The Alarming Decline in Soil Health, Particularly in North America – David Montgomery and Anne Bikle

The Alarming Decline in Soil Health, Particularly in North America – David Montgomery and Anne Bikle

David Montgomery and Anne Biklé discuss the urgent need for a transformative approach to agriculture, emphasizing the necessity to halt soil degradation and improve fertility. Highlighting the historical trends, they underscore that civilizations’ longevity often correlates with their soil management practices. By focusing on the interdependent relationship between soil health and plant nutrition, they advocate for the integration of regenerative farming methods. These practices not only rebuild the soil rapidly but also ensure the food produced is rich in essential micronutrients, leading to better human health. #RegenerativeFarming #SoilHealth #HumanNutrition

00:00 Lifespan of Agricultural Civilizations
01:20 Loss of Soil Organic Matter
03:23 Decline of Soil Health
04:26 Causes of Soil Degradation
05:48 Reversing Soil Degradation
06:30 Impact of Soil Health on Plant Health
08:51 The Soil Food Web
10:35 Soil Life and Micronutrient Uptake
14:04 Soil Life and Connections
14:24 Regenerative Agriculture
15:02 Principles of Regenerative Agriculture
16:08 Economic Benefits of Regenerative Agriculture
20:53 International Examples of Regenerative Agriculture
22:09 Case Studies in America
24:29 Profits in Regenerative vs Conventional Farming
25:19 Regenerative Farming & Benefits
26:44 Reduced Fertilizer & Pesticide Usage
27:18 Nutrient Density of Foods & Regenerative Farming
29:44 Evolution of Agriculture

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The entire top soil the fertile part of the soil is missing from a third of the US Corn Belt this data all sort of puts into perspective how imperative it is that we figure out a different way to farm that does not degrade the fertility of the land and it can better support

Not only feeding the world but as we’ll see better support human nutrition with more minerals and more phyto chemicals in our food but let’s look briefly to wrap up this uh um discussion of past societies about the problems of net soil loss in the past uh net soil loss of

Roughly a millimeter a year and that’s about the pace that the this conservative estimate of the pace I could argue for given the data that I’ve just shown you at that pace it would take about um 500 to a, years to a road through a half meter to 1 meter thick so

A foot and a half to roughly 3ot thick soil that’s typical of most um hillsides around the world and it turns out that that time scale thousand years plus or minus is approximately the life lifespan of most major civilizations outside of major river flood Plaines that was

Another aha moment I had in riding dirt that the time frame that it would take for conventional agriculture in terms of conventionally tilled fields to to erode off the top soil is kind of similar to how long most agricultural societies have lasted but I also hope you’re sitting there thinking well what about

The Nile in Egypt that’s been farmed for thousands of years or the Tigers and Euphrates in in the Middle East the the the indis and the autra in India or the big rivers of Loland China these are all places where we know that agriculture has been practiced for thousands of

Years that still support large population so what is it about those places that seem to be perhaps a little different and it’s hidden right there in their physical geography because all those places I just mentioned are Big River flood planes and what happens on flood planes well they flood and what

Comes along with the water well it’s not just water but also silt clay sand mineral particles nature can refresh and rebuild the fertility of of uh tilled land on flat flood Plains because they’re fairly flat so erosion is slow and they’re refreshed by flooding if they’re allowed to flood and not ditch

Not dyed off from their their annual floods and this is how societies were able to maintain agriculture over the long run in those parts of the world where we know of long-term agricultural civilization so um they’re kind of the exceptions that help to prove the rule

That once farming gets out of the valley bottoms and up onto the hillsides uh that are vulnerable to erosion uh by water and rain and where soil rebuilding takes place slowly under natural conditions the clock literally starts ticking uh and there’s another aspect of soil degradation beside just loss of the

Soil itself and that’s loss of soil organic matter this slide shows you two uh soils from adjacent Fields literally developed on the same geology under the same climate right across the fence from one another uh in North Carolina so in that gray noodle that I was showing you

