Photo by Jason Halley, California State University, Chico

 by Cynthia Daley, Ph.D.

Cynthia Daley, and co-founder and Director of the Center for Regenerative Agriculture & Resilient Systems at California State University, Chico, is a nationally recognized leader in regenerative agriculture. In 2006, she established the Regenerative/Organic Dairy Program in collaboration with leaders in the organic dairy industry, creating one of the first programs of its kind in the western United States. Dr. Daley has been involved in dozens of research projects and mentor networks with farmers across California and the country.

Research is establishing how critically important soil health is to the long-term success of agriculture and how effective regenerative soil health practices (minimizing soil disturbance, keeping the soil covered as much as possible, and maximizing crop diversity) can be at sequestering carbon and other greenhouse gases, and increasing fertility and water storage, and this is true for all production practices, management styles, soil types, and ecoregions. 

The best way to keep soil covered is to maintain living roots in the ground because they feed the soil with carbon. Living plants use photosynthesis to create carbohydrates to feed themselves and also to discharge carbon into the soil to feed soil microbes. Healthy soils have a very diverse microbiome. Diversity in the soil is just as important as it is in the human microbiome.

But crop diversity is difficult for many growers to grasp because for the last five decades they have been told to specialize, to do one thing—grow corn, for example, fence-row to fence-row, and as a matter of fact, take out the fence rows; you don’t need those anymore because you’re not going to raise livestock.

We are now finding that was a huge mistake. Monocrops are far more vulnerable to diseases and pest infestations. We need to diversify farming operations with cropping systems that are layered so we can spread out the risk. If farmers only grow one crop and it fails or the price is low that year, they will have big problems. When a farmer grows a diverse mix of crops and cover-crops, those plant roots secrete a mix of exudates that feed a whole host of diverse biology that build resilience and fertility in the soil.

And we need to bring the livestock back because they perform important functions in the regenerative system. They can eat down and terminate a cover-crop and leave behind manure and urine that are beneficial to soil health.

Changing the Farming Culture

As effective as these principles are, it’s not easy to get farmers to change the way they do things, so, when I work with farmers, we first discus context. What is their process of production? Why are they on that land? How did they get there? What are their goals and aspirations? These are the kinds of things we need to know before we can design an appropriate conservation plan for their farm that can result in a meaningful change in their practices.

This approach is part of the nine-step process for the Natural Resources Conservation Services (NRCS). We ask why they’re in the business of farming. You would not believe how often that is a difficult question for some growers to answer. We want to know who needs to be at the table and who makes the decisions. Those are important aspects of context. We work with them to understand their future resource base, and sometimes that can take weeks to answer because farmers are so busy solving urgent problems and farming that they aren’t thinking about those things.

There is no question that conventional agriculture is contributing to the environmental and climate crises, but that’s a difficult conversation to have because no growers want to think they’re doing things wrong and creating problems, so that’s not a topic I tend to discuss with them because they will tune me out. I might as well go home. The conversation’s over.

However, when thinking critically about a farming operation, the biggest resource concern is water.  Water quality and supply are critical issues and clearly agriculture is a big part of the nation’s water problems. There’s no doubt about that and ignoring it has been a real challenge because you have to acknowledge you have a problem before you can fix it.

So, when I talk with growers, initially, it’s not about climate or carbon, but when they begin to understand how carbon is linked to water–higher levels of soil carbon increase water holding capacity in soil and reduce erosion–that’s an easier conversation to have.

How we talk to farmers is so important if we want to work effectively with them to change the way they farm. We first want to understand how they are feeling about certain issues. If they are reacting negatively with anger or angst, it’s an indication that we need to sort that out first before we can make any real progress. There needs to be a revelation on their part to buy in. There’s a lot of psychology involved in helping farmers change the way they produce food, and that’s not how I’m trained, but boy does it have an impact on what I’m doing, so I’ve had to figure it out.

We need to meet them where they are. Bottom line economics, water, livelihood, longevity, and legacy are the main issues. “I don’t want to lose the family farm. I want my kids to be able to farm.” That’s their context, and it’s an important one, so once we help them establish that and work through some of those decisions, then the rest becomes a little easier. We can then start talking about how to farm through a carbon lens if what they really want to do is build a legacy on their farm that they can hand off to the next generation.

Building Healthy Soil Makes Farms Resilient

We’ve got lots of tools in the toolbox: no till, multi-species cover-crops, Integrated Pest Management, managed rotational grazing, etc. How we apply those tools depends on the context and the direction that farmers want their farming operation to go in. If you are an orchardist who wants to produce regenerative almonds, I will choose different tools than I would for a farmer growing a variety of row-crop vegetables that are rotating among several different fields. That’s a different context that requires different tools, but the same soil health principles apply. We need to minimize disturbance and keep the soil covered either with cover crops or by maintaining an armored layer of mulch on the soil.

