University Place

Grassland 2.0: Restoring Grassland Agriculture

– Welcome, everyone, to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab. I’m Tom Zinnen. I work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Biotechnology Center. I also work for the Division of Extension, Wisconsin 4-H. And on behalf of those folks on our other co-organizers, PBS Wisconsin, the Wisconsin Alumni Association, and the UW-Madison Science Alliance, thanks again for coming to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab. We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year. Tonight, it’s my pleasure to introduce to you Randy Jackson. He’s a professor in the Department of Agronomy here and he was born in Glenwood, California, and went to high school in La Habra, California. He studied environmental science at the University of California, Riverside, and got his master’s degree in natural resources at Humboldt State University in California. Then he went to UC Berkeley to get his PhD in natural resource policy and management.

He came here to UW-Madison in 2003. Tonight, he’s gonna speak with us about Grassland 2. 0: Restoring Grassland Agriculture in Wisconsin. Would you please join me in welcoming Randy Jackson to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab?

– Thank you, Tom. It’s really a pleasure to be here, and I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to talk about this project, Grassland 2. 0. It’s a five-year project that was funded by the USDA. We’re about 2 1/2 years into it. And the title is sort of a nod to the importance of restoring, not grasslands like the way the grasslands were, say 200, 250 years ago in terms of their structure, but in terms of their function. And by function, I mean their ability to take carbon out of the atmosphere and build soil and store carbon and soil, which, of course, is really important for climate change.

Their ability to hold on to nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus, to keep ’em out of our waterways, their ability to foster and promote biodiversity, a thriving biodiversity, but maybe most important, their ability to support a diverse and thriving human population. And, of course, so much of our agricultural landscape these days is dwindling in terms of human population. And so the project is very much about trying to get more people back onto the landscape, back in agriculture through grassland agriculture. The project is based at UW-Madison. We have partners at the University of Minnesota and many other NGOs that are listed on the title slide here. And I’m not gonna read through them, but they’re critical to the approach that we’re taking, which is to try and engage as many people, as many organizations as we can to get excited about grassland agriculture and Grassland 2. 0. The project is based on this notion that Aldo Leopold left us. And I don’t know if a lot of other people distill it quite this concisely. But for me, the takeaway message that Leopold left us with is that when we take care of the land and when we care for the land, that we really are taking care of ourselves, that we’re caring for our well-being, and that there’s an identity here and that’s purposeful.

And that is that when we take care of people who care for the landscape, who care for the land, that that’s an important thing too. And, of course, those are farmers, primarily. Farmers and land owners who are charged with this super special responsibility of taking care of the land, which is in essence, taking care of all of us, whether it’s food production or clean water or helping to stabilize climate, reducing flooding, et cetera, farmers have this special relationship with the rest of society. And this is part of what Leopold tried to get us to think about back in the early part of the 20th century. And it’s interesting, a few colleagues of mine have actually said, it’s a little bit sad that so far, Leopold’s legacy seems to be primarily a literary legacy. That is, we haven’t really stepped up to what he left behind for us with respect to our actual management. Maybe that’s painting with too broad of a brush. We certainly have worked hard in the conservation realm in places, but we need more widespread conservation in agriculture. My 20-year effort here at Wisconsin, at UW-Madison has been searching for ways to blend productive agriculture with conservation and to do that in the same place. In other words, not to separate where we produce our food, where we produce our feed from the notion of nature or vital, thriving, functioning ecosystems.

We have to have production systems that are thriving, vital ecosystems. And, of course, since the mid part of the 20th century, following World War II, we basically have found any manner of way possible to pour energy into our agricultural systems in ways that help us extract and produce as much yield as possible. So we’ve cracked open the soil, we’ve cracked open our landscapes, basically wall to wall in farmland. And we’ve done that with the tremendous amount of steel, the excess steel production, the capacity that we had at the end of World War II, and with the excess nitrogen fertilizer capacity that we had at the end of World War II. Nitrogen fixation, where we take nitrogen from the atmosphere and turn it into inorganic forms of nitrogen is the first step in making bombs, basically. And so we had a tremendous capacity to do that after World War II. And we’ve taken that and channeled it into our agricultural production systems, and with great benefit. I mean, it’s been an immensely productive agriculture. But it’s come with great cost. And I’m gonna walk through a little bit about what those costs have been.

