thank you and thank you all very much for coming it's a it's a wonderful day for an author of when their book finally comes out and today is the official release day for growing revolution so thank you for being here you know if you'd asked me ten years ago when dirt came out and i was standing up here talking about it if i would write a trilogy about soil i would have thought you were crazy but looking back i have and i had really good help on one of those books from my urge to write it's kind of a well it of all the sicknesses one can have it's probably one of the more productive but what i want to start with is really simple question which planet would you rather live on now i'm sure there are a few an adventurous few who will answer the red one on the right and if so go for it i think we need to get there eventually but i think most of us would pick that blue planet on the left in part because that color it's blue because there's free water on it it's essential to life the other thing that's really essential makes is a fairly easy choice for most of us is what you can't see and that's the atmosphere earth has an oxygen rich atmosphere we need water and oxygen those are the two things that we would usually think of but there's a third thing that's just as important in terms of supporting life on earth and that's healthy fertile soil as far as we know earth is the only planet anywhere that has soil on it because it is the mix of biology and geology and as far as we know yet this is the only planet with life on it and it's a fundamental difference between earth and mars that makes our lives a lot more feasible and yet soil is that one key resource that is consistently undervalued it is under recognized and it is truly a strategic resource every bit as strategic as things like oil things like the nature of the atmosphere things like rare earth metals for technology so oil is a strategic resource when you think over geological time frames and societal timeframes in terms of what it takes to actually support complex civilization of people we need fertile soil to do that and soil degradation is a global problem and a very underappreciated one and that's really the main reason why i've been adding a series of books about the problem of soil degradation the make the how soil fertility really works now that we understand more about the biology and what it might take to actually fix the problem so a degradation which is really what growing a revolution is about so it's a soil degradation is not under appreciated crisis how bad a deal is it just give you a couple images to get started on that one is the un map of soil degradation from a few years back you notice that there's an awful lot of yellow and red areas on this map those are areas where our soils have been degraded enough to actually influence agricultural productivity and it's paid in with a fairly broad some four hundred thirty million hectares of land around the world was once farmed has been abandoned from farming due to soil degradation that's an area that's equivalent to about a third of all present crop land and if you look at the problem of feeding the world in tw fifty twenty one hundred or the real challenge of sustaining that off into the indefinite future the way a geologist likes to think about things you know having that one third of the world's soils that were have been degraded and taken out of agricultural productivity having those back in production would go a long way toward solving the problem of feeding the world of tomorrow and so degradation is not just a modern problem it's one that actually has deep historical roots and that's what i explored in dirt the ero civilisations that got me started on this the soil trilogy and that was a geologist view of the problem of soil erosion in the as it influenced the course and fate if human civilizations viewed through the lens of archaeology and as it turns out i was writing a history of farming because farming practices tended were a major factor in the role of the soil degradation that influenced major civilisations around the world and if you look into and you look into  the the geo archaeology what was happening to the soils and what happened in terms of the archaeological record you see a record of soil erosion influencing the demise of ancient civilizations around the world from bronze age europe neolithic europe classical greece rome the southern united states central america and many more that i documented in in dirt and there was essentially a common theme that emerged from that theme that frankly hadn't really suspected when i started looking into that book and that theme essentially the plow as the villain in that book because it was the development of the plow that sort of most fundamental of agricultural icons that really set the steeds for degrading the soil and civilization after civilization and why would that be well think about what a plow does how many places in the world have you ever been where it was a natural grassland or a natural forest and you saw bare soil on the surface of the ground not many places outside of deserts have bare earth of the surface nature tends to clothe herself and plants and what a plow does is it turns the earth over and disrupts the vegetative cover and it takes some time for plants to come back and for the crop to come back and cover the soil back up and in that window if you get even a single major rainstorm you can literally rewrote off a centuries worth of soil formation in an afternoon in an hour it can happen ten minutes and the basic problem based agriculture historically as it looked at in dirt  was that it fundamentally changes the balance of soil production and soil erosion of the surface of the earth and the soil is like any other system something that can be made and something that can be lost and it's the balance between those competing processes that sets how much future generations w have how important has that been in the history of our own country well if we look at the eastern seaboard of the southeastern united states when the original breadbaskets of north america after european colonization you'll see that gray noodle runs from virginia up there in the upper right down to alabama in the lower left and that's the piedmont country the upland hill country and i'll just give you one example out of the ones that i drew from from dirt that motivated me in looking further into all this stuff and what it shows is the magnitude of soil eros since colonial agriculture came to this area and there's all kinds of reasons why colonial agriculture was so erosive part of it back of cultivation part the story of the plow but the key thing to notice here is that gray areas four to ten inches of soil lost in a couple  hundred years since colonial agriculture the black areas are pushing a foot but ten inches how big a deal is that there was only six to twelve inches of black fertile topsoil across this whole region to begin with when european settlers landed in this region in other words in just two hundred short years and yes as a geologist i can say that two hundred short years we had eroded literally almost all