Upstream - Regenerative Agriculture at Studio Hill Farm with Jesse McDougall

Episode Date: September 21, 2016

Raising animals for food is often cited as being one of the drivers of the ecological crisis we're in. But does it have to be? Meet Jesse McDougall, one of the farmers behind Studio Hill Farm in Vermont. He and his wife Caroline are part of an exciting movement known as carbon farming. We spoke with Jesse about the concept of regenerative agriculture and explored some of the politics and economics behind modern day farming in the United States. What is carbon farming? Or regenerative meat? Ever wonder what mob grazing is? And since when do farmers propose bills to Congress? Tune in to find out. Intermission music by Will Oldham. And thank you to our contributing team member Mark J. Phillips for recording and hosting this one. This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

Hello and welcome. You are listening to an Upstream interview, which is part of the Economics for Transition project. We're here today with Jesse McDougall, a farmer, author, and educator at Studio Hill in Shaftesbury, Vermont. Studio Hill is run by Jesse and his wife, Caroline, on their family's fourth-generation farm. They practice regenerative agriculture with the goal of providing healthy food to family and local community while improving the land on which the food is produced. Regenerative agriculture, or as it is sometimes called, carbon farming, is the agricultural

production of food, fuel, or fiber using methods that put more carbon into the soil or above-ground biomass than they release into the atmosphere. By focusing on pulling atmospheric carbon down into the earth, carbon farmers all over the world are able to improve the fertility of their land, produce more nutrient-dense forage and food, improve water retention and filtration, restore the land's natural cycles, improve profits, and free their lands from the dependence on chemicals. Jesse is also a member of the Advisory Board for Soil for Climate, a non-profit organization advocating for soil restoration as a climate change solution.

Welcome, Jesse. Thank you. It's great to be here. Can you describe a little bit more about your background and how you came to do this work? Yeah, sure. My background has nothing to do with this work actually. While I'm farming on my wife's family's farm, my wife being the fourth generation, she grew up summers here, but I grew up in the White Mountains of New Hampshire and had no agricultural background. The area had no agricultural background to speak of. And everything that I ate came in on a truck or through the drive-thru.

So I grew up with no real sense of how food was produced or soil or anything that we're talking about today. It just happened that one day I fell in love with a girl with a farm and I guess fate led us to this. And how that happened was that this farm was purchased in 1936 by my wife's great grandfather and grandmother. They were from New York City and and at the end of the Depression, or at the tail end of the Depression, I should say, they were looking for more food security for themselves and their family. And, you know, so they searched, as many people did, for a farm. And they looked all over southern Vermont in particular particular because it had easy access at the time by train to the city, which they wanted for their products,

and they found this farm here. The story goes that great-grandfather wanted a stream and great-grandmother wanted a view. She was an artist and writer and poet and painter, and he wanted the stream, the year-round stream, to generate the farm's power with a hydro dam. And what they were looking for was food security, and the family's been maintaining it ever since.

It was a dairy. They ran a dairy from 36 to 63, and then some new regulations required them to, would have required them to put in some new infrastructure that they couldn't afford and they decided to shut down the dairy. The granddaughter of the folks who purchased the farm started a horse boarding business here, which grew over the next 40 years. And she, Edie, became the woman who ran the farm and was a pillar of the community. And she's who my wife grew up learning everything from in the summers, farm related, and would follow around on the hay operation. And they managed their hay fields in the way that most farms in this area manage their hay fields, and most farms across the country do. It was a process that used heavy tillage and heavy chemicals in a corn hay rotation where the fields would be

planted in corn for three years and sprayed with synthetic fertilizer and Roundup and other pesticides and herbicides. GMO corn, you know, Roundup Ready corn. The point of which, I should say, was to kill all the seeds of all the invasive species in the field. So that after three years when they planted it back to hay, what grew was what they planted and nothing more. They wanted a very specific set of grasses for their hay bales. And that's true of most hay farmers. So that's how they managed that. In 2011, we learned that Edie was sick. She was diagnosed with glioblastoma, which is an aggressive form of a brain tumor, and in September of 2012, she passed away here in Bennington. It was absolutely devastating

for the family and for much of the community. She was, you know, kind of a superwoman. She was a pilot and entrepreneur and farmer and horsewoman. And, you know, my wife and I came in to help out wherever we could. I knew nothing of farming, and my wife knew the process that she had been taught by Edie. But we'd been so scared by the cancer and its potential link to the chemicals, which of course we can't prove. But nonetheless, we were so scared by the cancer that we, our first decision was to stop spraying anything on the farm. We knew we had to clean up the environment around us because we, well, we, you know, we're organically minded. We, I worked on

an organic farm for a summer or two, um, shopped organic whenever we could, but we didn't know really what that entailed. So that's how I came to agriculture. I was kind of married into it, got very lucky and in love. And how I came to regenerative agriculture is starting with that decision to stop spraying chemicals on the farm. And we naively thought that, oh, yeah, we'll stop spraying chemicals and the whole ecosystem will rebound. And there were two problems with that thinking. One, from the outside, it looked like the ecosystem was doing fine. We had lush, green hay fields at the time of Edie's death.