But it is important to keep in mind that there have been tremendous benefits as well. One of the main costs has been that we have, rather quickly, but we continue to wear down our soil organic matter. Often, we interchangeably use the term organic matter, soil organic matter and soil carbon. The organic matter is about half carbon. You can see here in this cartoon that when the plow initially came to our grasslands and our forests, but in this part of the world, it was primarily in the grasslands. As soon as we disturbed and tilled up that soil, we liberated a massive amount of carbon off to the atmosphere. And that continued as we continued to till and plow the soil and disturb the soil. And you can see that it was very quick, very quickly, over a matter of decades, we had worn away about half of the organic matter. And by wearing it away, I mean, we liberated it to the atmosphere primarily, but we also caused it to erode in waterways and find its way downstream. So much of our current efforts in sustainable agriculture or regenerative agriculture, there are lots of names for it.

So much of it is trying to put ourselves on a new trajectory where carbon and organic matter are actually accumulating under our agricultural production systems. And, of course, there’s a buzz in the world today around the idea that we might be able to build carbon, accumulate carbon and store it in our agricultural soils as well as our forest soils and wetlands and all this. There’s a tremendous amount of interest in agricultural production systems that might be able to take carbon out of the atmosphere and store it in the soil. So much interest that the Biden administration and the USDA recently put on the table $1 billion for pilot projects looking to get more so-called climate-smart commodities out on the landscape. And they have a long list of what they mean by climate-smart. It’s agricultural systems that include cover crops in those systems, that include no tillage, they don’t disturb the soil the way we used to, and lots of other things as well. But it’s interesting and a little bit ironic that the USDA now is trying to find ways to put carbon back in the system while at the same time, they incentivize and reward with payments and insurance and other types of incentives a type of agriculture that continues to wear away carbon and liberate it and put it into the atmosphere. Not the first time that the government has set up rather ironic counter, purposeful projects, but this is where we’re at right now. When I mentioned that the current agriculture is basically liberating significant amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, I mean, not only from the soils that the agriculture is done in, but the overall agricultural production system. And so corn is a good example of this.

Maybe the best example of this. Here in the United States, we have 300-something, 320 million acres of ag land. About 105 million acres of that ag land, about 1/3 of it is planted to corn every year. And you can see here on the left, about 40% of that corn goes to feed livestock. Mostly, those livestock are in what we call confined animal feeding operations or feed lots, when it’s beef cattle or swine. Most of our dairies in Wisconsin nowadays are confinement operations, where animals are concentrated into small areas, their feed is produced out on the ground, out on the landscape and hauled into them, fed to them, and then their manure and excreta is scraped up and returned back out to the land. So you can see that about 40% of our corn goes to that, to livestock feed nowadays. About 27% of it, and this number goes up and down every year. And these, by the way, are the Iowa Corn Growers Association numbers. About 27% of our corn goes to our gas tanks in the form of ethanol.

So-called first generation biofuels. And a big part of it, of corn goes to exports, export markets. It’s sold on export markets, 16% of it. 9% of it goes to food and industrial products. And, in particular, most of that is high fructose corn syrup for soda pop. But also, food additives to help make foods crunchy and to help processed foods stay, quote unquote, fresh for longer periods of time. But they’re basically, it’s for processed foods. Stuff that Michael Pollan might say you find in the middle of the grocery store, not on the edges. And then about 9% of the corn that we grow every year is residual, it’s excess. And sometimes, it piles up on the docks, sometimes it piles up in barges, sometimes it’s destroyed, but we have an excess amount of corn grain in the U.

S. every year. Lately, folks from UW-Madison and elsewhere, but the project was led by Tyler Lark, who’s a UW-Madison scientist and working with Holly Gibbs and Chris Kucharik and Eric Booth, and others here at UW-Madison, published this paper in the proceedings of the National Academies of Science. Very influential piece that basically demonstrated the negative effects of this renewable fuel standard, which was a government mandate, that 15% of our transportation fuel come from first-generation ethanol, ethanol made from corn. And so this has been in place since 2007. And these folks took a crack at estimating what the ramifications for the environment have been. The takeaway message is if you look at all these plots of the U. S. , in all cases, it’s caused significant degradation of the environment. It’s put more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere as N2O.

It’s caused an expansion of crop land, it’s caused an increase of carbon emissions, an increase of nitrate leaching into our waterways, phosphorus runoff into our waterways, et cetera. So it really has been basically a disaster with respect to the environment. Not only that, it’s been pretty clearly shown now that in terms of energy, it’s a net energy loss. So essentially, it’s a way of finding, a way of taking fossil fuels, like natural gas and oil, and turning it into energy and fertilizer that we pour into the agricultural landscape. We then extract the grain from the agricultural landscape, but in doing so, liberate more carbon to the atmosphere from the soils, and then we combust it in our gas tanks, putting that carbon back into the atmosphere. So that on net, it’s a net carbon loss. So it’s been a devastating policy is sort of the takeaway message here. And yet, it’s very clear that this issue is the bottleneck for getting elected president of the United States. When you go to Iowa, you better be ready to step up to whether you’re gonna commit to more of this corn production for ethanol or not. And if you’re not ready to commit to it, it’s been very clear over the last cycles, two or three cycles of presidential races that you will not make it through that bottleneck of Iowa.

