The Dr. Hyman Show - Could This Practice Be Our Saving Grace?

Episode Date: February 7, 2020

Regenerative farming takes a clear approach to agriculture, in that it’s not just about sustaining the land in its current state, it’s about bringing it back to its original, vibrant state. This creates greater biodiversity, more nutrients, stronger soils, and healthier food. Regenerative farming encompasses numerous practices that benefit the soil in which crops are being farmed. It is about being minimally invasive and supporting natural symbiotic relationships, so that bacteria in the soil, grazing cattle, and everything in between, are working together. In this mini-episode, Dr. Hyman sits down with Miriam Horn as she shares the story of a midwest soil farmer who is using regenerative practices to restore his land back to its original Prairie state. Miriam Horn works at the Environmental Defense Fund and is a New York Times best-selling author. Her books include, Rebels in White Gloves, Coming of Age with Hillary's Class, Wellesley '69, Earth: The Sequel, The Race to Reinvent Energy Stop Global Warming, which was co-authored with the Environmental Defense Fund president Fred Krupp, and Rancher, Farmer, Fisherman: Conservation Heroes of the American Heartland. Tune into Dr. Hyman’s full-length conversation with Miriam Horn: https://DrMarkHyman.lnk.to/MiriamHorn

Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Agriculture is the single biggest impact that humans have on the planet. Farming and ranching, food production is the thing we do with the greatest impact on the planet. Soil degradation is a global problem and the implications are pretty massive. The balance of our climate, ecosystems, food security, and health are all on the line. In this mini episode, Dr. Hyman sits down with best-selling author Miriam Horn as she shares one farmer's efforts to rebuild the ecosystem of his soil using regenerative agriculture. And you really, you know, in your book, Rancher, Farmer, Fisherman,

you really kind of made the connection between the food we eat and the environment, which a lot of people don't make that connection. You found an extraordinary farmer, a multi-generation farmer, who had an awakening, Justin Koff, and he changed his whole way of practicing agriculture in the Midwest in basically the grain belt. And tell us about him and how he had his awakening and what he's done and how it's transformed his farm and those around him. Well, so Justin is a fifth generation farmer and he went to college just when there was this

explosion in soil microbiology, when people were really starting to understand the complexity and the importance of the soil microbiome. So that was the focus of his study, was understanding this incredible, what one of the farmers calls a little city underground where everyone's working together, where fungi and bacteria are working together to nourish the crops, to hold the soil, to build carbon in the soil, to trap water, to do to protect human health, to protect plant health, to do all these critical things. So Justin came back from college understanding that his most important job was to take care of those microbes, that that's what he was really farming was the soil microbes. And that

the way to do that... He wasn't a plant farmer, he was a soil farmer. He was a soil farmer. And that the way to do that was to farm as much like the prairie as he could be, to emulate the native ecosystem that he lived in, this lost, now lost prairie, this prairie that had been ripped up by the sodbusters, to make his farm as much like the native prairie as he could. So that meant never plowing the soil. You seed by blowing the seed into the soil. It meant leaving everything on top of the soil, the residues, the living plants, dead plants, you just leave it

there as a kind of armor. It's almost like a mulch. Yes, exactly. But at a huge scale, because when he harvests his weed or his soy, he takes the grain out and he leaves absolutely everything else in the field. So it's like a 10, 5 foot tatami mat. So there is no erosion. There's no wind erosion. There's no rain erosion. It keeps his soils cool, even when it's blisteringly hot in Kansas. I mean, one of the greatest things about it is that these soil microbes that are his most important charges, when you plow soil and you fold that residue into the soil, it's like a big gulp, basically, for those microbes. You are delivering them with a hit of nutrients that totally screws up the balance of microbes. You get a huge overgrowth of bacteria at the expense of fungi.

The bacteria eat through all the organic matter and respire it as CO2. Your fungi, which are the ones that are really doing all the hard work, they're the ones that put out these beautiful silvery fingers that bring nutrients to the plant, they get choked out by the bacteria. Which are so important. The mycorrhizome in the soil is like a vast network of fungi that actually is so critical for maintaining the soil health and even fixes methane which is pretty interesting that the bacteria that right there's methane fixing

bacteria in the soil that help protect against the off-gassing from the cows right well that you know more about you should tell me about that because i don't know a lot about a lot of people say well if you grass-fed cows there you know you're still going to have methane it's still going to cause climate change it's far far more dangerous to turn CO2. But we know now that when you have rich grasslands, that actually there's methane-fixing bacteria and fungi in there that hold back the methane. That's why we had 60 million buffalo and no climate change. Well, they certainly, I mean, that's fantastic.

