What happens when you let nature back into the farm » Yale Climate Connections

Kelsey Timmerman grew up in farm country. He has witnessed firsthand the damage that modern industrial agriculture can inflict. In the process of writing his bestselling “Where Am I” trilogy –“Where Am I Wearing,” “Where Am I Eating,” “Where Am I Giving” – Timmerman traveled the world and, in the process, began to see how agricultural practices affect natural ecosystems, human communities, and the climate.

In his new book, “Regenerating Earth,” Timmerman explores this topic with equal breadth – he travels the world again, but in greater depth. Yale Climate Connections interviewed Timmerman via Zoom at the homestead he farms with his family outside Muncie, Indiana, where he teaches at Ball State University. 

This interview is the second in a series on new and recent books about climate change and agriculture. Our interview with Michael Grunwald, author of “We Are Eating the Earth,” is here. We’ll publish an interview with Mark Easter, author of “The Blue Plate: A Food Lover’s Guide to Climate Chaos,” later this month.

This interview has been edited and condensed. 

Yale Climate Connections: You begin and end your book in Indiana, where you live. Why did you feel that you needed to speak as a Midwesterner in telling these stories?

Kelsey Timmerman: Although it looks like a jungle behind me, [he gestures to the window] my land is surrounded by corn and soybeans, so I’m surrounded by industrial agriculture. I’ve seen the decimation that is happening in and around me. I have family and friends who feel like they are being exploited by this system. Then, when I heard about regenerative agriculture, I wondered what that could mean for my community, for me. 

Writing the book was a personal journey. I wanted to show how it changed my life and the place where I live. I wanted to tell the story as a rural citizen living on Earth today.

YCC: Early in your introduction, you give a gloss for industrial agriculture. You say “corporations farm farmers.” What do you mean by that? 

Timmerman: That came from a guy who lives just down the road from me. He’s a conventional soybean and corn farmer. What he means is that the folks making money are the giant agrochemical conglomerates who are supplying the seed and who are writing the prescriptions for how much of their [fertilizers and pesticides] to spray on the fields. The costs for these things keep going up, but what farmers are being paid per bushel is not. So many farmers wonder if their farm will even be there for their kids. 

YCC: You make a contrast between monocropping and multicropping or diversity. And you repeat the key point of that contrast in almost every chapter of your book: If you’re raising a whole lot of something like corn or soybeans or cows or pigs – and only that thing – then you need a whole lot of chemical support. And that chemical support is dangerous not just to farmers, but to the people who live around them. 

Timmerman: I’ve been to too many funerals of farmers in their 50s and early 60s who have died of cancer, and the family wonders if it was the time that dad got doused in this or that chemical that caused it. 

One of the things I wanted to get at with this book was how much industrial agriculture is being exported around the world.

To be in the Amazon and see a farm that looks like my neighbor’s farm – John Deere tractor, grain bins, and corn – you think it’s Indiana. One of the most ecologically diverse places on our planet, and we’ve turned it into a monocrop of corn or soybeans. Same goes for Hawaii. Same goes for Kenya. I saw that again and again and again.

But in the face of this degeneration, I meet people who believe in regeneration, who believe that they can do something different in their communities to make a difference. And that, for me, makes this a hopeful book, because if a woman restoring a small farm in Kenya can have hope, how can the rest of us not?

YCC: Let me just give a quick rundown of the places you include in your book. In the United States, you talk about Wisconsin, Ohio, Minnesota, North Carolina, Indiana, and Hawaii. Outside the U.S., you visit Brazil, Colombia, and Kenya. 

So at the end of your book, to follow this point to its conclusion, you list seven practices that unite the farmers that you profiled over its course. At the top is promoting diversity. So why is it so important to multi-crop as opposed to monocrop?

Timmerman: My neighbor does relay cropping. He plants wheat in the winter, which grows up in the spring; then he plants soybeans down into that. With just this diversity of two, he’s using less fertilizer and fewer chemicals. 

But also really critical is biodiversity. A pest is only a pest if the predator is not nearby. If you have diversity, chances are that in a natural system, the predator of that pest is also attracted to that area. 

Cultural diversity is really important as well. I know that in certain circles, we’re not even supposed to say “diversity” anymore. But we have big challenges ahead of us. And who’s to say what culture or what plant or what practice will really help us in a changing climate.

YCC: When you describe farms that are growing five, six, seven different kinds of crops that are all laced together into an ecosystem, those were, I thought, really fascinating chapters. One was in the Amazon, which was an agroforestry model. But you describe something similar in Wisconsin.

Timmerman: Yeah, Mark Shepard in Wisconsin had a big perennial food forest.

YCC: Right, to the point that you often couldn’t tell that you were looking at a farm.

Timmerman: Mark Shepard’s 100-acre farm is a great example of a highly productive system. From the overstory to the understory, the underbrush, and then the rows of vegetables, you are getting calories every step of the way.

