RAWLS: Why Doesn’t Everybody Do It?

Message below was sent to some members of the CCL Raritan Valley chapter and to other persons on 01-03-21.  It is the third in a series on regenerative agriculture with livestock (RAWLS).  Click tag “RAWLS” to see all.

Bill Allen    01-12-21

Hello All:

I return here to regenerative agriculture with livestock, what I call RAWLS, and begin with a review of some differences between it and conventional “industrial” agriculture.

Industrial agriculture is what you see in a picture of neat straight rows of corn stretching to the horizon on a farm in Iowa.  The land has been plowed for planting, and it will probably lie bare thru the fall and winter.  The farmer will have used fertilizers and pesticides.  The soil quality is poor and erosion carries some of it away every year.

A RAWLS farmer never plows the soil.  To plant seed he uses the “no-till” method, where a sharp disk is rolled over the soil and seeds are dropped into the slit.  He never uses synthetic fertilizers or pesticides;  he rarely uses herbicides.  He usually plants a cover crop after harvesting the cash crop (eg corn) in early fall.  Livestock graze this in the fall and winter.  Their droppings fertilize and help build healthy soil.  As the soil becomes more healthy it stores more carbon, that was in the CO2, that was inhaled from the atmosphere by plants.

RAWLS is the closest thing to a silver bullet that I know.  Except for the large corporations that dominate the farm and food industry, it’s a win for nature and all who live in it.  It is fair to ask, however:  If RAWLS is so great, why are more farmers not practicing it?

I can think of several reasons.  I will not try to judge which are most important.

[1] Habit, Tradition, Resistance to Change, Peer Pressure:  I am my best example.  I live in the house that my wife and I moved into with our first daughter 52 years ago.  I use a phone with a line the runs down the street, across the yard, into the basement, up to the study, and up to the handset that I hold to my ear.

Many farmers work land that has been in their families for generations.  They grew up learning from their fathers.  Following habit and family tradition, they continue doing the same thing.  They may hear of some potentially better practice, but they resist change from something they understand and are comfortable with.

Peer pressure is also important.  Gabe Brown, who farms 5,000 acres in ND, is a successful practitioner of RAWLS and an important advocate for it.  In his book Dirt to Soil he quotes a farmer in central Kansas:   “Peer pressure in agriculture is our biggest hurdle to converting to regenerative agriculture.”  Gabe has experienced this himself and handles it this way:  “People laugh at me and say that I’m different.  I laugh at them because they are all the same.”

Note:  RA is an acronym used for regenerative culture, and does not always include livestock grazing.  I use RAWLS to specify RA that includes livestock grazing.

[2] Lack of Information  Many farmers, perhaps most, don’t know about RAWLS.  Their farm neighbors are probably not practicing it.  They may have attended an agricultural college where only conventional farming was taught.  Gabe Brown’s son attended an ag college in ND, and complained that he was being taught practices that his dad had already abandoned.

The NRCS (Natural Resources Conservation Service), an agency in the Dept of Agriculture (USDA), has representatives who have for years promoted RA to farmers who will listen.  Writer and film maker Josh Tickell introduces Ray Archuleta in his book Kiss the Ground.  Ray travels the country and gives lectures on RA to groups of farmers.  The fraction of those who are sent notices and who attend is small.  Rays says this about those who do:  “If I get one in ten (to convert), I’m a happy boy.  Because farmers watch their neighbors, and that guy is gonna affect his whole community.”

[3]  Intellectual Limitation I have watched dozens of YouTube videos with RAWLS farmers and ranchers.  They say that each piece of land is different—because of features like soils, underlying minerals, topography, and climate—and that success requires studying these features and adjusting to them.  There is frequent examination of the soil and effort to understand what is happening there.

Gabe Brown began his RAWLS journey in the 90s after conventional farming and four years of weather disasters drove him to near economic ruin.  He now manages a very complicated and successful business with plants and livestock.  He learned how to do this by talking to scientists and other farmers, and by close observation and experiments on his own land.

In his book he shows a table of a “ten-way cover crop blend.”  It contains ten seed types and the quantities that are mixed together and planted as a cover crop after a cash crop of grain has been harvested.  Each is selected for what it will contribute to the quality of forage his cattle will graze during the fall and winter, or to the health of what he calls the soil “biology,”  the millions of macro and micro organisms that live in that ecosystem.

I suspect that some of today’s farmers and ranchers lack the intellectual curiosity and capacity for RAWLS success.  We may need a new class of smarter and better educated men and women, who will enter the profession with the freedom and commitment to observe, experiment, and learn.  I hope we will give them the respect that their profession deserves.

[4] Fear: Most farmers have families who depend on the income produced by their farms.  They may be afraid to leave something they know and count on, to something about which they know little, and in which they have no track record.

[5} Federal Subsidies: Many farmers, particularly those who grow commodity crops like corn and soy with conventional practices, lose money and are kept afloat with federal crop insurance and price subsidies.  These programs provide little incentive to change.

Example:  Land left bare after a cash crop is harvested is at risk of soil loss from high wind and heavy rain.  Cover crops reduce these risks and improve soil health, but they receive very little subsidy.  In 2017 only about 4% of US cropland was planted with a cover crop.  20% of land used no-till.  This left 76% of crop land bare and exposed during the fall and winter months.

In 2019 federal subsidies nationwide were 32% of all farm income.  RAWLS farmer Gabe Brown reports that he does not participate in these subsidy programs and is profitable every year,

[6] Influence of Large Corporations: As he was leaving office President Dwight Eisenhower warned of the growing threat from a “military-industrial comples,” that lobbied Congress to influence military policy and spending.  We have today what I will call a “farm-food complex” (FFC) of large corporations, that dominate the farm and food industries and lobby Congress to support the industrial farming system that enriches them. 

A typical Iowa farmer may practice industrial agriculture and alternate between growing corn and soy.  He is on a treadmill driven by the FFC.  Each year he will buy seed, fertilizer, and various biocides that cost him about $180 per acre on a farm of 400 aces.  He will probably have to borrow the $72,000 to pay for these “inputs” before he receives any crop revenue.  Total annual sales for farm inputs in the US is about $60 billion.

A major farm bill is adopted by Congress every five years.  About $75 million was spent for lobbying by Agricultural Services & Products organizations during the two years leading to the 2018 farm bill.  This group includes multinational corporations like Archer Daniels Midland (processor grain and other farm products), Bayer/Monsanto (seeds and pesticides), Deere (farm machinery), and Mosaic (fertilizer).

The same group contributed $22 million to political campaigns in 2020.  What do these large FFC firms get for their lobby and campaign money?