Cows, carbon, and climate | Joel Salatin | TEDxCharlottesville

Joel Salatin, an organic farmer located in the Shanendoah Valley in Virginia, loves his grass - and so do his cows. In this talk Salatin outlines the role that this often unsung hero of the plant world plays in sustainable farming, and the effects that efficient utilization can have on our environment.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx

Sunbeams are the essence of poetry.

Dreams, fantasy, fairy tales; sunbeams.

And yet, as esoteric
and mystical as sunbeams are,

they are the energy driver of the planet

in a very visceral, physical,
scientific, empirical sense.

But if I asked you to go out
and grab me some sunbeams,

we know they're valuable, right?

Well, grab me some;
could you bring them in here?

Let's talk about sunbeams.

Children will take you up on this,

they'll dance around a little while
and try to grab them, but they can't.

The fact is,

that something as esoteric
and mystical as sunbeams

is captured by nature's
photovoltaic array,

called photosynthesis in plants,

through the chlorophyll of plants.

And, specifically, grass.

So, the problem is that most of us,
in our modern culture,

are quite disconnected from grass.

When I say "grass,"
people immediately think of lawns,

golf courses, maybe a soccer field.

But you're not thinking about
the kind of grass

that the Knights
of the Golden Horseshoe found

in the early 1700s,
when Governor Spotswood,

the colonial governor
of Virginia sent his friends,

dubbed the "Knights
of the Golden Horseshoe"

- they were British after all -

sent them across the Blue Ridge.

The British had bumped up here
against the Blue Ridge.

What was over Afton Mountain?

What was over there?

So he sent them over
to discover what was there.

And what they found, they wrote back,

and they spent a couple
of weeks, and they said,

"Everywhere we rode
in the Shenandoah Valley,

we could take the grass
and tie it in a knot

above the horse's saddle."

It was a magnificent silvopasture

of elk, deer, passenger pigeons,
prairie chickens, pheasants,

turkey and bison, up to herds
of three to four million.

Captain Jim Bridger got behind a herd
out in the Black Hills of the Dakotas,

when he was sent out to explore it,
behind seven million bison.

Now, that's always intrigued me.

"Lieutenant, could you come
up here a minute please?

Sharpen your quill.

Start counting; one, two,
- you got that?"

(Laughter)

I have no idea,

but the legacy of these migratory herds

that were moved by both natural-
and Native American-lit fires

as a landscape choreography,

and these migratory patterns
where they move thousands of miles

created the soils that we are currently

mining today in the Midwest,

and that we already mined in Virginia

- up to three feet of topsoil
washed off of Virginia -

during the European
colonialization of the state,

and up until today,
and it's still washing off today,

because we have turned this beautiful,
perennial-based system

into an annually-based tillage system,
which is highly erosive.

In the Shenandoah Valley, where I live,

arguably three to five feet
of topsoil have washed out

and created the turbidity
in today's Chesapeake Bay.

So how does nature actually work?

How nature works is sunbeams come down,
it's captured by photosynthesis,

and converted into biomass;
into vegetable material.

And if we look at the different
kinds of plants,

trees, bushes, and grass,

intuitively, we think,
"Well, what's the most efficacious plant

to collect these sunbeams
and sequester the carbon?"

Your mind tends to go to trees,

because you can see,
"Wow, look at all that biomass!"

But in actuality,
trees are the least efficient.

Brush is more efficient, you know,
bushes and brush, and things like that.

And then, the pinnacle is grass.

The fact is that
when you look at a forest,

you're seeing 50 to 80,
maybe 100 years of stored carbon

all standing visible.

You're not seeing 80 years of grass

visible at one time.

Now, the grass goes through
a growth cycle just like us,

just like all living things
it goes through a growth cycle.

It starts slow, and then it accelerates,
and then it goes into senescence.

So the three stages of grass,

I call: diaper stage;

so right here in this pot
I have freshly-eaten diaper stage.

This is infant grass.

It's just been grazed,
and it's coming back.