Mark’s done the math, and he’s more productive per acre than a field of corn, which is saying a lot because corn produces a lot of dense, very dense calories. His farm is successful economically. He makes a living. But every farm is different. Mark’s is very close to Organic Valley, one of the largest buyers of organic produce in the nation. He also does consulting to build systems like that. 

But there’s another factor that doesn’t get talked about enough: It can be very efficient to grow a monocrop, but not very resilient when it comes to a pest or when the system breaks down. 

YCC: Are farm animals necessary to regenerative agriculture?

Timmerman: I think it depends on the context. For our family to live regeneratively, it sure is nice having chickens that eat scraps. And they have bedding that is great in our compost pile, which later goes to the garden, which then feeds us. In the springtime, we can put the chickens out and let them turn over the soil. There’s so many good things about having chickens where we live. 

There are also benefits to having animals in certain places in the arid regions. In Kenya, some lands have been turned around by reintroducing cattle and bunching and herding them. 

So, yes, animals can have a positive impact. In my Environmental 101 class in college, we talked about animals being the cause of desertification. But now there are places and people that show that animals can actually help bring that land back, too. 

YCC: What are the advantages, in terms of biodiversity and climate adaptation and mitigation, in letting nature into a farm?

Timmerman: When you let nature in, the land is able to hold more water and to hang on to its soil. And then other life is attracted to the environment you’ve created. 

We’ve let some of our land go wild. We rotated the sheep around and saw the trees pop up. There were no squirrels when we first got here; now there are. And the fields are now humming with insect life out here. We’ve got a ton of milkweed growing. We’re now this little oasis for the monarchs. Other people in the area are doing the same, and we’re seeing a greater diversity of birds.

I met people who have been on their land for 40, 50 years; they’ve seen things change and turn around. We live at a time when many humans lack meaning and purpose, and we face a future where we might even be more alone. Getting outside and getting your hands in the soil is good.

YCC: Another point that several of your farmers make is that you have to listen to what the land needs, and you have to figure out the very specific formula for turning the land around. And that seems to make this model more exportable than the industrial model when we’re talking about Africa, Asia, Latin America.

Timmerman: Other than that, the industrial model has a lot more money behind it. There’s a lot of money to be made by selling seeds and fertilizers and pesticides into other countries. But in Kenya, the farmers discovered that the seeds they were sold wouldn’t grow; then they couldn’t buy additional seeds, and they couldn’t afford to buy the fertilizers. Whereas working with cattle, they were able to regenerate the land.

Growing a single monocrop like corn on degraded land is really tough for subsistence farmers in Kenya. And it’s not all that effective in helping people eat more calories or get out of poverty. 

YCC: So would you say, then, that regenerative agriculture is the solution to living on a climate-changing planet with 10 billion people, or that it’s a necessary part of the solution?

Timmerman: I would not say it’s the whole solution. I know some reports suggest that we can completely sequester all the carbon that humans produce in the soil. That’s not going to happen. But the holistic practices of being part of a place, noticing change, and getting to know what works, those could be really critical for our future, whether it’s farming on a small scale on your own homestead, or it’s on a larger level where you’re a regenerative farmer who’s feeding other people. 

YCC: Are you familiar with “We Are Eating the Earth” by Michael Grunwald and his skepticism about regenerative agriculture? 

Timmerman: Yes. 

YCC: What do you think Grunwald gets right about regenerative agriculture? What do you think he gets wrong? 

Timmerman: There are probably three ethanol plants less than a 30-minute drive from my house. So I appreciate Searchinger [Grunwald’s number-crunching adviser] showing that biofuels aren’t the magic bullet people thought they would be, that they’re a waste of land that could actually produce food for humans. 

I also agree with him that this idea of sequestering so much carbon constitutes a sort of tunnel vision. I myself suffered from carbon tunnel vision for a while. That’s not a magic bullet either.

YCC: What does he get wrong?

Timmerman: Well, I never really understood what his definition of regenerative agriculture was, and that’s a challenge because there are many different definitions of regenerative agriculture out there. His book, I think, is very focused on yields and overlooks other benefits of regenerative agriculture, like biodiversity and keeping soil on the land. He says land is not infinite; well, neither is soil. And it is washing down our rivers at an alarming rate. He talks about land use a lot; I think land used up is a problem, too.

YCC: I loved the opening title to the first chapter of yours, “Plant the World You Want to Live In.” What message would you like readers to take away from your book? From this interview? 

Timmerman: The culture practitioners in Hawaii ask the younger kids, “What river do you belong to?” I would love if my neighbors, other farmers, and anyone who reads my book asked themselves, “How can we be part of the places that we live and be protectors of those places?” Even though we’ve done so much wrong, we should believe that humans can be a force for good, working with and within the cycles of nature to heal the planet and to heal ourselves a little bit as well. If people on the front lines of this fight against degeneration can still look towards the future with hope, how can we not?