Episode One - Regeneration
Episode Description: Regenerative Agriculture was the number one food trend in 2020 - with companies from General Mills Foods to the Patagonia clothing company turning to regenerative farming practices in their businesses. 2021 marks the start of the UN Decade of Ecosystem Restoration and in this episode, we take a look at how an organization is using regenerative practices to transform a conventional farm into a lush ecosystem, discover how a declining dung beetle population is contributing to greenhouse gas, and learn how regenerative practices in Indigenous Cultures are an important part of their relationship with nature.
White Clover Farm
Website: https://www.whitecloverfarmohio.com/
Podcast Script:
GABBY LOOMIS-AMRHEIN: To me, regenerative agriculture is, first of all, a term that is often misused, or used in conjunction with two other terms - that being restorative agriculture and sustainable agriculture. These have all been kinda trendy buzzwords for a while. Regenerative agriculture is a little bit more recent.
So sustainable - the idea behind it is that you can sustain something. It means continuing at the pace, or with the practice that you are currently using. We know that agriculture as it stands today, by and large, is not doing wonderful things ecologically. So sustaining that isn't enough. Right?
(MUSIC INTRO)
HOST INTRO: Welcome to Grounded Hope: I’m the host, Renee Wilde, and that was Gabby Loomis-Amrhein. She is the land manager at Agriara - Ohio’s first center for regenerative practices, which we will talk about more in this episode.
The United Nations General Assembly has proclaimed 2021 through 2030, as the UN Decade of Ecosystem Restoration. The goal is to build a strong, broad-based global movement to ramp up restoration and put the world on track for a sustainable future.
This coincides with the timeline scientists have identified as the last chance to prevent catastrophic climate change.
Modern agriculture is responsible for around a quarter of global greenhouse emissions, and last year, regenerative agriculture became the number one food trend as more organizations and companies moved towards this practice. General Mills announced last year that they would employ regenerative practices on 1 million acres - a quarter of the land it uses in North America.
Farming regeneratively, through practices like diversifying crops, rotational grazing, using cover crops, and minimizing the disturbance of the soil, can lead to healthier soils that can hold more water and carbon. Not only does it make the land more resilient and productive, it can also offset fossil fuel emissions by up to 15 percent.
We’ve created this podcast to examine the past, present, and future of regenerative agriculture - to build a roadmap for a more resilient way of living by building healthy food systems, and healthy communities, that can adapt to the changing climate.
From the highways to the hedgerows, we bring you Grounded Hope.
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RENEE WILDE: A few years ago, The Arthur Morgan Institute for Community Solutions purchased a conventional farm at auction, on the edge of Yellow Springs. The organization's focus is building resilient, vital communities, that can withstand dramatic shifts due to climate and economic disruptions. That 128 acre farm is now Agraria, Ohio’s first educational and resource center for regenerative practices.
The center is committed to providing an outdoor, experiential education for K-12 students that increases their knowledge about soil and their personal connection to the natural world and serves as a field site for area researchers to study the impact of regenerative farming on ecosystems
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DENNIE EAGLESON: I come here, early in the morning. As early as I can get up, so I can get the really beautiful light. And I just enter the space, and I just slow down, and look really carefully, and pay attention and listen.
WILDE: Dennie Eagleson is a local photographer who has been documenting the farm’s transition.
EAGLESON: Every three months I take a walk of the entire farm, and what I’m doing is taking pictures of the land - basically, individual shots that stitch together into a panorama - and so the purpose of me taking these panorama’s is I’m tracking the land over time, and over seasons, and also over what is being planted in the fields. What’s happening in terms of weed suppression. What’s coming up. What’s thriving.
WILDE: Along the edge of one field, slender black stalks are all that remains from a cover crop called Sunn Hemp.
EAGLESON: Which was something that Jason Ward had planted. I think it’s weed suppression. It’s also building soil.
WILDE: When grown as green manure, this yellow-flowered tropical plant can produce 120 pounds of nitrogen per acre and suppress weeds by 90%, in just three months.
(CHICKENS)
WILDE: A black and white feathered flock of Barred Rock chickens forage in a pen next to the market garden area.
EAGLESON: And they started with basically this field, which really does not have much good soil fertility, and they added so much compost, and now manure. And next year, it's going to be so much more productive.
The ground had been planted in soy and corn for, what, 40 years? You know, So much glyphosate - and no regeneration, no cover crops, or anything. And the soil was compacted, and it was kinda like red clay. And it had no life in it at all.
It took, I don’t know, a year, before we found the first worm. It was such a big event - It’s like look, there’s a worm!
(STREAM)
WILDE: Jacoby Creek runs through the heart of the property.
EAGLESON: There are always new projects and new research projects. And pretty soon, the Nature Conservancy is going to start the work on re-meandering the stream, which is going to be such a massive project.
