Soil: The thin veil that sustains us all

Nodules of leguminous cover crops biologically fix Nitrogen. This is an excellent source of nitrogen for a subsequent crop. This can be grown by the farmer, thereby not requiring the same volume of synthetic Nitrogen to be purchased

We’ve had the absolute privilege of meeting many inspirational people over the course of making this film, who are all passionate about nature friendly farming and stewarding the land to ensure that regenerative farming practices are utilised, wherever possible, to help protect the planet. Recently, thanks to an introduction by Stephen Briggs, who has been one of our film’s supporters since the very beginning, our Publicist Kate interviewed Nuffield Scholar and no till legend Blake Vince, who was one of the first people to champion the #soilyourundies campaign.

Our partner Country Trust rolled out their version of this brilliant initiative ‘Plant Your Pants’ last winter and into the spring and summer of this year. At the time, we filmed children from Winhills Primary School in Cambridge burying pants in soil on Tom Pearson’s farm with Amrita Huggins from Country Trust and Adrienne Gordon, who is one of our film’s principal characters. Read the blog about this here.

Blake Vince, who lives in Ontario, Canada, is a fifth-generation farmer whose father and uncles adopted no till back in the early 1980s.

How did it all start back then Blake as no-till was an unusual choice at that time?
We – my father and his brothers - started no-till in 1983, when I was 11 years old. At that time there were high interest rates, low commodity prices, and their motive for change was out of necessity. They had soybeans that were in storage at the local cooperative grain elevator, which went into bankruptcy and the creditor seized their soybeans as assets of the coop.

They had to pivot out of necessity and to figure out what they were going to do for cash flow as they didn't have the security blanket of an older generation behind them providing a financial backstop. They immediately started looking at ways to remain financially viable and so they sold some machinery and they looked at no-till as a viable option to reduce machinery usage, fuel and time savings, etc. That was the catalyst to change, they had to make it work and they did. Then, like anything, once they started gaining confidence and believing that the system had merit it was sort of a downhill ride. They got into this groove and started perfecting things. They certainly had some hiccups along the way. I remember those early days of people in the neighbourhood ridiculing them without having one minute's consideration of why they were doing it. They didn't ask the questions, they just made assumptions.

Since then, how has the farm continued to transition?
Our motive for what we do on our farm first and foremost is to remain financially viable. And then what’s important is all of the environmental benefits and the fact that we're protecting the environment. What really drives me presently is ensuring what leaves our farm is positive and that we’re not contributing negatively to the environment in which we all share as a society.

This of course includes water and air, which people often don’t consider. We have very high levels of asthma and cardiovascular, respiratory issues, emphysema and illnesses like that here. I think a lot of that is due to the fact that we're in a concentrated area of agriculture. There's still lots of tillage on the landscape so you've got a lot of dust particles in the air. I really like to think that we’re stewards of the soil. A lot of farmers like to stick their chest out and say, “Well, I'm a steward of the soil too” but when I look at their practices by comparison, I really question is that lip service? We hear time and again about the right to farm mentality. I think that we need to take some form of responsibility and to recognize that we really need to look after shared ecosystem resources.

Cover crops are an important part of today’s system. I was the guy here in our operation that brought in all of these big diverse multi species cover crops and at first  it was met with apprehension, to say the very least. When we started no-till, the concept at that time was brown and down, start everything clean. And here we are now planting into these big diverse green cover crops. If we take corn as an example, when we look at the conventional methodology if you drive along the road you can see every row, it looks lovely. And with my corn you’ve got to slow down and you think is it there or is it dead? I describe it as a high anxiety management system! And I try to remind producers, we don't harvest a crop in June, it's like the old parable of ‘the tortoise and the hare’. The hare comes out, he runs around the track, he's laughing at the tortoise. But it's the end of the race, the finish line that matters. Sadly, our measurement of victory is all about the bushels that we harvest. That's how the farmer is compensated. And that's also his sense of pride, he sticks out his chest and says well I harvested XYZ number of bushels or tonnes of grain from a paddock or a field, or whatever. Nobody talks about their finances. They don't talk about how much money they’ve spent on the machinery, or how much diesel fuel they consumed. And then how much did that contribute negatively to the environment, and so on. It's just a different way of thinking about it. I'm not transfixed on physical yield, I'm transfixed on financial yield, on making a profit.

Nuffield Scholar Blake Vince

Can you explain the difference in the runoff of water when you're farming the way that you do compared to traditional farming practises?
What really drives me presently is ongoing. We're having problems with blue green algae in Lake Erie and why that concerns me so much is because my water is derived from Lake Erie via a municipal water line. We were sort of backed into a corner to use that water, we have a very good well here on our farm but they mandated the farmers, we didn't have to hook up, but we had to pay for the water line to help subsidize all the non-farming residents. If you're going to make a farmer pay for something, he's most likely going to use it. That cost was also incurred on bare land, so if I had a bare farm with no building assets, no livestock, I still had to pay for that water line.

