A farm in Tennessee…
…with a friendly view into the regenerative future of agriculture.
My wife Michele and I recently found ourselves down on the farm of long-time friends Bill and Miriam Keener in southeastern Tennessee, outside Chattanooga.
Our visit to Sequatchie Cove farm was a chance to learn more about what’s known as “regenerative agriculture,” a movement I’d first heard in mountainous Darjeeling almost three years ago when The Energy Adventure(r) was traveling India by rail.
During several days-long visits to tea gardens — the quaint term locals use to describe their sprawling plantations — we learned back then how growers like Chiabari, Ambootia, Tea Promoters India, and Nuxalbari were adopting new organic and regenerative farming techniques in their fields.
Darjeeling’s estates stretch back more than 150 years. The terraced fields produce some of the finest, most expensive tea in the world. Implementing these new agricultural techniques wasn’t easy for communities steeped in time-worn practices and knowledge passed from generation to generation. But they now consider these new practices, which in many ways simply seek to imitate natural processes that governed the land before modern farming, an existential necessity.
And so it is with the Keeners at Sequatchie Cove, where four generations of them live and work. In many ways, it starts with the cow pie.
“That’s what you really want it to look like,” Bill told me as we paused in one of his pastures to examine a pile of manure.
He toed his boot right in, smearing it around to point out some things.
”You can see it’s not really hard. That would mean it’s not well-digested. It’s not really loose, either, which would mean too much protein. You want just this kind of balance.
“This right here, that’s what’s feeding the soil.”
And in the process capturing carbon, holding it below ground in nutrient rich soil that is also able to soak up and hold huge volumes of water during heavy rain. In other words, healthy soil is both absorbing the carbon dioxide that’s heating the planet and providing flood protection, all while producing the nourishment we need.
That sums up the essence of our climate challenge now. We have to move decisively to address the underlying problem — greenhouse gas emissions — while at the same time protect ourselves against the intensifying fallout from future warming we’ve waited too long to avoid altogether.
Since the early 1960s, driven by the need to feed a human population that was crossing the 3 billion mark on its way to the current 8 billion people on the planet, agriculture has transmogrified into a gigantic global industry.
Industrial agriculture’s effort to defuse the “population bomb” has become a threat to the earth’s ecosystem, a threat even to itself. Disasters, intensifying due to climate change, caused almost $4 trillion of crop and livestock losses globally over the last three decades, the equivalent of 5% of average agricultural output, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.
And in the end, as much as half the food produced is simply wasted. It spoils between field to table in developing countries that lack refrigerated supply chains or simply gets thrown out at the end point in developed countries. The organic matter winds up in landfills putting off gasses that warm the planet as it decomposes.
“The global food industry has created and perfected a system of production that is ultimately value destroying. Measures designed to increase yields and profits now threaten both,” argues a white paper by Pollination Group, an investment and advisory outfit focused on reforming food production. “The same system that has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of food poverty and malnutrition now stands as a future barrier to its own continued success.”
We’ve spent most of our time here at The Energy Adventure(r) focused on emissions from the burning of fossil fuels. But the reality is that even if all fossil fuel use ended right now, emissions from food production alone would preclude meeting the greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets set out in the 2015 Paris Accord. Cows burp up methane. Rice paddies across Asia emit methane, too, a gas 80 times more potent in causing warming than carbon dioxide for the first 20 years. Crop fields release carbon when they’re tilled, and energy used to make fertilizers and grow feed for animals that are then consumed is monumental.
For even some giant players in the world of industrial agriculture, the solution increasingly begins on farms and ranches, with the adoption of a regenerative approach to agriculture. This involves a broader approach to growing crops and livestock within, rather than apart from or even pitted against, the broader health of the ecosystem that allows us to live and thrive. It means increasing the ecological diversity in and around farms and ranches. This transforms them from net greenhouse gas emitters into carbon sponges that also provide food.
For a deeper dive into the potential for regenerative agriculture, check out at multi-part documentary film by journalist Peter Byck (click here). It traces a remarkable project Byck devised and carried out, in part with funding from McDonalds, to try to prove out the value regenerative farming as a climate solution. It’s a terrific look at farmers and farming today, both at the cutting edge of regenerative trends but also through the window of the deeply conservative values the industry is steeped in.
Bill and Miriam Keener didn’t come from a long line of farmers. That made it easier to think about new approaches to the work more than two decades ago. Sequatchie Cove Farm began on land along the ?? river purchased by Mariam’s parents.
Bill studied at the University of the South nearby before heading to Yale Divinity School for a masters, and he’s been known to wax philosophical. He and Miriam have turned the farm into a low-key center of learning, hosting arts, literature talks, performances and lectures over the years.
But regenerative farming, as practiced here, is just a collection of practical techniques to try to re-instill nature, and natural processes, back into agriculture.
Many of these, Bill points out on our early autumn morning walk, were developed by farmers in New Zealand as they figured out how to offload much more of the work, and cost, of farming onto nature, simply by working with it rather than against.
That means moving their small herds of cow and sheep in a tight group through pastures fertilized solely by manure and cut by nothing other than the grazing ruminants themselves. Crop fields aren’t tilled — which releases most of the carbon otherwise locked underground — and pesticides are replaced by the birds, beneficial bugs and resilient crops that flourish in and above the enriched soil.
The tight herd grazing is accompanied by frequent rotations of the herd to concentrate their manure, which is then broken down by insects and microbes and reabsorbed into the soil to nourish the grasses to grow again.
“Not only is carbon from the air being stored, but the soil is also like a huge sponge for water,” said Bill, marching through the pasture. Insects jumped, flew about, scrambling to get out of our way. “When you have zero organic matter, the rain hits it and just drains right through.”
Cows and cattle, which the Keeners sell for beef, are a particularly sensitive subject in agriculture. They consume vastly more food energy than would be needed if we simply consumed the plant nutrition directly, and their burbs are a substantial global source of methane. The big-time beef business, the domain of multinational corporate giants, is among the most highly industrialized parts of food production. The world would be better off if we consumed far less of it for a plant-based diets and meat substitutes.
But beef is the oil of agriculture. It’s not going away anytime soon. It’s too woven into the lives and livelihoods of too many people, a defining part of our identities for now. As with oil, consumption should drop steadily over time, the faster the better but recognizing it won’t happen overnight. Meanwhile, we have to mitigate fallout from its continued use, from methane emissions to deforestation.
Kelsey Keener, 36, was raised on the farm and now runs it. He’s embraced the regenerative ethos. When we were visiting Sequatchie Cove, Kelsey was in Northern California to learn more about regenerative chicken raising practices. You can read about it in his dispatch from the trip here.
He’s expanding Sequatchie’s egg business, with the farm’s 5,000 or so hens already laying some 3,600 eggs each day. They go out to retailers and restaurants as far away as Nashville. Kelsey, also known to wax philosophical, he does his bit on social media at Sequatchie Cove on Instagram and other platforms.
But he, too, is blunt about the challenge ahead with food:
"This factory-mindset, this industrialized factory-mindset, tries to cram nature into that model," he told the digital publication Food as a Verb in this interesting profile of the farm. "We’re sacrificing really our entire planet ... The true cost of this food is the toll on our environment and planet. The toll on these horrifying conditions that animals are raised in. The toll on humans."
His instragram dispatches (@sequatchiecovefarm) and the farm’s blog are great places to learn more.
Inspiring story, thank you Bill