Here, I have teenage grass, okay?

Juvenile, fast-growth grass;

remember when you could eat
a half-gallon of ice cream

and it didn't go on your hips?

This is juvenile grass.

And then we come into more juvenile,
but you see it's starting to brown down,

and eventually it goes to what I call
"nursing home grass".

(Laughter)

Okay? Senescence, the end.

The role of the herbivore in nature,
if you've ever thought about it,

and the reason I'm concentrating on this,

is because herbivores have gotten
a bad rap in recent days,

cows, climate change and all that stuff.

You see, the data points

to study the effect of cows
on the environment

are all coming from a position

that does not respect and honor

the herbivore in it's classic role.

The role of the herbivore,

and the reason the planet
is so full of herbivores,

think about Africa,

think about South America, the alpacas,
think about Indochina, yaks,

they're all over the place.

Reindeer, caribou,
there's a lot of herbivores,

groundhogs, prairie dogs,
you know, everything.

(Laughter)

Because without them,

this biomass would simply
turn into

senescent material, and just volatilize,
and die, and quit growing.

So the role of the herbivore in nature

is to take this
as it approaches senescence,

prune it back,

just like a viticulturist
would prune a vineyard,

or an orchardist
would prune an apple tree.

Does anyone think ill of an orchardist,
"Why are you pruning your apple tree?"

No, we think that's good,
we think that's good stewardship.

And that's exactly
what the herbivores did.

So, they pruned this back to restart

this rapid biomass production.

Without them, it stops;
the whole program stops.

Now, the problem is,

how do we duplicate this
if we don't have migratory patterns?

If we don't have four million
buffalo in a herd,

if we don't have 10 million
wolves chasing them,

if we don't have fire,

if we don't have the magnificent,
amazing choreography of nature,

how do we duplicate this amazing
principle that hydrated, built soil,

fed all the mycorrhizae
and the actinomycetes,

and built the soils
that we're still mining today?

How do we duplicate
that if we have a system

of private land ownership and all that?

Well, we do it with high-tech,
electric fencing.

Space age, microchip, electric fencing.

It's almost invisible to the eye,

and yet we can encircle
a herd of a thousand cows

with an almost invisible wire
that you would never see.

Visitors to our farm
are told, "Watch the wire."

They walk into it.

(Squawks)

(Laughter)

It's practically invisible,

but because it's such a strong
psychological barrier, the cows learn.

And they can see way better than us.

In fact, they can see
all the way around their heads,

except for 30 degrees on their back end.

So, they can see this,
they know it's there.

And it allows us to duplicate
this mobbed movement

that they would have had
in eons before we had private land.

We call this, "mob-stalking,
herbivorous, solar-conversion,

lignified, carbon sequestration."

(Laughter)

And so, as the biomass gets to this point,

we prune it back with the herbivore,
and then it begins to grow.

And as the leaf area begins
to get more and more chlorophyll,

the growth accelerates and accelerates,
so that from here to here,

let's just say, for sake of discussion,

from here to here,
this time period is 20 days.

From here to here,
the time period is only 10 days.

So it's accelerating
and then it slows off.

So what we're doing
is using the herbivore,

- in this case a cow, it could be a sheep,
a goat, whatever, in this case a cow -

we're using the animal
in its historic role,

using high-tech, electric fencing,

in order to leverage and stimulate
the biomass production.

The bottom line is

that in Augusta County where I live,
which is over the mountain,

in Augusta County,

the average pasture,
the biomass production,

if you dry it down and you weigh it,

the biomass production
on the average acre of grass

in Augusta County,
is 2500 pounds per year.

On our farm,

we've been there almost 60 years,
we've never planted a seed,

we've never bought a bag
of chemical fertilizer,

and on our farm we average
well over 10,000 pounds per acre.

We're all familiar with the tension
between ecology and economy.

And that there's a battle,
and we can't be environmentally sensitive

unless we sacrifice the economy.

And we can't be economically viable
unless we sacrifice the environment.

