Can the Soil Save Us? The Dirt on Local Agricultural Climate Solutions

American agriculture contributes about 10 percent of this country's greenhouse gas emissions, but done right, it can absorb rather than produce carbon and help overcome the problem of man-made climate change.  This exciting possibility is the subject of a Telluride Science panel moderated by Adam Chambers of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.  Panelists include Tony and Barclay Daranyi, who practice regenerative agriculture at their farm 33 miles northwest of Telluride; Chris Hazen, from the San Miguel County Payment for Ecosystem Services Program and Cindy Lair, deputy director of the Colorado STAR (Saving Tomorrow's Agricultural Resources) program.
Our podcast is hosted by award-winning broadcast journalists Judy Muller and George Lewis.

Transcript

Science Straight Up

Can the Soil Save Us?

Season 4, Episode 3

GEORGE:  From Telluride Science, it’s Science straight up.  And this time….

TONY:  Agriculture is the primary cause of human induced climate change. But ironically, it's also the solution to this worldwide blight.

GEORGE:  Can the soil save us?  The dirt on local agricultural climate solutions. I’m George Lewis.

JUDY:  And I’m Judy Muller. Each spring and summer, Telluride Science brings together prominent scientists for a series of workshops and sponsors weekly Town Talks where the participants share their discoveries and innovations with the community.

GEORGE: On this edition of Science Straight Up, we ask the question, can agriculture, the source of about 10 percent of the carbon emissions in this country, go from being part of the problem to part of the solution.  At the Telluride Conference Center in Mountain Village, Colorado,  Adam Chambers of the U.S. Department moderated a panel discussion on the subject.

ADAM: Tonight, we really wanted to talk about food and climate change. As I set the stage for everybody,  I want you to think about the carbon footprint of agriculture. And for now, for today, we'll just focus on the carbon footprint of agriculture in the United States. Our total carbon footprint, just from the agricultural sector in the United States, is about 600 million metric tons. China is the largest emitting country in the world, got the United States next. And we work down through, you know, Germany, Mexico, Canada, the US ag sector, remember, it's only 10% of the US carbon footprint. But that sector alone would be number 14 country in the world. So we have, the sector has a big a big carbon footprint. And so what we're going to talk about tonight is how can we reduce that carbon footprint, maybe pull carbon out of the atmosphere, right? here's a forestry sector and the agricultural sector, which I forgot to mention, that can pull carbon out of the atmosphere. So like energy sector, and other things like that, we can get them to net zero. But we have real opportunity with agriculture and forestry to pull carbon out of the atmosphere. And so that's what we want to talk about. But we want to start with Barkley and Tony, and we want to hear about it from regenerative agriculture from the from the farm and ranch level.

(NATURAL SOUND—birdsong and wind)

JUDY:  The Indian Ridge Farm sits on a high mesa near the town of Norwood, Colorado, 33 miles northwest of Telluride.  Barclay Daranyi and her husband Tony have owned it since 1998.

BARCLAY: Our relationship and love for the land has grown over the years. And I consciously and purposely use the word love to describe our feelings for our 120 acres. Our choice to farm is not an economical, not just an economical choice, but a spiritual one as well. Our idea of farming was and still is to give back to the land more than we take. In other words, we see farming as a give and take with the land, not just an extractive industry, but an additive industry as well. We believe in still believe that if we work with nature, care for the soil, and for the human animal communities that depend on that soil, that the whole ecosystem will benefit. And little did we know when we started farming back in 2001, that a name for this was regenerative agriculture.

Over the past 20 years, our farm has produced 1000s of pounds of food. I wish I could tell you how much carbon though we've sequestered I don't know that number. We annually rotate as many as 3000 Meat birds, 300 layer hens, about 100 turkeys and hundreds of cattle on our pastures through a lease with our local rancher. We've grown vegetables for as many as 70 families through a community supported agricultural model and operated a bakery. We've sold our products to our CSA, which is community supported agriculture, a farmers’ market, farmers markets and through online memberships. And Tony and I have now entered the final third of our lives. And we're again looking at next steps. Like many farmers our age, the question we face is who will farm this land when we’re gone. Our mission is to ensure this land continues to be farmed regeneratively that the water rights stay with the property and that it serves and feeds the many living creatures in our ecological community, both above and below the ground.

GEORGE:  Her husband, Tony Daranyi agreed, even as he couldn’t resist trying out a little organic farming humor.

TONY: I'm gonna start with a joke. It's pretty simple one. How did the organic vegetable die? Anybody?  From natural causes. (groans and laughter)  If we could all be so lucky. In all seriousness, we know we're dealing with a broken food system. We all live with a great paradox. Agriculture is the primary cause of human induced climate change. But ironically, it's also the solution to this worldwide blight. At Indian Ridge farm, we are committed to working on solutions. Right off the bat, let's make sure we distinguish between industrial ag and small scale regenerative AG. Industrial AG is essentially the broken system. Its factories, it's human exploitation. Its use of fossil fuels. It's chemical laden, it's pharmaceutical laden, it's transportation intensive. It's environmentally destructive, small scale. regenerative agriculture, on the other hand, is the opposite. But what is the definition of regenerative agriculture that we uphold and that we practice? Here's one definition I've come up with. regenerative agriculture integrates holistic farming practices that mimic the natural processes of the environment to create sustainability, and resilience.