Uh earlier in terms of the magnitude of Colonial um uh soil loss the loss of soil organic matter is also a big deal there this is from the conventionally worked field over there on the right it’s uh looks like sort of Cal khaki California beach sand is kind of what it

Looks like to me and there’s a reason for that it is beach sand it’s myene age 10 million year old beach sand so it’s an old beach that’s um now well Inland um that it’s has hardly any organic matter hardly any um you know there’s

Hardly any life in the soil when we were digging this up for the comparison the soil that’s right across the fence line it has more of a dark chocolate cake kind of a color the difference of course is carbon so and soil organic matter is roughly 40% carbon and carbon turns out

To be the key currency that drives the underground economy that helps keep land fertile that I’ll get to and that Dan will be talking about a little bit more but the key Point here is that the second element of soil degradation and the decline of soil health is turning

Rich dark carbon rich soil like the stuff on the left into soil like that on the right and we’ve done that on agricultural Fields all around the world the most recent estimate of what the extent of the loss of soil organic matter um from um North American soils is published in the journal

Sustainability back in 2015 uh where the authors concluded that the soil organic matter content you can also read the soil carbon content of many soils in North America is only about 50% of the level at the time when they were converted from forest or prairies to farmlands in other words we’ve lost

About half of the soil organic matter in our farm soils and that’s the equivalent to essentially draining the natural batteries of our soils by about 50% over just a couple hundred years this presents a major problem for thinking about how to feed the world going forward um particularly as we look

Towards an agriculture in a post oil World in which the Reliance on synthetic nitrogen fertilizers is going to become much more problematic so how did we get there today with um with modern farming practices that have resulted in you know widespread soil erosion off of whole regions of of our country and the

Degradation of soil organic matter not only around the us but globally off of many agricultural Fields taking it down by roughly half uh well there’s really two factors that are the the primary things we can point to heavy routine tillage is essentially the first piece

Of it uh we we plow we basically have been plowing too much uh and when we plow it basically um uh irates the soil it exposes it to oxygen so organic matter will oxidize it stimulates bacteria in the soil to break down that organic matter uh and we’re not building

Then up organic matter um and also the overuse of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers is the second piece in terms of uh degrading soil organic matter because again that can stimulate overstimulate the the um um bacteria in the soil that can uh break down soil organic matter and accelerate its its

Loss from soil profiles so the two key backbone practices of modern conventional agriculture routine heavy tillage and the over application of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers have both contributed to degrading the fertility of land and the degrading soil organic matter they’ve been able they help have helped to maintain harvests but not to

Maintain the native fertility of the land thereby setting up problems in the future so the question that I was left with after writing dirt was actually kind of a big one can we reverse the historical pattern of soil erosion and soil degradation and if so

How could we do it and how fast could it occur and this is where we transition to the sort of the good news part of the talk because I’ve come around to being a bit of an optimist in thinking that we can not only restore the fertility of

The world’s agricultural lands that have been degraded but we could do so remarkably fast with techniques that we already have we already know and that are soundly rooted in the science of soil uh soil ecology and and the relationship of soil Health to plant health so I’m going to move into the

Second part of of the of the talk here um we’ve looked at how farming practices can affect soil Health now let’s turn to looking at how soil Health influences and translates into plant health and that’s a story that an and I started working on when we wrote The Hidden half

Of nature a few years back our first co-authored book that set the stage for what your food ate and what it did for us is it helped provide insights into what kind of science we could use to help solve the problems that uh were Unearthed if you’re pardon the pun in

Researching the dirt book so what those kind of insights well they flowed a lot from our garden and it’s a biologist she’s a major league Gardener I like to think of her as a plant Whisperer she can bring plants back from the edge of death but she also brought her soil back

To life in our yard when we bought a house in North Seattle um where we live back in the late 1990s it came with soil like this khaki stuff over there on the left a lot like that degraded um North Carolina uh tobacco Plantation but over the course of roughly a decade of