the topsoil off of a broad swath of the early agricultural engine that fueled the growth of o country this shows you essentially a picture of what that looks like on the ground today the soil over there on the right is from a tobacco plantation that's been in continuous cultivation for over a century the soil on the left is a forest that had been cultivated but had been allowed to go back for forest for about the last century and you notice there's a slight difference in the color between the soils one the one on the right is sort of an anemic khaki beach sand like deposit  that is very dry and blocky the stuff on the left is full of organic matter it's darker it has a lot more carbon in it it's much more fertile fertile it basically captures the difference of what conventional agriculture has done to soils across the eastern seaboard the topsoil is just gone from that field on the right the tops all on the from the forest on the left is what really supports the productivity of that forest now the problem of so that predation is one that george washington among others in the early  colonial times recognized as critically important for the future of our country and as it turns out i would argue the future of our world and in seven thousand nine hundred six washington wrote in a letter to alexander hamilton that a few years more of increased realty will drive the inhabitants of the  states westward for support whereas if they were taught how to improve the old instead of going in pursuit of new and productive soils they would make these acres which now scarcely yield them anything turn out beneficial to themselves washington was a keen observer of the soil on his plantation and he he and others like thomas jefferson adopted crop rotations they planted cover crops but they still used the plow and the significance of that comet become apparent a little later in the talk but  they were very concerned about maintaining the fertility of their land because it was essential to their livelihood and washington was very concerned about the degradation of soils along the eastern seaboard that he saw happening in his time because he thought that that would force american farmers across the appalachians and to the west not because of the concept of manifest destiny that came a century later he thought it would happen because of soil degradation and indeed that is what happened as people moved out of the seaboard in the early one nine hundred century and he go west in case the dirt goes into more detail and all that but if we turn back to our own state of washington there's an example here that is actually a compelling example of why a geologist would think that plow based agriculture what i would call conventional agriculture for the most part these days is very destructive to the land you notice that this is a we tweek field out in the pollution in eastern washington now you don't see any wheat out there at the moment do it's been plowed it's freshly plowed field what you see are all those little channels little reels you could just plow right across and you could erase them with the tractor quite easily but it's soil it's gone missing and if that happens year after year and sustained banner you can quite literally strip all the soil off the field there's estimates that the pollution has lost fifty percent of its topsoil in the last hundred years in other words we're repeating in the pollution what happened on the eastern seaboard in or the early days of colonial agriculture what this photograph shows you is a fence in that upper right corner is a fence that the farmer originally built around his water cistern back in one thousand eleven when the fields was first plowed the only thing that happened in this field since then was was planted in  winter wheat using cloud based agriculture and occasionally those storms would happen those rules would come remove soil and you notice this cliff developed and there's a there's a little black line over there that all walk over and show you a minute that shows you how that is a one foot increment on a survey rod that shows you how far down that soil has eroded in the fifty years between sixty one when the photo was taken one thousand eleven when the first plowed and  that on the negative but it's a one foot increment on a survey rod five feet of erosion and fifty years that's about a foot every decade that's about an inch a year there is no place on earth that soil forms at a pace of an inch a year with the possible exception of my wife's garden you know but i'll get to that so in researching dirt i've compiled data on both the contemporary rates of soil erosion and long term geological rates of soil erosion to compare with agricultural rates of soil erosion and to make a long story short i spent about a month in the library compiled all the data i could get my hands on and i've boiled it down to one table to spare you sort of all the details and i'll show you the media and the average values for the different things and all of all the show here i'm not going to show you a whole lot of data tonight but this one is important because that red number is really different than those blue numbers the red numbers the average global erosion rate from conventional agriculture using cloud based agriculture what we would call conventional today the erosion rates for no till agriculture the next ones down in blue rosen rates under native vegetation so oil production rates the rates at which nature build soils and long term geological erosion rates which should match those so a production rates if the world was on average closed in soil which we perceive it to be at least in the course of human history so the big difference the red numbers a lot bigger in the blue numbers by a factor of at least a millimeter year millimeter and a half or so over roche and soils build paces of a tenth to one hundredth of a millimeter year so if you'll give me that difference of about a millimeter a year and the erosion rate off of conventional agricultural fields versus the rate at which soil is built use you can do the math on the back of a napkin and show that the soil loss of a millimeter year implies you could lose half met metre two or three feet of soil and approximately five hundred thousand years and if you look back to the archaeological record that's about the longevity of most major civilizations outside of major river flood plains why the exception of major river flood plains will think about other areas now think about what happened in tibet as the silt all went to china or in the sudan in the theo p as it went to egypt or in this address mountains as it went down into mesopotamia those areas were roading and subsidizing the productivity of long term civilizations in those flood plains but i do suppose that if you look at other civilizations that are in upland areas like the eastern piedmont like the piedmont in the eastern united states you see a similar story of a few centuries of intensive farming up to maybe a thousand years of intensive farming and the soil can literally be gone if you go to syria today you go to libya today you can find areas where there are roman