Flavorful, nutrient dense foods can only come from healthy land. Unfortunately, in America we have been destroying our land since the Europeans first arrived here hundreds of years ago. They began settling, farming, and replacing valuable grasslands with monoculture row crops (those famous “amber waves of grain”). In the process, they also killed off large populations of grazing ruminants like bison and elk, throwing the ecosystem out of balance. As a result, our soils lost their ability to adequately absorb and retain water, and the soil microbes that fix nitrogen from the atmosphere were greatly reduced in number.
As modern farming practices continued, our problems got worse. By the early 1800s, in the east coast states, we had lost approximately 10” of our original topsoil layer.
By the 1930s, we witnessed the environmental disaster known as the dust bowl. The ecological disaster was not a fluke of nature – it was caused by ill-conceived farming methods.
July, 1938: Modernized farming practices displace tenants from land in Texas during the Dust Bowl.
Over the past century, modern farming practices have largely continued. In addition to environmental problems, we have seen a drastic decrease in the nutritional value and taste of our food, and an increase in toxicity due to overuse of chemicals.
How do we fix this? Sustainable farming is the “trendy” term you hear today, but considering what we have done to our land, is it really the kind of environment we want to sustain? If we continue using industrial and even sustainable organic farming methods, we are threatening both the long-term availability of land to farm as well as our overall health.
At Joyce Farms, we have moved past sustainable farming to an even more effective approach – regenerative agriculture. The good news is, with the proper practices in regenerative agriculture, we can quite literally regenerate the land by rebuilding our soil, leaving it far better than our generations found it.
Regenerative agriculture is a method of farming that builds soil health and enhances ecosystem diversity. It ultimately offers enhanced profitability to the farmer, a more humane life for livestock, a much healthier ecosystem, and healthier food for all of us. For these reasons, we have become practitioners of and advocates for regenerative agriculture.
Regenerative agriculture is a complex idea, but here is the gist of it:
Conventional farming methods involve strict routines, separation of crops and livestock, and overuse of chemicals. These practices are damaging and unsustainable. Farmers using regenerative agricultural methods rely on the natural balance that Mother Nature provided rather than harsh chemicals, and they are able to adapt their systems to changing conditions.
The regenerative agriculture practices that we have in place at Joyce Farms have shown incredible results in rebuilding organic matter and biodiversity in the soil, leaving the land better than it was before.
Pictures above show the same farm. The left was taken while sustainable farming methods were in place. The right was taken after regenerative practices were implemented.
If you’re building a house, you start with the foundation, and the same applies for agriculture. Soil is the ultimate foundation for success. Without it, we have nothing. To regenerate the land that we have degraded, we have to start by restoring what should be underneath the soil surface: the microbes (our “soil livestock”).
What makes soil healthy? Microbes. 90% of soil function depends on microbes, so healthy soil should contain a strong microbial population. In every spoonful of healthy soil, there should be 50,000+ microbial species and billions upon billions of microbes. These powerful microbes produce soil “glues” that bind the soil together, allowing it to draw in more water and oxygen, which results in less runoff. They also solubilize minerals in the soil and slowly feed them to the plants, helping them grow.
In reality, no soils are completely mineral deficient, but in unhealthy soils, the minerals are bound and not available for plant uptake. In conventional farming, farmers rely on synthetic fertilizers and manures to compensate. Regenerative agriculture allows us to build soil health through a strong microbial population, so we can eliminate the expense of these artificial fixes that, for the last 100+ years, we thought necessary. But chemicals and fertilizers aren’t necessary – we can use nature's own system to do the things that she's been doing for thousands of years to produce highly functional soils.
So how do we build these microbial populations? Plant variety.
You have probably seen farms like this all across the United States:
Copyright: oticki / 123RF Stock Photo
This is an example of what regenerative agriculture is NOT. This is monoculture farming. Monoculture operations are based on planting one kind of crop, growing it to harvest, and leaving the land bare until the next season. Any plants that are not the selected species are considered weeds and killed with chemicals. However, we know that healthy soil depends on a strong microbial population, and that comes from a variety of plants.
Warm season forage mix in Joyce Farms cattle pasture
Every plant produces a different array of root executes that attracts a different array of microbes. The larger the variety of plants, the stronger the microbial population in the soil. Many of the “weeds” that monoculture farmers consider pests to their crops are actually vibrant forbs that are beneficial to grazing livestock, insects, pollinators, birds, and other wildlife.
Different plants also produce different arrays of secondary metabolites, which are highly medicinal to our livestock and wildlife. For example, some of these plants actually act as de-wormers for the animals, meaning the livestock don’t have to be chemically de-wormed. With monoculture and near monoculture systems, you don’t get those benefits.
Livestock are also extremely beneficial in fostering plant variety. Hundreds of years ago, when bison roamed freely, there were 300+ plant species growing all together across the grasslands. The bison grazed wherever they wanted and existed in immense herds packed together for protection. They moved a lot and trampled a lot, and that’s what created the diversity.
All of that variety still exists in the soil - it’s a latent seed bank waiting to be revived. Conventional farming methods suppress those seeds, but by grazing our cattle in a way that mimics the bison behavior, we can tap into that seed bank and recreate that old prairie ecosystem.
To mimic the bison, we raise our cattle and hogs in a rotational grazing method called Adaptive High Stock Density Grazing (AHSD). Rather than leaving the animals to graze on a large area for weeks, we contain them to a smaller area for a shorter amount of time. They forage on all the plants in that area – grasses and “weeds” alike – and then are moved to another area. The foraged area is then allowed to re-grow, naturally, using no chemicals or fertilizers. The plants that grow are the plants that should be there, not something we choose to grow or cause to grow artificially.
AHSD grazing methods in place on Joyce Farms cattle pasture
Studies have shown that with just 5 years of AHSD grazing, significant results can be achieved in terms of building soil organic matter, soil carbon and overall soil health. Adaptive grazing also creates competition among cattle, so they eat more of a mix of forage species. This helps them develop healthier, and tastier, beef.
Regenerative agriculture is a phenomenal system that has always been here, activated by the sunshine and the rain. It not only restores our land in terms of biodiversity and soil health, but also produces incredibly nutrient dense, vibrantly flavored food. It is a system we are proud to say is now the standard for our heritage farms.
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