So, not only is ethanol production devastating for our environment, one of the big pushbacks that we get when we talk about corn production is that we need this immense amount of productivity to quote unquote, feed the world. And I just wanna make clear when we export corn, we’re not feeding the world. It is being sold to relatively affluent countries where they feed their livestock. So when you hear the feed the world trope, it’s basically that. It’s trying to provide cover for this extractive industry where we’re extracting fossil fuel or extracting soil carbon from the landscape. More locally, when we think about dairy production in Wisconsin, America’s Dairyland, we have significant environmental degradation as well. Our confined animal feeding operations result in an immense amount of manure and urine that needs to be returned out to the landscape. And this picture on the upper left shows an industrial approach to taking that manure and returning it to the landscape. But it’s returned to the landscape, generally speaking, in the shoulders of the growing season, which is to say when the plants aren’t growing. And so there’s little or no plant uptake, as you can see in this photo, there’s no plant uptake during this period when the manure’s being spread.

And so that manure and the nutrients that are in that manure find their way into our waters. They leach down through the soil and results in nitrate in our groundwater. And this plot up on the right of the state of Wisconsin shows that there are very few places in Wisconsin where the groundwater isn’t contaminated with nitrate to levels that are dangerous to humans. A recent study up in the northeast part of the state estimated that cow manure is causing over 200 cases of acute gastrointestinal illness every year. And you can see, when you take water out of the tap, and that’s the picture over here on the right, that whether it has nitrate in it or not, it just looks awful, and it is not something that you could use as potable water. So this is devastating to local communities, absolutely devastating. Not only does nitrate leach through the soil, when it’s spread on frozen soil, or when the soil freezes after it’s been spread, when there is some sort of thaw, and I guarantee you that if you drove around on the landscape in Wisconsin right now in the early spring, you would see many of these types of scenes, where manure that was applied on top of the frozen ground is being picked up by water that’s running off, and largely, phosphorus is going along for the ride with soil particles that are being washed away over land. So we have this nitrate leaching, percolating down through the soil and getting into our groundwater. And then we have overland runoff of soil particles that have phosphorus attached to it, and also phosphorus is dissolved in that water. And when it gets into our streams and lakes, it has devastating effects.

It fuels algal growth, it fuels blue-green algal blooms, toxic blue-green algal blooms. The picture on the left here is Lake Wingra, basically unusable when they have algal blooms, and that is for much of the summer nowadays. The picture in the top middle here is the Yahara River, turned blue green as a result of algal blooms, and the bowl there that Emily Stanley, my colleague from the Center for Limnology, dipped out of the river. And this all aggregates down to the Gulf of Mexico, pictured down here on the bottom right. The phosphorus and nitrogen that also finds its way into the Mississippi River, and eventually, into the Gulf of Mexico. They both conspire, the nitrogen and the phosphorus, to fuel the same sort of phenomenon down in the Gulf of Mexico. And this has been devastating to shrimp industries and fishing industries in the Gulf of Mexico. So much so that we now have these really well-intentioned and popular programs where we bring fishers, anglers, shrimpers from the Gulf of Mexico up here to Wisconsin to introduce them to farmers in an effort to get them to make a connection, to make a connection to where all those nutrients are coming from and basically to where the devastation to their livelihood is coming from. So, in addition to these nutrient dynamics and carbon dynamics, biodiversity has been devastated by the way we do agriculture in North America. This paper was published in 2019 in Science, and the left-hand plot here shows the takeaway message at the highest level.

And that is that since the year 1970, they estimated that over three billion birds have been lost in North America. The middle plot breaks that down by habitat, and you can see at the bottom there, the brownish curve is showing that grasslands have really had the most precipitous decline of birds. And of course, grasslands are where we do agriculture. That’s the Corn Belt, grasslands shown in that figure down on the bottom right. You can see the hotspot is the Corn Belt. That’s the tallgrass prairie. And the way we use land and the way we manage land has caused a devastating decline in, not only bird numbers, which is what the first two plots, A and B are, but in the proportion of species that are declining. So the number of different species that are declining, you can see in grasslands is upwards of 60% of all the grassland bird species have been declining as a result of our land use and land management. And this is just birds. We could talk about other forms of biodiversity.