And two, that's not what we saw. The hay production plummeted after we stopped spraying and synthetically fertilizing. So in 2013, our hay numbers were down considerably, and in 2014, they were down again. And in the winter of 2013, after we'd seen such a plummeting of our fields, we panicked and we started searching for how to do this organically because, you know, if nothing else, we're very stubborn. And so we turned to YouTube and books and articles and we called our friends and our organic farming friends and our conventional farming friends and our you know organic farming organizations and asked them how do we manage 50

acres of hayfield without chemicals and they all said the same thing if you figure it out let us know and we didn't figure it out but that process of research led us to regenerative agriculture, and specifically to Alan Savory's TED Talk, in which he talked about the ways in which you can regenerate soil through animal activity. And, you know, the stuff that he was talking about happening in Africa, where he works, the desertification of grasslands, the drying of soils, the invasion of moss, the green sludge and slime that was covering soils, the thinning of grasses, and the slow decay of the field was happening in our field,

slow decay of the field was happening in our field, which we thought to be astounding and terrifying because we live in one of the most verdant places in the world. So that led us to the idea that animals might be the solution that we were looking for. I mean, we knew if we took, let's say, 300 tons of hay off the field every year that we needed to put something back. And we didn't know what, and we didn't know quite what, and we didn't know how much because we didn't understand grass. We didn't know how grass grew. We didn't understand the biology of the soil. And the more we looked into how to grow grass without chemicals and regenerative agriculture,

the more that led us to the soil so we experimented with 50 chickens in a mobile coop in 2014 and we moved them twice a day and they did the work of fertilizing and scratching and what we saw a week after the chickens moved through the worst, driest, sandiest, most depleted patch of hayfield was green lush grass starting to come up. And a month after, we saw tall lush green grass coming up, and by the end of the summer, we had a green mohawk coming down the middle of our worst field on the farm, which thrilled us to no end. And as a bonus, people wanted to buy the chicken because it was raised on pasture without chemicals, without GMOs. So that's when we knew we were onto something here ecologically and economically. So we doubled down and we did more chickens the next year and

turkeys. And last year we added a flock of sheep to precede the chickens and turkeys in the rotation. And that's when we saw an explosion of ecological benefit in our system here. We were able to do, regenerate 20 acres of hayfield last year. The boost in production we've seen, which I'm now viewing as the least important metric of success but the boost in production we've seen is staggering that field is now back up to just under where we were with chemicals production wise but ecologically what we're seeing is the entire food chain returning to the farm

where you could walk through a field on this farm from one end to the other and not step on grass we're now seeing thick lush green grass growing and all the ants all the spiders all the butterflies all the birds we have geese nesting in the fields we have turkeys walking right through the barnyard wild turkeys i should say making making home on the farm. We have deer all over the place now. You know, once we started focusing on feeding the soil, everything else just exploded. And the more ecologically resilient this farm becomes, the more food we can raise here, which makes us more economically resilient. So we are converts and we're excited to be doing this work.

And so just to summarize, you took over the farm and saw that this chemically intensive farming was something that you didn't want to continue into the future, and so tried organic agriculture and got nowhere with it. Well, that's not exactly true. I mean, what we're doing now is organic agriculture and got nowhere with it. Well, that's not exactly true. I mean, what we're doing now is organic agriculture. It's regenerative organic agriculture. What we saw wasn't working was just stopping the chemical propping up of the soils.