tax records that record great harvests off of areas where there simply is no soil think about that some of the world's major trouble spots are places where these problems were set in motion long ago so the question obviously then becomes well do we have to repeat this on a global scale i've shown you the data that suggests we are in the process of doing that but do we have to is it  consequence of how we form or is it something that can be reversed and what this show picture shows you are my hands holding to soils that started out identical the one in my right hand on your left of the screen is the soil that we started with in our yard in north seattle when we bought a house in green like and decided to make a garden out of it the soil on the left is the soil that we have today in the yard and it is basically gone from that  khaki relatively infertile dirt to very rich fertile soil how did we do that well that's what and i describe in our book the hidden half of nature and it relates a lot to that wheelbarrow down there in the lower rank corner that she painted up with racing stripes because when we bought the house in green lake and we took the lawn off to try and actually plant a real garden we found that we had dead dirt we had glacial till not a single worm it was that khaki stuff i just showed you and she decided that we really needed to add a lot of organic matter to the soil and to try and bring the biology back to merge with the geology and bring the soil a lot back to life and life back to the soil and that's really what she and gage in doing and i encourage you to check that book out if you want the full story there's a there's a lot more there than i'll be able to go t next couple minutes here but basically her gardening activity rebuilt the soil in our yard as i was writing the dirt book about civilizations destroying their soil over centuries she was doing the opposite right under my nose in the backyard it took a few years to really notice the magnitude of the effect but what this shows you here is a pit that we dug in the in the yard about five years into the garden restoration effort and her printing shears are over there for scale and if you look at the bottom of the slide first that's the till soil that we had it's basically harder than what's basically nature's concrete it's hard stuff you notice that the plant roots go down to it and they don't go into it they go sideways because they don't want to go down into that till notice all the  leaves and the compost and the wood chips that and was layering on mulching on the top of the soil that was her primary restoration technique not disturbing the soil but adding organic matter from the top and notice there that we have about two inches of actually decent brown soil it's gotten even better much blacker as i showed you a moment ago since then but within just about five years we've built about two inches of soil that's actually incredibly fast in terms of how fast nature can build soil and that started me wondering well could we actually rebuild our need the globe's agricultural soils and how do we do it one of the processes well in looking at what happened in our yard we started looking at what is known as the soil food web what happens to all those leaves those wood chips the mulch the grout the compost the coffee grounds that we added to our yard they have added added to the yard and are consumed by bacteria and fungi that break that material down incorporated into their bodies and then are in turn grazed on by micro arthropods other organisms in the soil that when they consume the microbes that we're consuming the organic matter they then excrete their waste products that are essentially micro manure they're essentially like livestock manuring the soil from the inside out and microbes are incredibly nutrient rich because they've been grazing on things that were once living and so they have a full complement of the nutrients and micronutrients that it takes to grow new life and it turns out that the life in the soil is the engine that drives that recycling system and so by restoring the carbon content of our soil by restoring their gannett matter we are feeding the microbes that were processing that material back into the raw materials to build new plants and it turns out that we learned something in researching didn't half of nature that i was unaware of neither and or i had been taught this and saw science class and that is that if you look at the zone of the of the rise a sphere the zone around the roots of a plant it's one of the most life dense areas on the planet it's like a little amazon a little serengeti and it's but it's below ground it's out of sides out of mind we haven't paid a whole lot of attention to it but when we learned that plants will actually push out thirty to forty percent of all the carbon that they fix through photosynthesis they've got this monopoly on photosynthesis they can make sugars they push thirty to forty percent out of their roots into the soil why would they do that if you had a you know nature's license to print money would you then just go throwing it around well yeah maybe some of us would but but plants in general do this and it makes no sense until you think about well what might they be getting out of the exchange what are they doing they're feeding the microbes that live in the rises fear the zone around their roots and those microbes in turn if they were doing things that harm the plants that would be an evolutionary dead end it would not have come to characterize most of the plants and on the land surfaces of earth so if you blow up that tip of a root and you look about what's happening in the root zone around plants what and i learned is that rises fears of by a lot what we like to call a bacteria the little white the white strings are fungal hifi that connect with the plant roots and go off into the soil and those plant accidents that are pushed out of their roots what are they they're sugary compounds or carbohydrates or proteins there's even some hormones that plants pushout in the soil they don't make it far they make it a millimeter to a centimeter before they get eaten by all those microbes and what are the microbes do with them well what all organisms do they metabolize it and they excrete something else it turns out that that's something else the waste products from microbes are things like plant growth promoting hormones there are things that you know to help the plant grow and that's a virtuous circle where the mike the plant is feeding the microbes in the microbes in turn are promoting the health and growth of the plant wheat and i go into a lot more detail on how that works but that was a total eye opener to us because it explained to us how it was that adding this organic matter to our yard triggered such an explosion of life above ground in our garden that has brought us such joy over the last decade as as it has evolved and changed literally changed our lives and there's a lot more that we go into in that book as well including the peril the strong parallels between the micro biome of plants the microbes that live in and around the roots and the