The Deep Dish

An insider look at food and farming from Civil Eats

~ The Civil Eats Editors

• First Look: Biochar's Big, Carbon-Rich Moment
• The Follow-Up:
  • 1,000 Farms Bringing Hard Data to Boost Regenerative Farmers
  • California’s Healthy Soils Program Is Mainstreaming Climate-Smart Farming
  • Urban Farms Can Take Soil Remediation Into Their Own Hands
• The Check-In: David Montgomery & Anne Biklé: Soil Health is Human Health
• What We're Reading

First Look: Biochar’s Big, Carbon-Rich Moment?
Experts and advocates say it’s time to address the soil amendment’s limitations so that its potential as an agricultural climate solution can be realized.
BY LISA HELD

On the day the Tigercat carbonator arrived in western Montana after being towed from Oregon, Michael Schedel turned to his first order of business: getting it to the burn site. The machine—which looks like a giant metal dumpster mounted on Snowcat-style treads—was “a colossus,” he said, and his team had to navigate it over narrow, rolling forest roads.
 
As a forester for the Nature Conservancy, a big part of Schaedel’s job is improving fire resilience on about 500,000 acres of former industrial timberland. It’s a tough gig: After clearing diverse ecosystems that included plenty of large, old trees, timber companies planted dense clusters of young trees in their place. Now, the forests are primed to burn hot and fast, and as a result of climate change, wildfires have become more frequent and severe.
 
When he thins out the forests, Schaedel collects debris and burns it in piles so that it doesn’t become fuel for future fires. It’s common practice in the industry, but it releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and creates air pollution. So he and others are turning to the carbonator—which burns the material in a controlled way that traps carbon and creates a product called biochar—instead.
 
After two weeks of trying it out, he was impressed with the results. His team was burning debris that would fill 60–80 dump trucks daily with little to no smoke. But the second half of their plan is bound to be more difficult. Schaedel’s team is working with a group called Blackfoot Challenge to convince western Montana farmers to take the biochar and add it to their soils.

1,000 Farms Collecting Hard Data on Regenerative Agriculture
BY TWILIGHT GREENAWAY

Running through the stats from the first year of the 1,000 Farms Initiative on the phone recently, Jonathan Lundgren sounded proud and a little surprised by all that his small team of scientists has been able to accomplish. And it’s understandable: Since they set out to start researching regenerative farming systems across North America last spring, the scientists from Lundgren’s North-Dakota based Ecdysis Foundation have made some serious headway.

According to Lundgren, they gathered data and “quantified life” on 389 operations where forward-thinking farmers are reducing tillage, planting cover crops, diversifying plant life, and practicing managed grazing across 15 different states. They visited farmers who are on the cutting edge of regenerative agriculture, including those managing bison pastures, growing more than one crop in the same field (AKA intercropping), perennializing wheat, and integrating animals into orchards.

While out in the fields, the scientists took 20,000 soil samples by hand using long “cores” or tubes. They tested the way water infiltrates the soil, cataloged the plants, birds, and mammals on the farms, and used nets to collect and count insects, reaching 1 million bugs by November.

Over the remaining nine years of the project, they aim to answer pressing questions like: How much carbon can farmers help store in the soil? And what role can soil health play in combating drought? The research also stands to turn into hard data what farmers and soil health scientists have long noticed anecdotally.

Take the almond farm transitioning to regenerative practices that Ecdysis scientists visited this summer near the southern end of California’s Central Valley. “It’s 100 degrees out everywhere else. You walk into this orchard and with all of your senses you can feel that it's something different,” says Lundgren. “The temperature is 10–15 degrees cooler. You hear birds, you see bugs, you smell organic matter. My job as a scientist is to put all those things  into numbers.” One of the most noticeable differences on that farm, says Lundgren, was the centimeter of topsoil it had added in just one year. “And that's in the desert,” he said.

Nearly all of the farmers in the study are swimming upstream in places where conventional agriculture—and the policies that support it—rule the day. And Lundgren and others hope the data that Ecdysis gathers might help change those policies.

For example, Lundgren recalls visiting one outlier farmer practicing intercropping to build soil health in Northern Montana who was struggling to get crop insurance. “Crop insurance agents in that region said, ‘Intercropping isn't a best management practice. When you lose [crops due to bad weather], you’re on your own.’ And that’s really stifling innovation,” he says.

Helping farmers make the case for regenerative practices may also help some bridge divides with their convention ag focused friends and neighbors—such as the Montana farmer’s father, who Lundgren said disapproved of his son’s approach.

