Episode Six - Healthy Soils & Healthy People
Episode Description:
Today we turn to the ground beneath our feet to bring you stories from two agricultural pioneers in Ohio. One is a farmer that turned to cover crops in the 1970’s to replenish the soil in his fields, the other is an award winning soil scientist researching how those healthy soils can be used to combat climate change. We wrap up this episode at an Urban Mushroom farm in Dayton, whose gourmet mushrooms are not only good for you, they're good for your soil, too.
Guided By Mushrooms owner Audra Sparks holding Golden Oyster mushroom
Photo Credit: Renee Wilde
Podcast Script:
HOST INTRO: Welcome to Grounded Hope, I’m the host, Renee Wilde
We’ve created this podcast to examine the past, present and future of regenerative agriculture to design a roadmap for a more resilient way of living, by building healthy food systems and healthy communities that can adapt with the changing climate.
Today we turn to the ground beneath our feet to bring you stories from 2 agricultural pioneers in Ohio. One is a farmer that turned to cover crops in the 1970’s to replenish the soil in his fields, the other is an award winning soil scientist researching how those healthy soils can be used to combat climate change.
We wrap up this episode at an Urban Mushroom farm in Dayton, whose gourmet mushrooms are not only good for you, they're good for your soil, too.
From the Highways to the Hedgerows, we bring you Grounded Hope.
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DAVID BRANDT: COVER CROPS
RENEE WILDE: If you want to talk to David Brandt during spring planting season, you’ll have to do it in his office.
(TRACTOR STARTING)
We’re inside the cab of his blue, late model, New Holland tractor. Dave was up till 2 am last night planting with his grandson on his farm in Carroll, Ohio.
This morning he’s back at it, planting soybean seeds directly into last year's corn stubble on this 100 acre field. A practice commonly referred to as no-till.
It was a loud, bumpy ride so the sound quality is a little rough in places. Here’s David Brandt talking while he’s driving the tractor.
DAVID BRANDT: 1969 was our first year we no-tilled, using an Allis Chalmers corn planter. In ‘71 we were 100% no-till and have been ever since then.
WILDE: No-till is an ancient farming technique going back 3,000 years. Early humans would poke a hole in the ground with a stick, drop a seed in that the hole and then cover it up with dirt.
But it wasn’t until Edward Faulkner's 1943 book, The Plowman's Folly, that no-till methods started to gain traction in modern agriculture.
Faulkner argued that plowing was the single greatest misstep in the advancement of agriculture, and instead suggested that farmers should leave crop residues at the surface of the soil, only working them into the upper layer of the soil using a disk-harrow or other surface tillage.
Although Faulkner was mocked in his own times, this Ohioan is now widely considered to be the father of conservation and no-till farming.
Sixty years later, about 35% of farmers in the U.S. use these no-till practices.
BRANDT: It wasn’t regenerative farming then, it was conservation farming. Not moving much soil, or having erosion from the fields. So that was the reason we went to no-till.
WILDE: Since World War II and the introduction of agrochemicals, no-till farming in the U.S. has depended on the liberal use of herbicides and pesticides to kill the weeds and insects.
In the 1990’s research began to show that by planting a cover crop of nitrogen fixing plants in the fields during the off season, and then tilling those plants into the soil reduced the weeds in the fields and helped to control pests and disease, while preventing water runoff in the soil.
BRANDT: We started in ‘78 with cover crops because we started losing yield just by no-tilling corn and beans together, and we found that rye worked really well to suppress the winter annuals. It increased the soil bean production by about 4%.
Late ‘90’s I met Steve Groff and we started planting peas and radishes together as a cover crop and that worked extremely well. The radish went deep and helped to break up the hardpan. Winter peas gave nitrogen for the radishes as they got bigger.
WILDE: Steve Groff is a regenerative farmer and the author of The Future -Proof Farm. The Tillage Radishes Groff was developing on David’s farm were stellar at loosening the compacted soil and improved the organic soil matter so that David achieved bigger yields on his corn crops.
Down the road, a field of waist high foliage, is dotted with red crimson clover flowers and purple, hairy vetch flowers. Sunflower skeletons from last season bend gracefully above the lush foliage.
David will use a different type of no-till method in this field.
