An Open Letter from a Farmer to People Who are Passionate about the Planet

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.

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."