BFA Newsletter - 7/1/22
Soil Carbon and Regenerative Agriculture Systems: A Conversation With Tim LaSalle
On July 6th, the BFA will be hosting a webinar with Tim LaSalle about his work at the Center for Regenerative Agriculture and Resilient Systems at Chico State University. Earlier this week we sat down with Tim to learn more about his research and hear about his hopes for how the human race might work within Earth's natural, biological systems to combat climate change and create a more viable future for ourselves on this planet.
Tim has served as the first CEO of Rodale Institute, Executive Director of the Allan Savory Center for Holistic Management, consultant, advisor, and research coordinator for the Howard Buffett Foundation in Africa on soils and food security for smallholder farmers. He is Professor Emeritus of California Polytechnic State University, and former President/CEO, of the California Agriculture Leadership Program where he arranged educational leadership programs in more than 80 countries with heads of state, ministers, and community leaders.
Can you give us a little background on you, and what led you to the work you’re doing today?
When I was the CEO of The Rodale Institute, I was interested in the questions of global food security, hunger, water shortages, and climate change. There was enough data sitting on the shelves to begin to do work on those issues, but there were limitations in the methodologies that much of organic agriculture was using, particularly in terms of practices that cause soil disturbance, and that was getting in the way of us maximizing our research.
I went with Howard Buffett to Africa, and he gave me a field of very poor soil in order to prove out how we could take a biological approach to the soil and move it into a no-till environment. The soil was very responsive to our methods, which was exciting, but more importantly, I came home from my time in Africa with the understanding that the suffering and hunger that come from climate change have already taken a toll there. Weather patterns were so disrupted that farmers could no longer grow food, and we heard of farmers committing suicide as a result. And yet that’s not a topic that has gained a lot of attention in the United States. I haven’t been able to get a lot of audiences particularly interested in it.
I decided that in order to change agriculture globally, we had to start here in the United States. Unfortunately, our understanding of soil and farming comes from a ten-thousand-year history of degradation, decline, and destruction; high inputs, high fossil fuel usage, and carbon lost to the atmosphere. So that's a paradigm change that needs to happen, and needs to happen rapidly, for civilization to have a future. But historically, it takes a hundred years to change a scientific paradigm, and with climate change, we don't have a hundred years. We have a decade, maybe, to turn this around.
So Doctor Cindy Daley and I helped co-found the Center for Regenerative Agriculture and Resilient Systems at Chico State University, to begin looking at creating research that could explore the potentials and possibilities in this field of study. Both of us had independently spoken to our belief that the work could be done on a much bigger scale than it was currently. We decided we wanted to study the successful farmers who are seeing these huge numbers of carbon in their soil. A lot of scientists were making fun of them, saying their data was wrong, etc. Well, we have now become those farmers, doing similar work with Chico State, showing similar levels of carbon in our soil. And we've done it in two years. We have seen soil carbon accumulation at ten times what general science says is possible on farms.
We’re currently trying to get a big project funded to replicate this work, and get robust data to push through to the scientific community, which needs to be clobbered with so much data that they can no longer deny it. It will affect policy, and government programs, and climate programs, and it should affect people working in the development world with regard to helping farmers become food secure. Because soil carbon is the lifeblood of living, breathing, vibrant, fertile soil. Soil that captures more water, has drought tolerance, and creates more nutrient-dense food, something I know you all at the Bionutrient Food Association are interested in.
Can you talk more about the concept of carbon sequestration, and how capturing carbon increases soil health?
I’m going to challenge the whole paradigm of sequestration. We don't want sequestration, because that's not a living, breathing carbon cycle. And to accumulate and accrue this level of carbon, you need a living system. Sequestration is a dead carbon - it's cemented, solidified, buried, and not usable again. Really what we're looking at is carbon that accrues at a ten times or greater rate in the soil. It's a living, cycling carbon that respires much more slowly out of the soil; you have a dynamic biological exchange happening in the soil while you're building total inorganic and organic carbon. So it’s not truly sequestration, and we want to disabuse ourselves of that term. It’s the wrong business, trying to say that what we need is permanence. But if we want to live, we need carbon cycles. What we need to do is support Earth in her wisdom, doing what she has always been doing. And we've got to stop emitting, obviously, at the levels we’re at. But we’re able to draw down. And nature can draw down, if we support her as a living system that knows what she’s doing. We can do it. It's possible. The question is, will we do it?
Are you hopeful about humans doing what we need to do to make that happen?
