing plan.
So we had a very fruitful lesson.
They really like it.
Thank you very much.
And I have trained around 700 landowners
and around 300 herders as well.
The people understand it's not about
the number of animals.
It's not about the land.
It's not about climate change.
It is about how management is being done on the land.
The numbers of the wildlife is increasing on a daily basis.
What they have come to prove is that
wildlife and livestock can graze together
without any problems.
In two days' time, Lemek Conservancy
will start their holistic grass management plan,
by allowing 1,000 or so number of cows
to come in to graze in the conservancy.
This gives the Mara a bright future.
- The way climate change has been framed,
is that it's a problem of emissions,
and the ordinary person has nothing to do there.
It's always been kind of leave it to the experts,
and that has left people feeling helpless,
and kind of tuned out.
How do we encourage people to shift
not only how they do things, but how they see things.
The very first thing is to know
that healing ecosystems is possible.
Your backyard, your lawn, is an ecosystem.
Just imagine if everybody who has a lawn,
took a little piece of that,
and grew some vegetables and herbs.
Wow, the artichoke looks more artichokey.
Then you get your connection to the land,
and you're actually relating to all land
in a different way, because you see it differently.
What it really is about, is how people feel connected.
- Green Cover Seed, it started out with just our kids,
but as we grew that business,
eventually we ran out of kids.
Then we had to start bringing in outside people.
The blessing with that is,
we're able to support close to 30 families,
- With the rate that we're going right now,
we'll probably cover a million acres
with the cover crops that we sell.
I think our customer list now
is 11,000 different customers in all 50 States.
- I'll be quality control.
A lot of corn.
- We want to help farmers and ranchers
regenerate God's creation, specifically the soil,
but we also look at that as people as well.
One of the reasons the average age
of the American farmer is older than it should be,
is because there were a lot of kids
that were discouraged at coming back to the farm,
because it was tough to make a go of it.
And we have customers all the time that say,
boy, doing this type of farming,
it's just made it fun again.
- What do you think, Boscer?
- Not only are you producing something that's healthier,
but I can see now that I'm building my soils back up,
and there's something just really freeing
about knowing I'm building something for the future.
- Now what's the best thing we can do, Bug?
- Push them forward?
- Wait.
All right, put your fence up, Bug.
We're into our third year of earnestly
doing everything we wanted to do.
I can't imagine doing anything different.
- It's what you've always wanted to do, Peter.
And I'm watching these two, too, and how they're growing up.
Maloi, with her coloring book.
And that's pretty neat for 12 year old girl,
to have her own ISBN number.
- My coloring book is called, Don't Call It Dirt.
Barney McQuack, he's telling all the little kids
the story of regenerative agriculture.
This page is specifically about how
I'm the fifth generation of our ranching.
This is about the healthy grass.
There's a quote from Gabe Brown,
"Nature does not function without animals."
I started out with a 4-H project in Veterinarian Science.
They said, the way you graze and the way you do things,
doesn't have to really do with the animals' health.
I was like, I'm gonna prove them wrong, so,
I emailed Nicole,
Joel Salatin and Gabe Brown.
Then Nicole called me and she's like, you're right,
we're gonna teach them.
This is the last page.
- You know, Pete always says,
we want to put more into the land than we take,
really sharing that with people,
and that what we're doing and what they're getting
starts with the soil, and is going to end up in their food,
and they're eating it for a really good reason.
They're taking part in this whole movement.
When you buy from someone local, it has more meaning.
These farmers and ranchers who are trying to work
with the land, and do right by their soil,
do need our support.
- So hop aboard.
You can just hook in right back there.
I decided that it was time to take fishermen
like me and begin transitioning all of us
from wild harvesters to regenerative.
- So when you harvest, you can actually keep growing.
- So I created a Green Wave to train
that next generation of ocean farmers.
And they come from all walks of life.
They're land-based farmers who can't afford land,
indigenous communities, former fishermen.
What's interesting is the majority are women.
It's a big surprise.
I thought it was all gonna be crusty fishermen like me,
but oddly women seem to be stepping into this.
Maybe they're the ones that'll figure out
how to build a different, more cooperative system.
For us at Green Wave,
we think that climate change and inequality are linked.
We can create an army of people making a living
solving the biggest crisis of our time.
What I hope to see is sort of these blue carbon reefs,
up and down our coast and all around the world.
The seas are rising, which I know is scary,
but we can either build seawalls and flee our coasts,
or we can look at the ocean
as a place to do climate solutions.
We can build something completely new,
something creative and beautiful.
- 32 years ago that we start this,
it's amazing how many ranchers and cattlemen
start looking at it, and they believe that this works.
- Jesus, you recently attended a workshop
right here in Chihuahua,
where more than 500 people, you said?
- More than 500 people attended, yeah.
- 30 years ago, how many people
you were able to get into this?
- We were just five of us.
- Five.
- Well you have to pay them to go.
You have to give them the food and everything.
- We can definitely bring back any former grassland
or any desert.
The beauty of what we're doing is when you go
to a workshop or seminar in Chihuahua,
you see a lot of young people.
- We need to regenerate,
not just agriculture, but our communities,
our institutions.
Only when enough people in society say it makes sense,
can our institutions change.
So we've got to get the young people to demand
that policies be developed
in national and global holistic context.
Then the right things will flow to the top.
They're not condemning anybody.
You get beyond the conflicts.
And then they'll have hope.
- The piece for me that is the most important
with holistic management, is honoring everybody's voice.
Every grandchild, no matter how old they are,
are invited to family meetings, and they come.
- Let us not love in word, neither in tongue,
but in deed, and in truth, amen.
- Regenerative in an agricultural sense,
we understand that.
What's the consensus guys on the barbecue?
But it all starts with the foundation,
and what are the roots?
Roots, when you're dealing with soil,
you have to keep nurturing it.
But in this case, it's the roots of our family,
and just instilling that harmony is the only way
to accomplish anything as a group of people,
whether it's a family, or a country.
- They have become of one mind
to manage the land,
and preserve their quality of life, successfully.
This is what we've been able to achieve with our family.
- My favorite part is watching something
come from the grass,
to the cow,
to this beautiful piece of cheese.
- This is beautiful.
- Isn't that pretty?
- I would like to continue learning this method of dairying,
and one day have this for myself.
- What I'm seeing with regenerative agriculture,
is this is a train that's just not gonna stop rolling.
You know, everything about it just makes so much sense.
To see the young people coming through,
and being really engaged with what is possible.
How can we get good, better?
How do we really put nutrition back into the system,
and feel really passionate and excited about it?
Change is happening, and happening quite quickly.
We really are seeing the transformation of agriculture.