A land-focused approach to farming was the topic of a networking event this week, including the benefits of regenerative agriculture.
Greg Kloxin, director of soil health and water quality for the Oklahoma Conservation Commission, said Monday that his mantra is to farm with the land, not just on it.
“It’s restoring agriculture back to its roots — pun intended,” Kloxin said. “We’re never too old to learn, and my favorite response to ‘How are things going?’ or ‘What do you know?’ is ‘I’m still learning.’”
In conservation, he said he used to zoom in on a single resource without considering its context.
“I was in a silo, looking at water, trying to address stream health issues by focusing only on the water and the life in that stream and disregarding it as a component in a system connected to many other things that work interrelatedly together,” Kloxin said.
By considering the stream part of an entire watershed, he was able to solve its health issues more easily, he said. Kloxin encouraged people who wanted to get connected to reach out to their local conservation office.
Koy Floyd, 87, a retired research professor who owns about 300 acres, explained his regenerative approach.
“If there’s a creed — no fertilizer, no weed killer, use cattle, let and regenerate things,” Floyd said. He said his team is doing soil analysis to figure out forage availability and forage consumption for cattle. He explained that if they know what nutrient imbalances are in the soil, they can figure out a natural way to increase nutrients and thus increase forage. Floyd plans to do this in natural ways.
Devlon Ford, a regenerative ranching advisor at the Noble Research Institute, explained how the ecosystem is interconnected.
“For most of my career at Noble, I worked on the ranches and I was a cowboy as a cattle manager. But as I’ve gotten deeper into this, I realized I was more of a grass manager, and even deeper than that, I was managing the microbes below ground through my grazing management,” Ford said.
They hold knowledge-sharing events and classes nationwide and teach interactive classes for adults on soil management, grazing and farm economics.
Ford said some people come to practice regenerative ranching because they want to produce healthier food, but there are other reasons.
“You can be more profitable through regenerative ranching,” Ford said. He said more food can be grown more often through the use of regenerative methods.
Sam Bass, a retired U.S. Navy chaplain, shared a personal story about his wife’s experience with cancer. After an initial diagnosis, their family began to eat more organic and natural food, and the cancer subsided. Though years later she lost the battle, Bass said he felt called to regenerative gardening as a way to honor her memory and provide healthy food for others.
“Know your context. If you try to make regenerative agriculture prescriptively, ‘If I do it here, I can do it over there,’ it won’t work. You have to know your soil,” Bass said. “My training is, like I said, in theology … and what I do know, like translating scripture, if you take scripture out of context, you’ll end up with the wrong results,” he said.
He noted the use of widely used commercial weed killers, some of which have been linked to cancer and damage the soil.
Tori Rose works the garden at the Cleveland County Detention Center every morning with inmates who volunteer to help plant, water and tend the soil. Rose spoke at the event and responded to questions about whether inmates actually get to eat the vegetables.
“Yes. They put them in their chicken and rice burritos,” she said.
“They all say they’re sleeping better and they have less anxiety,” she said. “They’re just soaking up all the sunshine. And then they go in there and they share that light.”
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