In a couple of days he will plant directly into this big cover crop, and then run a piece of equipment with a roller attached over the field that bends foliage so that it lays on top of the newly planted seeds and acting as mulch for the soil as it decomposes.
BRANDT: Most of our cover crops for corn have at least ten 10 species in it. When we started using nine and ten (species) for corn it eliminated the use of nutrients by 75%.
In other words our nitrogen rates went down, our row starters went way down, our chemicals were reduced by as much as 60%.
And that’s when we started calling it regenerative farming. Because we were regenerating the soils by the use of diverse root systems that each one gives. The ten species we use have root zones from 2 inches deep up to 5 feet deep.
WILDE: David’s cover crop rotation starts with sunflowers, sun hemp and cowpeas as a warm season legume.
BRANDT: Then we’ll use crimson clover, hairy vetch, winter pea, blanset clover, barley, some rye, and flax.
WILDE: David found out that using flax on his fields helped build the mycorrhizal community which increases a plants resilience against insects and diseases.
BRANDT: So we eliminated the use of insecticides and fungicides thirteen years ago. And, all the corn and soybeans we plant today are, what I call, naked seeds, they have no treatment.
WILDE: David is a technical advisor for the Ohio State University-Lima campus 10-year, 600-acre, regenerative farm-transition research project.
The soil in the fields surrounding the campus had been severely compacted from years of conventional farming.
David came up with a plan that divides the farm into three distinct areas: one that uses conventional practices for a baseline, one that uses no-till practices, and one that uses no-till and cover crops.
David and his son went in early this spring and sowed peas and oats in the cover-crop fields.
BRANDT: Yesterday the farmer was planting corn in there, and said the peas and oats were about a foot tall, and the soil was damper and looser than any other soil he was planting on that farm.
So, it’s quite exciting to get to work with professors from Ohio State, to show them what we can accomplish by using roots rather than using tillage.
DR.RATTAN LAL: CARBON SEQUESTRATION
DR. RATTAN LAL: We have to consider soil as a living entity. It has divine powers, if I may put it that way.
If there is any place in this Universe, solar system, in which death is resurrected into life, that’s soil. Where the dead material, whether its plants or animals, that death feeds life.
Because soil organisms can work that dead material, plants, animals, or termites or whatever that’s buried in the soil, they become mineral, eventually, and the new plant's roots absorb those minerals and then life begins again.
And that resurrection happens only in soil.
Therefore soil is a living entity. It’s a life giving entity. It not only supports life, it's a life in itself. And like any other living thing, soil must have a right.
Simply because you own it, does not mean you can do with it whatever you wish.
WILDE: Dr. Rattan Lal is a pioneer in the carbon farming movement. He has been studying how this combination of no-till, cover cropping and crop residue mulching practices, like what David’s doing, can help combat climate change.
We’re outside Kottman Hall on the Ohio State University’s main campus in Columbus, where Dr. Lal serves as the Director of the Rattan Lal Carbon Management and Sequestration Center, which the University renamed last fall in his honor.
DR.LAL: I got into carbon sequestration for different reasons. I was working in Africa for many years, like 20 years. I was based in Nigeria, and there the soil in the forest would have an organic carbon content of maybe 2%, 2.5%, in the surface layer of the forest.
And you create it for agriculture, (there’s) soil erosion, very high temperature, like to 45 degrees celsius, that would be 112,113 degrees fahrenheit.
Soil temperature might be even more, like 120 degrees fahrenheit. And therefore the organic matter content would decrease from 2% to .2%, one tenth, within perhaps 5 to 10 years.
And as the soil organic carbon decreases, soil becomes very hard, very compacted, very difficult to work with, very difficult to dig. And plants will not grow, or very poorly, and soil erosion problems would be very serious.
So the goal was how to restore organic carbon. This was in the ‘70’s and ‘80’s.
And then, of course, in (the) ‘90’s the question came, can soil carbon be stored for climate change mitigation.
So nothing changed as far as the research is concerned, only one more objective came: How much can you offset fossil fuel emissions by sequestration of carbon in soil.
WILDE: Dr. Lal has won some of the world's top prizes for his research into sustainable soil management, global food security and mitigation of climate change - including the Japan Prize in 2019 and the World Food Prize in 2020.