micro biome that we each have in our own gut turns out they're about the same system inside out it's actually really cool but we're not talking about that tonight the last point i want to make on this before i really get into the meat and growing revolution is that you grow plants very big but there's tradeoffs in terms of their health and what they'll do is if they are given what they most of the macro nutrients they need to grow big they don't invest so much in a root system and they don't invest so much in the eggs or dates that would actually go out and feed those microbes in the soil and what that means is that they're going to get a very little supply of beneficial microbial metabolites those growth promoting hormones and other compounds that the microbes are making with the eggs of dates that the plants push out and with that microbes make with the the soil on the other hand if you have a soil that what is fed what and i like to call the soil life diet in a soil that is very rich in organic matter that plant will be putting investing in its root system to actually put out exit aids to try and  feed the microbes that will break down that organic matter and trade compounds with the plant the benefits the plant and it's a whole different deal it will get an adequate amount of macronutrients it will get more micronutrients because the fun guy are delivering the micronutrients to the plants if you don't feed the fungal you don't get as many of the micronutrients and it turns out that if you look at what's happened to our crops in the last fifty years the micronutrient concentration under conventional agriculture has gone to the floor drop by twenty five percent higher than fifty percent in some of the studies that we reviewed and in a soil life diet rich in a life rich organic matter rich soil you get a lot of the beneficial microbial metabolites now once we'd sort of seen the power of this kind of thinking for restoring our own yard it brought up the obvious question of well what about doing this on farms could you do it on full scale commercial agriculture could you do it in the developing world could you do it in on major commodity crop operations in the developed world and that's what really was the genesis for research in growing a revolution where i undertook a trip of about six months time where i visited farmers all around the world at who are practicing what i call regenerative agriculture hood and what others have called  regenerative agriculture the kind of agriculture that is embodied in that set of soil samples over there on the right hand side of the screen it's from the some old test plots at ohio state university where they've done a long term study of regenerative ag of different agricultural techniques the soil on the left is essentially what you get by just going to no till agriculture the one on the right is no till with cover crops and manure and a lot of organic matter added to the soil and basically was taken from very low carbon content to high carbon content really fertile soil in a little over a decade so how does this all play out will we all recognise the problems we're going to face in feeding the world by the mid century to later of next century that's one of the big problems that we face and it's a fair question to ask whether or not the twentieth century strategy of intensifying fertiliser use is actually going to be up to the task of maintaining let alone increasing agricultural production over the course of the next hundred years because how many people think that the price of oil and the price of fertilizer that's primarily manufactured using oil is going to go down over the next century only one person has ever raised their hand to bring that up at a public lecture you know it's all we're basically we're burning through our supply of oil and yes there are other fossil fuels we could use but no if we went to relying on coal you know the climate is going to get us in the end so  really have to rethink our strategy of relying on fossil fuel and nitrogen fertilizer intensive practices to maintain our crop yields if we're going to have a prayer of feeding the world in the future and that brings up the question of whether you know how could we rebuild saw fertility because it would be really useful for rebuilding all that degraded so agricultural soil we have in the world when we're thinking about how we're going to feed a post cheap oil and fertilizer world whether that happens in twenty years thirty years or two hundred years to a geologist those are you know those are just different you know they're almost the same it's only one zero difference on the end but the question is really how are we going to keep feeding nine or ten billion people beyond twenty one hundred it's not just how we feed people between twenty fifty and twenty one hundred how are we going to keep doing it and that leads me to think that we really need to think about ways to generate a different kind of agriculture and i came to see the feasibility of what i greener kind of soil health revolution in terms of agriculture we've had a number of agricultural revolutions throughout history and what i'm basically arguing growing revolution is that we're poised for another agricultural revolution but this one centered on soil health a fundamentally different concept through which to approach farming practices and many people and many farms in the world are already doing this this is not a terribly original idea i'm not claiming credit for that but i will claim credit for having gone to visit some of the people who are actually already doing it and trying to look for the common elements about what made it successful why was it working in the kinds of farms that i was looking at and what i basically came away with   dop in the principles of conservation agriculture can actually revolutionize agricultural production and take agriculture from what is essentially to date environmental problem maker and turn it into a major environmental solution and one of those principles will to let the cat out of the bag it's these three ideas right up on the screen now it's minimising soil disturbance which is the direct planting of seeds which include no tail agriculture basically the idea is that if you are disturbing the soil through  plowing you're not only leaving it bare to erosion by wind and rain but you're also chopping up the mike arrival fun guy you're basically stirring up the soil ecosystem you're compromising its ability to actually engage in that nutrient cycling that you can use to grow the next generation of plants or crops on a field it involves planning a permanent maintaining a permanent ground cover don't leave the soil bare and that means using cover crops planning things in between your commercial crops planning things even in between the rows of one's commercial crops and including legumes and when scrapper taishan in that idea is a good one because they can fix nitrogen and help replace fertilizers as well go into and diversifying property ations to help maintain soil fertility and also break up pathogen carry over if you plant corn after corn after corn crop in the same field