Healing the Planet - one cow at a time

July 19, 2024

Silvopasture is the deliberate combination of trees, pasture, and grazing animals. In our pastures we strive to have an abundance of trees to provide plenty of shade for our animals but enough sunshine to have grass under every tree.The USDA now recognizes the value of silvopasture in large part because its carbon sequestering abilities are greater than the sum of its parts.  A pasture with trees can sequester more carbon than either the same pasture without trees or the same trees without a pasture. A tree stores carbon in its woody trunk and branches while grass stores carbon in its roots. A tree on its own can sequester more carbon than the same area of grass, but not during a drought, and not during a forest fire – both of which are now happening with frightening regularity.

The Midwest prairies, along with the bison that grazed them, created six feet of the most fertile, carbon sequestering topsoil on the planet. For the last 100 years, that soil has been used to grow corn, wheat, and soybeans and is tilled annually - which releases all its carbon annually.  In much of the Midwest the soil is now largely infertile, and completely dependent on chemical fertilizers. What thousands of years of grazing animals created and bequeathed to us, agribusiness has managed to destroy in just a few generations.

Regenerative farming is loosely defined as any farming that regenerates the soil while producing food. Keeping the soil covered with grass, the carbon safely sequestered, and using grazing animals to keep the grass from turning into forest is in essence farming in nature’s image. Small scale regenerative farms are labor intensive and can’t compete with the conventional farms that produce food on a massive scale – mass produced food will always be cheaper, but at what cost to the environment? Cheap clearly has other costs. Livestock farming gets blamed for greenhouse gas emissions but it’s the tilling of the soil to grow the grain to feed the animals in confinement lots, that’s really to blame. It’s also the tilling of the soil to grow the grain that feeds our carbohydrate rich American diets.  It’s also the tilling of the soil to grow soybeans for tofu and other meat and dairy substitutes. Grassfed animals regenerate the soil - it was, in fact, the way the planet evolved.  It’s not the cow my friend - it’s the plow.