He says there is a growing interest in making agriculture a solution to the global problem of climate change because agriculture contributes about one-third of the CO2 equivalent of all anthropogenic emissions, both directly and indirectly.
DR. LAL: So farming operations should be such that we decrease the emissions from farm operations.
WILDE: When soil is turned for planting it mixes underground carbon-containing molecules with atmospheric oxygen, creating greenhouse gas in the atmosphere and leaving the soil depleted of life-giving carbon. Incorporating no-till practices in agriculture can drastically reduce the amount of carbon being lost from the soil.
But, it’s not enough just to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide released by farming. In order to stay under the 2 degree rise in pre-industrial temperature levels that scientists say would avoid more catastrophic climate events, we need to remove the vast amount of CO2 that’s already accumulated in our atmosphere.
Dr. Lal says that plants are the answer.
Plants use the energy in sunlight to convert carbon dioxide and water to sugar and oxygen more efficiently than any other method of carbon sequestration, and by using cover crops in the off season, farmers are creating more opportunities for carbon dioxide to be pulled out of the air and stored underground as organic soil carbon.
DR. LAL: And soil is a storehouse of 25% of all terrestrial biodiversity, and their food is carbon.
WILDE: Carbon sequestration has the potential to remove 5% of the US.’s annual CO2 emissions. But here’s the catch, carbon is only stored in the soil when the ground remains untilled. If that ground gets tilled up again, that carbon is released back into the atmosphere.
Dr. Lal wants to see a Soil Health Act, much like the Clean Water Act and Clean Air acts we already have, that would pay farmers to use carbon sequestration practices.
DR. LAL: And this is where I’ve been talking about compensating farmers for doing good things. They may risk additional costs, inputs, and they may risk reducing output, for at least two or three initial years when they change from one format to another format. So rewarding them for those losses is critical, otherwise they will not continue.
WILDE: New markets are slowly emerging that would pay farmers to use practices that store more carbon in the soil. Two of the problems facing the commodification of carbon credits is the lack of methodology available to test how much carbon is being captured and sequestered in the soil. The other problem is how to set a fair price for farmers.
DR.LAL: Growing carbon in soil and trees as a farm commodity, similar to soybeans, wheat and corn, milk and poultry, that you can buy and sell.
So if the U.S. Farm Bill 2023, if the growing climate solutions act being discussed now finally materializes, and is approved, several things have to happen. We must determine what the fair price is. We must determine how to certify it, how much farmers have sequestered, that means having the methodology available. And we must have a market based solution so it becomes a routine practice, so just like corn, soybean, (the) farmer knows(s) what to expect.
WILDE: Dr. Lal is one of four hundred people from around the world who have been chosen for the upcoming United Nations Food Systems Summit this year.
DR. LAL: So far there are 2,400 solutions (being) presented to the Secretary General. We have to put this carbon trading, carbon sequestration, soil health, at least (as) one of them.
So my hope, my goal, is that the next farm bill in 2023 will have (a) healthy soil act.
GUIDED BY MUSHROOMS
WILDE: In an article in the Guardian called A New Era Of Agriculture: How Soil and Mushrooms Can Help Solve The Climate Crisis, Paul Stamets, a mycologist and medical researcher who studies the role fungi plays in soil health, says that "a major component of soils in terms of biological carbon is from fungi – mycelium – living and dead. Some scientists have stated that fungal mycelium is the largest repository of biological carbon in healthy soils."
At Dayton’s Second Street outdoor Farmers Market customers lined up at the Guided By Mushrooms booth to buy freshly harvested gourmet mushrooms, mushroom extracts and mushroom spiced products.
CUSTOMER: What have you got today, then?
DAVID SPARKS: We have Phoenix Blue Oysters, Black Pearl, and we have Lion’s Mane.
MICHAEL GOLDSTICK: The Black Pearl Oyster mushrooms are (a) really, really good meat substitute for the vegans. They love them because they are so thick, so you can just slice them and they've got that meat texture.
CUSTOMER: Can I have a quarter pound of each then.
GOLDSTICK: Absolutely. You sure can. A quarter pound of each. He’s going to go with the variety pack.
My name’s Micheal. I’ve been working here for a couple of years now.
I think a lot of our job is educating people about the power of mushrooms, and not only the functional mushrooms that you see that we made for the medicinal supplements, but even the culinary mushrooms here all have the ability to lower cholesterol (and) blood pressure, great for your heart.
