eat music) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) - We're in Chepachet this afternoon.

I am with John Kenny, the owner of Big Train Farm.

And the reason I came up here, John, to talk to you about soil regeneration, because I know you're very familiar with that.

- Great, yeah.

Well, I've been trying to learn about soil and regenerative practices for a long time, for as long as I've been a grower.

And carbon in soils is particularly important for the topic that you're interested in, climate change, and the general sort of planetary health crisis.

On planet Earth, the primary reservoir for carbon is the ocean.

It's about 77% of global carbon is found in the sea.

That reservoir has been tapped.

And at the moment, whenever additional carbon is burned and put into the atmosphere, when it dissolves into the ocean, it leads to ocean acidification.

So soil is that alternative reservoir.

And globally, soil holds about 5% of the Earth's carbon.

But that reservoir is able to accept carbon in a much more sort of healthy process than the ocean is, at least currently.

And one of the reasons is, is because so much of our global landscape, about 38% of the terrestrial globe is in agriculture.

And most of that land has been severely depleted of its carbon.

And that carbon is found in a term that people refer to as soil organic matter, which is previously dead, previously living rather material that has since died and is in different states of decomposition.

In places like tall grass prairies, like out in the Dakotas, the amount of soil organic matter that you'd find in those soils pre-modern agriculture was about between 6 and 9%.

And just to give you some idea.

For every percent of organic matter you have to the depth of about six inches, what we call a plow furrow, that adds about 20,000 pounds of material.

And of that 20,000 pounds per acre, about 40 to 50% of that can be carbon.

So modern agriculture on a modern ranch in the Dakotas, the soil organic matter can be down around 1%.

So that's a major, major spectrum.

And when we talk about regeneration and when we talk about soil as being a willing sponge for global carbon, in a natural setting, we have that much of a spectrum to clear, going from 1% back up to that pre-agricultural percent of organic matter.

And that doesn't mean it's post-agriculture.

Modern agriculture can be regenerative in that way.

And that's pretty much what regenerative agriculture means when you're talking about soil carbon.

- By managing the soil, you're making it healthier.

And by making it healthier, I'm assuming all those nutrients that are in the soil get transferred into what you're growing, making what you're eating healthier.

- Yeah, the term soil health is not really a well defined or technical term.

So we're playing around a little bit with the words, but I think for most people it rings true that when a soil is producing very, very nutritious food that does not require the inputs of a lot of synthetics, even really unsynthetic fertilizers or use of pesticides, that soil could very well be considered healthy.

And the overall environment when you observe that can also make that claim too, 'cause you can see more biodiversity, you can see a lot of ecological benefits.

- [Alex] Now what do you use in your soil to help with the regeneration?

- The process for us has been first to minimize the disturbance.

So the no-till thing has been a nut to crack.

There's a lot of different ways to do it.

Every farm is slightly different.

Because our farm has such a high water table, a seasonal high water table, we went with a method using raised beds, permanent raised beds that have like sort of a dome shape.

They're sort of like long domes, if there can be such a thing.

But just basically, these long 150 foot mounds, about 750 square feet a piece, and we have about five acres of those.

We have added compost to it.

And we do a lot of cover cropping, and we do other sort of more like holistic practices like inoculation using compost extracts, vermicompost, this kind of stuff.

Always kind of with an eye on trying to keep the soil well aerated without disturbing it, have good water infiltration, good water retention, something that we should talk about considering the drought that we've been in.

- Right, that water retention turns out to be extremely important during the drought that we had here recently.

- That's right.

Yeah, so most farmers who practiced tillage had an incredibly difficult year this year.

And I know this was one of the wetter parts of the state, and we still didn't have rain for six to eight weeks.

The entire month of July was completely dry.

But if you have undisturbed organic matter in the soil that organic matter has the potential to hold about, again, this magic number 20,000 gallons per acre per percent.

And retaining that requires leaving that soil relatively undisturbed.

So throughout this season of extreme recently degraded to severe drought that we're in, we did not irrigate any more aggressively than we normally would.

