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“Our Turn at this Earth” airs weekly on HIgh Plains Public Radio.
“This farming has gotten so industrialized and out of hand,” Gabe Brown said. We were sitting in the shade on his North Dakota regenerative farm, watching several hundred chickens scratching in a field of mixed cover crops. They provided ready contrast to the ills Gabe was describing. Most chickens these days live in cages so small they can’t even spread their wings.
“Our Turn at this Earth” airs weekly on HIgh Plains Public Radio.
By lucky coincidence, my visit this May to the North Dakota farm of the remarkable soil health advocate Gabe Brown corresponded with a study being led by two other remarkable men. One of them was Abe Collins, who has spent most of his life raising cattle and sheep. He is now mapping the soils on regenerative farms such as Gabe’s,
“Our Turn at this Earth” airs weekly on High Plains Public Radio.
Often in our culture, when thinking about land, we think only about how much money we can make farming its soils, grazing its grasses, mining its minerals, or harvesting its trees. We think this way, understandably, because we need to make a living and secure our futures, but in that pursuit, we sometimes fail to notice what the land already gives us in its natural state.
“Our Turn at this Earth” is broadcast Thursdays at 6:44 pm on HPPR.
Could regenerative agriculture save the Ogallala Aquifer? That’s the question I first asked myself some months ago when I began learning about the Soil Health movement. I’d seen a video of Ray Archuleta, the agronomist who spearheaded the movement, demonstrating how non-tilled versus conventionally farmed soils absorb water. When he placed a clump of soil from a field that had been tilled year after year into a jar of water,
“Our Turn at this Earth” is broadcast Thursdays at 6:44 pm on HPPR.
Gabe Brown threw a drain spade into the bed of his pickup, and invited me to hop in the passenger seat. I’d arrived at his North Dakota farm earlier that morning and was getting a crash course in the art and science of regenerative agriculture from one of its foremost practitioners.
The first field we drove to was not one of his,