Intensive compost and mulching and regenerative gardening and turned this kind of a soil the Khaki soil into this Rich Black Earth shown there on the right took it from less than 2% organic matter up to pushing 10% organic matter and the explosion of life that happened

Above ground in the garden is was a great joy and benefit to both an and I but that this could happen so fast that we could rebuild the health and fertility of the soil in years not decades or centuries or Millennia but in years really put the um an exclamation point

On the idea that we could rebuild soil fertility remarkably fast in ways that could transform Agriculture and also as it turns out human nutrition which we’ll get to in what your food Aid who are the key players and actors well what we learned in researching the why behind

How it was that our soil in our yard was restored stast really um brought up the uh the importance and power of the soil food web uh and the soil food web is something that is um uh basically shorthand for all the life in the soil the organisms that are consuming each

Other and consuming the compost and mulch that we were layering on the soil in our yard to help build soil fertility and all the bacteria and fungi and micro risal the micro risal fungi in the soil that were consuming and breaking down that organic matter um were basically

Repurposing that organic matter and and the uh elements that were contained in it back into forms that could be taken up by plants to support their growth and it turns out that the life in the soil that that also is supporting is a great engine of getting things like mineral

Elements out of the soil and into our crops um why because fungi like saprophytic fungi or fungi that that that that Feast on dead things you know are supported by both organic matter and in and indirectly by plants in ways that Ann will be talking more about but this illustrates just a fungal

Hyy uh going out through the soil that uh latches onto mineral elements and those fungi can basically they’re they’re specialized at removing mineral elements from the soil things like zinc things like iron uh and then they’ll trade the they’ll bring those back to plants and they’ll trade them to

Plants in exchange for some of the um material for for the organic matter that plants can produce and that plants can exude out of their roots in ways that Ann will explain in more detail um but what this means is that fungi life in the soil in a healthy fertile

Life-filled soil uh the life in the soil can actually serve as root extensions for plants that help them acquire things like mineral micronutrients that the plants may not have access to in the immediate vicinity of their roots and what do those things like well they’re things like iron things like zinc things

Like selenium elements that we don’t need uh a lot of to support our own health um and that plants don’t need a lot of but that we need that little bit an awful lot that’s they’re called micronutrients we need them in small amounts but they they serve disproportionately huge uh uh roles in

Both promoting the health and defense of plants and also in supporting our immune system and in supporting the health of hum of people and it turns out that life in the soil uh are one of the key elements through which um minerals get into our food and the modern the

Adoption of modern farming practices that have greatly you know changed the communities of Life in the soil that have disrupted the microbial Miners and truckers that helped to get mineral elements into our food um have played a role in the historically documented declines of mineral uh elements in food

For example that David Thomas back in the in 2003 wrote a paper that was looking at how mineral elements had decreased in fruits and vegetables over the course since the second world war essentially and he found that copper decreased by 3/4 calcium decreased by just under half iron decreased by just

Over a quarter magnesium decreased by about a quarter potassium a decrease by 16 about an eighth or so um in other words there’s across the board there’s been some fairly large decreases in minerals particularly in things like micronutrients like copper uh and the hypothesis usually put forward to that

Explain that is that as we started to breed crops to be very productive in very nitrogen Rich environments um very overly fertilized fields in modern agriculture um that we selected for plants that that in the those higher yields the plants we put make more biomass and so the things like copper

And iron that they took up through their roots from the soil would be spread through um through a greater amount of say wheat kernels in the case of a wheat crop and therefore in each bite of wheat you’d be getting say half as much or quarter of as much of the minerals that

We’re looking at so but we think and and I think and of hypothesize and document the science in the series of books uh that the degradation of soil organic matter and loss of soil life has contributed to the decline in Mineral density in foods in part because there

Are experiments that have shown that if you take if you um inoculate plants with particular microbes um and that you can enhance the uptake of things like phosphorus or iron or zinc uh and that if you conversely If you eliminate those or degrade those microbes and those those connections particularly the