Some of our crops did not get any irrigation, and we've had normal to great yields.

- That's really important.

And yeah, I mean, I know that having that mound system, it also retains more water.

- Yeah, exactly.

So just the fact that it has that dome structure, so that adds compaction strength.

You know, if you're stamping on a flat roof, be much more likely to punch through it than you would if it was, you know, arched.

Arches are strong, and a mound is simply a series of arches stacked up against each other running a long way.

So for two dimensional fields, you know, a typical flat field, even rain, a good heavy rain is enough to compact that soil.

But we don't have that issue with our raised beds.

And infiltration is good because the soil isn't disturbed.

And all of those microbial sort of controlled pathways and channels and pores, all that stuff that evolves in the soil over time helps facilitate those water dynamics.

- I think the whole aeration thing of the soil is extremely important.

- That's right.

And when most people think about aerating, they think about going through and ripping with rippers or chisels or plows or whatever.

But this is completely different.

This is something that you sort of start somewhat aggressively in building these things, but then you sort of move to a gentler and a gentler and a gentler approach where at the most aggressive, we're just ripping two inch furrows in order to plant plugs into or something like this.

- And when you're building these mounds, would you be putting your organic matter in at the very beginning of the season before you do the planting?

- From actually a systems point of view, that's an important point because our soils naturally here are fairly low in organic matter and very sandy.

So in order to get those mounts to stick and hold their shape, it was necessary for us to add compost for one season before we actually built the beds themselves.

- So, I mean having a compacted soil really isn't very good.

- No, no, 'cause air is vital for plant roots and microbes.

Plant roots have to breathe, and microbes have to breathe.

If they're the microbes you want in your soil, they require oxygen.

- Do you find with the warmer temperatures that you have a longer growing season in the soil also?

- The thing that sort of seems to affect us the most, at least on the tail ends of the main growing season, is erratic weather.

So we'll have some warm, warm weather, but then we'll have another like, very, very cold snap.

Or we'll have extended periods of torrential rain, and then we'll have extended periods of drought.

So having warm temperature in November can be beneficial for a week perhaps, but then you'll get hit with a really, really hard frost the next week.

So, yes, I mean extreme weather is always at inconvenient times is always something to be concerned about.

- Do you find yourself being able to plant different products with the climate changing?

Does it give you, you know, more of a variety at all?

- You know, I think the climate has been pretty screwed up throughout the extent of my growing career which is about the last 22 years.

I remember putting cattle paneling up at a farm I used to work on in January in a t-shirt, and I remember the cherry trees were blooming that year.

That must have been 2005.

And cherry trees were blooming in Providence that year.

So, I think I've just been sort of coming up in this new landscape throughout my career, and it's very unpredictable.

- If more farmers can become managers of the soil, then in turn by producing a healthier soil, it may be enough for the planet to change this erratic weather pattern.

- Like I was saying earlier, agriculture accounts for 38% of land use, and most of that soil, most of that land has been degraded in some way throughout the 20th century.

And we're still very much living with the 20th century agricultural mindset.

So that amount of land, if you can use that land as a sponge for atmospheric carbon by putting it into the soil, there's definitely some evidence that could help our situation.

But I think it's a whole systems approach.

I mean, we just cannot be burning as much fossil fuel.

- Oh yeah, yeah.

- But agriculture is such a big player, and as you start to look at the pieces and tease it out and tease it out, you see its impact.

I mean, in terms of fossil fuels, food production has been estimated as high as 50% of our greenhouse gas production.

But that's one of the wonderful things about regenerative agriculture, and why so many people are so optimistic about it.

It's a field where people can make an impact in solving this global health crisis that we're in.

- [Alex] And it gives us, hopefully, food that has more nutrients.

- That is one of the promises of regenerative ag.

And that's certainly been the case with our small journey on our small farm is that the quality of our product has gone up and up and up.

- John, thanks very much for letting us come here today.

I really appreciate it.

- Thanks very much for letting me join you.

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