So when we stopped spraying, so in that way, yes yes quote-unquote we went organic things collapsed because the soil was dead it had been sprayed for 40 years with all of and tilled and and compacted with machinery for 40 years so there was nothing left in the soil to produce grasses or help grasses grow i should say and it wasn't until we paired the livestock with the fields, with the grasses, and restarted that grazing-grazer cycle, nutrient cycle, that the grasses responded. I mean, the grass and the grazers have evolved in a dance over the last 220 million years together as two parts of one system. So what you have is grasses that have evolved to thrive under the activity and benefit of mob grazing or

packs of animals grazing it occasionally. And so when we recreated that one missing part of the system, we saw the grasses respond and go gangbusters. And could you talk a little bit more specifically about how Alan Savory's method has contributed to what you're doing? Sure. Well, like I said before, we knew we had to put something back if we were taking tons and tons of material out of the field. were taking tons and tons of material out of the field. What he helped us understand was how grass grows and the role that animals play in helping grass to grow. Part of what Alan Savory is also talking about is that livestock play an important role in addressing climate change. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Sure. Well, you know, Alan Savory likes to use the term vilification of livestock. When, as is often pointed out, livestock, as managed today, are a contributor to greenhouse gas emissions and therefore a contributing factor to climate change. However, that is not the fault of the livestock. That is the fault of the managers of the livestock. The high-density, intensive, confined animal feedlot operations, or CAFOs, bring so many animals into such a small space that the management of manure becomes vitally important. And often it's done wrong and often it's not done well enough. So manure is usually held in a lagoon or a pit or some kind of contained storage facility.

And instead of being sent back to the soil. So in such concentrations, that's a dangerous amount of phosphorus or nitrogen and methane to be holding in one area, and they off-gas and they leak, and they pollute the environment around them, and environmentally, they're a disaster and disgusting. What Allen is talking about, or I should say Mr. Safory is talking about, disgusting. What Alan is talking about, or I should say Mr. Safery is talking about, is changing the management of livestock, returning livestock to their natural environments, the field or the forest, and changing the way we manage them in agriculture to mimic the way that they would act in nature. So for example, here on our farm, we use a system of mob grazing where the flock of sheep are out on pasture all year round. We provide them shelter

and water via wagons that we move into their paddocks. But, you know, if left to nature, move into their paddocks. But, you know, if left to nature, they would travel in a pack around the fields of the valley, move into a particularly rich patch of grass, eat everything down, trample everything down, and then move on, either because they've gotten all that they can get or because they've been scared off by predators. And what that leaves behind is a trampled, fertilized, aerated section of the field. And those are the conditions under which that grass has evolved to thrive. And those sheep won't return to that area until the reward makes the risk worth it, you know, to expose themselves in a field. Meaning when the grass is tall and lush and green again.

So that's what we do here on the farm. We move the sheep into a patch of the farm that is lush and tall and green. And we move them out when they've gotten all that they can get. Or I shouldn't say all that they can get. But, you know, when the grass has reached a point down to two or three inches, which is at the beginning of the rapid growth stage for grass, and then we move the chickens in behind it and turkeys in behind them to peck through the manure left behind by the sheep and pick out any bugs or eggs that have been laid there.

And so the two paddocks just travel around the farm in this mob-grazing fashion. And now what that's doing is capturing the carbon that is stored in the grass by feeding it to the sheep and the chickens. They turn it into manure. They put that manure directly on the soil and trample it into the soil with their hoo you know, hooves and mob activity. The chickens come along just after the sheep and spread that out and scratch that into the soil even further. So instead of manure being contained in a pit and

off-gassing in the environment or manure being spread out on a dry, sunny field and oxidizing into the atmosphere, the manure is very directly worked down into the soil by the action of the animals. So in that way, you're taking the carbon that was sequestered in the grass, you're turning it into meat and animal and manure, and working it down into the soil where the soil's microbiology pulls it down even further and turns it into soil and I mean that's how the soil of the Great Plains was built six feet deep it was the great American bison roaming freely across the plains moving in bunches trampling defecating moving on and that's what built that soil up over time and

it's been the tillage and the mismanagement of livestock that has depleted those soils over time and polluted those water waste. So livestock is not the problem. Livestock, in my opinion, is one of the answers. It's just that we need to change how we manage the livestock. You're also a father. I am. Has raising a child affected your views on climate change and also being on a family farm that's now in its fourth generation? Oh gosh, yes. I mean, I was scared of climate change before. Now I'm absolutely terrified. You know, we see the effects of it. So coming to the farm meant I was stepping into a much larger story. You know, we came here before we had our son Angus in 2012. He was born in December 2013. So stepping onto

this farm and taking up a role here meant I was, my wife and I were looking back four generations. I mean, we were picking up tools that her great-grandfather used. We were walking in fields that they walked. We had pictures of them in clothes that we were wearing. And it was incredibly humbling and also a relief to not view myself as the story anymore of my life. I was now a part of the story of the farm. And I knew that if I could contribute successfully to moving this farm forward a generation, then I had had a worthwhile life. And then once Angus was born, and we've got another one due in September, yet to play or yet to be named, now we're looking ahead four generations.