GEORGE: He recalls a time in North American history, when giant herds of bison roamed the plains, before the white settlers changed everything.

TONY: That's one of the concepts of regenerative AG is you try to mimic what nature has done. And this is actually where intentional rotational grazing mob grazing originated from, you know, finally someone studied the Midwest and asked the question why, when the settlers, the Western Europeans arrived in this country? Did we have 16 feet of topsoil? And on the prairie lands in the Midwest? And the answer was the bison, millions of bison roaming in the Midwest as a herd animal, it's a herd animal as herds, dropping their manure incorporating that manure into the soil, eating down the grass to a, to a level that was sustainable and moving on. And mob grazing, tries to emulate that, as a food production system. And at the same time, as a way to improve the soils.

JUDY:  Now, counties and states are creating incentives for farmers like Barclay and Tony to practice sustainable regenerative agriculture.  Chris Hazen, a wetland ecologist, runs the San Miguel County, Colorado Payment for Ecosystem Services program.

CHRIS: Ecosystem services may be a term that may or may not be familiar to many of you. But, it’s all the benefits we receive from people like Barclay and Tony doing what they just described. 

We’re all deriving those benefits. So a payment for ecosystem services model rewards those landowners for their good practices on the land, and encourages them to continue them or improve them, or maybe convince their neighbor that they could do things differently and contribute to the commons that we all benefit from. Barkley and Tony have a vegetable garden, they have grazing, they have pasture land, and we broke their property down into constituent units, and evaluated the practices on those portions of their farm. Barkley and Tony's vegetable garden where they've been putting all of their compost for X number of years actually sequesters X amount of carbon, same with their pasture land where they do rotational grazing practices with cows and chickens and goats and other animals. And we, we can do the math, and we can figure out how much carbon they're actually putting into the soil. And Barkley earlier said she doesn't know how much carbon they actually put in the ground. I do.  

 It's about it's about 80 metric tons of carbon that they have on their property, which may seem like a really small number when you voted against the numbers Adam was throwing out. But this is on a small parcel of land. So the win is if we can get started to get more and more people to do this type of practice on their property. So in 2022, we added three more landowners after we had this model in place.  

GEORGE: And now the State of Colorado has joined in with a program called STAR—Saving Tomorrow’s Agricultural Resources.  Cindy Lair is deputy director.

CINDY: Got to start mine, like Tony with a little joke, a little soil health joke, you know, dung beetles are really the secret. They are part of the secret and rangelands and sequestering carbon and they recycle nutrients and things like that. So let's start with that. The dung beetle.  What do they order when they go through the drive thru at the fast food restaurant? The number two value meal. So… (laughter and groans)  

GEORGE:  Uh, these are the jokes, folks. But seriously,  Cindy Lair says you don’t need a bunch of dung beetles to enroll in the STAR program. 

CINDY: You go from one to five stars, you go to hotels, you go to restaurants, and they all have this one to five star rating, depending on how well they do. Well, we have this star tool, and they made it available to anyone in the country who wants to use it and it’s a self-assesment tool. You could do star all by yourself, you don't need us at the state to help you. But the one that the state that we're running does have some financial incentives behind it. And so why do we like star it's rewarding producers for for the efforts that they're doing for the, for doing the right thing. It's scientifically rigorous. It's developed by a diverse committee of scientists. 

We’re not out there telling you how to farm.  The number of acres that we've been working with that we had 19,800 acres, and that is a lot of ranch land included in that there's about 124 different producers that are participating in that in that first go around. And what that came down to on an annual total carbon, or metric tonne equivalent was 3134 metric tons annually, sequestered, and that is basically like removing 675 gasoline powered passenger vehicles from our highways per year. 

 So it's not changing the world yet, but it is just doing what we can to make that work. And so with this climate smart commodities grant the $25 million, we're also working very closely with Colorado State University, we're expanding the program to many Western states in the Rocky Mountain region, were helping the STAR program became a national organization that's available to a lot of different entities. 

GEORGE:  She noted that consumers have a lot to say about the way that agriculture does business.

