Dirt to Soil: One Family's Journey Into Regenerative Agriculture

Gabe Brown didn’t set out to change the world when he started working alongside his father-in-law on the family farm in North Dakota. But as a series of weather-related crop disasters put Brown and his wife, Shelly, in desperate financial straits, they started making bold changes to their farm. To simply survive, Brown began experimenting with new practices he’d learned about from reading and talking with innovative researchers and ranchers. As he and his family struggled to keep the farm viable, they found themselves on an amazing journey into a new type of farming: regenerative agriculture. Brown dropped the use of most herbicides, insecticides, and synthetic fertilizers, a standard part of conventional agriculture. He switched to no-till planting, planted diverse cover crop mixes, and changed his grazing practices. He transformed a degraded farm ecosystem into one full of life, starting with the soil and working up one plant and animal at a time. In Dirt to Soil, Brown tells the story of that amazing journey and offers a wealth of innovative solutions to our most pressing and complex contemporary agricultural challenge: restoring the soil. The Brown’s Ranch model, developed over 20 years of experimentation and refinement, focuses on regenerating resources by continuously enhancing the living biology in the soil. Brown’s Ranch has grown several inches of new topsoil using regenerative agricultural principles in only 20 years! The 5,000-acre ranch profitably produces cash crops and cover crops, grass-finished beef, lamb, pastured laying hens, broilers, and pastured pork, all marketed directly to consumers. The key is how we think, Brown says. In the industrial, agricultural model, all thoughts focus on killing things. But that mindset was also killing diversity, soil, and profit, Brown realized. Now he channels his creative thinking toward how he can get more life on the land: more plants, animals, and beneficial insects. “The greatest roadblock to solving a problem,” Brown says, “is the human mind.”