Dear People Who are Passionate about the Planet,
I am a young farmer from Alberta, Canada. I recently listened to a round table discussion pertaining to care of our planet on a Christian podcast. It was a fairly good
discussion, but there were some comments about beef, organic food, and bees that were somewhat
uninformed (which is not unusual among the general population). Normally the comments I heard would frustrate
me. However, a short time ago, I attended the amazing Western Canada Conference on Soil Health and Grazing and I would love
to take a few moments to share the ridiculously exciting things that are going
on in the North American agriculture industry in respect to caring for and
healing our environment.
I’ll begin with beef.
Many consumers have heard the claims that beef is bad for the
planet. However, there were about 500 farmers and
ranchers at the conference talking about the amazing things that cattle and other livestock can
do, when managed properly, to bring healing to our planet.
We talked and learned about how beef cattle are an integral
part of protecting North America’s grasslands, one of the most endangered ecosystems
on the planet. In fact, if we take the
cattle away, the grasslands turn into deserts!
Instead of letting that happen, the leading farmers and ranchers are
learning the best ways to manage their cattle to keep the soil healthy. When the soil is healthy, the plants are
healthy, which allows the cattle to produce nutrient-rich beef and milk! Even more awesome, when the soil and plants
are healthy, our broken water cycle gets closer to being repaired AND the carbon
in the atmosphere gets sequestered in the soil through natural processes! Farmers are using some simple principles to
heal the land, the water cycle, and the air!!
How insanely cool is that?! As
for the issue of the amount of land required to produce beef, most livestock
are raised on marginal land – that is, land that is unsuitable for crops in the
first place. Using that land to grow
veggies instead of meat would actually do more harm than good. I could go on about how important beef cattle
and other livestock are to a healthy planet, but I’ll refrain for now.
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| Beef Cows on Pasture, August 2017 Photo credits: Neil Rysavy |
The next topic I’ll cover is that of organic food. Many consumers think that buying organic food
is what’s best for the planet and for our health, mainly because of the lack of
pesticides used in organic agriculture.
Actually, organic farmers can and do use pesticides, though their
selection is more limited. Not using
pesticides and synthetic fertilizers is an important step in repairing the soil
and ecosystems, but that doesn’t automatically make organic production better
or healthier than conventional practices.
Organic farmers can destroy their soils just as easily as others and
they can have food that is just as poor in quality as others. I won’t stop anyone from choosing organic,
but the added value may or may not be there.
Several of the keynote speakers at the conference I attended could be
organic producers if they just filled out the paperwork, but they refused to do
so. I think that says something about the types of conversations farmers want to be involved in. We want to talk about good things, not create fear of our competitors.
Moving on, I find concerns about the bees to be
interesting. Yes, bees have been having
some trouble lately, and yes, some of that is from chemicals being used to
treat other problems in agriculture.
However, some of the problems simply have to do with diseases that are
wiping out colonies. Other issues have
to do with modern-day cropping systems which don’t provide a variety of
flowering plants for the bees to visit throughout the season. Our fields all bloom at once and then the
flowers are gone and the bees have to work harder in the times before and after
the big blooms to find the flowers they need.
One of the awesome things we talked about at the conference was growing
poly-cultures – having several species of plants together in the field. The diversity benefits bees and has other
incredible benefits (depending on what species are planted) including carbon
sequestration, pest control, improved water and nutrient cycling, additional
feed for livestock after harvest, and more!
The greatest part of this, in my opinion, is that the world doesn’t need
to set aside millions of acres for bee farms!
This is an increasingly normal situation: a crop farmer
plants a diversity of crops in his field.
A honey producer brings his hives to the field and the bees do their
thing, benefiting both producers who require the bees’ services (pollination and honey production). Later, the bees are removed, the farmer
harvests his cash crop and a beef producer brings his cattle over to graze the
crops that were planted as a companion to the cash crop. The cattle add fertilizer to the field and
convert the plants to nutrient-dense beef.
Look at all the food produced in just one field!!! These are things that leading farmers and
ranchers are doing in North America just to produce food and it just happens to
be healing the soil, the water cycle, the air, the surrounding ecosystem,
etc. How incredible is it that God has
granted us wisdom to find the best ways to care for our earth while going about
our daily tasks! And we get to work WITH
animals instead of shunning them for being inefficient. I think that is absolutely incredible, not to
mention a fantastic fulfillment of what God has commanded us to do in Genesis 1:28
and 2:15!
I hope I haven’t ranted too much or bored you, but I was so
excited to share how God has been working in the agriculture community of North
America to bring healing to our planet that I just had to tell you about it! I believe that God calls all Christians to join Him as He restores the brokenness in our world - including in creation. These are some of the ways that farmers get to join in the work. What is God calling you to do?
Sincerely,
A Farmer
P.S. If you want to know more about what you can do to help agriculture be a healing force instead of a harmful force, check out my post, "What You Can Do to Help a Farmer."