CINDY:  You know, it takes a long time to turn the Titanic. consumer pressure is really heavy. And people are speaking with their forks and with what they buy, and they want that change. There's, it is hard to change minds and perspectives and paradigms. So I'm not saying that it's easy. We have the Farm Bill programs through the Natural Resources Conservation Service, and they help farmers do better with regenerative agriculture. And then also, we have a generational shift right now, and a lot more younger people are getting into farming and ranching. And I see them as really willing to give some of these not new concepts, but they're new to a lot of conventional growers. They're thinking about doing things different than the way they've always been. So it's very slow to change. But I see it happening. And I believe… you know, you can pay somebody an incentive payment for five years to do something better. But after five years or more, they might just decide now, I'm gonna go back to the old way, you know, this is easier. Well, if they can make more money off of what they're growing and growing it the right way, we see the potential for that shift to happen even quicker.

JUDY:  One problem that an audience member pointed out is that conventional industrial farming gets huge subsidies from the U.S. government.  So far the subsidies for regenerative agriculture are tiny by comparison.  Tony Darayni:

TONY: I'll just drop a quick parallel to what we're seeing with our energy system. Fossil fuels have been subsidized in this country for years, decades. And this shift that we're seeing finally towards alternative energy sources, is finally taking place but it's been it's been this push and it's been these alternative energy sources have had to compete with energy from the fossil fuel industry that's been subsidized by the government, by our tax money. which has kept it cheap. And now we're seeing this cost curve starting to shift. And it's the same with agriculture. The I just saw the number today and Cindy, correct me if I'm wrong, but our industrial ag system gets over $11 billion a year in subsidies from from the US government, the regenerative AG, if you will, or these programs that we're seeing gets a pittance, we're talking 10s of millions of dollars compared to the billions that that the large corporate agricultural interests get.

GEORGE: Adam Chambers of the U.S. Department of Agriculture said nevertheless, the times, they are a-changing.

ADAM: Producers, agricultural producers, farmers, ranchers, they were pushed on yield, it was all about yield. Let's reward somebody who has the most yield corn acres, and let's put a sign in their, in their field and talk about how high their yield is. And yield doesn't deliver checks to the farmers, right? It may deliver checks to a chemical company, a seed company, big, you know, a big, a lot of different other companies, let's put it that way. And so you're seeing kind of a rebellion of farmers saying, Hey, I'm not going to chase that yield so that I can get this really small payment, I can actually do things in a more regenerative manner, and make a little bit more money. 

Now we need to continue to vote with our dollars and buy regenerative right to get that movement to take that movement for further. But I think that the farmers and ranchers in the country, and with programs like what we've seen, can start to think about, hey, I don't need to just chase yield, because that's, that's that's a degrading system. That's going to take me down a bad rabbit hole.

JUDY:  Cindy Lair, of the Colorado STAR program, says even big farmers can get on board with the regenerative farming movement.

CINDY: And so I think that just because somebody's big, doesn't mean that they're completely bad. I think that there's a way to look, instead of at that yield, the Almighty yield, they're looking at net profitability, their input costs are lower, and their margins get bigger over time, not immediately, it takes a while, sometimes you see a reduction in, in productivity. But I think it is possible even for large scale landowners to be more regenerative. But I think there's a place for everybody in this in this conversation. But interestingly, you know, in the 80s, that's when things they said get big or get out. 

And, you know, there's a really great book by Sally Vogel who was an attorney who took a class action lawsuit to Secretary block the Secretary of Agriculture at the time, she wrote a book on it, it's called the farmers farmers lawyer. It set our whole agricultural system on the this trajectory of getting huge, and I don't think we're going to make it small right away. But I think the next generation of farmers and ranchers they can't afford to the capital expenses of it These big farms. So I think we might see some smaller, more operators on on large amounts of land. But I think we could see more operators.

GEORGE:  Kris Holstrom, a farmer and a San Miguel County, Colorado Commissioner, had the final word:

KRIS: Thank you, for all of you in the audience. And thank you for this panel. We have a long way to go. We've come a long way. And so I would just encourage everybody who's listening to find your niche, find a place you can support these efforts, whether it's fine buying from the Indian Ridge, online or at your local farmers markets. I think CDA two has a newsletter. I mean, just sign up for this so that you stay informed. And I just as Commissioner, I just, you know, bluegrass does their bit with with their donations, everybody can do a little bit. And if we all do a little bit, we can make some progress. So I just want to say thank you hugely to all of you and to for putting this on.  (applause)

JUDY:  That’s it for this edition of Science Straight Up.  Alpine Bank is a keynote sponsor of Telluride Science. Our panel discussion was recorded live at the Telluride Conference Center in Mountain Village, Colorado, and the venue was made possible through the kind auspices of the Telluride Mountain Village Homeowners’ Association. Dean Rolley is our audio engineer.

GEORGE:  Mark Kozak is Executive Director of Telluride Science. Cindy Fusting is executive manager.  Annie Carlson runs donor relations and Sara Friedberg is lodging and operations manager. For more information, to hear all our podcasts, and if you want to donate to the cause, go to telluride science-dot-o.r.g.  I’m George Lewis.

JUDY: And I’m Judy Muller inviting you to join us next time on Science Straight Up.