Fungal connections it turns out um it can have a big impact on Mineral uptake by plants this shows you data from some experiments uh that were done in Japan where um scientists took onion plants and they inoculated them with arbuscular micro isal fungi um and they had a control and

They M inoculated with two different kinds of fungi and look over here on the right uh in the green stuff uh the phosphorus uptake by plants at different levels of micro isal colonization so the control that was had no micro isal fungi was taken up about 25 picograms of

Phosphorus per plant if you look at the inoculated ones they were taking up you know that were well inoc calculated they’re taking up almost 10 times as much phosphorus now phosphorus is something that we that modern conventional agriculture tends to apply in great amounts to our Fields but Micro

Isal fungi provide an agent for actually getting it out of the soil particles and getting it into plants suggesting that uh there’s alternative ways to fertilize crops that may not require as much nitrogen as we add if we basically had the right life in the soil the right bacterial and fungi fungal communities

To actually unlock the potential of those elements in the soil and get them get those elements into our foods and so that’s a little bit on the connections in terms of uh soil life and what it can do to what’s getting into our food growing Revolution was the book

That we wrote uh after writing the hidden half of nature when we realized that it’s sort of one thing to bring your soil back to life in an urban lot in Seattle where you’ve got a lot of coffee shops around and the Seattle zoos just down the street with a supply of of

Well- composted herbivore manure they like to give away on an annual basis because they have got a lot of it they need to get rid of we always left asking the question of well could we bring soil back to life relatively fast on fullscale operational uh Farms that were

Productive and capable of at a scale capable of feeding the world that led to writing growing a revolution where I visited Farmers around the world who had done to their Farms what an had done to our lot it’s essentially the howto story of how to basically move from an era of convent

Agricultural chemistry that or conventional agriculture that emphasizes chemistry into an era of regenerative agriculture that really emphasizes cultivating life in the soil to turn degraded lands back into verdant Fields how does this work well the general principles of regenerative agriculture ones that um uh I found in visiting

Farms in Equatorial Africa Costa Rica across North America involved a combination of of three pra three key practices uh plus a potential fourth and those three practices that worked on farms you know subsistance Farms up to really large uh conventionally mechanized farms in in North America were to minimize the

Chemical and physical disturbance of the soil which means not plowing so going to no till farming but also going to minimal or no chemical use uh so going to either organic no till farming or going to uh noil farming that used you know a bare minimum of chemicals or to um

Organic farming that used no chemicals but used a bare minimum of tillage those kinds of combinations Trying to minimize the disturbance of the soil and always keeping the soil covered uh that means with a living with a living crop a cover crop so always keeping living Roots

Growing in the ground uh for reasons that will become very apparent in an’s half of this talk uh and also diversifying crop rotations so minimizing disturbance that’s providing a stable home for soil life keeping uh cover crops growing that helps to provide organic matter when those cover

Crops are are knocked down and mulched into the soil and maintaining a diverse crop rotations that’s about having a diverse community of life in the soil um so that there’s multiple positions that soil life can play to partner with crops in ways that an will talk more about um

Then the fourth element of regenerative agriculture that uh I view as an a potential accelerant for soil building is reintegrating animal husbandry into cropping operations so that their manure can actually help uh stimulate both soil biology and to help build soil organic matter um now there’s obviously there’s

There’s good and bad ways to do that uh if you overgraze a landscape uh integrating animals with farming can destroy the land but there are regenerative methods and ways to do that that can help to build soil fertility and to help um increase uh the the productivity of the land uh now the

Principles that are involved uh are fairly generalizable they translate to other settings but the specific practices need to be tailored to the specific setting of the landscape so the far Farmers I visited say in Costa Rica were not the using the same practices as Farmers that um I visited uh in North

America or in in central Africa but the general principles that minimal disturbance the cover crops and the diversity and then the potential to accelerate with regenerative grazing practices um translated to settings around the world and actually paralleled what an was doing in our yard in terms of her regenerative gardening what kind