The foundation for changing to a regenerative way of farming is soil management. I use the acronym BTS for degraded soil; it stands for “beat-to-shit soil.” (Obviously, I don t use the term when I’m talking directly to farmers). BTS soil has been overworked and abused. It looks like powder. There’s no tilth. You pick it up and it blows in the wind. BTS soil has no air space so it compacts when rain hits it, and water runs off instead of infiltrating and becoming available to the plants.

There’s an awful lot of farm land with BTS soil. You can see it on farms where the wind is whipping up clouds of dust. There are times during almond harvest during which you cannot cross the road because visibility is so poor. Farmers acknowledge this is a problem and are open to discussing how to fix it.

Park the Tractor

As I mentioned, one of the key soil health principles is to minimize disturbance. The number one way that farmers disturb the soil is with tillage or plowing. Many farmers engage in what I call recreational tillage. When they invest 100 grand in a tractor, they want to drive it. My sister is a full-time farmer. Her tractor probably cost more than my house. It has GPS and she rides in the tractor knitting away for the grandkids while the tractor is plowing. The only thing she has to do is stop knitting long enough to turn the tractor around and engage the GPS again, and away she goes down the field.

Farmers really enjoy running their tractors. They like a nice, clean tilled filled. To them that’s beautiful. But is bare soil really beautiful? There’s nothing living in it. They are abusing and degrading the soil with tillage by releasing carbon into the atmosphere and creating erosion of valuable top soil. Tillage also destroys important soil species such as mycorrhizal fungi which attach to the plant root and gather water and nutrients for the plant.

The way we try to make farmers understand the consequences of tillage is to involve them as co-investigators in the research projects that we conduct on their farms. Doing that has dramatically changed attitudes and converted farmers to evangelists for soil health. The way we will make real change and scale up regenerative practices is by having farmers talking to other farmers and sharing what they have learned and implemented successfully on their farms. 

Dale Tyson of Heyday Farms is a grower in Palo Verde, California. When we started working with him, he had some of the worst soil I’ve ever seen. It was like a sandbox. In two years, we turned that soil around; it’s now accumulating carbon. No more greenhouse gas emissions; instead he is drawing carbon out of the atmosphere and into the soil where it’s a benefit. You should hear Dale talk now. He’s got 4H and Future Farmers of America kids coming to his farm, and he’s teaching them what he has learned. 

The neighbors are wondering what the hell Dale is doing. How is he able to produce that much hay when he is not out there tilling? His plow is now a lawn ornament and a testimony to the fact that he’s given it up. He’s really proud of that and has become an effective advocate. We believe if we empower the farmers, they will help the transition, and that is the best way to scale up these practices. It will take people like Dale Tyson to go against the cultural norms and try something new when the old practices have failed.

Another such pioneer is Danny Unruh, a Mennonite walnut grower just outside of Chico, California. Danny may be facing skepticism and ridicule at the local coffee shop about the weeds in his field, but he is more concerned about the biology in his 200 acres of walnuts. As a result of adopting healthy soil practices, his input costs are only $800 dollars an acre compared to his neighbors’ which are about $2200 because heathy soil does not need expensive inputs. That saves farmers money and makes their operations more profitable.

Kicking Bad Habits Creates New Possibilities

40% of any fertilizer application is lost to leaching and to volatilization, releasing nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas. The challenge is to convince farmers to break their fertilizer and pesticide addictions and to open them up to the possibilities that regenerative practices offer by building the farm as a self-sustaining ecosystem in which those inputs are not needed. The paradigm shift is to get growers to see that a field of cover crops is beautiful and that having bare soil is an undesirable and counterproductive way of growing food.

Farming can absolutely be a way to help mitigate the climate crisis. These practices are ready to implement now. It’s not a future technology. We can do this, but it will take changing a farming culture that is deeply ingrained. Albert Einstein purportedly said, “We cannot solve problems with the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”

Scaling up means elevating early adopters who have skin in the game, who have been successful and profitable, and who have something to show other growers. We host field days and provide breakfast burritos and hot coffee (it’s always helpful to have good food). Danny Unrue’s wife makes sweet rolls that are amazing. People come out just for the sweet rolls and tolerate everything else. Field days elevate the best regenerative growers and expose conventional farmers to proven soil health practices.

Our goal is to educate, educate, educate. Climate-smart farming needs to taught in every agricultural college across the country. That’s going to be critical.

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