And again, terrifying and humbling, but it informs our decisions. It is the guiding, it's how we make our decisions. Are we going to build this or that piece of infrastructure in a way that our grandkids are going to look back and say, man, he knew how to build. Or are we going to tend to a field in a way that leaves the field more fertile for them or less fertile for them. And of course, the answer is we want to build an incredibly fertile, resilient farm here that will benefit future generations, or at least we want to start down that path. I mean, we are maintaining buildings that were built 200 years ago like castles. And we're praising the work, the hard work of older generations.

And we are also kicking down sheds that were built in five-minute panics, you know, meant to last a season but lasted 40 years and propped up for 40 years. And we're, you know, cursing the panic that built that shed. So the work we do here tends to stay here. And we know that we're leaving our mark on everything. And we want that to be a strong, solid, safe, clean, fertile mark. Studio Hill also offers what you guys are calling a regenerative meat CSA. What is the CSA model and why do you use it?

And how do you communicate this story that you're telling, not only the family history of the farm, but also this amazing story of regenerative agriculture to consumers? Do you find that they resonate with the story? Good questions. The CSA model stands for Community Supported Agriculture, and that started in Europe. It's basically the patron model, where people interested in what you produce are willing to risk some of their money by fronting your operation for a season. And they'll plunk down a share of what you've determined to be your operating costs for the year.

You know, and in return, you deliver them a portion of your crops. In the way we do it, we have a regenerative meat CSA with monthly home delivery where people subscribe to our farm. And in exchange for their patronage, we drive turkey, lamb, chicken, pork to their home every month. And in that way, we're hoping that we can be a more convenient alternative to seeking out healthy meat in the health food stores and such, because it's hard to find, as most people know, organic and non-GMO and pasture-raised meat in your standard supermarket. You can find it in health food stores that often requires a separate trip. So what we're trying to do is make it very easy for people in our area to get this kind of food,

while providing the farm with a recurring income stream and a reliable income stream. And the number of subscribers we get dictates how many animals we raise and the more animals, I mean, the more subscribers we get and the more animals we can raise, the more land we can regenerate. So it's an opportunity for people to participate in a food system that rebuilds the environment instead of degrades the environment. So we're proud of that. And in terms of telling the story to folks, we have a website at studiahill.farm where we tell our story. We have banners up around town and we would like to do more with labeling, but red tape and federal regulations dictate what we can say on our food labels. We can't say regenerative. We can't,

or well, I shouldn't say we can't. A lot of, there's a lot involved with saying various things on certain labels and there's a rule for every one of them. And, you know, we're busy farmers trying to chase sheep and chickens around and often can't navigate the red tape associated with labels. So what we end up doing is, you know, podcasts like this, which we're very happy to do, and we write articles often. We just try to get the story out there on social media, Instagram, that kind of stuff. You recently proposed a bill to the Vermont Senate titled the Vermont Regenerative Agriculture Certification Program. What is the idea behind this, and what happened with the bill?

Well, that was 2015 Senate Bill 159. And what I was proposing in that bill was a certification program, much like pasture-raised or organic or whatever certification program you have out there for regenerative farms. So I thought it would be valuable for farms in the state of Vermont to volunteer themselves for a program that could certify them as a regenerative farm and submit themselves to a series of tests that would confirm that they were in fact building carbon in the soil over year, over year, over year, or improving the soil or building more top soil year, over year, over year. So there was soil or building more topsoil year, over year,

over year. So there was just a few tests that his farm had to pass three years in a row. And if it was determined that that farm was sequestering carbon and improving the health of the soil, they could be deemed by the state as regenerative and then use that label on their products and on their farm. And that was what I proposed. And it ended up getting tabled. It was received well, a lot of interest in both the House and the Senate. Didn't make it to the House, but there was a lot of support there. Very proud of that bill and what we did with it. And I got a lot of help from a lot of smart people. It was introduced by Senator Brian Campion here, who's a state senator here in Bennington County.

And it got tabled ultimately by the Senate Agricultural Committee. So it didn't make it to a vote. But I think it was tabled for good reasons. I think that we can improve it and we intend to improve it and reintroduce it in January when the government comes back into session. But I always viewed that as step one, kind of a conversation starter. I didn't know how far it would get. I'm thrilled it got as far as it did, frankly. And my hope was that it just started the conversation about what kind of agriculture we want to have in the state of Vermont.