Of results can it produce well it can turn soil like this clay on the right into soil like the one on the left these are both the Cardington clay soil it’s a soil from David Brand’s Farm uh from this his family farm in Carol Ohio uh where they grow wheat corn and soybeans

For the North American commodity crop markets um but they also grow diverse mixtures of cover crops um they’ll grow up to I think they’re up to like you know probably 15 or 20 different kinds of cover crops even in a single mix in the field at present so they always keep

Something growing and this is the kind of soil David started with back in in 1971 this happens to actually come from his neighbor’s Farm which he just bought for um recently for reasons that um uh will become apparent in a moment um and this is the soil that David has built on

His farm he turned that khaki clay into a rich chocolate cake that’s permeated with holes full of life very productive he’s been able to greatly reduce and I think at this point pretty much eliminate his Reliance on nitrogen fertilizers and and chemical fertilizers and pesticides um in a way that has

Really helped his bottom line so this is David here shown the modeling one of his tillage radishes out in a in one of his Fields by his neighbors’s yellow soybeans and he’s got a mix of crops growing there in that field uh but he is kind enough to walk me through the

Economics of his operation and his conventional neighbors where his conventional neighbors are doing full tillage they’re plowing a lot they’re using 200 pounds of nitrogen per acre 2 and A2 quarts of Roundup that’s glyphosate per per acre and that’s costing them 500 bucks an acre in sunk

Cost and at the the year that they um um that I visited his farm they were uh the the the uh uh County average uh yield is about 100 bushs an acre at four bucks a Bushell what they’re getting that year that means his neighbors were losing a

Hundred bucks for every acre of corn they planted the more they worked the more money they lost that is the key that’s the Achilles heel of modern conventional agriculture where the the input costs have gotten so high and the commodity prices have gotten so low that it’s actually very difficult to turn a

Profit as a farmer what David brand has done is he’s gone no till for 44 years he then uh that started to integrate cover crops um and a diversity of cover crops in his operation and now he does no tillage he only uses the year I visited a little bit of nitrogen a

Little bit of Roundup so he’s not an organic farmer I teased him that he was organic-ish because he was moving so close to being an organic farmer that’d be very simple for him to go that last mile um what he was doing was costing him 320 bucks an acre he harvested about

80% more than his conventional neighbors and at that pace he was making 400 bucks an acre when his neighbors were losing a 100 bucks an acre this is part of what turned me into an optimist to think that um regenerative agricultural practices the combinations of practices that he

Was using could actually help could catch on among conventional Farmers across North America and move them much closer to the world of organic agriculture um these kind of practices also worked in on subsistence farms in Africa uh this gentleman here is Kofi boa he runs the noil center for uh noil

Center in Kumasi Ghana he’s been teaching uh villagers in his region to how to move from their uh traditional slash and burn or Sweden style of Agriculture to using a no till method with cover crops um they have small farms that are worked by hand but what

This has done is it allowed them to basically shut off erosion when you basically slash and burn it actually is fairly erosive after the burning um and so notice what happened to the amount of um soil erosion on the fields in this area they went from 1,800 kogam per

Hectare per year which is kind of an abstract number I realized but just notice it dropped from 1700 down to 77 it almost shut off erosion what happened to their crop yields their traditional yields of a ton and a half per Hector of corn increased to four and a half tons

They tripled and their tradition the yields of cow peas basically doubled doubling and tripling of crop yields is better than the Green Revolution did uh and this was done um on Fields using no agrochemicals using no um uh no TOS no agrochemicals it was is a way of

Thinking about the soil and rebuilding soil Health through the adoption of those principles of minimal disturbance cover crops and diversity these folks got diversity into their fields by growing eight or so different crops in the same field at the same time with the polyculture you know low crop ground

Hugging crops and tree crops um but the point is is that they revolutionized their Agriculture and rebuilt and revolutionized their soil this next soil that I’ll show you is from uh the singing frogs Farm the Paul Elizabeth Kaiser’s Farm in Sebastapol California uh and the soil on the left is from a

