Part Two: Full Interview With Brian Alexander

Continued.. The New Face of the Environmental Movement: The American Cowboy, Full Interview with Brian Alexander 

The Kennedy Beacon sat down with Brian Alexander of the Ranching Reboot podcast, which produces weekly episodes with farmers and other people in the agricultural sphere about how to improve their trade. Alexander, who is a fan of Kiss the Ground, is restoring some of the most environmentally sensitive land in America – part of the Great Plains that stretches through the driest sections of Kansas – and he is using cows to do it. Unlike those who want to reduce the number of cows (because of farts), he stresses that ruminants are an integral part of the plains ecosystem. [The following interview has been condensed.]

The cattle on Brian Alexanders farm

Nikos Biggs-Chiropolos (NBC): How did you learn about regenerative farming?

Brian Alexander (BA): A bunch of us out here started using regenerative agriculture when we realized sustainable was the buzzword. And we don't want to sustain the current system. We want to make something better. It's kind of always been in my thinking, the natural cycling processes of the land. So it's not that I came to regenerative agriculture. I was always here.

The regenerative holistic mindset is not just a set of practices. People get fouled up because people want a set approach, a set of practices that they can apply every year and don't have to think about  modifying them. Holistic management and regenerative agriculture are different; if you want to make a small change, you can change something you're doing. But in order to make a big change, you have to change the way you're thinking.

NBC: I get the sense the American conventional model is misguided. 

BA: Yeah, American Ag policy is totally off. They say, we got to feed the world. But we're not feeding the world. Less than 30% of the world is fed from industrial agriculture. By and large, we're producing foods that have no nutritional value. 

We have USDA nutritional guidelines. Everybody's fat, sick, and diabetic. There's no profit in cure, but there's unlimited riches in chronic disease treatment.

Also we've become a nation of tenant farmers and ranchers. What is lacking is owner-operators. 

Cattlemen carry the whole economy on their back because they have to buy from everybody and only a few people buy from them. You've got the guy who sells a calf to the sale barn. Somebody buys it, packages it with a bunch of others, sends it to a background lot. Then they go to grass for a while. And then they go to the feedlot. And from the feedlot, they go to the packer. And from the packer, they go to the wholesale. From the wholesaler, they go to the retailer.

Now think about all those steps in that chain, plus the truckers. Think about how many times a tax is collected in that chain versus an owner-operator direct-to-consumer grass-fed beef business like mine.  And you tell me what government's going to support what I do versus what grows the economy and grows tax revenue. Production agriculture should be the bedrock of the economy.

NBC: Cattlemen aren't making money? 

BA: The meat packers are making the money.

Because they're the ones that control the supply and the price. Just go look at JBS, which is a Brazilian corporation run by a pair of criminal Brazilian brothers who have paid massive bribery fines. And in return for that, our Secretary of Ag, Tom Vilsack, gave them a $600 million contract with the Department of Defense.

NBC: Why the Department of Defense?

BA: Gotta feed the troops.

We have four meat packers that control 85% of the beef market. Smithfield, one of the big ones, is owned by the Chinese. We have created these market behemoths with unlimited market power and unlimited lobbying power. 

Everything looks really simple from an office. 

NBC:  And they're making farming policy. They have no idea what your life is like. 

BA: Almost everybody I know has an operating loan and a line of credit. The bank needs security, right? And in order to get that security, you have insurance. The terms of the USDA subsidized crop insurance basically drive you to grow one of three or four crops. And your insurance man's probably going to tell you, “Well, you got to follow the advice of a crop consultant.”

Drive through a farming community and see where all the nice new trucks are. They're at the farm credit office. They're at the bank. They're at the crop consultant. They're at the fertilizer salesman and they're at the tractor dealerships. That's where all the new vehicles are.

The American farmer and rancher doesn't benefit from federal subsidies, federal crop subsidies. They're merely a pass-through to all the other support agencies that are farming the farmers.

If you grow corn, soybeans, and wheat, you're basically guaranteed to stay in business, because crop insurance.

And that's the problem. The safety net has become a hammock. And there's so many producers that are just content to rest in that hammock and not innovate. They're not pressured to innovate.

NBC: What could make farmers change to regenerative methods?