what you're really doing is you're setting a banquet table for pests for corn sitting out advertises ments on billboard's and then almost paying them to come on the other hand if corn pests that sort of colonize a field one year if their eggs hatch in a field that then planted in barley or then planted in something else they don't have stuff to eat so diverse these three principles minimizing disturbance including cover crops and diversifying property asians are the three principles that were in common in the farmers i've visited around the world so i'll share with you a couple  thoughts on some of the farmers that i visit i'm not going to be able to describe all of them most of the farmers i visited were intentionally conventional farmers who had decided to change the way they farmed only one farm that i went to was an organic farm  one was never a forestry operation and coast to wreak i want to much more about that one was really cool but this gentleman back runs dakota lakes farm in south dakota and the reason i chose him was a he's charismatic  and it was good to write about the he's radically transformed the area that he's worked in and see his area in south dakota is from the area where the cover picture of my book dirt that was a poster child from the dust bowl he took me on a three hundred mile driving tour in the area around his demonstration farm and i saw three ploughed fields and it's mostly due to his efforts in terms of showing farmers there's a different way to do stuff with no tail agriculture and then working to develop techniques that would work for them in their setting and he's basically solve the problem of erosion in that area and i was i was flabbergasted it was an amazing they've done amazing work there so what is it done centrally to they've adopted no till cover crops and they've adopted complex rotations what this is allowed them to do in rebuilding the fertility of their soils they've greatly reduced the amount of diesel that they use because if they're not plowing they're driving their tractors across the fields less they've cut their diesel  by half or more they're using less fertilizer and far less pesticide he hasn't used pesticide as if i recall correctly in a number of years at all on his farm and they're using just a small amount of fertilizer relative to what they used to and what's happened to their crop yields well the traditional using their traditional methods they've gone from sixty three bushels an acre soybeans up to seventy nine bushels an acre using these techniques in other words their heels didn't go down by adopting this more environmentally friendly farming they went up and the corn did the same thing and this is on a major major commercial operations on large farms in north dakota south dakota i also went to farms in africa and has worked with farmers in the village and his village in the area near commodity to transform that agriculture that they had from their traditional form of agriculture into one that involves those three principles  they'll have a poly culture here you can see plantings with peppers underneath notice there's no bare ground there's the remains of last year's crop on the ground as a mulch in effect and what kofi has done is the farmers that he works with  e not people that you could ever realistically in the short term at least imagine that bringing the green revolution to africa would actually help feed why not because they don't have money to pay for the fertilizers to pay for the g m o seeds to pay herbicides they're not organic farmers but they are resource limited in terms of the capital they have their primary asset is labor and what kofi has done is he's basically shown them ways to trent to transition from their traditional slash and burn style of agriculture to a new style of no till agriculture with cover crops that have diverse rotations and multiple crops in the same field some of them have up to eight crops in the same field at one time and you might imagine that might be a little difficult to do with mechanical harvesting but if it's feasible to do with manual harvesting and so what's happened to their productivity well first of all look at the numbers for the erosion rate up there and the traditional slash and burn they lose a lot of soil and how does slash and burn work well used you cut the forest in one area you harvest it for a year or two then you move on to another area and you let the jungle come back and restore fertility before you come back to the area they did before how does that work when your population gets big enough that you have to farm everywhere every year it doesn't what they get is a huge erosion and that case has no till system is cut erosion you know almost down to background rates and notice also what happened to their crop yields down there the traditional practice is reeling a ton and a half of corn perfecter with kofi methods they're getting four and a half tons perfecter tripled the cowpies doubled what he's managed to do is without increasing their use of agra chemicals or inputs he's managed to greatly increase their harvest by fundamentally change in their philosophy and practices to adopt those three general principles and he's leapfrog from their traditional agriculture right past what we might call modern conventional agriculture into conservation agriculture and in his village when he started nobody owned their home now they all do you walk through the streets with kofi and everybody knows him it was that it was a a very inspirational visit to a very inspirational man and these other guys that i'll show you here the other two farmers to talk about tonight and talk about a few others in the book the guy on your left is gay brown and he's someone who's a cattle rancher and farmer in north dakota and he's basically restored his prairie soils using cattle as one of the main catalysts for change because just the way you can apply those three principles of regenerative agriculture for cropping there's other ways to think about how one actually runs cattle and in my ph d work i worked on the ero california coast ranges and showed that spanish dairy cattle cause a lot of the big gullies because they always let the cows hang out by the creeks where the water was and so the cows were always there what gave does is he basically moves his cows around a lot he follows the practices of what the buffalo the style of grazing that the buffalo practiced which was clumping up in a herd because the wolves were out and grazing intensely on an area but always moving and then once they graze there they wouldn't come back for a year or so as high disturbance low frequency grazing and that's what gave us practicing on his ranch and what neil dennis and other scotch and cattle ranch i visited were doing they've managed to greatly increase their stocking density while restoring their prairie soils and as and as a not not unrelated restoration they've restored the prairie vegetation communities on their on their fields the guy on the right is david brand he's an ohio commodity crop farmer who is showing off one of his daikon radishes he grows them to till his fields he was actually