Day 180: Regenerative Farm Field Trip

I went on a road trip today! 

I was asked by my supervisor if I wanted to go to a farm tour in Cotton Plant, Arkansas (in the Delta, square in row crop country). The tour would be of Adam Chappell's farm, a farm I keep hearing about in soil health circles (yes, we have circles). And the tour was to be led by one of my favorite soil people (yes, I have favorite soil people), Ray Archuleta. The tour had been arranged in order for those in a group that is collaborating on a sustainable agriculture project to get on the same page in terms of what the phrase "regenerative agriculture" really means. 

So what does regenerative agriculture mean? Isn't organic, like, the best? Well, yes, for the most part, organic farmers have been knocking it out of the park in terms of being good stewards of the land for decades. The term regenerative has arisen in recent years and is a little different than organic (though you can have regenerative organic farms). Regenerative focuses on the idea that we can bring soils back to life and restore good soil health. Most soils in the U.S. are terribly degraded. All the tillage and chemicals and monocropping we've been doing for the past 100+ years have turned the rich soils of our country into dust. Yes, we've lost a lot of soil to erosion, but a more subtle loss has been the loss of soil organic matter. Every time you till your land, you introduce oxygen to the soil ecosystem. When you do that, the soil microorganisms go crazy and eat lots and lots of soil organic matter, releasing it into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. Do that multiple times a year for 100 years and you get dead soil. 

So, the "regenerative" refers to regenerating the life of the soil. Farmers have found many ways to start get life back in the soil in the span of a few growing seasons. They use all different methods, but they all have a few things in common: the soil is covered by plants most of the time, tillage is minimized or eliminated, chemical use is reduced, diversity is increased, and often animals are used to graze the fields at least part of the time. In other words, farmers have started reducing the soil damage they cause while utilizing plants in as many different ways as possible to get carbon pumping into the soil. Some people call the plant a "liquid carbon pathway" because they turn CO2 into carbohydrates and those get pumped into the soil to feed the microorganisms there, in exchange for other nutrients. Plants have a symbiotic relationship with the bacteria and fungi in the soil; they feed each other. 

(Most organic farmers have been utilizing these practices all along, but they're not strictly required. Some organic farmers, especially the giant ones in California, use so much tillage that they are degrading their soil, even if they're not spraying pesticides or using chemical fertilizers. Hence the slight distinction between organic and regenerative. It's kind of a sensitive subject in the organic world.)

Adam Chappell had been farming conventionally for years, but pigweed that had become herbicide resistant was literally causing him to go bankrupt. None of the extension or university people had any other ideas except spraying more herbicides more times. He started googling organic farming and discovered the idea of cover cropping with rye to suppress pigweed. He started on a mere 200 acres with cover cropping, and the results were so promising he just kept increasing more and more. Now he's cover cropping on all 8,000 acres he farms using diverse cover crops in his rotations, and has reduced pesticide use to a small percentage of what he had been doing, he has reduced irrigation significantly because his soil can hold more water, he has eliminated tillage, and he has become profitable. 

So, I drove the three and a half hours to Adam's farm quite happily, re-listening to some On Being podcasts (Robin Wall Kimmerer's and Michael McCarthy's interviews - highly recommended) and to some music (The Highwomen, also recommended). I was in a rental car I picked up Thursday evening, and it was quite zoomy compared to my Prius. I drove east and east and east, and the landscape got flatter and flatter and flatter. It brought back the memory of my first weekend in Arkansas, where we drove to the King Biscuit Blues Festival in Helena, AR. If I had kept going another 50 miles after the farm I would have been there. 

I found my way to Adam's farm and got there with ten minutes to spare before the meeting started. Ray was setting up some demonstrations - a slake test and an infiltration demonstration - and a few of us stood around in the hot Delta sun chatting. It felt so... normal. Companionable. 

Once everyone had arrived, we sat on a lawn under a big shady pine tree and had lunch. We went around the circle and introduced ourselves and said a little about who we were and what we did. There were about a dozen of us, all working in the field of agriculture or conservation. 

After lunch, Ray gave his demonstrations. I tried to video it but my phone overheated and turned itself off. Then we got to meet Adam, who is a big, redheaded barrel of a man, probably in his 40s, with a real thick Arkansas accent. He shared his story (which I described above) and then led us out into a few of his fields. On a farm as big as his, you have to drive from one area to the next, so we all caravanned to see first his soybeans, then his corn, then his rice. We dug a hole in each of the fields to get our hands in the soil. It was moist from a recent rain, and soft, and it smelled like... soil. You know, like your good garden soil. Most row crop soil has lost that smell, which comes from soil microorganisms. We saw earthworms, too! They are an excellent indicator of living soil. 

All that litter is from the cover crop grown
before the soybeans. And if you look closely you can
find the earthworm.

I was guzzling water this whole time, but I could feel the start of a headache coming on. By the time we left, I was ready to go find some ice tea. Five hours had passed so quickly and happily, the humans in the group as abuzz with conversation as the insects that hummed around us no matter what field we visited. No doubt about it, Adam's farm was a living place. Though he's still operating in the "conventional" agriculture arena, he's found a way to do it that improves his soil more every year, and doesn't contribute to the insect apocalypse or the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. I turned the car west and drove home, my head aching but my mind full of excitement after a day on a farm that offers me hope.