The hippies of the 50s and 60s gave ecology a bad image in the United States. Caring for Earth didn't look sexy to Westerners once married to Eastern religion, communes, and psychedelics. That is, nobody was willing to listen about ecology if it meant listening to hippies.
The resultant eye-glossing affect has lasted. Unexpected redemption is on the way.
A HIP LEGACY
When I arrived on the campus of a formerly great American university in 2008, there were a group of city kids chomping at the bit to study in their newly-minted, "Sustainable Agriculture" major. These city kids had more enthusiasm than the rest of we enthusiastic ag majors. They also had more piercings in their noses. The women of Sustainable Ag often sported colored or dread-locked hair. The few men somehow tended toward the slighter side of this slim-build author, and were paler than their counterparts in majors like Agricultural Mechanics. Their overall countenances gave the distinct impression of having never driven a tractor or thrown a bale of hay. These were the ag campus hippies of 2008.
The SUSTAINERS talked about--you guessed it--sustainability, and organized some recycling on campus (if memory serves correctly). For the most part, the rest of us had no idea what these hipsters were talking about. While a few of we crazier Plant Sciences majors were interested in "no-till" cropping and breeding corn plants to be more energy efficient, all anyone seemed to hear from the Sustainable corridor was static.
There was a gaping disconnect--part of a chain of discord, opposition, and resentment, which I suspect spans decades. At the heart of the conflict is a simple (implied) assertion: that the hippies knew better about Earth than the farmers charged with "stewarding" Earth. The essence of the conflict has remained the same in mind, the setting changed.
Farm kids such as myself came of age in the RoundUp revolution, as well as the CAFO expansion. The frame of "sustainability" is a choking hazard for those of us who grew up in a scene of rapidly accelerating efficiency. (Compare: children who have never been without a cell phone.) With the talk of organic milk and vegetables, self-sufficient farms and more, the sustainable crowd sounded overwhelmingly regressive. And what did they know?
What did they know of freezing lambs and smothered piglets? What did they know of calves stuck in mud, or of breaking ice over water troughs? What did they know about our parents' lives? Of their summers spent weeding 120 acres by hand?
To all of those former days, we had already bid farewell and sighed. No thank you, we said, as we looked at weed-ridden, sad, "organic" corn fields next to robust modern hybrids. No thank you, dear hippies, we'll keep moving forward, we thought.
From where we sat, the sustainable crowd could keep their buzzword (2008 was a great year for buzzwords); they had no credibility.
...
Ten years later:
Thanks to some persistence, and perhaps to grocery bags, "sustainable" is now a household word. However, it is difficult to tell what the word means in common parlance, other than the opposite of "unsustainable." And therein lies the rub: What if, in the scramble to stamp certain farm practices SUSTAINABLE (or not), we all missed the plot? What if "organic" methods were no more sustainable than the allegedly unsustainable conventional standards, because both share a common, fatal flaw?
Yes, we have missed the plot for decades, or millennia, depending on how you look at it. And now, the plot has been regained. Regenerated.
THE UNHIP
Soil scientists in the early 20th century were grasping at the nature of soil microbiology and its relationship to fertility. Then, commercial fertilizers came online, and the research was left behind. The decades of movement toward fertilizers not only left soil microbiology research behind, but microbial soil life itself has been shattered and shed. That trend, which was unknown and unnoticed, began an inconspicuous reversal in the U.S. in the 1970s, by accident, it seems.
You see, David Brandt of Carroll, Ohio (below), is a self-proclaimed 'dumb farmer.' (I've heard him speak this way in more than one presentation.)
Brandt stopped tilling his crop fields in the mid 70s, not for conservation reasons, he says, but because he could not afford to own the necessary equipment.
After five years of no-till, compaction of the soils brought yields sloping downward. One necessity begat another need: a way to open the soil to air and water. Brandt discovered cover crops in the form of oilseed radishes. 
What Brandt seems to have begun, others followed and improved.
ENTER: THE NEW HIPPIES
Gabe and Paul Brown, North Dakota http://brownsranch.us/
The Brown's were instant farming failures when they began in the 90s. Attempting to grow wheat and raise cattle by conventional standards was breaking them. On the verge of getting a job "in town" in order to support the farm, Gabe made a change. He stopped tilling. Like Brandt, that change led to cover crops. And many, many more changes.