We have, for listeners who don't know, we have a water pollution problem in the state where Lake Champlain, most notably, is suffering from algal blooms. It's getting choked off by phosphorus. And the state is responding with a set of required agricultural practices intended on improving the state's water quality. And it is, I'm sorry to say again, villainizing livestock and the mismanagement of manure, which I do think is a problem, and I do think needs to get cleaned up. But I also think that they are working around the edges of the field and not attacking the elephant in the room, which is the soil health in the state. And I think this bill would have shifted the focus onto the soil. So I am happy to say that the Agency of Agriculture is launching an environmental

stewardship program. It's now in beta form where they are inviting farms to submit, you know, to volunteer for this program and they will come and test your soils. And if you are rebuilding soils on your farm you are certified as an environmental stewardship farm or something like that not clear on the details but it's a very new program i'm excited that the state is doing it and i'm hoping that we with this next bill that we introduce can either piggyback or bolster or somehow intensify that stewardship program by rewarding farmers who are doing this work. I mean, the farmers who are doing this work up and down Vermont

are providing environmental services by cleaning up the environment, by putting the carbon into the ground, by keeping water in the ground. to the ground, by keeping water in the ground, a 1% increase in organic matter across one acre of land will retain 16,000 gallons more water. And when you think about the water runoff problem we have in this state, if we were able to increase the organic matter in our soils through these regenerative practices that we're talking about, then we wouldn't have such a water runoff. We wouldn't have a pollution problem. If farmers focused on improving the organic matter in the soil across the state, then the ecosystem across the state would rebound tremendously. And a lot of farmers feel that farming anywhere is difficult, and farming in a small state like this is especially so,

and that if we are putting carbon underground, then it wouldn't be inappropriate to charge a carbon tax to Mobil and Shell and the giant corporations that are bringing the carbon pollutants into this state, a carbon tax that gets paid out in part or in whole to the farmers who are putting it back underground. That's one example of regenerative economics, I guess. And I mean, there are a lot of different programs we could do to support this kind of farming in the state. But we're going to look at all that and figure out what makes most sense for this bill and propose it. You're listening to an Upstream interview with

Jesse McDougall of Studio Hill Farm, conducted by our contributing guest host, Mark J. Phillips. They'll be back in the second half of our program. In a small far room the bed is set With trinkets all surrounding Yet lonely it rests so dry it sets With souls aside abiding There moves legs warm and close inside Though no leg braces a hello And pictures On walls where

Paint is laying Where sinks Are friendly Running Reflect Reflect Metal cast My toe Has long Reflect, reflect, metal cast My toe has long been sworn

My knees are blue, my eyes are too My love has not forgotten Will come, will come, oh he will come And make me have a baby Then I foresee we all as three Will ride it all together All us three We'll ride All together The hills have eyes The trees have lives

Disjointed like a hero No saga told, no things unfold To make the ride much finer The length is fine, his hand in mine Does someone hear our chatter? A lover's laugh, a bleeding calf, a dog out in the harbor. That was We All, Us Three Will Ride by Will Oldham. Welcome back to Upstream. We're in conversation with Jesse McDougall of Studio Hill Farm.

of Studio Hill Farm. What would you say are some of the larger barriers to farmers adopting regenerative agriculture, moving from conventional agriculture into the type of work that Alan Savory proposes or other types of regenerative agriculture? I see two major problems. One is just inertia. We've done it this way, We've always done it this way. This is how you do it. That's what I've seen in this area a lot. And I think that's the smaller of the two problems. The bigger of the two problems, I think, is economic panic, frankly. I think farmers operate on such slim margins that if what they're doing works, even by a dime a week. They're going to keep doing it, and they don't have the time to experiment with newfangled ideas. We, because we were so green coming into this, had the luxury of experimentation,

and the luxury of time to experiment, I should say, and we got lucky. A farmer who's been doing this for decades and who is just hustling to make rent every month or a phone bill every month or the chemical bill every month doesn't have time or interest in experimenting. It's too risky. There's too much at stake. There's all the land. There's the four generations five generations in some cases more of the family legacy at stake one thing I'd like to see the state do

in helping people consider this form of regenerative agriculture is production insurance so for example the state could take funds from the general fund or a carbon tax or you know a penny a gallon tax or something and say to farmers, listen, if you devote 10 acres of your property to using regenerative