Neighboring uh a neighboring field literally across the fence from their Farm uh and it’s what they started with in terms of of of soil quality they then uh spent about 10 years at this point um rebuilding soil Health through a no organic essentially an organic no till vegetable farm they’re not certified

Organic but they’re not using any chemicals and notice the difference in the soil it started off the same just 10 years ago the pace of soil building is remarkable in this case and they’re not alone one more example this is Gabe Brown’s Farm in bismar North Dakota um

In his right hand he’s holding up the soil from his Market Garden where he applied those regenerative agricultural principles the soil in his left hand is his neighbor’s soil you’ll notice the color difference again that’s carbon it’s basically carbon taken out of the atmosphere through photosynthesis and put into the ground through agricultural

Practices um it’s a way to actually help mitigate the greenhouse gases that are are causing climate trouble um and the potential for that is actually huge globally what happened at Brown’s Ranch is that he started off with three inches of top soil back in the early 1990s when

He was uh when he first went to no till he had about 2% organic matter he then Diversified his cash crops Diversified as integrated cover crops in the late ’90s went to multi-species cover crops in the late 2000s it reintegrated Livestock in 2010 um by just a few years

Ago he turned that 3 in of top soil into 14 Ines more than tripled it and his organic matter is up to 6% he more than tripled it those are huge changes and in a time frame that is geologically instantaneous to be able to completely restore the fertility of your land so

That is basically functionally equivalent to a native Prairie and do it in less than 20 years is remarkable and yet he’s done it and other people have done it as well and they’ve done it profitably which is what makes me an optimist on this uh um uh on this issue

This is a slide from a paper by Clare Lan and Jonathan lungren that was published back in 2018 the year after uh growing re growing Revolution came out and what they did is they compared the economics of regenerative and conventional Farms on um on in the in

The Corn Belt across the um American Midwest and what this shows you is the no neue and cost per Hector on their on the for the averages across those Farms so the way you read the graph is the bar at the top that’s how much they harvested that’s what they got for their

Harvest per Hector they spent all the colored stuff on corn seeds and crop insurance and herbicides and fertilizers and so on and the profit is the bar on the bottom left over the regenerative Farms are shown on the right you’ll notice that they harvested more they got

A better income off their fields because their yields went up once they restored fertility to their land uh and they spent less doing it these again these were not organic farmers they were conventional Farmers but they were weaning themselves off of conventional inputs and they were left with a much

Healthier profit in the end that’s what really started turning me into an optimist on this issue of what could um of whether or not regenerative practices could be adopted um also uh another benefit of re rebuilding the health and fertility of soils is the healthy soils have a higher water holding capacity uh

For every 1% increase in organic matter they you can hold up to 20,000 gallons of water per acre water that will sink into the ground to be available for growing crops photosynthesis only works if you have sunlight and water so water is the big vulnerab vulnerability for agriculture in many regions and healthy

Soils have a better ability to not only absorb that water but to hold on to it and make it available to crops so there’s lots of benefits of farming with healthy fertile soils there’s I put at the top of the list higher farmer profits comparable yields after

Conversion are big part of the the reason for that the other half of it is that farmers can use less fertilizer pesticide and fossil fuel uh while harvesting those those comparable or greater harvests and that is a recipe for a healthier profit but it also means

That there’s more carbon in the soil and that’s carbon taken out of the atmosphere and put into the ground taken from a place where it’s a problem to put it in a place where it’s a net benefit not only to the farmer but also to um to

The health of the land and ultimately as we’ll see to the nutritional content of the foods that we Harvest off these lands um and it also means that um there’s less off-site um uh pollution if we’re using less soluble nitrogen and phosphorus as fertilizers then less of its getting into rivers streams

