Women of the Earth

- In July 2023, Vermont was hit with a couple days in a row of just massive rain and there was flooding all over the state.

It was devastating.

Farms were hit with an extraordinary situation.

The conversation in the subsequent years has been a lot around how do we deal with these heavy rains and a lot of water?

The healthier the soil, the more resilient it is to handle extreme weather events.

Soil's truly at the baseline and the foundation of where all life comes from and helping to encourage there to be healthy soil feels like a top priority and doing that in a way that is cyclical and regenerative.

(bright music) My name's Corie Pierce and I'm the owner of Bread & Butter Farm.

We got here in the fall of 2009.

We always imagined this place to be really multifaceted.

And honestly, the '23 floods showed us the resilience of just over a decade's worth of doing the kind of work that we're doing.

When you're working to be a land steward on land that has been conventionally managed and tilled for decades and decades and soil compaction is huge and real and fertility is low and all of that, you've gotta start with the soil.

You've gotta start by building back the soil in order to do truly anything with that land.

Being tuned-in to what impacts soil health is the baseline of where we try to learn and to think and make decisions.

The healthier the soil, the more resilient it is to handle extreme weather events, especially like heavy rain.

And so what happened in 2023 with the heavy rain events was a real wake up call I think to a lot of people because we were able to see where land was resilient and was able to withstand the rain and where it wasn't.

If you're looking at a really healthy soil system, you're seeing often dark organic matter.

You'll see that the soil is covered with plants growing over it.

You'll see roots moving through it, breaking any compaction that they come to.

You see little air pockets that are then made because of that, that are contributing to spaces where both microbes can crawl and move.

And also where water will be able to infiltrate as we have rain events as opposed to heavily compacted and not very healthy soil.

It's dry, it's hot.

There aren't plant roots in there.

The pore spaces have been collapsed with heavy compaction that might come from machinery driving over it or even heavy foot traffic going over it.

Water will go quickly through the top bit and then it will hit a point of compaction very quickly 'cause there aren't those pore spaces.

And so water's not able to move through many different plants.

Their tender little roots aren't able to move through.

And seeds that might be in the soil are unable to spring to life.

So our goal on all the land that we manage is to build healthy soil everywhere and it's gonna look differently whether you're in our pastures or whether you're in our gardens.

But the principles are similar.

Humans have obviously played a part in creating environmental challenges that we face, but I also think it's really important for humans to see themselves as an integral and important part of the ecosystem and their relationship to the land and to the plants and the animals and the soil that we can have a really beautiful positive impact.

Here at the farm, we are trying to reimagine what building community around the land can be.

Where are you guys from?

I think humans have disconnected a lot from the land and also from where our food comes from.

So when I thought about having a farm that I was part of, I really wanted to think about a way to bring the community to the farm too.

Our philosophy around farming is trying to mimic what we see that's actually happening in the micro ecosystems that are all over this land, while also making some choices to bring in some other new species, whether it's trees or plants or animals.

So we're raising mixed vegetables and small fruits year round.

And we're also raising a cattle herd for beef and then a small pig herd for educational purposes and also for their pork.

Not really piglets anymore.

- Yeah.

(cows mooing) - Grasslands and pasture lands, they are inextricably linked to the herbivores, the grazers of that area.

And we have sadly disconnected a lot of those relationships.

And so bringing back those animals is really that first line of defense for building the soil.

So we're about to move the cattle to the next paddock and they're moving anywhere from one to eight times a day based on the cells that we make or the little paddocks that we make.

And we're basically trying to mimic how this herd would move if they were a wild herd.

So as a wild herd, they would be packed up together, they'd be coming through and grazing and they'd basically be taking like the top bite of grass and then trampling the rest of what's left over.

And their hooves would dig into the soil kind of pushing down what's left over, almost like mulching it as they go.

So the relationship between the cattle and the grasses is enhanced as they're able to work together essentially.

So the cattle are eating the grass and the grass is able to respond to that disturbance and drive their roots deeper.

And as they poop and pee, the microbes are able to build soil more deeply and the whole system is enhanced across the board.

We've seen tremendous increase in the biodiversity and the water holding capacity and the organic matter in our soil in the years that we've been grazing these animals in this way.

So all in all, that symbiosis is able to withstand then in more extreme weather conditions like heavy rains because more water is able to be absorbed by the sponge-like soil.

And more plants, more water is held and more plants are only gonna be there if there's healthy, rich and deep soil.

- So the farm's been here since 2009 and we've gone from an average of three to five species per acre in fields we did not seed at all to over 21 species per acre.

So if you think about biodiversity and relationships, that is a dramatic increase.

All they're doing is living their lives and doing their thing.

And our job is to get outta the way as much as possible.

And it's really cool to see what they can do when you just let them do what they do.

(bright music) (cows mooing) - So they're talking 'cause they know, they see Brandon setting up the next line so they know they're about to get fresh grass.

The moms are talking to their babies and telling 'em it's time to go.

(cows mooing) (crickets chirping) Rogue Kolorabi.

I say these look a little like aliens.

Fun root.

I just think they look like they've like levitated up out of the soil.

So this is what we call the Keyline Garden.

We've established the beds there.

This is a bed, that's a bed, here's a bed.

And the pads are permanently in these spots and we've intentionally planted all of these beds section after section along the contour of this hillside here.

So the Keyline Garden is important in how it's oriented on the contour of the land.

And the best way to think about that is that as heavy rain hits the ridge of the land where the Keyline Garden is, it will flow down the hillside there and then the natural sort of flow will then spread it out along the whole garden.