Farmers are moving fairly rapidly on this. This is a movement. Unlike the organic movement, which is a hundred years old and represents one percent of our farmland, regenerative agriculture is moving at a very rapid pace. A lot of farmers like to say it's farmer-led, which adds credence and credibility to the movement for other farmers who are not going to listen to university people or government policies. What Dr. Daley and I spend a lot of time talking about is farmer profit and soil fertility. Some farmers still don't believe in climate change, and aren’t going to change practices because of that issue, but we need those farmers as part of this movement. So we need to speak their language in regards to what's going to help them and their businesses. And restoring soil health is a clear way for them to ultimately make more money.
Right now, with the price of things like fertilizers and other inputs, we see this as an opportunity to have deeper conversations with farmers, discussing ways they can have an avenue out of writing these big checks. We are talking to them about ways they can move towards healthier soils, and more money in the bank, without coming at them with the arrogant purity and righteous indignation that a lot of organic people want to carry on their shoulders. It stays away from arguments, and just moves directly into, “Here's how your farm can become more profitable”. They're going to be accruing carbon whether they want to or not, because that’s what biology is going to do. So our hope is that they’re going to be on our team, maybe unwillingly at first, but that they're ultimately going to be willing because they need to reduce their costs.
What role do regenerative practices play in all of this?
A lot of people try to define regenerative in practice-based systems. We're not interested in practice-based systems. But we think there are some core principles that are going to help make this function. One is tillage. We have to reduce or eliminate tillage completely. The second is to keep a live root in the ground for as many days of the year as you can and increase that diversity. Winter cover crops are a highly diverse multi-species, and they are crucial. Not tilling is really crucial. We started our research by positing the importance of removing chemicals and fertilizers, but the work we’re doing on our farm for this project does not remove all of those components, and we’re still seeing huge increases in the health of that soil, and in carbon accrual. So it has become a matter of being able to ease farmers into reducing their chemical inputs without cutting them off completely, and in essence, that means a transition that is very gentle. They will see no yield differences, and they will see cost savings, because they’re using fewer inputs.
We’ve been surprised at how fast things happen when we just support nature. We saw a field that had been disced, and plowed, and rotated and fallowed, and that farmer hadn’t seen earthworms in thirty years. After shifting to a more regenerative model, fourteen months later, you couldn't put a spade in the soil and turn it over and not see earthworms. Just by making these two shifts, tillage and live roots, the life and health of the soil jumped. Just support nature and she takes off. That's the regenerative model.
The BFA community is very engaged and loves to support the causes and people in our orbit. Is there a good way for people to get involved with the work you’re doing?
Wendell Berry said, “Eating is an agricultural act.” And I like to take liberties with his quote by saying, “Eating is a climate act, three times a day.” You're either going to be emitting carbon dioxide by what you're eating and how it's farmed, or you're going to be accruing it in the soil. So that's one component, and then you say, “How?” One way is to start to demand regeneratively produced food. Another way is to give directly to projects doing this work. We're looking for partners who can give anywhere from $5 a month to 5 million dollars on the research project that Dr. Daley and I are working on. That's a way for direct engagement and involvement to help fund the research that gives us the data to change policy, and the world, and how we understand agriculture. That, to me, is extremely crucial, and we’re just beginning. Click here to learn more.
Is there anything else you’d like to share?
I would like to drive home that when you build a healthy soil biome, what’s obvious is that you see increased soil fertility, and reduced costs and increased profits for farmers. You also see increased drought tolerance and water percolation to reduce flooding. Furthermore, it increases biodiversity and food nutrient density, by all accounts that we’re seeing. We're not just talking climate, we're talking about life on the planet and its health and vibrancy. When the amount of biodiversity is increased below the soil line, it’s increased above the soil line. And when you increase the biodiversity of the biology, you increase the health of the planet, and therefore increase the health of the food we eat. All of that is the way nature inherently wants to work. It’s biology, and we just need to support it.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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Interested in learning more? Visit soilcarbonaccrualproject.org
Beef Study
BFA's Bionutrient Institute is leading a study to define Nutrient Density in beef, and we are still accepting farmer and citizen scientist participants who would like to submit samples for our 10/1 sample run deadline. We were recently awarded grant money that will allow us to accept more partners to sign up for free, so now is a great time to get involved. We're incredibly excited to be able to offer this opportunity to our community.
In this study, we collect detailed data from our partners, which helps us to draw conclusions about the nutrient density of the meat and the health of the soil and forage or farming practices. We are currently running a total of 300 samples, and we expect to start sharing data from this study with the public this summer as the different analyses reach completion!
Click here to learn more about our research and sign up to be a partner.
