[gentle music]
- Michael Dolan: Farming is probably
one of the hardest jobs out there,
and it's one of the most satisfying and rewarding jobs.
C'mon!
Get back!
One of the most satisfying things that you can do
is work on the land and have the relationship with the land.
[cow mooing]
[gentle music]
I'm Michael Dolan.
We're on Seven Seeds Farm,
which is located on Pleasant Ridge, Wisconsin.
We run a highly diversified farm
that produces beef, pork, and chicken, all pasture-raised.
- My name is Ankur Desai.
I'm a professor
in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences
at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
And a lot of the work I try to understand
is how does the surface of the Earth,
and particularly the biological organisms
that make up the surface, influence climate
and climate change.
One of the research questions we had
is really understanding how does dairy production as a whole,
the vegetation, the animals, the forests around that,
the people, and the equipment that's used by people
all use and exchange greenhouse gases?
So greenhouse gases is a term
that defines all of the gases in the air.
And the more greenhouse gases there are in the air,
the warmer the atmosphere becomes.
We call them greenhouse gases 'cause in some ways,
they kind of act in the same way that a greenhouse does
in terms of keeping this place warmer
than it would be otherwise.
If we had no greenhouse gases at all,
Earth would actually be completely frozen over.
So greenhouse gases are important
for keeping the climate habitable.
But what we are doing now is dramatically doubling
to tripling the amount of greenhouse gases.
That is gonna push our climate to the other side,
where it is possibly not habitable for humans
and other organisms.
So cows produce both CO2 and methane,
which are greenhouse gases, and they breathe it out.
[insects chirping]
So what these instruments are directly measuring
is the exchange of greenhouse gases from the vegetation.
We all breathe, as do plants, but they do it the other way,
which is they photosynthesize.
And as cows are walking by,
they might be emitting CO2 or methane.
And so plants take up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere,
and we can measure that.
So one of the things we've learned
from working with these towers and from the studies we've done
is really the importance
of having different mixes of vegetation.
Forests, pasture, wetlands, all of those
that are taking up carbon
have offset some of the greenhouse gas emissions
that a farm would produce in its production.
So there's a lot of excitement right now
about this idea of planting trees
as a potential climate solution.
- Michael: A silvopasture is the process
of having trees or cultivating trees in your pastures.
So silvopasture essentially
comes from the word silviculture,
which is the cultivating of trees and pasture,
which is that having livestock on the land, grazing,
and it's combining the two essentially.
So adding trees to your pasture for the multiple benefits.
One of my favorite sayings is,
"It's not the cow, it's the how."
It's not the cow that's causing the problems,
the methane into the atmosphere,
it's the how we're raising the cows
that's causing the problem.
I got interested in the silvopasture
to mitigate the carbon in the atmosphere.
The benefits of having the silvopasture
include the shade for the cattle,
but we're also producing food on those same acres
that the cattle are grazing.
So we're producing chestnuts, hazelnuts, pears, apples, plums.
So we have great grass-fed beef,
but we also have chestnuts that we can eat as well.
The trees also reduce heat stress to the grasses
that are growing in the canopy below.
Every time the grass grows,
the roots are equally as tall below the soil surface.
So every time we graze it down,
the roots slough off and add in the carbon into the soil.
So we're actually over time,
we're putting more carbon into our soils
rather than releasing our carbon into the atmosphere.
The relationship between the cows and the trees
is very important in that
they'll actually browse on the trees
and use a lot of it as feed
as well as get the shade benefits from the tree canopy.
And that's why I got into this method of farming
is to produce a better quality product
and a sustainably-raised product
that we can feel good about eating
as well as regenerate our soils and regenerate our landscape.
- This is a really exciting time right now in climate science.
And the work that we're doing has been shifting
from basic research of understanding climate
and climate models, but then how do we apply those
to systems like a farm to help them be more climate smart?
- We need more farmers that want to farm in this type of manner
so that we can try and reverse climate change.
We need to do something.
And I think agriculture
is probably one of the number one answers
to reduce climate change
because we have this vast amount of land
that we can put our carbon that we've emitted into the soil.
We can start farming in this sort of manner
where we're not the problem to climate change;
we're the solution to climate change.
[gentle music]