These beds are kind of accepting that water and basically able to soak up more and more and more as all of the soil that you see right here is just so rich and full of microbes and full of tons and tons of life.

The goal too with the soil is that we're disturbing it as little as possible.

So these lettuces will get harvested.

We'll leave behind a little root stump there and we just leave that and we let the microbes just break that down and incorporate that back into the soil.

And then we can heavily mulch this with straw or hay and then we'll plant the next crop right into that.

So it's basically just a continuous system.

If we think about soil like a giant sponge, you know, if you have a nice giant sponge, you can soak up a lot more water.

So in the top six to 12 inches of healthy soil with every 1% increase of soil organic matter, the soil has the ability to then to hold over 20,000 more additional gallons of water per acre.

And so if we have a big flood event and there's plants growing in that soil, whether it's grasslands or whether it's our crops, the amount of water that can be absorbed is just, we can't even understand what that is.

It's just so much more than what we can think of.

If we have a field that has been heavily compacted over and over again, there aren't roots holding that in place, that is just literally gonna get washed away.

You're gonna get erosion, you're gonna get those gullies, you're gonna get all this beautiful hard-earned top soil that we've been working for just washed away.

So having plants and roots is the best.

Holding it all in.

And then when you can't have that, having that covered.

But we're pretty much like in a race all the time to plant this out.

So like this bed right here just got cleared out, just got harvested.

And now we're gonna either plant it again, which we're kind of on the cusp of how much time before winter here we can get a crop or we'll cover it with hay mulch and that will hold it.

That'll serve as that like holding it in place for the winter.

(bright music) We can walk together.

All right, let's go to the egg garden.

- What's available?

- This is the loofah.

Oh my gosh.

So see how it's, that one's squishy.

Like some of them are still super hard.

You can harvest them when they're green.

You just don't know if the sponge inside is gonna be fully developed.

- Yeah.

- What I've learned is that you can peel this back and that's the sponge, right?

- Yeah.

- But you first have to squeeze it all out 'cause there's all this like fleshy stuff that you want to get out of the sponge and then this will all have dried out.

And then you can just have this as sponges and you don't have to buy petroleum based sponges or loofahs to exfoliate.

But I feel like the kids are gonna get thrilled about processing this.

Personally since starting the farm, I've moved more and more towards the education side of what we're doing.

And I think a ton about how kids aren't as much as they were 20, 30, 40 years ago, just playing outside.

And just the challenge of competing with technology is really hard.

So the real challenge is like how do you compel someone to step outside their house, to put the phone down, to step away from the screen and just be there and just slow down?

The best kind of learning happens when you're doing and when you're doing something that is purposeful and meaningful.

And I think for so many kids, not everybody, but so many kids actually engaging with the land and animals, it just feels so ripe for education here.

And obviously, the land in and of itself is like a giant playground if you allow it to be for all ages, right?

But just continuing to be thoughtful and creative about all the ways to just literally be outside and feel comfortable and engaged and really just normalize it.

It's so beautiful.

All right.

you guys look up at the canopy.

(tarp whooshing) (water pattering) (birds chirping) I'm like a big believer, especially in a small scale veg operation, to do as much by hand as you can 'cause it gives you the time to really actually look at your plants.

'Cause if you don't take that time, you miss a lot.

(bright music) What we're trying to do here is just being a prominent place in our community for people to come in many different ways, as a customer, as a kid coming to a program or coming for a concert or event or whatever the entry point is, being able to see people working in agriculture I think is also really important.

'Cause you can come here and you're literally watching our crew go in and out of the greenhouses and heading out to the pastures to move the cattle.

And it's not that often that you get to do that.

- Her vision for this place was always to be a community farm.

And when I first heard her say that in the beginning, I didn't totally know what that meant.

It sounded really nice to me 'cause I've always been drawn to community, that word and that concept, what I feel and what I sensed from a lot of people who step foot on this land and in this place, it tends to feel like, oh, there's something happening here.

There's something a little bit different.

And that goes back to the power of an intention and Corie's seed that was planted for that.

(bright music) - When I was a kid, I always wondered why humans seemed like they needed so much extra stuff as compared to every other animal that I saw.

And our needs as a species are pretty simple, right?

We need to be nourished, we need to have shelter, we need to have love in our lives.

And how do you get that, where do you get that?

You literally get that from the land and from how the land supports all of us around that.

And so the work needs to be done to grow the food.

The work needs to be done to take care of the land.

The work needs to be done to take care of the kids, the elders and everybody in between.

Land-based work has become so uncommon, which is crazy, right?

And so how do we make it more common again?

And at the heart of it all is that community.

Tending to land and tending to each other and tending to kids require a lot of people and a lot of perspectives.

Just even asking the question, what does it even mean to be a land steward?

You know, I think we should all think about that.

'Cause otherwise it's sort of like, oh, I'm not a land steward so I don't really think about it.

I don't care, you know, we can pave this over.

And you know, it's just like, that's a lot of where that disconnect happens.

So taking that responsibility and hoping that everybody can take some amount of responsibility to the land, to the oceans, to the waterways, to the whole thing, feels really important.

(bright music) (birds chirping) (light upbeat music) The land which we stand Is the only thing we have That can withstand the weight of our lives So learn to treat land like treat your own two hands Honor its strength, cherish the gifts it holds Honor its strength, cherish the gifts it holds (audience applauding) - [Artist] Thank you.