Today, Brown's Ranch sets the standard for what farming might and ought to be: Diverse, robust, "self-insured" (as opposed to federally subsidized), anti-fragile, you might even say.
Utilizing the work of Alan Savory and André Voisin before him, others are reinventing beef cattle production.
Allen Williams left Mississippi State University to become a rancher. Today, few know more than he about the intersection of forage management, animal nutrition and production, human health, and happiness. Williams left the comfort of the ivory tower to embrace the risk of ranching...
And there are those who teach.
Lastly, in the line of new hippies, I give you Ray Archuleta. https://vimeo.com/channels/raythesoilguy
When I met "The Soil Guy" last fall, I teased him, appreciatively, for his "abrasive" way of delivering his message. A good bit of laughter ensued.
Ray said, "You're right." He and his business partners don't sugar-coat, and don't beat around the bush, because people who aren't ready to hear their stories aren't going to listen anyway.
Farmers who are willing to listen will hear messages I find explicit or obviously implicit in the presentations of Brown, Williams, Archuleta, and others:
-'What you know about farming just ain't so.'
-Your agronomist probably isn't helping.
-Some of what you're doing is destroying the land, and that's destructive to your bottom line, and worse yet,
-It's destructive to your quality of life.
These are big pieces to put together, and even bigger pills for farmers to swallow. The big pill is part of what makes Archuleta an ideal poster-boy for the "soil health" movement. The first thing Archuleta had to do was swallow his career in the NRCS. https://www.nrcs.usda.gov
For decades, Archuleta was a government employee, supposed to be teaching and placing soil conservation. Then he found out that he was wrong. He learned terraces and waterways and buffers weren't doing a darn thing to keep lakes cleaner. The only way keep our soil, he learned, is to let it function like soil--that is, as the microbiological ecosystem that we now know it to be.
I think Archuleta expects to spend the rest of his life teaching soil health in order to make up for the years he spent teaching things he now knows to be destructive.
These are the new hippies of agriculture.
They're speaking of ecology on the most-informed terms possible. They're saying we should seek to rejoin ourselves with the land, as farmers.
When they're not talking about the truly budding science of soil--which is biological, not physical--they're usually talking about living in harmony with the land. These agriculturalists, no matter how modest Brandt remains, are wise in their implicit or explicit understanding of themselves: they are living parts of their farm ecosystems--their role is perhaps less steward than it is conscious member, whose job it is to PAY ATTENTION and act ADAPTIVELY.
As opposed to the hippies of old, it is evident that scientific study will back the new hippies soon. Contemporary claims that regenerative or holistic practices are supported only by "anecdotal" evidence will soon wear thin.
Unlike the environmentalist movement, the new hippies are firmly "pro-Man" within their "pro-nature" framework. They're anti-laziness.
Where the sustainability movement emphasizes "minimal impact" and indefinite repeat-ability, the new hippies favor purposeful impact and adaptation.
Practitioners of regenerative agriculture don't have to practice Eastern religion or go barefoot, but reading about either is worth consideration.
The new hippies of agriculture number far beyond these men, but they number far too few. Unfortunately, many modern farmers seem unwilling to listen. Even Gabe Brown's neighbors, whom have watched his family thrive on the land for 20 years, seem to disregard his progress.
This writing is a part of my own exercise in attempting to understand why the promise of regenerative agriculture has not struck the hearts of the men and women who most need it. Is it because they don't believe the science? Or don't want to change? Cannot believe what contradicts their lives' work? Or could it be that farmers hear, in the regenerative/holistic movement, traces of a language from a subculture they have long resented?
Whatever the reasons, I hope they'll start hearing us--we, the new hippies.
The way we grow our food makes all the difference. We must produce in a way that works WITH our soils, because our health depends on healthy soils. Can our soils depend on us?
For more information about regenerative agriculture, click most of the above links, or head over to YouTube.
The above commentary is intended more for humor than disparagement, candor more than shame, and thought-provocation above all.
Consider upvoting or at least sharing this article if it's at least good to learn about the regenerative farming movement.
*I obtained all photos from Bing search.
On Tuesdays I like to eat meals like these paired with a Irish Stout. Fridays are another story... evil laugh
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