When the Ecdysis team arrived at the farm, Lundgren recalls, “I walked over and I shook his [father’s] hand and said, ‘You know, what your son is doing is so special that we drove out an entire scientific team to see his field.’ And you could tell that mattered to him. They stood a little closer together after that. We moved the needle.”

Lundgren hopes to add an additional 500 farms to the study in 2023, although the list’s growth (and the size of the staff available to study those farms) will depend largely on funding. However, one recent development promises to help Ecdysis ensure that it reaches often-marginalized farmers as well as marginalized practices: A recent grant from the Rockefeller Foundation will allow the 1,000 Farms Initiative to develop a fellowship for Black, Indigenous, and other people of color to train underrepresented groups in regenerative agriculture.

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California’s Healthy Soils Program Is Mainstreaming Climate-Smart Farming
BY TILDE HERRERA

After Napa’s Atlas Fire destroyed 75 percent of Hossfeld Vineyards in 2017, the family-owned winery faced the expensive prospect of repairing its soil—the top layer had been stripped of all organic matter—and rebuilding a healthy ecosystem. Thankfully, says winemaker Hayley Hossfeld, the winery received an $82,000 grant to help pay for hedgerow planting, cover crops, compost application, and mulching—practices that improve soil and its ability to sequester carbon.
 
Now three years into the grant, which is part of California’s groundbreaking Healthy Soils Program (HSP), the drought-tolerant cornflowers and phacelia Hossfeld planted have become popular with insects and wild bumblebees, and her cover crops and hedgerows are thriving. “This program helped me carry out my goal to improve the organic matter in my soil,” she says. “I don't think I could have done that without it.”
 
The state initiative was hailed as a “win-win policy” when it was established in 2016 for its potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions while boosting soil fertility, drought resistance, and crop yields. The Healthy Soils Program (HSP) funds two project types: incentive projects to help farmers and tribal communities implement healthy soil practices, and demonstration projects, where farmers collaborate with universities, nonprofits, or resource conservation districts to showcase healthy soil practices for education and research purposes.
 
In its first three years, HSP funded more than 640 incentive and demonstration projects worth $42.1 million. Those figures soared in the 2021–2022 fiscal year, when the program funded 940 incentive and demonstration projects with $66 million that year alone, the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) announced in June. CDFA says that since 2017, HSP has awarded more than $107 million in projects that will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by an estimated 367,717 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.

That’s not the only way that HSP has evolved over the past six years:
 
• Project types: HSP incentive projects now cover more than 25 practices, including whole orchard recycling; silvopasture; nutrient management, which requires farmers to reduce their fertilizer use by 15 percent; and filter strips. The most common projects are compost application, cover crops, and hedgerow planting. Demonstration projects include many of the same practices, along with others that have been less studied such as biochar applications, vermicomposting (worm-assisted composting), and mycorrhizal (fungi) application.
 
• Funding: HSP received zero funding in the 2017–2018 and 2020–2021 fiscal years before its budget rebounded with $75 million in 2021–2022 and $85 million in 2022–2023. But since the latest funding appropriation is considered a short-term budget surplus (and next year is likely to be slim), CDFA can’t staff up. However, a tentatively approved block grant program will award larger grants to NGOs, universities, tribes, and other entities to administer HSP regionally.
 
• Demand: The number of farms interested in participating in HSP consistently outpaces the funding. For example, HSP awarded only 70 percent of the incentive applications it received last year. “If we reflect back on that first year or two, “says Brian Shobe, deputy policy director at California Climate and Agriculture Network, “we weren't sure if there would be enough demand. And every year, that funding has increased, and now we're over 10 times as much funding and we're seeing growing demand from producers. I think that's a success in itself."
 
What’s more, the program has brought little-known practices into the mainstream, Shobe said. "The idea of healthy soils as a climate solution that can reduce GHG emissions and sequester carbon has been normalized within the legislature.”
 
While HSP was a first for the nation, a slew of similar programs have since been approved in states such as New Mexico, Colorado, Maine, Maryland, and New York, which promise to further expand practices that stand to benefit farmers, underground ecosystems, and the climate.

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Urban Farms Can Take Soil Remediation Into Their Own Hands
BY MATTHEW WHEELAND

In 2019, we reported on an effort by the New York City Housing Authority to bring clean, lead-free soil to urban farms in its public housing projects. And yet while New York was able to repurpose freshly excavated soil for urban farms, most cities aren’t able to offer such a significant investment of resources.
 
“It is really hard to have robust urban farming without municipal support,” especially if you want to scale up safely, says Rachel Surls, the sustainable food systems advisor for the Los Angeles County Cooperative Extension.
 