I'm here to present to you the notion,

as a fact, that we can actually have both.

But what we have to do
is manage things completely differently.

The data points that impugn the lowly cow
as the destroyer of the planet,

have the wrong object
to have a problem with.

The problem is not the herbivore.

The herbivore is doing
what she's always done.

She's, you know, a 4-wheel-drive,
portable sauerkraut vat,

(Laughter)

turning carbohydrate,
fermenting it into meat and milk,

nutrient-dense food.

She's doing exactly
what she was supposed to do.

But she's not being managed
the way the wild herds

and the migratory patterns
were managed where they moved.

And they vacated areas long enough
for the forage to go through

this magnificent 50, 60, 70-day
physiological expression cycle,

and then be pruned back
and harvested at the appropriate time.

In fact, what happens on most pastures,

the grass never even
can grow to this point.

It's kept very, very short.

So it's pruned 20 times in a season,

and you add up all those
couple hundred pounds of time,

and it comes out to about
2500 pounds per year.

Instead, we let the forage
come way up here

to full physiological expression
by denying access.

We move the cows every day to a new spot,
letting everything else rest

and go through this rapid
accumulation cycle.

And what it means is that we triple,
quadruple and even quintuple,

the amount of forage
that can be produced on a certain area.

Now, that cow is dropping 50 pounds
of goodies out her back end every day.

(Laughter)

So just think about what happens
when you change it

from 4000 pounds
of manure and urine per acre,

to 20,000 pounds
of manure and urine per acre.

Suddenly, you have soil-building capacity.

So here we are,
not only harvesting way more,

but we're sequestering way more carbon,

we're using the animal
in its historic role,

we're honoring and respecting
the cow-ness of the cow.

When you feed the herbivore
foreign things like grain,

and you lock them up in a feedlot,

and you do all the kinds
of desecrating things.

I mean the US-duh - I call it the US-duh -

(Laughter)

for 30 years laughed at us for doing this.

They said, "Grind up dead cows;
feed them back to cows."

And we were branded Luddites
and anti-progressives,

anti-science, you know.

"Come on get with the program, Salatin,
what's this grass stuff?"

Forty years later,
there's this sudden global,

"Oops! Maybe we shouldn't have done that!"

(Laughter)

And it's beyond me why we still give
these sophisticated agents of our culture

the freedom to tell us
what to eat and how to eat.

And so, the "what-if" of this:

Just imagine i

if all of our neighbors did this

instead of continuous grazing,
where they turn 50 cows into 100 acres

and just leave them all year,
and the grass can never get above

what I call diaper grass.

And it just sits there in, like,
half of first gear.

There's a lot of analogies
we can make here,

but the point is that the grass
never accelerates.

It can't because it's,
"Are they ever gonna get out of diapers?"

It's the same way the forage is.

But if we control it,

so that the animals only access
a tiny little spot each day,

and create a mosaic pattern, guess what?

Now we've got moles and voles;
we've got bird nesting sites;

we've got a continuous
mosaic of pollination,

of blossoms, red clover, white clover,
and dandelions that are for pollinators.

You've got all sorts of growth
going on below the ground

because now we have this biology.

The soil cools down because
it's got all this nice cool mulch

that's transpiring and oxygenating.

(Inhaling)

I'm inhaling the oxygen out of this plant.

(Exhaling)

And it's inhaling my carbon dioxide.

Isn't that cool?

And tomorrow it goes through a frog,
and then it goes into a goldenrod,

and then it comes back,
and it's this wonderful connection.

And so, what if?

What if U.Va would serve this kind of meat
instead of the concentration camp meat?

(Applause)

What if McDonald's served this?

What if Burger King served this?

What if you ate this?

And what if I ate this?

As a blessed way to participate

in the most healing, amazing,
nurturing choreography of nature.

By respecting the cow-ness of the cow.

Using her as an herbivore
in her historic role.

And participating
in the nurturing of the planet.

Thank you for letting me share
something that's very simple with you.

Thank you.

(Applause)