BA:  I know Bobby's talked with Gabe Brown before. Gabe's been in front of Congress. He's a good friend of mine, and Gail Fuller, who I know Bobby's had on a panel because I watched it. Here's the point. Neither one of those two got to regenerative agriculture because they thought they were going to get rich.

Gabe Brown half stumbled his way into regenerative agriculture because he couldn't afford to do anything different. Greg Judy in Southwest Missouri, same way. Gail Fuller, my good friend, and he'll admit this too. He said, “The only reason I got here is because I was broke.”

And you know, looking at my own history, I developed things the way I did because I was broke. It's called producing more on less with ingenuity. Yeah, I could have leveraged assets. I'm risk averse. I'm debt averse. 

So that's why my operation looks regenerative. It's efficient. It works for me. And it provides a good quality of life for me.

I need to explain the six soil health principles.

Brian Alexander with his cow 

NBC: Yes, I learned about that when I watched that film Kiss the Ground. 

BA:  Yeah, Kiss the Ground and Common Ground. Peter Beck is a great filmmaker and he's great at communicating what's going on in regenerative agriculture. 

These principles are widely agreed upon by the Weston A. Price Foundation, Noble Research Institute in Ardmore, Oklahoma, and Understanding Ag, Incorporated.

Number one is: minimize disturbance, removing tillage from the equation. A second principle of soil health, living roots in the ground year round. 

Number three, integrate livestock. The role of animals is important. There's magic that we don't understand that goes on inside the guts of a cow or any ruminant animal: cows, goats, sheep, and horses to some extent, all ruminant animals. 

You don't feed the cow. The microbes that live in the rumen, they feed the cow. The cow gets most of her nutrition from digesting dead microbes.

Then the manure hits the ground and dung beetles transport it back down into their burrows. That's carbon sequestration. 

Another bullet point: It's not the cow, it's the how. Vegans that don't eat meat because they think it's cruel to animals or it's bad for the environment. When they're talking about Factory Farms, they absolutely 100% have a point. I'm not a part of that system and I'd very much like to change it. 

Number four, increase diversity. You won't find a monoculture in nature. 

Number five, cover the soil. Naked soil is hot, dry soil. When your soil temperature gets to 140 degrees, your microbes are dead. Fungi is dead.

It doesn't have to be much over 85 in Kansas on bare soil for it to be 140 degrees. If you have living roots in the ground, 365 days of the year, you're probably going to have some sort of solar panel above those roots trying to catch sunlight. 

If a raindrop hits grass, it shatters and loses energy. But if it hits exposed soil, it creates a compaction event and it starts to build a crust that reduces moisture infiltration. So that's why soil cover is so important. It increases your moisture capture rate from rainfall, reduces runoff, decreases soil temperature, and helps add to soil life. 

We leave soil bare. We leave it fallow. We till it to a fine powder. Now, we lose about an average of five tons an acre of topsoil per acre farmed. That's per year.

Now, the most important one, the sixth one, is: know your management context. Simple fact, I'm at the edge of the desert with the edge of plains. Somebody from Maine doesn't want to hear me talk about ultra high density grazing with long rest periods, because that's not appropriate for their management context.

NBC: What kind of change is needed to get farmers to consider these principles?

If we really want to change the thinking, we've got to start young. You're not going to go out and convince some 60-year-old farmer that's been farming the same way for 40 years to do anything different. Not going to happen. Been trying for 15 years. It doesn't work.

We've got to start with the food in the schools. The current USDA nutrition guidelines and food pyramid have nothing to do with actual nutrition. Now I have some internal issues with what I'm about to say, because I'm a libertarian and I believe the Department of Education should be abolished along with every other three or four letter agency. But that's not realistic right now.

But if we start with the kids in school, we direct school food programs to use local produce, we integrate the children in the food growing process, then we get the food police out of the way.

If Bobby gets in the big house, there's a lot of levers that can be pulled: subsidies, programs, and taxes. It's always a carrot and stick approach. I think the better approach would be to immediately start trying to educate the next generation. Because that change will come from the bottom up. Once we're starting to effect change that way, then we can gradually start rolling back and sunsetting all of these programs that are driving environmental destruction.