For the Love of Soil: Strategies to Regenerate Our Food Production Systems

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We’ve been in a chemical experiment for many years and that experiments, unintended consequences and now coming to the forefront. People are starting to realize, “We can’t keep food production like this. This is not how your father’s always done it. It’s not working.” The Green Revolution is finally starting to realize the consequences.

I spent recovering by applying the foundations teachings and my life has dramatically turned around. I have never experienced such vitality and happiness in my entire life. I am so grateful for WAPF. I have become so passionate about physical and mental health as well as farmer rights. I’m so eager to become involved in sharing knowledge about these things.” That’s Eden from Leesburg, Virginia. That whole argument and I get that people are feeling overwhelmed. They want to feel like they’re making a difference but the problem is the industrialization of food. Going vegan, if you continue to eat industrial food, you’re just as big as a problem because you’re then eating soy products. You’re eating processed products that come from on no-Bali or something instead of looking at how do I eat local. A lot of beef is raised on land that would never be suitable for crops anyway. A lot of the statistics that you see about meat are all based on what happens in a CAFO. I don’t eat CAFO meat. I’m not interested in eating an animal that’s basically been sitting in a yard its whole life. It’s a great business model because now, you’re going to need this pill. You’re going to need that pill because that whole systems become compromised. It’s a great business model but not for us. What would you advocate instead then? If I literally came up to you and said, “Nicole, I’m going to stop eating meat. I’m going to buy all my stuff from Whole Foods.” You were like, “No,” and you explained to me that’s not very helpful. What would you suggest I do instead?Together with her team of soil coaches, they work alongside producers in the U.S., Canada and across Australasia. Supporting producers who work with millions of acres to take their operations to the next level in nutrient density, profitability and environmental outcomes. For the Love of Soil' is a land manager’s roadmap to healthy soil, revitalized food systems in challenging times. This book equips producers with knowledge, skills and insights to regenerate ecosystem health and grow farm profits. Yes. I used a quote there from Stephen Jenkinson who talks about hope. Hope is mortgaging the future. Hope is something that you hold out as some comparison. Something that you’re going to cling to and pray for as opposed to what’s happening is happening now. We need to be focusing on the things that we can do now. Hope is the other side of hopelessness. We go from being feeling overwhelmed to maybe the Knight in shining armor is going to roll up. Then, "Everybody knows" that synthetic nitrogen is not good for the soil (OK, maybe not EVERYbody), but she explains it well. Ok, so I'm struggling with how to rate this book. As a regenerative farmer myself, and an organic farming consultant with 25 years experience, I want to love this book because any helpful attempt to further the regenerative ag movement is worth 5 stars! Books like this are so badly needed, now more than ever! But, this book has it's share of problems. If I'm comparing it to other regenerative ag books that received a 5 star rating, this one would probably get a 3. But I want to be generous and give it a 4. Here are the problems.

Within the below transcript the bolded text is Hilda Labrada Gore and the regular text is Nicole Masters. The case studies, science and examples presented a compelling testament to the global, rapidly growing soil health movement. “These food producers are taking actions to imitate natural systems more closely,” says Masters. “... they are rewarded with more efficient nutrient, carbon, and water cycles; improved plant and animal health, nutrient density, reduced stress, and ultimately, profitability.”There are things that you can do for your own health but the major driver is, as consumers using our consumer dollars to choose better. Weston Price is looking at not eating processed foods but not eating industrially grown foods. This whole argument around meat is not around cows per se. It’s not the cow, it’s the how. It’s how are those animals being grown, produced, and raised? Brix measure the dissolved solids in the setup of a leafy plant. We’re using that as a tool to look at how much sugar and dissolve solids? How well is that plant photosynthesizing? It’s an indicator in the field. Whereas, these new meters are new infrared, spectroscopy, so they need to be correlated with those specific crops. At the moment, you can test maybe twenty different crops, apples, pears, and those obvious ones. There’s a lot of calibration that’s still required to test it but some of these new meters will tell you where in the world was this grown, which is cool. People can correlate that this has come from this property. It’s taken all of these things for a while but now it’s a hand meter.

That is a good word of encouragement because sometimes when we have these conversations we’re like, “Everything is falling apart. We’re killing ourselves.” I liked that you ended your book on a hopeful note and I’d like to end this show on a hopeful note. I want you to answer the question. If the audience could do one thing to improve their health or maybe even the soil health, what would you recommend that they do, Nicole? Here I am, just one person. Let’s say, I know my farmer but I still want to do something on a bigger scale to turn things around because won’t our dollars and won’t our choices impact that business? Some of the operations I work with, they’re measuring things like the bio-digestability of grains. They’re measuring no residue of chemicals. They are measuring increases in Omega-3, trace elements, or vitamins in the food that they’re producing. That’s what I want to see. We start to get down to, what is this food quality? Can we improve the quality that we’re buying? There are a few spectrometers in different types of meters that are being released in 2021 and 2022 that are going to be ones that consumers can hold and measure for themselves what is the quality of this produce, which is exciting. I think this is one of the things that we saw come out of that Monsanto case was that they’re making up data. They know the impacts that this is having on either humans, soil, microbiology, or nutrients. They know full well what’s going on and more of these documents that are coming out. I’m not a big conspiracy theorist. I hate that stuff. Unfortunately, it’s big business at play. Why would you stop the gravy train? Unfortunately, it’s people not being connected to the integrity or wanting people in landscapes to flourish. It’s just a business model. As for critiques, there are times where the author repeats herself. I personally found this helpful, as it allowed some of the pertinent ideas to sink in. That said, I can imagine it would be irritating for some.The first chapter had me hooked. Nicole shared her own story about Paraquot poisoning in her teens and how it affected her health and her journey into ultimately becoming an Agro-ecologist, educator and systems thinker. She not only tells her story but weaves it beautifully into the topic of this book. She speaks of chemicals, genetics, epigenetics and more telling the story of human reliance and exposure to these things. She encourages each and every one of us to listen to our bodies, nature and our intuition to build a rich and insightful life. In so doing she builds the reason for having written the book and her love of nature and soil. William Gibson once said that "the future is here - it is just not evenly distributed." "Nicole modestly claims that the information in the book is not new thinking, but her resynthesis of the lessons she has learned and refined in collaboration with regenerative land-managers is new, and it is powerful." Says Abe Collins, cofounder of LandStream and founder of Collins Grazing. "She lucidly shares lessons learned from the deep-topsoil futures she and her farming and ranching partners manage for and achieve." She has been providing agricultural consulting and extension services in Regenerative Agriculture since 2003, and is the Director of Integrity Soils Limited.