agriculture practices over the next five years and sell the crops and the meat and whatever you produce on that acreage just as you normally would. And if you produce less, we'll make up the difference with insurance. Now, experience has told us and experience has told other people who have switched this method that they're not going to sell less, they're going to produce more. On our property alone, we're not only producing the hay, but we're producing the chicken and we're producing the lamb and we're producing the turkey on the same ground. So if the state were to say, use these methods, we will ensure you against any losses for experimentation, more farmers might be able to take a look at that if they knew that they weren't going to

lose the farm in doing so. So that's one of the things we're looking at with this next version of the bill. And similarly, what would be some of the barriers for consumers to realize the importance of purchasing food that is produced this way? Price. This is not a cheap way to make food. Economies of scale come into play. I can't produce a chicken for $1.99 a pound. And that's what people are used to seeing. And what we're selling varies between $5 and $10 a pound, depending on what you get. Sometimes $14 a pound if it's retail. And a lot of farms are in rural areas where there isn't a lot of money anyway, and so selling to the locals is not an option. So the only option for small farms is to get their meat out of Dodge and get it to New York and to Boston and to Denver and to L.A.,

and the food distribution systems that used to be in place to do that, I mean, the reason great grandfather moved to this area was for the train access. He could put milk on a train and send it to New York City, eggs on a train and send it to New York City. Those are gone. We're looking for ways to get our meat easily to the city. And what we're finding is farmers buy a truck and drive it down if they get it there. And I find that to be foolish. I mean, the whole system is now geared toward mega production. All the food comes out of the Midwest. So what we need is sort of a rebuilding of a food distribution system that could take

food from small farmers in Vermont and get it down the river to New York and to over to Boston and bring some of that money back this way. And that's step one, you know, and once we start getting some of that money back this way, and I can pay more people to work on my land, then they can afford the food that we're raising, you know, and we can grow to a point and maybe if we pool all our efforts together, we can get down efficiency wise to a point where we can compete with the high-end industrial markets. But it's going to take a lot of education of people. A lot of people don't know that food production can be environmentally restorative. People assume agriculture means

destruction, and people certainly assume livestock means destruction. But that's not the way nature does it. And it's just poor management. And it's the industrial management of animals, which is disastrous for the animals and for our health and for the planet. You're also an advisory member of the organization Soil for Climate. What does Soil for Climate do and how do you contribute to their work? Soil for Climate is, I mean, I'm thrilled and proud to be a member of Soil for Climate's advisory board. At the moment, they're focusing on education and raising awareness about regenerative practices and the soil's ability to sequester carbon, so to be a mitigating factor in climate change. They are also moving into policy,

so they were key in helping me promote the Vermont Senate Bill 159, the Regenerative Certification Program, and they have an advisory board ranging from everybody from me to Alan Savory, which is, if you know me, it's a widespread there. But they're a great group of guys, and they are trying to help people,

and farmers in particular, bridge the gap. And they're setting up chapters, soil for climate chapters at major universities. They have one at Northeastern University now and trying to get the next generation of people like college kids, you know, excited and filled with hope that they don't have to watch this world burn up. There are ways that we can put the carbon back in the earth. And they are ways that also happen to feed the planet, you know, so we can produce food, we can put carbon in the ground, and we can have hope for a clean environment and a more resilient food system. And that's what

they're dedicated to teaching and proving. If you ever need numbers on this stuff, you can call those guys. They have all the numbers to back up everything they're talking about. And they're trying to link funders to farmers and it's really a good great organization so this is a similar question to before but when i first learned about the role soil can play in climate change i thought it was just the most astounding thing yeah that there's seemingly this magic bullet out there and it feels like something we should be jumping off the rooftop screaming to people. And so similar to the question about acceptance of regenerative practices, you know, what stands in the way of a larger acceptance and appreciation

for soil health as just a fundamentally important need moving forward? Well, we have a very extractive industrial mindset. I think what I'm finding when I talk about this stuff is people don't understand that you can, A, be profitable, and B, put something back. You know, it's easy to make a fortune if you rip down a mountain and take all its gold and sell the gold. fortune if you rip down a mountain and take all its gold and sell the gold. That's extractive. What we're doing here is creating an economic enterprise that puts back and rebuilds the production area. And that's a foreign concept to a lot of people who think that you must, in order to build one resource, you have to deplete another. And I guess in terms of what we're doing here, we are drawing

one resource down, that is the excessive carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and putting it into the earth. But while doing that, we're making the earth, the soil, more fertile and able to produce more food, therefore. So I think the first barrier is mindset. I think another barrier is investment in infrastructure. A lot of farms have spent a lot of money and still owe a lot of money on heavy equipment that is built to till and plow and disk and seed. So there's a great lack of momentum to move out of that. People are still struggling to pay for those tools, and if you look at what Gabe Brown is doing in North Dakota,