We could talk about arthropods, bees. We can talk about soil microbes, we can talk about fungi in the soil, we can talk about mammals, other critters. The biodiversity decline has been absolutely devastating. And so we’re really pushed to ask the question, why? For what? You could imagine that if this immensely productive agricultural system were immensely profitable for farmers, that would be one thing. But as this data that I’ve downloaded from the USDA Economic Research Service shows, over the last 26 or 27 years, starting in 2019 and going back to 1996, in the upper Northern Crescent, which is shown in the blue there on the figure on the right, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, over into the Northeast, across those last 26 years, there have been four or five years where corn has been profitable without some government support or some government payments to help buttress and provide insurance to farmers. But just taken on the market, you know, the income that comes as a result of growing corn, it’s been net profitable only 4 out of the last 26 years. And the prospects last year were not particularly better. This year, the price of corn is looking to be quite high. And so that’s part of the reason that people continue to stay in corn is because of the prospect that the next year will be super high in terms of the value of the corn. So in many respects, it’s sort of like gaming.

But it’s less like gaming because the government de-risks it. They provide insurance. We, I say they, it’s we. We provide insurance to farmers to help make them whole when the system goes negative in terms of profitability through a system of insurance and commodity payments that fluctuates from one year to the next. Thinking about dairy here in the dairy state, things haven’t been much better. Since I got here in 2003, we’ve lost, on average, over 300 farms per year or one a day, dairy farms go out of business. And it’s largely smaller and midscale farms that go out of business. And the devastation of that has been very real for people and for communities. So you can see here that in just Rock and Walworth counties, two counties in the southern part of the state, the numbers have declined since 1975 by an order of magnitude. Basically, we’re on track now with fewer than 7,000 dairy farms in Wisconsin.

If you play out the trajectory and if that rate of loss doesn’t change, we’re on a course to have say, five or six farms, dairy farms in Wisconsin by about the year 2035. It’s a precipitous decline, and it has been going on for a long time. And the reason for it is not a big secret. We produce too much milk, as The Cap Times so eloquently put it here on their front page a couple of years ago. You can see the byline there. Production is up, prices are down, and farmers are in crisis. And boy, are farmers in crisis. And I don’t mean to be flippant about it. It has been very devastating, not only to the farmers who give up and go out of farming, but to their local communities as well. And the reason that we produce too much milk is because we have this what we call productivist philosophy.

And it’s not just a philosophy, it’s a productivist approach to rewarding people who produce more and more. The focus is almost solely on producing more. And as a result, we’ve had a tremendous focus on squeezing more and more milk out of fewer and fewer animals. And so you can see that milk production has continued to increase even as the number of farms has decreased here in Wisconsin. The number of farms has decreased, but the size of the farms that continue to stick around has increased. And so you can see here that on the left, we had, in 1994, five or six permitted CAFOs, that’s confined animal feeding operations, in 1994 here in the state of Wisconsin. A CAFO is defined by the Department of Natural Resources as a confined animal feeding operation that has a thousand animal units, which is a milk cow or so, confined into a single space. And you can see here that by 2017, we had, I don’t know how many dots are on that plot, but I guarantee you that it’s more now in 2021. And they’re concentrated in, unfortunately, the worst place possible, the northeast part of Wisconsin. Door County, Kewaunee County, and on down the coast of Lake Michigan is what we call fractured bedrock.

It’s silurian dolomite bedrock that has got cracks in it, and it’s porous. It’s basically like a sieve or a colander. And on top of it, the soil is about five or six inches thick. So anything we put on those soils in terms of manure and urine, cow excreta, et cetera, much of it is going to leach right through that soil and leach right through that bedrock and into our groundwater. And so we have immense groundwater contamination up in that area, as I talked about earlier. So we’re moving from these sort of bucolic, pastoral, small farm landscapes to industrial situation. And some people argue that is actually a good thing, that it will help us and it’ll make it easier for us to manage nutrients and manage nutrient losses and that sort of thing. That has not borne out so far. These CAFOs tend to be sources of massive losses of phosphorus from manure lagoons that inevitably leak or manure spills that come from spreading the manure out on the landscape. And the inherently leaky cropping systems I showed you earlier, where the manure leaches down through the soil or runs off across the land.

But it’s been devastating socially to small communities. You can drive around Wisconsin and see these, what used to be vital, thriving, small towns that have dried up in terms of their business prospects and their infrastructure. Schools close, churches close, not enough population, young people are moving away. It’s just been devastating socially. So now that I’ve laid out the grim situation that we find ourselves in, we have to ask, what would sustainable agriculture look like? What would a system that actually is beneficial to the public good look like? And I’ve just made a checklist here of the things that we indicated to USDA when we wrote the Grassland 2. 0 proposal, that it would have these dimensions. That it would be profitable, this agriculture would stimulate rural growth and prosperity, that it would produce high-quality products that would support existing and emerging markets, that it would build and hold onto soil, carbon, and nutrients, that it would support biodiversity, and it would maybe most importantly, connect people to the food and to the land where that food is produced. And we think this is a system that actually is beneficial to help people get more in touch with where their food comes from and to get more in touch with the land. So I wanna turn to some data that we’ve been producing as part of the Wisconsin Integrated Cropping Systems Trial, WICST. This is an experiment that was started in southern Wisconsin at the Arlington Ag Research Station, the UW-Madison Research Station.

