HEATHER SMITH THOMAS

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Revolutionary Agriculture— Educating Farmers One at a Time

BY HEATHER SMITH THOMAS

Michael 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 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 dad about soil—just about yield, tractors, This field is an example of the improved forage stand that resulted from high stock density grazing on one of the participant farms.

diesel fuel and technology. I was into all that, and loved to farm, but then started to realize that this system is broken and not making any money. The farmers who have changed how they are doing things, and get their soils turned around, are suddenly realizing they are making more money. “It’s still farming; there’s no magic involved. It’s not like suddenly everything is going to be perfect, but we realize this is the solution to the problem—the solution we’ve been waiting for. I had been waiting for this for 30 years.”

The Need for Change

Michael believes it will take a revolution to change our present agricultural system. “I was asked to speak at a group of producers in Pipestone, Manitoba who met to discuss how agriculture could change the conversation about climate change. I said that unless they come to terms with the monolith that agriculture has become, they are not going to beat it. There is too much power behind it. But we can try to change agriculture itself,” says Michael.

“I have been trying to find ways to help agriculture, one farm at a time, to help farmers figure out how to get out of the trap they are in. They sense that something is wrong but are not sure what it is or how to fix it,” he says.

“The story they’ve been taught, and bought into, doesn’t allow them the tools to get out of that trap. Community dynamics make it even more difficult; people want to belong and do what everyone else is doing. If they start doing something different, their friends and neighbors start talking about them in a negative way.”

In his consulting work he tries to help farmers understand the big picture because he feels that most farmers have accepted the idea that agriculture is simple. “There has been a dumbing down,” says Michael. “We tell ourselves that the answer to every problem is simple. If you have a weed problem you spray. If your soil isn’t producing enough, you fertilize. We want simple answers to a complex question.

Michael is concerned that farmers know very little about soil biology, so they have simplified everything. “That’s dangerous. The answers they get when they talk to someone like me rather than to their ag supplier are more complicated (and that’s a harder sell). Our dependence on technology has simplified ag, so it’s very difficult to now add complexity and more diversity and quit growing monocultures, and integrate livestock back into the monoculture annual cropping systems. I try to help farmers understand this,” says Michael.

Creating Long-Term Solutions

So how do we fix these problems? “We can start with the energy cycle by pumping more carbon back in (which can be done with livestock),” says Michael. “Here in Manitoba people are starting to talk about carbon tax, but there is huge potential for agriculture to be part of the solution. Right now the ag groups are fighting to the death to be exempt from the carbon taxes, though agriculture in Manitoba represents half of all greenhouse gas emissions. Half of agriculture’s half is simply from making and using nitrogen fertilizer. We could cut ag emissions in half just by reducing nitrogen fertilizer use. This would be easy because we could just grow legumes. We don’t need nitrogen fertilizer; it’s a luxury and wasteful.”

Michael notes that chemical fertilizer also has a very short term benefit. You have to keep using it and it doesn’t add as many nutrients to the soil as does a natural source like a legume or livestock urine/manure. “The challenge is that a grain farmer wants to plant his crop, harvest it, and go to Arizona for the winter and not worry about owning livestock. When you are living that life, you are ‘successful’ but also stuck in that cycle. Some farmers come back to Manitoba in time to get the crop in, and then can’t wait for harvest to be finished so they can leave. They hate what they are doing and that’s tragic,” says Michael.

“Part of this unease is because farmers don’t really understand what has happened and they are suffering from a stress very similar to a low-level post-traumatic stress syndrome. They have been going to war—doing a job they don’t really like—for the past 20 or 30 years. It is becoming distasteful, but they are trapped because it’s the only way they know to make a living farming, even though what they are doing is destructive.”

The grazing clubs Michael works with are mainly cattle producers (mostly cow-calf) but many of them have mixed farms that still grow some crops. “We are able to integrate it all together and talk about soil health and diversity, climate change, growing good food, etc. All of these things are coming together into a system we call regenerative ag.

“Our grazing club meetings are like group therapy—our meetings are much more than transferring information. Being able to talk to other grazers and farmers and sharing ideas can be very helpful. We suddenly have something that is quite special in Manitoba. After 15 years I can see that it’s turned into something that’s more than just trying to help farmers. It’s become more like a big family.”

One of the speakers Michael had present to the grazing groups was HMI Certified Educator Blain Hjertaas.. Hjertaas said farmers can build soil health without livestock, but not as quickly. Large-scale agriculture is increasingly specialized and big grain farms don’t want to deal with livestock. Advocates for regenerative agriculture counter this reluctance with the idea that beef and grain producers could team up. This could be challenging, however, if producers don’t share the same vision or can’t find anyone in their area that would be willing to enter this kind of partnership.

Hjertaas suggested that a co-operative cattle herd, purchased by outside investors, might be the solution to that problem. This large pool of cattle could be managed by a group of existing cattle producers who have the knowledge to run the cattle, and put them on grain farms whose owners want to improve soil health with cover crops or rotational crops that could be grazed. Revenue from cattle fed and sold through the program would then be shared between the grain farmers, cattle operators and the investors involved with the co-operative.

Through these kinds of presentations and summer farm tours, Ducks Unlimited has helped sponsor Michael’s work with these grazing groups. As farmers trust conservation groups like Ducks Unlimited and the programming they provide, then the opportunities for sharing new practices increases—leading to the regenerative agriculture revolution that Michael has been working toward.

Part of the Ducks Unlimited Grazing Groups Program is to have field tours on participating farms for farmers to offer opportunity for peer to peer learning.