he's managing 5,000 acres on Brown's ranch just outside Bismarck. He grows corn. He grows wheat. He grows the cash crops that so many farmers do, but he does so without tilling. He does so with livestock. So his system goes in the spring, he will bring the livestock into a field and they will eat down whatever he had planted as a cover crop over the winter, usually rye. And then once they've trampled and eaten everything down, he will come in with his seed drill, which is a planter that

is towed behind a tractor that injects seeds down into the soil. So the seed can go down through the residue that the animals have left behind into the soil. And he'll plant his corn crop. And then a week later, he'll come in and plant whatever crop he's under sowing under the corn. The corn will come up just as it normally does. and he will harvest that just as he always did. And then the undersown crop, he'll bring the livestock in to eat the undersown crop. And then he may plant wheat in that field if it's early in the season and do the same thing, but then he'll plant the cover crop for the winter. And then he'll do it over and over and over again. So he is just building and building and building and building his topsoil without tilling and producing the same crops he always did. And by the way, he's selling out his meat and his crops and his products at every farmer's market he goes to.

And I mean, he'll tell you he's doing just fine. Thank you very much. It's that economic argument, I think, that is going to catch farmers' ears who have been struggling for 40 years just to pay the bills and really taken a beating at the markets and at the hands of distributors and supermarket chains. And people are trying to make food cheaper, cheaper, cheaper, and putting more and more people in the chain between the farmer and the consumer. So I think education of the agricultural community is going to be huge. And I think stories like Gabe's are important for farmers to hear that by using less equipment, by using different equipment, just the seed drill, those are fairly common, very common.

And livestock, you can have productive crops and rich fields and make more money. So it's that win-win-win argument that I think we need to get out there. And here at Studio Hill, using planned grazing, you've managed to get rid of your chemical inputs, which were costly. They were. You've managed to add animal production, right? You're now selling meat and skins, you said? Yes.

And you're also growing healthier soil for future generations. And boosting our hay production. And boosting your hay production. And this, I mean, we came at this, we didn't get into this because we wanted to raise animals. We came at this because we wanted to grow more and more nutrient-dense hay. So the animals were here for the hay and the grass production. And we kind of view the animal products as a byproduct of our hay improvement system or our soil building process. But yeah, we've been able to improve our economics, improve our ecology,

and cut our costs. Win, win, win. And once we're able to get up to a certain level, we can export more food down to the cities, bring more money up to this rural and struggling area, and pay more people to do the work here. And I'm hoping that one day we can build a co-op of farms across Vermont, maybe the Northeast, that are doing regenerative agriculture, whether that's with livestock or perennial tree crops or perennial crops or no-till vegetables, that we can, just like the dairy co-ops do, combine the efforts of a whole bunch of smaller farms

into one marketing certification distribution entity and bring regenerative food down to where the money is and bring some of that home. And hopefully, if we bring enough at home, we can pay people here enough that they can afford the food that we raise here, which is, you know, it's ridiculous that in all of these farming communities, people don't earn enough to eat what is grown there. You know, the food that the farmer eats is brought in on a truck,

you know, because he doesn't earn enough to, farmer eats is brought in on a truck you know because he doesn't earn enough to um well you don't want to eat everything you grow you know what i mean because you need the money you got to pay the bills they can't pay the bills in lamb so so who are the other people and farms that you look to for inspiration? Well, Gabe Brown, obviously. Alan Savory, Joel Salatin, Eric Tonesmeyer, Ben Falk, Mark Shepard. These are the giants. These are the people who are doing it and doing it well and have been doing it for decades.

So whenever I get discouraged or start doubting what we're doing here, I log on and watch some of their videos and get a boost and see what this farm could be like 20 years from now. And, you know, the pictures of the depth of soil that they've been able to build on their farms doing this stuff, I find to be just unbelievably inspirational when I'm looking at patches of our farm that are still dry and dusty and need more animals. So that's great from a small farm aspect. The work Alan Savory is doing on a global climate level is really inspiring. And the work Eric Tonesmeyer is doing with his new book, The Carbon Farming Solution, and his argument for tree crops is very compelling. So there's a lot of work being done right now in the area of, I'll call it,