quite surprised when i told him what we might pay for that i can radish in a farmer's market in seattle why does he grow radishes it's a cover crop he plants them in between his corn and soybeans and he lets them dig them you know they have this great taproot to goes down in the soil when he first got his ranch it had bad soil with about a half a percent two percent of organic matter it was hard those radishes help actually break it up now he loves them because they grow big they take nutrients from deep in the soil bring them up into the topsoil and then he lets them rot he just like mosen down and lets them rot in the soil and they form little pockets of nitrogen and phosphorous rich fertilizer biological fertilizer that then helps the subsequent crop grows he's been no telling since he came back from vietnam he was a in the marine corps in vietnam in the one nine hundred sixty s and he came back and started no tilling in ohio then so he's been doing it for about forty four years and the transformation he's made on his soil is absolutely astounding you put a shovel down into his soil relative to his neighbors farm which he actually just bought but that had been conventionally farmed for as long as well for probably about a century and it's like night and day same soil same climate same crops have been growing different style of management and it's way more profitable what he does so if you compare bratz activities the brandt farm in ohio to the county average the county average was about full tillage using about two hundred pounds of nitrogen fertilizer per acre and two and a half courts around up the total cost for doing that was about five hundred bucks an acre and  county averaged two years ago when david was reporting this to me where the corn yield is average about one hundred bushels nacre that means that farmers in his region lost one hundred bucks an acre for everything they planted they lost money working hard when i  was researching this book in the final stages i ran across a paper from iowa in two thousand and fifteen that reported that twenty five percent of the farmers in iowa lost money on every acre they planted that year their input costs were higher than they could get for the corn what that reflects is that modern conventional agriculture has gotten so good at growing commodities crops that it's driven the price of those crops down but the methods that are being used to grow them depend on inputs that are based on fossil fuels the price of which have been going through the roof and the companies on either end do just fine it's the farmers that are squeezed in the middle and to me that's the big sort of untold story of the demise of family farms in america is that we managed to convince farmers to farm in a way that decades on their squeezed and being balanced on their backs in the middle so brandt was mostly interested in well how can he lowers input costs and by restoring his says soil using those three principles of re agriculture and to be fair all these people have been talking about started with no till then they had to cover crops then they diversified the rotations they've gone through the learning curve to figure out how it works and one of the reasons for writing a book like this is to try and share that information in vision so that every farmer doesn't have to really learn over the twenty years it took them to figure out the technique so on branch farm with forty four year noto with cover crops he's not telling at all so he says on his diesel straight away he's only using twenty four pounds of nitrogen acre about twelve percent of what the county average is and he uses a quarter round up an acre he's not an organic farmer but he's pretty darn close to it and i like to call him organic ish and that was an acceptable term t farmers i was talking with not everyone wanted to be called an organic farmer and i said look you're just not using much inputs why not just like not use any and take the price premium there's a whole lot of issues involved this is some cultural some economic but brant his total cost acre was thirty two bucks his yield was better than the county average substantially and at four bucks a nature acre at four bucks a bushel he was making four hundred dollars an acre he was quite profitable on his farm he was spending less to make more it makes a lot of sense when you look at it that way so one of the benefits of conservation agriculture of adopting these free technique these three techniques and playing them out over years comparable or increased yields i didn't visit a single farm where someone who had adopted all three of these techniques found that the yields went down other than in the two year to three year transition period where if they had land that had been conventionally farmed for decades to a century they had to start rebuilding the organic matter in the soil before they would actually see the benefits of adopting these techniques so there's there's a transition period but i was shocked at how brief it was two or three years now to get the full performance that brant was getting he's been doing it for forty four years his soil is amazing game brown soil is amazing  but that can be done and it can be done in decades not centuries that a geologist would have thought that would have taken to rebuild for soil they greatly reduce or fossil fuel and pesticide use they increase the amount of carbon that stored in their soil and that increased their crop resilience as well the amount of water that they can hold that the soils would hell would hold was greatly increased over conventionally tilled soils and y well a life rich soil that has lots of worms lots of fungal lots of structure to it when rain falls on it it'll sink into the ground and get down where you need where you want it for crop roots if you continuously till the soil and you break up that structure the first time it rains you get a crust on it and the water runs off into it into a river stream it doesn't as much of it doesn't actually make it into the soil you can park in x so if you think in terms of climate resilience actually that's a very effective way to build it and obviously the thing that would be of great interest to most farmers is that every farmer i talked to that adopted these practices had higher profits than their neighbors because they were maintaining their yields while spending less on inputs and so one of the things i learned in researching this book is that the real question i think about the future of agriculture isn't so much the question of sort of low tech organic versus the way that the mainstream media tends to portray things but it's really a question of how to apply an understanding of soil ecology to the problem of increasing and sustaining crop yields in a post oil environment some of the farmers i visited were very low tech some of the farmers i visited were really high tech and they you know had g p s devices on their giant prairie called crawler planters and kept track of everything they put on every square meter of their farm it's not really a question about technology  question about the philosophy behind which one is approaching