It was started in 1989 by Professor Josh Posner, who sadly passed away about seven years ago now. He started this experiment in the face of a lot of interest in whether or not organic crop production had the capacity to be as productive as conventional, sometimes we call it not organic production, the typical kind of production. And so what these circles represent are different cropping systems that he established. I say he, it was he and his team and lots of other folks from UW-Extension and the Michael Fields Ag Institute, et cetera, lots of folks that worked with Josh. They established continuous corn depicted on the left, where corn is just planted year after year after year. It’s planted with high inputs. That is, lots of inorganic nitrogen fertilizer, herbicides, pesticides, the latest genetics to maximize yields and increase productivity. Corn and soybean produced in rotation, which is that second middle circle there. And then an organic system, the gold circle, corn followed by soybean the next year, a wheat cover crop to protect the soil, and then clover, which is a nitrogen fixer. It takes nitrogen out of the atmosphere and puts it into the system to minimize or reduce the amount of fertilizer that you need to apply to the corn in the following year.

So that’s an organic corn soybean rotation. And then three dairy forage rotations. And you can see the corn with three years of alfalfa managed in a high input way. The organic corn with an oats cover crop, and then alfalfa. Organic, so no synthetic fertilizers, some manure applied, and then a rotational grazing system that’s perennial grassland, pasture, rotationally grazed by dairy heifers. Dairy heifers being those animals that haven’t quite reached, aged to go into lactation and join the milk herd. So this was an amazing experiment because not only did he establish all six of those treatments, but he replicated all six of those treatments in four replications. And each phase, which is to say like the corn soybean rotation has two phases, each one of those was replicated four times. So that corn soybean rotation takes eight plots every year, and so on. So it’s a massive undertaking.

You can see the picture on the upper left there, and it’s managed brilliantly by Dr. Gregg Sanford. And in the past, it has been managed brilliantly by Janet Hedtcke, who’s now the superintendent at the West Madison Ag Research Station. Okay, so one of the things they did was take one-meter-deep cores, which means all the way down to the glacial till, which is the bedrock. Everything above that is soil. And they did that in 1989, and then they went out and did it again in 2009, so 20 years later, with an interest in how much carbon, either accumulated or was lost over that 20-year period across that entire one-meter-deep horizon. I mentioned Gregg Sanford. He did his PhD work here. This is the main result from his PhD work. And so this is the change in soil organic carbon over that 20-year period.

And you don’t have to stare at this very hard to see that the takeaway message was every system was losing a significant amount of carbon, except for the pasture, the perennial grassland pasture, which neither gained nor lost significantly. I mean significantly in a statistical sense. It neither lost nor gained carbon. It held onto what it had. Now, interestingly, if you look at the different depths with the pasture, the surface, 30 centimeters, actually did gain carbon significantly. But from 30 to 90 centimeters, they lost carbon significantly, and so on. When you sum all that up, they didn’t undergo any significant change. All the other systems lost significant and relatively massive amount of carbon over that 20-year period. We’re currently analyzing the 2019 data to see what’s happened over 30 years and are anxiously awaiting those results. So our findings fly a little bit in the face of other folks’ findings, and there’s a bunch of methodological reasons that I’m not gonna go through all here.

But one of the main ones is that most studies deal only with the surface soil, whether that’s 10 centimeters, 20 centimeters, 30 centimeters, most don’t go across the entire soil depth. And so unsurprisingly, we found in some of these systems, I don’t remember which ones that lost. Some of them actually held onto what carbon they had originally in the surface horizon. Some of them even gained a little bit, like the pasture in the surface horizon, but lost so much at depth from 30 to 90 centimeters. Then on average, the entire solar profile lost carbon. And this is really important when we talk about things like carbon markets or carbon trading schemes, where farmers are getting set up to get paid for storing carbon, that is taking carbon out of the atmosphere and storing it in soils. And so if we think they’re storing it in soils because they’re gaining some in the surface horizon. If they are simultaneously losing it from depth, that’s a big problem because they’re not really storing, on net, atmospheric carbon in the soil. So that’s one of the methodological issues. Another methodological issue is that rarely do you have a full 20-year chunk of time to actually look at real changes.