And we want to make sure we are making people aware that there are natural, perfectly great ways, through food, to protect your body.
WILDE: Mushroom farming is also good for the environment since growing fungi doesn’t require turning over the soil and releasing carbon into the atmosphere. These mushrooms are grown indoors in a soilless growing medium made from sawdust and soybean husks called Master’s Mix.
Here’s David Sparks whose hobby started all this.
DAVID SPARKS: The mushrooms absolutely love it. That’s what we grow most of our stuff on.
There's some strains we’ll grow on all sawdust and with maybe a supplement like wheat bran. We’re growing some Black Reishi Mushrooms like that right now. And we’re also going to be doing a bunch more shitake’s here pretty soon.
Different recipes you use to grow different fungi the best way. It’s kind of like a bakery in a way.
AUDRA SPARKS: Hi, I’m Audra Sparks. We are at the Guided by Mushrooms farm in northwest Dayton, in the tip of Clayton, outside on a beautiful day. We’re on the Stillwater River and it’s a great spot.
WILDE: Behind us is a low, concrete building that used to be David and Audra’s home.
AUDRA SPARKS: He had a small tent in the garage, it started as a hobby and posted pictures on social media. He had a friend who was a chef who was like, ‘I want some of those’, and it spread and the farm grew inside the house, and it took over the house, and now we’re a mushroom farm. (laughs)
WILDE: Audra has created their line of specialty food and health related products from the leftover mushrooms that weren’t pretty enough, as she puts it, for the grocery store shelves, which she then dries and turns into powder
AUDRA SPARKS: I am an environmentalist. I have an environmental law degree. I’m all about doing things in a way that’s not about harming the planet.
You know like David said, growing mushrooms uses waste products of other agriculture. Our waste products can help other agriculture.
WILDE: Studies show that by using a fungal-dominated compost on agricultural fields, improved the ratio between fungi and bacteria in the soil critical for healthy plants, along with an improved food productivity.
Fungi can also increase the rate of carbon sequestration significantly.
In one documented case by Dr. David Johnson for the Institute of Sustainable Agricultural Research at New Mexico State University. Dr. Johnson documented that the soil in his fields where he used a fungal-dominated compost was capturing approximately 38,000 pounds of CO2 per acre per year while supporting improved crop production.
The yields of his cotton crop were double the average in his area without the use of fertilizers, herbicides or insecticides.
Mushrooms have also been used to stabilize stream banks along rivers, clean up toxic messes in the environment from forest fires in California, biocycle old buildings into new ones in Cleveland, and clean up everything from oil spills to nuclear meltdown.
AUDRA SPARKS: One of the things we do at the market, for instance, is we sell our old spent blocks. You can see on that rack there are a bunch of old blocks. That white stuff is mycelium, which is the root system of mushrooms to put it in a layman's way.
But all that mycelium needs to do is be fed more and it will keep growing mushrooms. We sell those blocks to just individuals to throw into their compost, it gets your compost going really crazy, really fast, and grows mushrooms off of it.
We encourage people to use it to incorporate mushroom growing into their landscape. You can take some of those and mix it up with some sawdust or straw, kind of layer it up in a shady part of your yard and grow mushrooms. And as long as you keep putting straw or sawdust back onto it you're going to keep getting mushrooms.
Mycelium, it’s kind of immortal, because as long as you just keep feeding it, it will keep growing.
That’s one of the ways we can use our waste products at a small scale.
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HOST OUTRO:
This podcast is brought to you by Community Solutions Agraria Center for Regenerative Practices. The center hosts farm-based research, educational classes and events. They will be hosting the Nourishing Life Conference June 18th and 19th and an upcoming seed saving school with our very own Beth Bridgeman August 14th and 15th.
Grounded Hope is funded in part by a grant from the Ohio Humanities. Our Webmaster is Rachel Isaacson. Our scholars are Beth Bridgeman from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, and Rick Livingston from the Ohio State University in Columbus.
You can go to our website at Grounded Hope dot org to find book and movie suggestions, and even recipes that reflect each episode's theme, along with questions to generate group discussion.
I’m Renee Wilde, and you’ve been listening to Grounded Hope.
Agraria Farm at Sunset