The first step in growing food safely—whether you’re in a city, suburb, or rural area—is to learn the history of the site, Surls says. “Look at old maps at the public library, like Sanborn maps,” she says, to get a sense of whether businesses like gas stations, auto body shops, or dry cleaners were located on the site. “There are all kinds of light industrial uses that come with different degrees of risk,” she adds.
 
Then, get a professional laboratory soil test, which will reveal pollution from some of the most common heavy metals. If the test comes back with risky levels of lead, you’ll want to figure out how to address it. “People believe they’re most likely to get [exposed to] lead from eating the produce in your urban garden,” Surls says. “But the most likely way is if you leave your soil bare, get soil on your fingers, and breathe it in.” Wind can also blow up contaminated dust.
 
If your soil is contaminated, or even just lacking in the organic matter needed for plants and insects to thrive, then it becomes a question of whether you should remediate that soil or bring in new soil—a potentially expensive endeavor.
 
Keeve Nachman, an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, has found that bringing in new soil isn’t always necessary. In 2017, Nachman and a team of researchers at the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future began an in-depth study of the soil health at Baltimore’s urban farms. The study, published in 2021, found that almost every farm was within safe levels for contaminants like lead.
 
“We often recommended mitigation strategies that don’t involve expensive digging and hauling,” Nachman explained. “We know how to prevent exposure without a lot of cost or effort.”
 
As Surls and Nachman both explained, it starts with knowing the history of the land, and then keeping the soil covered—cover crops and mulch help retain water, reduce dust, and return nutrients to the soil. From there, you’re just getting started, says Maurice Small, a Georgia-based farmer, trainer of farmers, and longtime champion of sustainable farming.
 
“Nature is very patient, so you have to be patient as well,” he says. Small starts his farm projects with a two-week observation period, learning to understand the contours of the land. And after that? “Become like Johnny Appleseed; sprinkle some stuff here and there, things will start to pop up, and as that happens, you’re helping nature enhance itself.”
 
“It has taken a generation for the idea to sink in that you don’t have to have a tractor to make good food—you don’t have to have a million-dollar machine to make a profit,” Small says. And while the country’s small farmers have made consistent progress in taking a more soil-first approach to growing, he adds, “we have a long way to go to improve our soil, to improve our farms, and to improve our lives.”

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The Check-In: David Montgomery & Anne Biklé: Soil Health Is Human Health
BY NAOMI STARKMAN

In their new book, What Your Food Ate: How to Restore Our Land and Reclaim Our Health, geologist David R. Montgomery and biologist Anne Biklé make a compelling argument that regenerative farming practices result in healthier soil and higher nutrient density in food.

In the book, the husband-and-wife team share the results of their own extensive research and the existing literature on soil health. Conventional farming practices, including tillage and commercial fertilizers, disrupt the necessary, healthy symbiosis between plants and the soil, they write, noting, “We traded away quality in pursuit of quantity as modernized farming chased higher yields, overlooking a farmer’s natural allies in the soil.”

We spoke with them recently about the nutrients that set food grown with regenerative practices apart, and why they believe those practices, including the no-till method’s greater capacity for holding water and preventing soil erosion, could be a key solution to drought in the West.

Fifteen years ago, when you wrote Dirt, there were very few people talking about soil health or about changing farming practices. How have things changed in that time?

David Montgomery: I'm impressed by how things have changed over the last 15 years. It has been very interesting to see the growing interest, not just among people who are interested in reforming the food system, but among farmers looking to farm better and to be more profitable. And there are all kinds of interests that have come together in the last 15 years that give me a lot of hope for continued momentum.

Anne Biklé: Farmers are definitely beginning to change their practices. Initially, a lot of the no-till movement was among conventional farmers. And I'm heartened to see that it has also crept out into the organic world. It’s really important that all farmers are seeing that the less we physically or chemically disrupt the soil, the better off the health of that soil is and then that can ripple out through their operations and pocketbooks. I hope that continues to catch on. I don't think we've run into anybody who said, “I'm against soil health.”

Montgomery: There has been a lot of interest from farmers, consumers, and even companies, in terms of thinking about how they want to position themselves in the marketplace. We’ve spent a lot of time in the last 100 years worrying about growing enough food to feed everybody—and that's a legitimate concern. But we took our eye off the ball collectively about the way that farming practices influenced the quality of food. It's heartening to see a growing interest in that because I think we firmly believe we can harvest an abundance of very nutritious food to nourish the world. And if we can set our sights on that, as farmers, as consumers, as companies, and as governments, that can really help reform and change agriculture over the next few decades. Soil health is being talked about at COP 27, and there’s talk about support for regenerative agriculture in the farm bill. People are starting to pay attention.