Often, people infer changes by saying, “Okay, that plot’s been like that, “and this plot’s been like that for 20 years, let’s compare them and see what the differences are. ” So we have a very robust dataset, and it’s a unique dataset. Not only did Gregg show that the pastures held onto whatever carbon they had, Yichao Rui, who’s now the farming systems director at the Rodale Institute and his postdoc advisor, Matt Ruark here in the Soil Science Department recently published a paper that showed that the carbon that’s in the pastures is actually bound up in mineral-associated organic matter. So the y-axis here is MAOM, and that is carbon that is in some sort of ionic or covalent bond with mineral particles in the soil. And as a result, it is more stabilized. So it’s in there and likely to be in there for a while. And so you can see that while the pasture didn’t significantly increase the soil carbon that it had, the carbon that is in there seems to be more stable or more stabilized than the carbon in other systems. Super important finding. I mentioned Janet, who helped Josh run the WICST experiment. She ran this model called RUSLE2, the Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation.

We did not publish the data, but it’s a fascinating modeling output to look at. What RUSLE2 does is predict the amount of soil loss that you would see from a particular system on a particular slope with a particular aspect, et cetera. So you put all these environmental factors into the model and it predicts how much soil erosion there’s likely to be. And what you can see here is that the pasture was predicted to lose very little. In fact, the amount, which is less than a half a ton per acre of soil is about what we estimate the rate of soil accumulation to be in a pasture setting. So it’s sort of a equilibrium type of loss, if you will. We’re gaining as much as we might lose. In the red, I’ve translated the amount of soil that might be lost to the amount of carbon that would be lost. And so that’s what’s on top of each bar. You can see the organic systems in particular, the organic corn soybean wheat, and the organic corn alfalfa system are the worse off in terms of soil erosion or predicted soil erosion.

And that’s because those systems, because you can’t use synthetic herbicides and pesticides, a lot of mechanical tillage is used in those systems to help control weeds, especially in years where it’s wet early in the spring, and it’s hard to get equipment in the field and the weeds get atolled. Then we come in with mechanical doom and gloom, so to speak, and really churn up the soils. And as a result, make a lot of soil available to erode. So that’s something to be wary of when we think about organic systems. And a lot of people are doing a lot of really important work to try and find better ways to control weeds than churning the soil like that. Nonetheless, a significant amount of carbon is gonna be lost to erosion when we have these annual cropping systems like corn and soybeans. I wanna briefly talk about work from the super grad student, Ashley Becker. She just published her master’s work. And Ashley took a little bit different approach than we took at WICST. She contacted over 30 farmers all around southern Wisconsin and reached out to them and asked whether she could come on their fields and sample their soils down to 30 centimeters.

And you can see there, she broke it into the 0 to 15 increment as well as the 15 to 30 increment, and looked at the total amount of carbon in those soils and compared it to a nearby row crop field. And I’ll just cut to the chase here. Her results are that in the surface 15 centimeters, there was almost 12 tons, that’s megagrams, almost 12 tons more carbon on a hectare basis in the grazed pastures than there were in the annual row crop fields. Interestingly, from 15 to 30 centimeters, no significant difference, indicating that her diligence that she went through to make sure that the row crop and the grass field were reasonably similar in terms of their environmental context to begin with really made sense. Turning to water quality, I wanna point out some work by another super grad student, Tracy Campbell. She works with Dr. Chris Kucharik in the agronomy department. She used Agro-IBIS, which is an agro-ecosystem model that simulates carbon and nitrogen and phosphorus and water dynamics at a fairly small scale, like at a 30 by 30 meter scale. She applied that across the entire Yahara River watershed, which is pictured here on the right. And what’s pictured here on the right are the estimated phosphorus losses from the Yahara River watershed.

And those phosphorus losses, of course, end up in Lake Mendota, the Yahara River, et cetera. I showed you those pictures. Her modeling showed that in order to meet the EPA’s mandated total maximum daily load for phosphorus goals, and I don’t remember what those numbers are off the top of my head. But in order to meet them, if we start now and stay this way ’til 2070, if we reduce the number of animal units in the Yahara River watershed by half, and put half of the ag land into perennial grass and keep it that way ’til 2070, then we will have met the EPA’s total maximum daily load phosphorus goals. So it’s an enormous problem. I’m trying to give you a sense of the magnitude and the enormity of the transformation that we need to have if we are gonna have clean water in the Yahara River watershed, if we’re gonna be able to recreate, and swim, and fish in these water bodies, we need a type of agriculture that is fundamentally different than what we’ve got now. And the pushback that I get when I make statements like that is, well, people need to make a living. And they do need to make a living. And as I started out saying, we need to take care of farmers. We need to find ways to take care of farmers.