Groundwater the Gulf of Mexico all the places that the overuse of of fertilizers have contributed to environmental degradation now the one thing I haven’t shared with you yet is well what does this mean for actually the nutrient density of our foods that were grown these these regenerative soil

Um building practices so anine Ray archeleta Paul Brown and Jaz Jordan did a brief study U when we were writing what your food ate to look at the effects of what do those these regenerative farming practices mean for the health of the land and also what’s

In our food so we took 10 paired adjacent farms uh both a regen conventional one and a regenerative one across the US shown here on this map so from California all the way over to Connecticut and we just tried to find um Farms where the the farmers had been doing regenerative agriculture for

Between F between 5 and 10 years involving all three three of the practices the minimal disturbance the cover crops and the diversity and then we sampled their soils and we had them grow the same crops AC you know literally cross the fence line uh and then compare the nutrient density of

Those crops so what do we find in the soils that’s the the first these two barg the box and whiskers plots down here in the lower leftand corner of the screen uh the percent soil organic matter on the regenerative Farms was about on average twice what it was in

The conventional farms in other words it had basically they within a couple decade well actually within about a decade or so although some of them have been doing noil forit for longer um you know within a short period of time they had restored their soil to comparable to

What the native soil was reversed that 50% loss of soil organic matter that I told you was so common on agricultural lands around the world earlier so they’d revers that in their top soil uh and their soil Health scores had tripled so the amount of life in the soil and its

Activity had really gone up so they had life-filled fertile soils um that had been restored what did this do to what’s in their food well it increased the phytochemical content by 15 to 20% what are phytochemicals phyto is plant chemicals a chemical plantmade chemicals things like carotenoids and carrots the stuff

That make them orange a good UV protector phenolics phytosterols things that are antioxidants anti-inflammatories when they get into our bodies and that serve other purposes and plants that Ann will talk about mineral micronutrients are up 15 to 30% for certain ones um and the soil Health

Scores as I mentioned had gone up you know factors of 30% to about 2 and a half times depending on which which paired Farm we’re looking at so in other words there’s evidence that these regenerative farming practices are not only good for the land but they’re also enhanced the nutritional quality of the

Foods that we Harvest off the land so finally in the last couple minutes that I have I’m going to basically share sort of my vision of where we are I think in the world of Agriculture um we’ve gone through a series of four agricultural revolutions were poised now for a fifth

One um and that is the first Revolution was the idea of cultivation and tillig in the first place this is the Greek goddess of Serial series um uh just for illustration but you know agriculture itself was a radical idea and a revolution in in human Lifestyles the second Agricultural Revolution was when

We started thinking about soil husbandry adding legumes to crop rotations the uh the idea of cover crops and crop rotations are not new ideas these are very old and traditional ideas that were brought in I would argue in the second Agricultural Revolution where people start started doing things to maintain

The fertility of the land um but that didn’t always sustain it because of the overreliance on tillage and that’s where we have an opportunity today to combine no till practices with the ancient wisdom of things like cover crops and and crop rotations it’s just my favorite quote from Leonardo Dent about we know

More about the movement of celestial bodies than about the soil under fooot how many things in science can you say that about that from five a quote from 500 years ago is as true today as it was then many of the connections that we write about in what your food ate that

Ann will be getting to in a moment um was are basically you know discoveries in the last couple decades that have revolutionized our way of looking at agriculture but the third Agricultural Revolution uh was what happened in the 19th and early 20th centuries in terms of mechanization and industrialization

No big Mysteries there I like to think of the fourth Agricultural Revolution as the Green Revolution and biotechnology rolled into one I I’ll I won’t Ed editorialize about um about either of those but let me basically say instead that I think we are at we are poised for

What I hope will be a fifth Agricultural Revolution uh and that is one that’s focused on building soil Health on the kind of regenerative farming practices that uh we’ve been writing about and talking about so far in this talk that can rebuild the health and fertility of land as a consequence of intensive

Farming and thereby not only improve the environment but but pull off the daunting challenge of feeding the world going forward um but also as Ann will be Emphasizing