VPT Online: ReGeneration: Abe Collins






	HOME episodes host & producers teacher's guide feedback Interview Transcript Abe Collins Sustainable farmers Ted Yandow and Abe Collins of Swanton, Vt., changed their farm from a grain-fed dairy operation to a grass-fed grazing operation, creating a positive effect on climate change. We spoke with farmer Abe Collins. Q: Can you talk about farming and global climate change? Abe Collins: So much of farming is tied up with the carbon cycle which is the cycle of life — birth, growth, death, decay. That’s the cycling of carbon dioxide, through plants and photosynthesis and then through the food web. It’s eventually that organic matter – humus — which the CO2 is turned into, that is the long term storage for giant molecules, carbon-based molecules, in the soil. And the formation of humus is being explored. It has enormous potential for sequestering huge amounts of carbon dioxide and storing it in the soil, where it becomes soil fertility, and grows us food from sunshine, air, water and soil. That’s biological farming. Q: I’d like to hear your story. AC: My family’s from northern Maine, but I grew up in Vermont. I mostly learned how to farm, became interested in farming, in Arizona, where I was living and working with young Navahos who were working to stop desertification on their homeland. They’re a great group of people, working with their whole families because they knew that their land was turning to a desert. It used to be healthy grassland, and they were using permaculture to bring it back. Eventually we found out though, that the old people were right. When they had enormous herds of livestock, and they moved in cycles across the land, the grass was there and it was healthy and they were rich. But when things changed, and they had to settle down because of new laws and stay in one place with their herds, the land changed very quickly. We ran into the work of Alan Savory, the African scientist who realized that we have to see environments as being whole and that the giant herds and the grasslands, and their predators, like humans, have co-evolved for a long time. They all need each other, and the soil biology needs the big herds, too. The carbon cycle breaks if you don’t have the big herds helping decompose the grasses in their guts. It’s all about the microbes. The microbes, during the dry season, live in the guts of the animals, and without these giant thunderous herds grazing and trampling the soil, the carbon cycle breaks and healthy land turns into a desert. So that’s really where I got into farming and doing this work that had to do with permaculture. Q: What is permaculture? AC: It’s a system of design that draws on traditions of sustainable agriculture from around the world. People have lived on land and not degraded it and been able to keep things going. Permaculture has taken all these traditions and pulled them together in a system design that has to do with observation and connecting all the loops, trying to bring it all back home, making all your mineral cycling, water cycling happen effectively, locally. Q: Tell me about the design of this farm. AC: This system of design is based on keyline, which is really the foundation of permaculture, too. Keyline was invented by a man named P.A. Yeomans in Australia, in the middle 20th century. He figured out that we could build topsoil very quickly. It started with systematic landscape design — designing all your roads, buildings, water layouts, fields, fencing — based on the water shapes of the land. It’s a lot of contour work. Q: What’s a contour? AC: A contour is a level line on the land. Like if this lake started rising, the shape it took across the land would be the contour. But Yeomans figured out that you need a lot of water in a dry place. It’s nice to slow down the water cycle — when it rains you want to keep the water around — so some big damns that were interlinked, and gravity irrigated and flood irrigated the land, that was part of it. But further, he realized that soil biology is the key to fertility and profitable agriculture. There are some basic requirements of the microbes in the soil — air, water and minerals – that makes the soil fertile. So using a subsoiler plow … Q: What’s that? AC: A subsoiler plow is a non-inversion tillage tool. It’s these shanks that don’t turn the soil like a moleboard, but rather just lift it, fracture the soil and loosen it, and the next time it rains, the water just falls into the land. There’s all this physical looseness and air and just physical space for animals and organisms to live their lives down there and for roots to grow very quickly. Q: You say water is important. Australia is dry. How relevant is this to us, in Vermont? AC: Soil biology has the same requirements almost everywhere — air, water, minerals, having a covered surface, not bare soil. The need for water in Australia is very pronounced. In Vermont, we’ll have a real good year, sometimes a real wet year, but we have real dry years as well. We’re in a rain shadow in this particular location. Given climate change and the fact that everything is also getting very unpredictable, it may not be a bad idea to throw in a few ponds, have some water on hand should you have a real long dry spell. Q: Now you mention climate change, with the Yeomans style of building soil quickly, what are you talking about? AC: The USDA has held for along time that it takes a thousand years to build an inch of topsoil, and that’s what Yeomans figured out; that topsoil can be formed very quickly. Q: How quickly? AC: They have a record of building 4 - 6 inches of new topsoil per year. That’s converting subsoil through topsoil through organic matter, so you have a formerly pure mineral subsoil and are incorporating lots of organic matter into it. Essentially, you’re composting grass roots and grass lands (that would include legumes and forbs) into the subsoil and creating topsoil. Q: Speak to global warming. AC: This is something that really needs to enter the conversation and our actions concerning climate change. We need to understand climate change. Too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has broken the carbon cycle. On earth, we have a mineral cycle which includes a carbon cycle. We have the water cycle. We have biodiversity and community dynamics. This is biology unfolding, nature happening. And we have the flow of sunshine through plants into the food web. That’s four simple ways of looking at ecology right there. If any one of them breaks, the whole system breaks. You have healthy land that turns into a desert, or ocean that turns into a desert or you have a mono-crop corn field which is the equivalant of a desert. The carbon cycle being broken means that all that carbon that used to be in the soil, as fertility, as humus, as