They certainly hold carbon. I mean, you look at Justin's soils now, and again, his model is the prairie, so his metric is the prairie. So it's how close can you get to the levels of carbon and organic matter and the diversity and vitality of the microbiome in the native prairie? And we do still have some, so family had farmed since 1865 the old way. He's been farming the new way for about 20 years. In that 20 years, he has rebuilt half the carbon that is in the native prairie. He's fixed that carbon in the ground because these, again, it's all this organic matter. It's this kind of goo that holds nutrients in the soil. And these fungi, they actually like wrap their arms around the carbon and hold it there. I mean the other really important

thing in an ecosystem like Kansas which is some of the most extreme weather on earth, the Great Plains and becoming more extreme all the time is that if you if you don't plow the soil you know when, when you plow, it's like when you rip steel through soil, it's like a tornado and an earthquake at the same time. You scramble these microbial communities, you rip apart these symbiotic relationships, and you completely collapse their world. Healthy soil looks like a coral reef. It's full of air and space for water.

Plowed soil is just a hard pan that nothing can permeate. So because Justin doesn't plow, if he grows a plant like a radish or an alfalfa plant that puts down a big old taproot 10 or 20 or 30 feet down, that channel stays there. And so water can get into his soil all the way down. The beauty of this kind of farming is that it actually allows us to save the water and complete the cycle of carbon so we don't create emissions that lead to climate change. It's very powerful. And Justin doesn't. He doesn't irrigate. He's able, because he farms in this way that keeps his soils cool and that captures every drop of rain water he has no

irrigation on his that's extraordinary right and so you think about these these farms that use massive amounts of irrigation and then what happens is when there there's drought you know they can't grow food and when there's rain the soils can't hold the water because they're depleted soils and they leads to floods which is why we see this cycle of druds druds flouts flouts and drugs droughts and floods that are mixing the whole world up and i well i'm carrying a ton of pollutants into the water which you don't want you know when soil is eroding so is everything else like nitrogen that you don't want in your waterways and you know and it's a global issue mean, there are a lot of people who think, who can trace, including the Joint Chiefs of Staff,

who trace a lot of social instability in the world and even terrorism back to the depletion of soils and to drought. If people are starving, if their soils are depleted and they can't grow anything and they're displaced off their farms, they are extremely susceptible to radicalization. And Tom Friedman writes about once a year, he writes that column. And I think there's a lot of legitimacy to it. I think it's true. I remember reading this book that we had 60 million bison.

We killed them all to basically deprive the Native Americans of their food supply. And then, you know, fast forward into the thirties and we had the dust bowl and they were connected because we protected the soils with the bison. And now we had none of that. And then there was a scene in the book where called Kiss the Ground, where the dust bowl was rolling into Washington, DC into Congress while the guy was testifying about what we need to do about it. And it forced the regulators to actually do something about it. Well, and Justin's family, there are people who still remember it, who remember this wall 10,000 feet high and 200 miles wide of dust

rolling across the prairie. 10,000 feet high. 10,000 feet high and 200 miles wide of dust rolling across the prairie. 10,000 feet high. 10,000 feet high and 200 miles across. It stripped 10 million acres of soil. Soil is essentially non-renewable, and it destroyed millions of livelihoods. And so that memory, Justin lives in that Dust Bowl region. He lives in the area that was depleted in that way. And that memory, you know, it's what led to the creation of the Natural Resource Conservation Service, the soil conservation service in the U.S. government. But also it really was planted the seeds for this revolution away from plowing because plowing had really laid the groundwork for that disaster. Stripped and eroded land produces less nutritious foods and less overall yield.

Over time, it also causes the land to become barren and desolate. Revitalizing old farming methods could be our food supply and our planet's saving grace. Incorporating agricultural animals also plays an essential role in creating a productive and successful regenerative farm. When cattles are raised outdoors, grazing on pasture for the right amount of time, they force the planet to draw more carbon into the soil as they regrow. As the cattle move to new pastures, the process continues. These practices have been found to hold major potential for turning agriculture into a climate solution rather than a key source of the problem. Farmers who are practicing these methods need our support. Engage with them by going to your local farmer's market.

And support them and our future by buying foods grown in nutrient-dense soil. Thanks for tuning in to this mini-episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider sharing it with a friend. Until next time. Hi, everyone. I hope you enjoyed this week's episode. Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional.

This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner. If you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their find a practitioner database. It's important that you have someone in your corner who's trained, who's a licensed healthcare practitioner, and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.