I was very honored (and extremely nervous) to be invited to participate in a conversation with Minnesota Public Radio’s Angela Davis about farming, extreme weather, climate change, and regenerative agriculture alongside Heidi Roop, director of the University of Minnesota Climate Adaptation Partnership, and Ariel Kagan, the Climate and Working Lands Program Director with the Minnesota Farmers Union.
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The grass has been slow to grow up in northern Minnesota but the cattle are grazing and enjoying a feast of dandelions. We now have a respectable herd of 46 cattle, mostly Shorthorn and Hereford/Red Angus crosses.
I have been doing a lot of grass monitoring to determine what size paddock this many cattle need. We already know the biology in our soil is not super active as it had never been grazed before our arrival. But now that we have a real herd, we can reach more of our pastures with rotational grazing.
The more we graze, allowing the proper rest time, the more the soil biology will be stimulated to wake up and do the work of feeding the grass. The more the grass is eaten and regrows, the more it pulls carbon from the atmosphere through photosynthesis and stores it in the soil.
The more cattle we can get rotationally grazing the land, the more carbon is sequestered. The more YOU eat grass fed beef and lamb, the more we both fight climate change.
Did you know cows can help reverse climate change?
I know this idea goes contrary to much of what you hear about eating meat these days; the mainstream message has been that cattle are a major contributor to the methane emissions that fuel climate change.
The truth is a cow’s effect on global warming has everything to do with how it is raised. Cows and other livestock do put methane into the atmosphere, but when they are 100% grass fed and pasture raised in a rotational grazing system, the grassland ecosystem they are a part of sequesters more carbon in the soil than the methane they release…
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