stable organic matter, is now in the atmosphere. We’ve also released all these fossil fuels which are ancient plants stored in the soil. Q: Meaning oil. AC: Yeah, meaning oil, coal, gas. Now that’s been burnt, it’s all carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We have too much CO2 up here, and not enough organic matter in here, in the soil. Probably half of the carbon dioxide that’s in the atmosphere belongs in the soil. It isn’t related to burning fossil fuels, it’s related to the oxidation of organic matter through our farming and grazing. Q: Wow. AC: And it’s a pretty simple matter to return it. The numbers are so manageable, that I find it very hopeful. We’re at 380 parts per million carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We probably need to drop that to 100 parts per million very quickly. If the great plains were restored to the fertility levels that they had 100 years ago, we would do that. Worldwide, if the organic matter in all the land that we farm and graze currently was increased 1.6%, atmospheric CO2 levels would be at pre-industrial levels. It’s a very simple, fast thing that we can do, but we need to make the shift to a permanent covered soil agriculture. Q: You’re saying that if we increased the organic matter by 1.6% it would make a big difference? AC: Oh yeah, people do it very quickly. Soil carbon can be increased 2 and 3 and 5 % if you do all the right practices. Q: What are the wrong practices? AC: In terms of how to build, increase soil carbon, there are certain practices that work and certain ones that don’t. If we’re maintaining bare soil through any part of the year at all, guaranteed we’re losing soil carbon because carbon likes to oxidize, react with oxygen and burn off. If we’re adding synthetic nitrogen, that will burn off your carbon, too. If you want to increase soil carbon, you have to have covered soil. That’s the number one condition. It needs to be covered with decaying organic matter and living plants. And so perennial grasslands are this incredible way to maintain that soil cover. The managed grazing of grasslands is the fastest way to build soil carbon that we know of. Q: When we’re driving down the road, we see farmscapes, bare soil — triple whammy — but if you do the right thing — triple win. Is that correct? AC: I think so. When we maintain covered soil, when we have perennial grasslands growing, then soil is being built, the water cycle is being stabilized, slowed. Rain falls and falls in, because there’s cover catching it. Q: Why don’t we see covered soils? AC: I think that we’re seeing more and more grass farming every year around the world. When I was in the west, I took some time to travel around ranches that were practicing holistic management. These fence-line contrasts between people who were planning their grazing and using their livestock as a primary tool to harvest solar energy through grasslands, making a living and building topsoil, versus those who weren’t — it was phenomenal. You had healthy land with streams and rivers and wildlife on one side and on the other side, where you had rested land, land that environmentalists had somehow had the livestock excluded from, or where there was serious overgrazing, you had desert situations. Q: Managed grazing? AC: Yes. In brittle environments, seasonal rainfall environments, where you have a dry season and a wet season, big herds of animals are bunched for protection and moving as they would when there were predators lurking on the outskirts of their little camp. There’s either that or you can have livestock managed by people in a way that simulates that. So in the deserts, without the big herds — this was one of Alan Savory’s large discoveries — without the big herds of animals to cycle carbon, the land turns to desert. In this environment, compost happens because it’s always moist. If you just leave this land, it will go back to a forest. But if we use the livestock as a way to make a living as farmers, as a way to produce this perfect food, we use them as biological accelerators. We can build soil incredibly fast in this environment, with livestock and grazing land. So yeah, it’s a way to build topsoil, to sequester carbon, to produce food using animals, sunshine, air, water and not fossil fuels. Q: What’s your understanding of a perfect food? AC: It would be a food that would nourish us and pay attention to the food we’ve eaten over our evolutionary history. It would be high in Omega 3 fats, conjugated litalaic acids. That’s the fats that come from the vegetative phase of growth of plants, not the seed phase. Most of the human diet is grains, but we’re much better adapted to eat a lot more fat, from animals that have eaten grass or fish that have eaten algae — both eating the vegetated growth phase of these plants. Q: What was the process that got you to decide to go this route? AC: Alan figured out that if environments are whole and then you start pulling pieces out, things break down. And he figured out the grazing aspect. He created a grazing planning procedure based on a military planning procedure. It was possible to plan the timing of grazing and animal impact with large herds in a way that always regenerated degraded land, by doing this grazing planning. But the farmers or ranchers who were doing this, they would triple or quadruple their livestock numbers and then maybe they get divorced or they buy too many fancy things with their new money, and things would fall apart. Eventually Alan came up with a decision-making framework called holistic management that said that you have to get land, people and money right every time that you make a decision. And land in terms of the basic ecosystems processes. So, Teddy and I wanted to be moving toward some future state that includes land, people and money; let’s call it a holistic goal. We looked at what kind of life we wanted — quality of life, what do we have to produce, profit, a healthy landscape, time to be with our familes, things like this. And how does the land have to be in the future to sustain all this? How does the water cycle need to be — slow, functioning well, rain falling where it lands. How does the mineral cycle need to be — localized, carbon pulled from the atmosphere into the soil, (biodiversity needs to be high) and solar energy needs to be flowing through lots of vigorously growing plants being harvested by our wildlife, by our livestock, and turned into food and income. So a holistic goal is quality of life, forms of production and future resource base. We tie all that together, and then we just test decisions toward it, whatever major decision comes up. We want to make sure we’re moving toward that holistic goal in a way that’s financially sound, that does right by their people, and is going to make the soil better. Return to top