They're going to be taking out all the honeysuckle next to the stream, and they're going to be planting native shrubs and plants. So it’s going to be an ecosystem overhaul. It’s going to look so different.
(BIRDS)
WILDE: Regenerative agriculture means farming with nature rather than against it. The principles of regenerative agriculture include keeping the ground covered all year round, low till or no-till, diversity above and below ground, using perennial and native species, and integrating livestock.
(CATTLE)
WILDE: White Clover Farm lies sixty miles south of Yellow Springs. It’s here that Jim Linne went from gastroenterology - to a grass-fed beef farmer. He sees the direct connection between gut health and soil health first hand on his 300-acre farm in Hillsboro.
JIM LINNE: So we’re a 100% grass-fed - grass-finished. We’re certified by the American Grass-fed Association. This means that your animals can never receive grain their whole life. They have to be outdoors on pasture year-round, and you can’t use any antibiotics or hormones.
With my background in medicine, I’ve seen what happens with our antibiotics over the years. You just continue to develop increased resistance among the bacteria. We’re on fourth and fifth-generation antibiotics now and none of the other generations work any longer. Now we have three or four different species of bacteria that are antibiotic-resistant.
WILDE: Under previous owners, this farmland had been rowing cropped with corn and soybeans, but the rolling hills and silt loam soils made the ground highly erodible. Linne uses regenerative practices, like rotational grazing and diverse cover crops, to transform the landscape into the lush, sustainable farmland it is today.
LINNE: It’s a way of agriculture where you follow certain principles that allow us to produce food while at the same time protecting the environment and improving, not just maintaining, improving our soils. So the best farming practice for this land is for it to be in permanent grasslands. It should never be plowed because it just erodes. So we planted out all the fields in permanent pasture or hayfields.
WILDE: Grass-fed beef is a bit of a misnomer. Cattle that are raised on healthy, biodiverse pastures eat an array of herbs, flowers, clover, and other legumes. Those plants naturally produce powerful antioxidants, to protect themselves from UV rays, disease, and premature aging. Cows digest these antioxidants as they graze, which then accumulate in their fat. Those antioxidants are then transferred to us when we eat their beef, and we reap the benefits of those plants.
LINNE: This is curly dock, and a lot of people just hate it. It’s a deeply tap-rooted perennial, and the cattle love it.
WILDE: Many of the plants in Linne’s pastures - like chicory, plantain, and curly dock - would be considered weeds by a lot of people. But the deep roots of plants like chicory keep the soil from eroding and the plantain packs a nutritional value for the cattle that rival the best alfalfa field.
A big part of Linne’s healthy pasture management is to shun the use of wormers in his cattle.
Ivermectin is one of the most widely used drugs for worming in the cattle industry. But studies have revealed that Ivermectin has a serious downside - it’s extremely toxic to dung beetles, causing them to lose their ability to communicate, find a mate, or find food.
LINNE: But what we’ve seen by not worming is our dung beetle population exploding, and 24 hours after the cow poops, there will literally be hundreds of holes, looks like buckshot, and those are all dung beetles that have drilled those holes, and taken that manure down underground.
WILDE: A 2016 article in Mother Jones called “This Lifesaving Medicine Unleashed a Global Poo Menace”, reveal that depleted dung beetle populations means an extra 312 pounds of cow waste, per acre, can pile up in fields, smothering the ground and releasing methane into the atmosphere. The article states that “Ivermectin may be doing to dung beetles what DDT did to birds, what diclofenac did to vultures in India, or what neonicotinoid insecticides are thought to be doing to honeybees.”
2020 was a pretty good year for Linne’s business. In a typical year, he processes 36 head of cattle. But when the pandemic caused big processing facilities to close down, a meat shortage occurred on grocery store shelves, leading customers to turn to local sources they hadn’t considered before.
LINNE: And I had so many customers who have never bought meat before like this, local meat, went out and bought a freezer and then wanted to buy a half or a whole cow, and I ended up selling out just within three weeks for the whole year, and I have 478 names of people who want to buy next year.
WILDE: But getting their animals processed has become the new bottleneck for regional meat producers. Linne’s long time processor went out of business at the beginning of 2020, leaving him scrambling to find a new one. He was lucky to find a place to take his cattle before the pandemic really hit hard in February. Now, that processor, like many across the nation, is completely booked up through 2021, leaving many small farmers with no place to butcher their livestock.
LINNE: Yeah, at a time when our local food movement, and demand for local food is taking off, we find we don’t have the infrastructure to support it right now.
WILDE: Linne is a member of the Community Solutions Board. He’s part of a group of local farmers who are working with the Ohio State University to build a processing facility that would support their region. He hopes the increase in consumer demand for regional, organic certified meat and produce, will attract more new farmers to grow more regeneratively to meet that need.
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DAWN KNICKERBOCKER: Regenerative agriculture and permaculture. They both borrow practices from Indigenous Cultures. Often they leave out Indigenolus knowledge and world views which can lead to the erasure of our people and our knowledge of people and our knowledge and our sovereignty.