But when you look at the economics data as Jean-Paul Chavas, ag and applied economist here at UW-Madison did way back in 2009, again, looking at the WICST experiment, you see here that the rotational grazing, shown on the right there in the dark green, it wasn’t significantly different in terms of profit, that is dollars for hectare profit than the organic systems, which fetch quite a premium because of their higher prices for organic products. But you can see that the rotational grazing was higher than the conventional grain cropping systems. And that’s when those grain cropping systems received government payments. Again, this was modeled and the results came from this experimental farm work. But Jean-Paul built in what the government payments would provide the farmers in terms of income, and still the rotational grazing system was more profitable. When he stripped away the government payments, it was even more stark. And I don’t think I have to belabor it, but especially the organic systems were much less profitable when he took away what, at the time, was considered the organic premium. Nowadays, we would not consider it a premium. It’s just the cost of producing organic food. But nonetheless, the point is that rotational grazing perennial grassland can be quite profitable, if not the most profitable approach to take to farming in this part of the world.

And it wasn’t just that experimental station result that has found this type of thing. Tom Kriegl, who’s a retired economist from the Center for Dairy Profitability, downloaded hundreds of real farm datasets that had all of their income, all their sources, all their costs, et cetera, and that’s all shown here. Takeaway message was, on a per cow basis, the grazing system on the left there compared to the confinement system on the right was almost twice as profitable on a per cow basis. $780 per cow for the grazing system compared to $457 for the confinement system. He further broke down the cost of production as a percent of income, which is not quite an intuitive way for me to think about it. But I think economists like this, and what’s shown in the dark blue down there is that for every hundred dollars of income in the grazing situation, the farmer was spending $76 for that $100 of income. Whereas in the confinement system, they were spending $90 for every $100 of income. So it was more profitable. Now, the confinement system is more productive. You squeeze more milk out of the cows.

There’s just no doubt about that. But if it’s more profitable, why not do the grazing system? It’s a big, open question and there’s lots of conversation to be had around that. So we are bullish on grasslands, if you haven’t been able to tell by now. We see grasslands as agriculture that’s part of the solution rather than part of the problem. This is Craig Van Duvel on the right here in his pasture at his dairy farm and Adam Abel, a NRCS grazing land specialist, who helped Craig switch to grazing. And I would just say that I don’t think Craig would mind me saying that the switch to grazing saved his enterprise, it saved his farm because it’s reduced his cost of production so significantly. But it’s also he would say, improved his lifestyle, his quality of life. He says, now that he’s grazing, he does his chores in the morning, he milks his cows, he lets ’em out into the pasture, he makes sure the fences are in good shape, and then he lies down and takes a nap. Then he goes in and has lunch, and he comes back out and moves the cows. This is the kind of report we hear from graziers over and over and over.

Not only is it a low cost of production approach to producing milk, but it also is an improved quality of life for a lot of people. We see this as agriculture’s solution because young people are drawn to this type of agriculture. Every year, I bring 50 to 100 undergraduates and graduate students out to grass farms like this one out in Spring Green. This is Dick Cates’ farm. And Dick is pictured there in the bottom left in the red shirt, posing for the camera. But the students come out, the young people come out and there’s always a few folks who grew up on farms and that sort of thing, so they’re not too surprised. But most of the students who are suburban and urban, their jaws are dropped. They didn’t know that there could be agriculture like this that’s so bucolic and so regenerative and so spiritual, and so fun, and so profitable. And they get super excited about getting involved in agriculture. And so there are young people every year coming through UW-Madison that want to get involved in this type of an enterprise.

This is Meagan Farrell, who’s the daughter of Bert Paris, who does organic dairy grazing down out of Belleville, Wisconsin. And Meagan’s pictured here being interviewed by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. And she’s being interviewed because she’s coming back to the farm after leaving the farm. She didn’t want any part of it when it was a confinement operation, where the feed was harvested and fed to the animals. But when her dad switched to grazing and she came back for a visit, she realized this is where she wanted to raise her family. So she’s coming back to take over operation of the farm and is super excited about bringing her family back to the land. This is what we need, more agricultural solution, more young people, and more diverse people in agriculture. So Grassland 2. 0 is trying to do this, trying to help us move towards healthier ecosystems, healthier communities, and ultimately, healthier people pictured in our logo. But we are up against an immense, locked-in system, a system that is underpinned by an ethos of productivism, as I’ve mentioned, and efficiency.