farming and how one is actually using the technology at our disposal in terms of the carbon sequestration potential of soil restoration there's a lot of interest in that and it's very well placed interest frankly i found that the estimates for how much carbon we could park in the world's agricultural soils should we adopt these practices and regenerate fertility were all over the map they ranged from at the low estimate that we could offset about five to fifteen percent of global fossil fuel emissions if we adopted these practices up to the road dale institute arguing that we could fully offset fossil fuel emissions through regenerative agriculture the point that i would like to make is that we should be doing this style of agriculture whichever end of the spectrum plays out in terms of the carbon game and we should be encouraging farmers to do that the carbon sequestration benefits you could think of as a bonus i mean we need to do this to maintain the fertility and that the yields that we're going to have into the future and we should put more research in to figure out the carbon angle and investigate it but the same practices you would use to restore fertility to the soil are those that will build carbon in the soil so i'd like to argue that the future of agriculture is really rooted in soil health we need to rethink the way that we look at soil and approach the problem the practice of farming and use the insi soil ecology to restructure agricultural technology focused on building soil health to enhance ecological processes and nutrient cycling and that's a that's a fairly different way to look at it then the conventional versus organic dichotomy that we're we're used to thinking about and i think that if we were able to convert conventional farming to this more conservation agriculture oriented farming it would move conventional farming to so close to organic ish that the difference between organic and conventional would become much narrower than it is today and the arguments therefore would be kind of less heated as my favorite quote from leonardo da vinci had to put in here somewhere we know more about the movement of celestial bodies than about the soil underfoot you know sadly that's  true today as it was five hundred years ago we talk a lot and i talk in the hidden half of nature a lot about the recent discoveries in terms of microbial ecology in the soil that we are literally on the frontier of just understanding who's down there doing what so how did we promote soil health and you know academics will argue for the next decade about how to define soil health but i would argue to you that it's something that you kind of diffuse see it you know it is kind of like our own health we know that for feeling healthier a feeling bad you can tell the same thing with the soil how it actually promote it well there's a few simple ideas and you know in a geologist may not be the right person to identify the right policy levers to actually move the ball down the field but reforming crop insurance and our subsidy programs we're basically paying farmers to destroy their soil these days this is not a good long term social policy by any stretch of the imagination and those programs really need to be reformed to try and reward farmers who are engaging in practices that build the scale on a farm and showing that it works is a really good way to get the word out and we can also provide assistance for that transition between the two to three years that it takes to convert methods we should be back stopping farmers who are adopting the methods to generate to regenerate the fertility other soil and one of the odd things that i ran across in researching this book was something about the god the intellectual godfather the fertilizer industry this is just this finally big guy who sort of realised that if you added certain chemicals to a soil it could boost plant growth and he positive the model the so called leaky barrel model over there on the right that if you think of a soil as a leaky barrel if you know whatever the nutrient that's in the least supply relative to the plants demand for it if you add more of that you can get more plants and that's really what led to the explosion of phosphorous and nitrogen fertilizers in the nineteenth century what i didn't recognise realise is that he wrote another book in one thousand nine hundred sixty three that first one where all his id about fertilizers came out it was written in the eight hundred forty s near the end of his life at the end of his career he wrote another book that he basically revised his view on how farming should be done and argued that returning organic matter to the fields was necessary to provide crops the full complement of nutrients in other words he recognized that if we just give plants nitrogen or just give them phosphorus we're only feeding them a portion of what they need to be healthy they need the full spectrum of nutrients and micronutrients to be healthy and he argued quite passionately that we had to return urban sewage to the farms from which the food was grown to actually close the loop in terms of nutrient cycling it's a view that's actually was very you know it was was one hundred years ahead of his time  but this is the intellectual godfather the fertilizer industry basically at the end of his life realizing that no maybe this is not such a good idea to rely on just a couple of months to spur crop growth and the point i want to make is that we are basically at a place where we need to think about soil differently in the twentieth century we often thought of soil as as a cheap industrial commodity the cheapest input to farming and what do you do with the cheapest input to any industrial process you're not going to be worried about conserving it you're going to use it up because that's the cheapest input we need to see soil differently and we need to see it as a long term intergenerational resource to be shepherded and stewarded because the future will depend on it every bit as much globally as the future of modern syrians and libyans depended on what was done a couple thousand years ago in their countries so we need to see soil as an ecosystem to be understood and worked with not something to be managed or worked against the idea of cultivating the beneficial life in the soil so that we can enhance the cycling and fertility that's happening there and then harvest crops from that is a whole different philosophy and way of looking at farming and those three principles of minimal disturbance cover crops including legumes and a diverse rotation those principles are essentially aimed at cultivating the beneficial life in the soil that will rebuild fertility now why would you want to bother going about this at a global scale as i argue the examples that i go through in growing revolution demonstrate is feasible  well i can't name any other single thing single act that would help with all four of those problems that we face up there on the screen today but restoring fertility to agricultural soils would help us feed the world of the future  the post cheap oil and cheap fertilizer world it would help us address the problem