agricultural climate change mitigation. Our cavalier attitude toward nature, And our cavalier attitude toward nature, whether we believe we are masters of it and can bend it to our will or can exist separate from it and spend all our lives in air-conditioned boxes and in air-conditioned houses, has gotten us into incredible trouble. The next generation, I believe, needs to understand that we need to participate with nature and that the human force is now so big that its effect on the planet is undeniable and has to be managed carefully. We can't just assume nature will take care of itself anymore because it can't. We're too big. Our agriculture is too big. Our industry is too big. We need to manage it in a way that it would manage itself. So a good example of that is this mob grazing. If we let our sheep go right now, because there are highways, we're in a rural area. I'm looking out the window right now at Rolling Green Mountains, but the deer are all but gone and don't come out of the mountains because of the highways and the traffic. The herbivores that were here aren't here,

so we have to return them to the land because grasses don't evolve in 200 years. They evolved in 220 million years to be what they are, and we need to maintain them and the forest in the way that they evolved to be maintained because that's how the world that we want to keep was created and what would be your ideal vision of studio hill in 20 years that's a good question. Less stressful. I'd like it to be, you know, I don't want to get rich. I want to get reliable is what I want to get. So if we had the number of CSA members or the number of outlet stores or the number of sales grew to the point at which we could grow everything we grew we sold. And

what we grew was at the right ecological level for this farm, for the land that we have. I'd like that to be Studio Hill so that after 20, 30 years of doing this, I can retire, give the next generation the option of taking it on or not, but I want to be able to pass to them an operation that is ecologically and economically profitable and managed well, so that what I'm passing on to them is not a burden. beyond that what i'm hoping for the larger vermont economy is like i said this regenerative co-op idea and if it's not a co-op just a ethos that takes over across this state that we're we're going to take care we're going to be modern stewards of our landscape and clean it up while producing food and economically viable

by creating economically and ecologically viable businesses. We can't look to government subsidies to support farming anymore. Farming needs to be profitable. And that can't be done by degrading the environment in which it's done. And then, you know, globally, if Studio Hill has any impact, I hope it's just that somebody somewhere comes across this interview

or something I've written or something, you know, pictures my wife has put up or something she's written that transmits some hope and some enthusiasm and some excitement for the next generation. We can break free of the industrial mindset and we can build a world that can feed itself. Yeah, that's all. And it, you know, and that's all extra. Like I said before, if we pass this farm on to the next generation in a way that's stronger than it is today, then I've succeeded. Anything else is extra, but that's my hope. Do you have more hope now for the future than you did before starting this work? Oh, yeah. It's incredibly empowering to see

carbon going to the ground. When I dug into our field in 2012 and 2013 and found sand and rock, A, I didn't know what I was looking at. I didn't know it was a problem. And B, looking back, you know, my throat wells up, you know, I get sad about that. And when I dig in it now and I find earthworms and grubs and beetles and roots, you know, my heart sings. And when I can dig a hole and my son and I can go down and fish for critters because the whole ecosystem is coming back, I mean, that gives me tremendous hope, you know. So, yeah, I'm filled with hope and enthusiasm and energy. And, you know, I collapse every weekend because I'm running around every week, you know, and doing this stuff. And it's exhausting and it's fun and it's a real honor to be doing this work. It's a real honor to be doing this work.

And where can listeners go if they want to learn more about regenerative agriculture and the work you do? Well, we have a website, studiohill.farm. We have some history there and some articles there. I have a small collection of YouTube videos on that site that have inspired me and taught me some of what we're doing. Soil for Climate is a great resource. They have a wonderful Facebook page, very lively community. Regeneration International is a wonderful organization, part of the Organic Consumers Association. They're doing great work. Kiss the Ground is an organization out of California that is talking about regenerative agriculture. They're worth looking up.

They make great videos explaining how all this works. And you also maintain a Facebook and Instagram. We do have a Facebook page at facebook.com, Studio Hill VT, and we are on Instagram at Studio Hill VT. All the photos on our Instagram are done by Caroline. She is the one with talent there. All the bad ones are mine.

But yeah, if you want to see what we're doing day to day, that's where to go. Great. You've been listening to an upstream interview with Jesse McDougall of Studio Hill. You've been listening to an Upstream interview with Jesse McDougall of Studio Hill. Their website can be found at www.studiohill.farm. Thank you, Jesse, for sharing your wisdom with us today. My pleasure. Thank you for having me. The sun is rising in the hallways Flowers blooming from our boats that fray

To the morning we run to shoreline Calling us to speak outside Waves under the earth and rocks Fasting ghostly shadows Tall like diamonds As we set fire to the sea As we set fire to the sea For more interviews and documentaries, please visit upstreampodcast.org.