There’s tremendous power in the system that keeps it in place. Academia is as much a part of that power structure as any organization. There are norms and institutions that support it and repair it and take care of it. It’s a amazingly resilient system, even in the face of all these problems that I’ve laid out today. So we have to find a way to crack that lock, if you will, to break that lock in. And we’re trying to do that in Grassland 2. 0 by coming at it from the top down and from the bottom up, as depicted by these arrows. And our top-down efforts are to collaborate with as many folks and as many organizations as wanna collaborate. And the four main things we’re doing in these collaborations are trying to raise awareness, like I’m trying to do now today, tell stories about success in grassland agriculture, to paint pictures of what healthy ecosystems look like, whether it’s the soil or the water or biodiversity, to paint pictures of what a equitable and diverse grassland system or grassland agricultural system would look like. We’re trying to develop models for what it means to help a broader, more diverse set of people get into farming.

Young people, across racial groups, across demographics, et cetera. Anybody who wants to farm should be able to farm, but we have to revise our policies to allow that to happen and to encourage that to happen. And we need markets and policies that provide a pull and demand for the products that come from grassland agriculture. Our great hope is that if we have enough of this, that we overwhelm the resistance that’s likely to come, that does come to change, the resistance to change because there are a few who benefit from the current system, who benefit from the status quo, but we have to drum up enough demand that we can overwhelm that resistance. Our bottom-up efforts are mainly focused on what we call learning hubs, which are place-based conversations in a few places in Wisconsin and Minnesota and Illinois to start out with, where we’re going through this process we call collaborative landscape design. A lot of jargon, but it’s important jargon. We really are keen to bring people together and connect groups of people who maybe aren’t used to talking to each other to explore what might be possible. And that just takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of trust-building, takes a lot of buy-in from people, and it takes some risk from people to set aside their preconceived notions, their models of the way the world works, and to put it on the table and engage in dialogue that explores, what does the world look like? Do we have any common understanding? Are there any shared understandings here? The whole idea being that we eventually get to a point where we can actually sit down and use some pretty powerful modeling tools to explore what new landscapes could look like, novel landscapes could look like, to design new supply chains and to think about what would be needed to get new supply chains in place to provide the market pull for these grassland products. To plan individual enterprises, the actual farms themselves, to sit down and think about, well, how could you be more profitable if you incorporated more grass into your system? And then to think about how we incentivize and support this change and keep it in place. But keep it in place in a way that’s dynamic and adaptive to an ever-changing environment.

So through all that, we hope to demonstrate what’s possible in these learning hubs. We have five such learning hubs now, I mentioned, in Minnesota, three in Wisconsin, one in Illinois, and now two more that seem to be emerging. They’re kind of greyed out here to give the impression that they’re emerging in the Great Lakes’ watershed basin up in the northeast part of the state and in the Red Cedar River basin in the northwest part of the state. So again, these are meant to be places that we come back to iteratively and recursively to talk about what’s possible in those places. Over time, we see that more and more demonstration of what’s possible is likely to help this whole thing spread, this whole Grassland 2. 0 notion spread. Hopefully, coming at it from the bottom up, as well as the top down, we gin up enough demand from citizens that we demand it from politicians, that we demand it from corporations, people that are selling us stuff, that we need healthier ecosystems, healthier communities, and healthier people. So I’m gonna wrap up now, and just thank you very much for the opportunity here. We’re really trying to inspire conversations about what’s possible out on the landscape. We’re trying to create new visions.

Our visions of a new agriculture, if you will. And we’re trying to grow agriculture in the image of the prairie. And we see that there are lots of opportunities for people, for people who are watching to get involved. And our website in particular has basically a list of opportunities or things that you can do to get involved. So if you’re an eater, which is to say all of us, stimulate demand for grassland products, you know, pay attention to what you’re buying. As much as possible, get your cheese, your milk, your beef, your chickens, your pork, et cetera from grasslands. If your citizens demand that your policymakers address social and environmental problems with transformative change, real change out on the landscape and not just incremental changes. Policymakers, likewise. We’ve got to have some courageous policymaking that actually plots out pathways forward that are not just tweaking the current system, which is fundamentally broken. Food processors and distributors have a role to play here in looking for new market opportunities and profit strategies.

Farm input suppliers have a role to play here, developing and marketing products that don’t degrade the environment, helping to restore productive grasslands. Farmers themselves need to look for opportunities to use more grass. Academics like me have the obligation to listen to and respond to communities to develop models of what’s possible in landscapes, supply chains, farm enterprises. This whole collaborative landscape design process is meant to be our effort to step up to this. And finally, everyone should join the conversation. Everyone needs to get connected to where their food comes from, everyone needs to get connected to the land one way or another. And we’d love to hear about your ideas, your passions, and help us build out Grassland 2. 0 so that it’s a movement more than it is an academic project. Thank you very much. Here’s our website, our URL, our Twitter handle, and our Facebook handle.

And I just really appreciate the opportunity to share Grassland 2. 0 with you.