LIVESTOCK
&
Revolutionary Agriculture—
Educating Farmers One at a Time BY HEATHER SMITH THOMAS
M
ichael Thiele considers himself a revolutionary—trying to change mainstream agriculture and help farmers see how they might be going down the wrong paths. He says this is a quiet revolution, but he is passionate in insisting that it must succeed for agriculture to survive. His mission is to acquaint more farmers and ranchers with a bigger picture, a holistic view that can lead to better care of the soil. Michael says regenerative agriculture is the only hope for repairing the damage that’s been done to the land by degenerative agriculture and a total reliance on technology.
Managing Ecosystems
Michael grew up on a farm west of Dauphin, Manitoba, just north of Riding Mountain National Park. “The park is now surrounded by farms, and has become an island. It’s not a big enough ecosystem, so some of the wildlife such as elk, moose and wolves have to come and go,” he says. His father had a grain farm next to the park and a few cows. “We Having dairy cattle grazing cover crops is one of were busy trying the innovative practices that Michael has worked to farm and make to share with other Manitoba farmers as part of a living and didn’t the grazing group program. have time for Nature. There might have been a few birds on our farm, but we were not interested in birds; we were doing the serious work of farming. “This was the attitude we grew up with—that we don’t have to think about Nature or ecosystem function because we’re trying to make a living and feed people. Over there, in that little park, that’s where we can have Nature. I had to come to terms with these ideas and unlearn that attitude, and start to understand what a farmer really is. The farmer is actually a manager of ecosystems. I learned some of this at university, but never synthesized it into something meaningful; it was just a lot of different courses I took—including plant science—at the University of Manitoba, where I studied agriculture,” Michael says. When Michael was first exposed to Holistic Management he started 10
Land & Livestock
h
May / June 2020
to make connections between various fragmented sources of information and bring it all together. “I now have a better sense of all these ecosystem functions like energy cycle, mineral cycle, water cycle, diversity, and how it all fits into regenerative agriculture. I am now trying to work with Nature instead of waging war against her, with all the consequences of high input agriculture (and its high emissions, high costs/low profits),” says Michael. “I never found a good place for myself in mainstream high-tech agriculture. Something seemed broken, but I wasn’t able to put my finger on it. Now I understand, and realize the consequences of what we’ve done in the past 100 years—maybe just 50 years—of high-input agriculture. So I went into a conservation career instead,” he says. Michael has worked for many conservation organizations such as the Nature Conservancy, Ducks Unlimited, and Manitoba Habitat (a Crown corporation that does habitat work) and now does some contract work and consulting. Currently he is working with cattlemen via the Ducks Unlimited Grazing Club in Manitoba. “People like Allan Savory were pioneers of this idea of regenerative agriculture, systems theory, holism, etc. This is all starting to come together and make sense for more and more people who are realizing the benefits. Now we realize that farmers over the past decades with modern agriculture have taken all those cycles and big circles and pulled them apart.”
Holistic Approach to Improve Agriculture
Modern technology led to segmenting and a focus on small parts, to the point that many farmers no longer knew how to look at the whole. “In doing this, we have degraded our soils rather than keeping them healthy or building them up. A holistic view can help agriculture get back on track,” says Michael. “I got lucky about 12 years ago when I got to meet Gabe Brown, Jay Fuhrer and other educators in North Dakota. Until then, I never realized agriculture could be so much fun!” says Michael. “At the end of a farming career you want to be able to say that you made a living, raised a family, grew good food, and your land got better. “Many farmers feel that they don’t have time for Nature, which is exactly the way I felt as I grew up. I never had any discussions with my This field is an example of the improved forage dad about soil—just stand that resulted from high stock density about yield, tractors, grazing on one of the participant farms.