WILDE: That’s Dawn Knickerbocker. She was part of the Community Solutions team that worked to bring this podcast to life.
KNICKERBOCKER: I belong to the Anishinaabe people. I’m a citizen of White Earth Nation. I’m an enrolled member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe from the Otter Tail Pillager band of Indians.
WILDE: For the past 20 years Dawn’s been working in what is now called regenerative practice. She came to live in Yellow Springs Ohio just three years ago.
KNICKERBOCKER: And when I first came I wanted to know whose land I was on. This is Native American land. People were forcibly removed from this land. People who managed the land, who grew food for the people.
And Ohio is an Iroquoian word, o-heee-yoh, which its meaning is good river, and these waterways are central to Indegenious creation stories of this land. And there are many sacred stories and sacred sights all throughout this land, and that surrounds us.
WILDE: The notion that America was a sparsely populated wilderness when Europeans arrived on these shores, is known as the Pristine Myth, and it obscures the reality that Indegenous people were shaping the environment all around them.
KNICKERBOCKER: It was part of the great North American trade route for food, and growing. And it’s such incredible fertile ground that has been managed through many indigenous practices since time immemorial.
WILDE: Last fall a message from ten Indigenous Leaders and Organizations called White Washed Hope began showing up on websites. The message points out that while “regenerative agriculture borrows from practices from indigenous cultures, it leaves out their worldviews, which are critical to those practices, and continue the pattern of erasing Indigenous history and their contributions to the modern world.”
They say that “while the practices 'sustainable farming' promote are important, they do not encompass the deep cultural and relational changes needed to realize our collective healing.”
These Indigenous Leaders point out that regenerative agriculture talks revolve around what’s happening “in nature”, while indigenous cultures speak of their roles “as nature” - and that the earth is a living being whose body we are all a part of.
KNICKERBOCKER: Many generations ago, there was concern about us moving away from our practices of being stewards of the earth, and understanding our languages, and our practices. And then over time we would move further and further away, like in a circle, moving further out into the distance. And there would come a point where we would stop trying to listen to our ancestors yelling our names, asking us to return.
And we would start to turn a corner, and we would listen, and we would start to know again. And we would start to know the names of our plant relatives, and understand the names of our water relatives. And we would start to reconnect with one another and return to our knowledge.
And as we were coming back to close the circle once again, this time we would not be alone, we would have others with us who would also want to understand the myriad of teachers, elders. They would be allies. They would be accomplices. They would be co-conspirators in the landscapes of this land.
They would understand that our greatest teachers is the natural world, and that we must care for these relationships as a teaching that is the core of our work. And what we need to strive to do is to be authentic, and work with integrity, and commit to healing.
WILDE: In Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, she writes - "We can't meaningfully proceed with healing, with restoration, without re-storyation. In other words, our relationship with land cannot heal until we hear its stories.
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You can go to our website, GroundedHope.org, to find educational materials, book suggestions, and recipes that complement these podcasts.
To see more of Jim Linne’s grass-fed beef operation, visit his website at www.whiteclover farms.com.
This episode was co-produced by Rachel Isaacson, an Americorps VISTA at Community Solutions.
RACHEL ISAACSON: Regeneration is one of my only hopes for a vital future for myself, and for future generations of all people, and all life.
We’d like to send our best wishes out to Dawn Knickerbocker in her new job at Native Americans in Philanthropy. Dawn is an environmentalist, activist, and Indigi-feminist working on culturally based sustainable development issues, and decolonization in her community and on her reservation. Dawn has been part of the Indigenous food movement for over twenty years.
Special shout out to the Humanities scholars who guide our podcast:
Beth Bridgeman is an Associate Professor of Cooperative Education at Antioch College, where she teaches a series of Reskilling and Resilience courses, exploring seed-resilience, plant medicine, regenerative agriculture and commensality. She is an Oral History in the Liberal Arts Faculty Fellow, receiving funding for her project “Re-establishing a Seed Commons through Oral History Methodology” with support from the Mellon Foundation.
Rick Livingston is the Associate Director of the Humanities Institute at the Ohio State University, where he teaches courses on Environmental Humanities and American Food Cultures in the Department of Comparative Studies. He sits on the Executive Committee of the Initiative for Food and AgriCultural Transformation, one of Ohio State’s university-wide Discovery Themes. He lives in Columbus.
This podcast is brought to you by the people at Community Solutions in Yellow Springs, Ohio and made possible through a grant from the Ohio Humanities.
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WILDE: We end this episode with another excerpt from Braiding Sweetgrass - “In winter, when the green earth lies resting beneath a blanket of snow, this is the time for storytelling. The storytellers begin by calling upon those who came before, who passed the stories down to us, for we are only messengers.”
I’m Renee Wilde, and you’ve been listening to Grounded Hope.
Agraria Farm at Sunset