So, if my water is going to come from Lake Erie, I want to ensure that the water quality that's in that pipe is suitable for my wife, my two kids and myself. And I want to be seen as being a positive contributor, not being a negative contributor to water quality, first and foremost. So, I engaged with my conservation authority and we set in motion an experiment where we're comparing conventional field scale tillage. We did a field scale experiment, not just a little plot, and we compared conventional soil management, a full tillage regime, to my no-till cover crops system. We're looking at the water quality, we're measuring a volume of precipitation throughout the entire year, we're measuring what comes out of tile drainage, so we block off all the four-inch lateral tiles, and we tie them into a main outlet so we can capture that data for a fixed location, several points across the field. And we're capturing surface runoff.  We're on flat topography here, so if there's going to be a land overflow event we have a flume setup at a location whereby we can catch and measure the sediment that comes off the field. The preliminary data suggests that my management system with cover crops and no-till is a definite benefit to the water quality, we're contributing less sediment load as well as less phosphorus when we divide that over the number of years that the experiment has run. The biggest issue of contention right now, and there is no perfect system, is when we broadcast fertilizer. Sadly, if that coincides with a significant rain event shortly thereafter, the fertilizer doesn’t have a chance to dissolve, then we tend to get events of potential larger levels of runoff. However, if we divide that same number over the length of the experiment, my numbers are still significantly lower but they show these one-off spikes. I'm not here to stick out my chest and say, I'm doing everything perfectly but I'm really trying to work tirelessly to do as good if not better than most.

No tilling into living green plants, soil is not disturbed with tillage. Zero erosion from wind, water or solar. Feeding carbon to the soil via the “Liquid Carbon Pathway” Dr. Christine Jones. Harnessing free energy from the World’s largest resource the sun! Via photosynthesis

Do you plant many trees on the farm?
Because we're so flat, so wide open, we do like to plant trees around the farmyard. The benefit is we're in a real wildlife corridor as pertains to avian migratory birds. When they're migrating from the north to the south, and vice versa, it provides an opportunity for a resting place. We always talked about tree nesting species and now what I'm really enamoured by are these grassland birds. Through our soil management, building cover crops and bringing back perennials to the landscape, we're starting to see a real return of some of these avian species.

From when you started to all those years ago with your dad and your uncles, is your real passion soil?
Absolutely. For many of us it’s really important to really truly understand that soil is not just inert, it's not just a medium in which we place seeds or plants into. Many people struggle to recognise the fact that soil is a collection of living breathing organisms because they cannot visualize it. I've said at different speaking engagements that I’ve been to, why so many people are enamoured with the lowly earthworm, which was Darwin's plough, is the fact that it's tactile, it's visual. But when we start looking at bacteria, and fungi, all these things that we can't see without the use of a microscope people merely look at it and say well that’s just dirt. They think, why are you getting so excited by this it's always been there, it'll always be there. And I say that's where you're mistaken, that’s where your theory falls to pieces.

I have a distinct childhood memory,  we were still ploughing, so this would have been in the early 80s, late 70s. I was really young and I was riding on the tractor and my dad was pulling a mouldboard plough and as he was ploughing the seagulls were inundating the field behind us, it was just white with seagulls. I was getting very agitated by these seagulls stealing my earthworms and my dad says, there’s nothing to worry about and I said they’re stealing our earthworms! Here I am a small boy with this affinity for soil, it’s in my DNA.

In terms of local farmers and the farmers that you speak to across Canada, and around the world, are they coming round to this way of farming?
I just lost my really good friend David Brandt from Ohio, my mentor. David was the champion, he was, as a lot of us refer to him as, the cover crop Godfather in North America. I went to his farm many times and there would be 350 people in his yard from all over the place, from far and wide, Canadians, North Americans even sometimes the odd international visitor. And yet his immediate neighbour right across the road would be out there intentionally tilling because David’s system was never going to work on his farm. And, similarly here at home my circle of influence sadly, has become much broader than the people that live adjacent, or even within my own province. I’ve been extended the offer to speak across the nation, of my own country, as well outside of my own country, and yet at home, very seldomly, sadly, am I invited to speak here.

You have to develop some thick skin. People that I’ve been able to influence, some of whom are here in Ontario, will call me up and, like my friend David, I've spent many, many minutes of personal time on the phone, talking to various producers as they try to adopt this system of cover crops and no-till, and to provide them with some words of encouragement. I've developed some really good friendships accordingly, because of my willingness to share.

Coming back to the #soilyourundies initiative which has been repeated far and wide, do you think it's going to be the next generation that really adopts nature friendly farming?
The simple beauty of that experiment is that it allows children to explore their youthful curiosity without inhibitions. They can quickly visualize that something is happening in the soil, even if they don't 100 percent understand it, there's cause and effect. Immediately they can latch on to it, it provides a little bit of levity, a little bit of laughter and so immediately it’s captured in the brain, because once you start engaging laughter that triggers the memory reflex.

I think engaging the youth is paramount. To share with the youth that it's not dirt, we need to get rid of that four-letter word. The four-letter word needs to become soil. And to show that there’s a huge difference between dirt and soil. And we need to engage and use senses. We're engaging their eyes by burying the pants, but we also need to make sure that we're engaging their nose, to smell the difference between soils and if we get certain individuals with enough courage to taste soil. You can very quickly start to pick up the nuances of soil texture and things like that. Get them to touch soil and to not be afraid to get dirty. We want them to form this relationship with soil the thin veil that sustains us all.