10/27/2023 0 Comments Fishing planet money farming 2018And it’s not complicated, says Gabe Brown. This kind of living soil is like an insurance policy against flooding and drought and that’s why soil health matters not just to farmers but to everyone. Take the water infiltration rate, the amount of rainwater the soil can absorb: when Brown bought the farm in 1991, the infiltration rate was ½ inch per hour, in 2009 it was 10 inches, he says. Dirt to Soil, his first book, is in part a handbook that teaches farmers and gardeners how to heal the soil but it also explains a lot of the soil science and explains why good soil is an integral part of a healthy ecosystem. His farming success has turned Gabe Brown into something of a celebrity in regenerative farming circles, and by now he spends several months a year, off the farm giving talks and running seminars and workshops. ![]() One Family’s Journey into Regenerative Agriculture, is the subtitle to his book which summarises his insight that everything on the farm hinges on the health of its soils. To Brown, it’s not about increasing the yield, it is about maximising the profit per acre. There is little that Brown’s Ranch doesn’t produce: grains, beef, pork, poultry, eggs, vegetables, fruit and nuts – and the list is not comprehensive. “Today, I tell people that those four years of crop failure were hell to go through, but they turned out to be the best thing that could have happened to us, because they forced us to think outside the box, to not be afraid of failure and to work with nature instead of against it.” Brown didn’t give up, despite the “disaster years” as he calls the period from 1995 to 1998. Unusual weather events often spell bad news for farmers, but anyone hit by hailstorms and a severe blizzard in four consecutive years might be excused for being done with farming, once and for all. Gabe Brown, the author of Dirt to Soil, farms near Bismarck in the US state of North Dakota, not far from the Canadian border.
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