of climate change by increasing the reservoir of carbon that we can sequester in the soils no carbon we put in soil doesn't stay there it turns over but you can think of it as a reservoir same way that a water supply reservoir has water flowing into it and flowing out of it the soil has organic matter flowing in and flowing out of it the trick i think in terms of carbon research seaquest race and is to increase the reservoir capacity of our soils so there's more stored in there at any one time restoring soils will help with biodiversity environmental degradation everything from if we could reduce our reliance on nitrogen based fertilizers as these techniques allow us to do it would greatly in decrease the amount of nitrate pollution in human water supplies in agriculture regions and also help address the great dead zone in the gulf of mexico due to fertilization in the mississippi basin and if you think about the biodiversity on earth we use about a quarter the world's land area to feed ourselves the future of biodiversity on this planet is intimately tied to the future of farming how we farm and if we can use you fewer pesticides and herbicides we will have more life on our farms and it can also restore profitability to family farms so frankly i don't see any reason why we should not be embracing these ideas full hawg at a societal level well there are some obvious impediments in terms of perhaps some people manufacturing inputs that wouldn't be used as much of the techniques might have sent they say about that but i can't see any real rational policy reason not to support moving in this direction and i'd like to thank you all for your attention that's really what i wanted to say i had not thought this her insights are absolutely essential to figuring out the stories in there and if you weave dove into the world of social media if you want to follow us on twitter or check out our website we invite you to do all that and of course i'll invite everyone here to get a copy of the book read it share it review it on amazon get the word out i think this problem of soil there gradation despite being one of the really big ones we face this one is fixable because if farmers can make a better living doing things that are better for the environment we should all be trying to help them make that transition so they can be prosperous and profitable and the next project and i are thinking of working on is looking at the nutritional differences in the quality of the food that's actually grown us techniques because we suspect that it's a big story but it's it's one that there's not a whole lot of data we can find yet so we're going to dig into that anyway thank you very much for your attention and i'll be glad to entertain a few question talkin science reliably validate mankind's incremental contribution to climate change compared to prior changes over deep history oh in terms of  well me we can you can look at the long term c o two concentration in the atmosphere and word the point now where it's been you know hundreds of thousands of years as far as i recall since we've been at that level the if you really want to look at there was a study back in one thousand nine hundred eighty eight that was done by means a stiver at the university of washington he was a carbon isotope guy and he did a study then that documented that about a third of the c o two that have been added to the atmosphere since the industrial revolution came from plowing up agricultural soils so you can look at that you can start to parse out which what how much came from fossil fuels and how much came from land management and you can look back in ice cores in terms of how much c o two has been in the atmosphere at any one time and we're going into uncharted territory for the existence of our species as an agricultural dependent species you know that the sea at that temperature and c o two through deep time has you know varied greatly from the hypothesized snowball earth where you know earth almost froze over to the really hot times before the pollution of the grasslands which is thought to have drawn down atmospheric c o two by increasing the carbon content of the world's great soils that we've now undone by plowing them all up but there's i would argue too there's actually a pretty good handle on what the human contribution is today to the change in c o two what there's a far less of a good handle on is what's going to actually happen if we go back into some of that high c o two terrain that has been around in some periods of the geological past what does that mean for the biology on the planet including us that's a much bigger open union any of the lobbyist groups for farmers and for the chemical companies have they you do you know the process that presenting this information to them any feedback on that well the book came out today so they're probably not aware about it but i expect that there are some people who will be really excited about it and some people who will be really quite mad about it or you know one of the things i did in addition to visiting farmers was to look in the scientific literature about you know what kind of studies have been done that it back up some of the things that they're telling you how can i triangulate that stuff so i tried to do due diligence in terms of the feasibility one of the key things though is that there's been very few studies of the effects of a system of conservation agriculture that involves all three of those elements there's a lot of studies that just look at no tailor just like a cover crops or just look at the rotations so getting the hard data to actually be able to forecast how big a change would it be it's a bit it's a bit tricky in terms of the whole lobbying thing no i have not talked farmers unions i've talked at many farming conferences but you know the farming conferences i've been speaking at are the no till conferences and the conservation agriculture conferences but every one of those i go to there's a mix of people who are just seeing these ideas for the first time and i was reaction really impressed with the community of farmers who are really pushing on these ideas and it seems to me to be really a ground up of bottom up effort because they've seen it works on their land and then i mean thing to sell they're just telling people what worked for them and trying to share that information many of them because they really are concerned about the state of the land when i first went to talk about farming practices after having written dirt i was afraid i'd be run out of town for saying that the plough destroyed civilisations and i was really surprised by how many farmers that i've seen this any elderly farmer students that i've seen this over the course of my life you're actually right and so i think there's actually a lot of common ground that could be had between sort of people in the blue the fortress blue cities of america and the broad swath of red across the heartland i think we really should be able to unite behind the idea of restoring fertility ourselves because everybody will benefit from well almost everybody benefit from it most people will benefit from it