The best book that not nearly enough people have read.
How to regenerate billions of acres while feeding billions of people at the same time.
There is book called From Dirt to Soil, written by a farmer named Gabe Brown. It is absolutely and massively game-changing, and here is why. If you read this book you will discover that large scale food production and healing the land is not either/or. It is and/both. Saving the planet and eating red meat is also not either/or. It is and/both. These statements may sound totally absurd at first, so let’s break it down.
Gabe Brown farms about 5,000 acres in North Dakota. When he first started out farming on his own, his soils were about 1.8% organic matter. Now, in 2023, they are close to 7% organic matter, which is close to what they were before widespread farming began in the region. An acre of soil holds about five tons of carbon for every percentage point of organic matter.1 So if he has added five percentage points of organic matter to his soil, then he has also sucked about 25 tons of carbon per acre out of the atmosphere, and sequestered it in the soil, where it can do massively beneficial things like absorb and store very large amounts of water, promote microbial life, and facilitate nutrient cycling. Now he farms about 5,000 acres. 5,000 acres, multiplied by 25 tons per acre means that he has probably sequestered somewhere in the neighborhood of 125,000 tons of carbon during the course of his farming career, all while producing huge amounts of meat and grains.
But it gets even better. This farm does not till, and uses practically no inputs - no herbicides, pesticides, fungicides, or purchased fertilizer. This is made possible through a combination of cover crops and intensive planned grazing. This last sentence that I just wrote is extremely important, and the crux the entire issue: By rotating cover crops and ruminant animals through his production fields he is able to produce food on a commercial scale without the use of poisons or synthetic fertilizers, while simultaneously sucking carbon out of the atmosphere. The conclusion is absolutely clear: Cows are not the enemy. The mismanagement of cows, however, is our enemy. And the the proper management of cows on cropland is absolutely essential to regenerating the planet.
The Brown farm is not an anomaly - the Regenerative Organic Alliance, which is just just one of many organizations promoting regenerative agriculture, has certified 47,192 farmers and 879,400 acres.2 All of these farms taken together are living proof that the future of farming and the way to save the planet is not through lab-grown “meat” or cricket factories, but proper management, in partnership with humans, animals, wind, sun, soil, and rain.
1: https://soilandwaterconsulting.com/the-value-of-organic-matter/#:~:text=Most%20organic%20matter%20is%2050,of%20carbon%20or%205%20ton
https://regenorganic.org