Ohh!

That little truck that's been sitting out there.

I'm gonna go work on, try to get it going.

It won't run.

Well, it's been sitting all year so...

It's the battery or something.

Yeah, that'll probably catch it.

Yeah, yeah!

Keep fixing all this stuff every year.

We haven't been hitting it, you know.

We just... can't get the yields we need.

Something's got to change.

All right, well, I'm gonna go.

Let me know if you need some help.

All right.

This farm has been in our family for six generations now, over a hundred years.

I started when we had a small farm of, you know, 800-900 acres.

My dad was very open to me, trying new things.

We tried new crops and soybeans and cotton, and we're probably looking at 2000 acres of cotton this year.

Between my son and I.

It's a family, friendly, type of business, you'll do, lots of responsibilities.

Driving at 9 or 10 years old.

The first daughter, just like I did.

I started driving a tractor at 9.

You hand it down, it just comes naturally.

We plowed every year, and we could control our weeds that way.

And fertilizer had come up on the scene and things were looking good.

Then we started putting in anhydrous because it's cheaper.

And anhydrous is a gas that is very toxic to worms and toxic to humans.

When we finally decided to quit, we realized our worm population was way down, the compaction was way up.

I mean, we work seven days a week, 14, 15, 16 hours a day, and after a while you get burnt out.

It's a delicate balance, especially when times are rough.

The amount of time that I was spending in the fields, constantly putting out fires of weeds and erosion and bug infestations, and you could never do it all.

Spending 18 hours a day out spraying all night because it's the only time the wind was down.

It was hopeless and it was profitless and it was dark.

I understood that the life that I was living put me around a lot of dangerous things.

My grandpa had had cancer.

My father had had cancer.

I was starting to resign myself to the fact that I was gonna have cancer one day.

I had no intentions of quitting because our commitment was to our family and what they needed.

But I still wasn't at peace with all the things that were dangerous for our health.

We're not wishing these same problems on our children.

We're looking for a solution.

I've made a commitment inside my own heart and mind that if by the end of my life I found a way that my children don't have to have cancer too, then it will have all been worth it.

And part of that had to do with us continuing to get educated.

Right!

Because that's the part that was missing in the formu.. We... were... you know, had covered all the bases, but we didn't understand the life... um under the soil.

Several years ago, I went back to 2012 and started tracking the history of each farm and everything that happened on the farm.

We've got several fields like that.

These are some of the depictions of the irrigation pivots.

We've tried many, many things, you know.

New agricultural tools, implements, software, products you can buy and apply.

You think some of them are going to be great and then they end up not working for you.

We realized that our soil was at a place where the water would just run off.

The soil was more sandy than it should be.

It couldn't accept the rainfall and hold it.

This was the year he planted cover everywhere.

Things that we were seeing were painting a picture.

We just started looking on YouTube and looking at books, you know, asking questions of anyone that knew what we were looking at.

When we got introduced to soil health and got introduced to the ideas that are in the regenerative movement, they resonated.

They resonated in what we were seeing and what we were feeling.

All of a sudden, we learned that soil was alive.

It completely changed what I'm looking at and how I'm relating to it and what it means to be involved with it.

We were fighting the health of the soil.

We were pushing it down instead of boosting it up.

That was when the lights came on.

Both for our own health and for the soil health.

And said, there's another way, and we are going to figure out what it is.

There he is.

Yeah, there he is.

Oh, it stopped.

Nice.

Our bodies, we are a living ecosystem, just like the soil is an ecosystem.

And we were seeing these two things and how they have been disrupted.

We've been fighting it, fighting it, fighting.

So much of what I've been doing is spraying to kill, trying to dominate, trying to hold back life that wants to grow.

When it's balanced, the struggle goes away.

This is a soil from the 280s.

Wow!

So this one didn't have any synthetic fertilizers.

And... lots of good cover.

Lot of good cover, lots biomass.

Yeah.

We added fungal inoculants.

I know there's going to be lots of mistakes.

There's going to be lots of failures.

You can't control all the variables, but we're going to fall forward.

We're going to learn from everything.

So we will, ...so just, just... take a bean and just put it, just a couple of inches down.

A green bean.

He's almost a plant, isn't he?

One row is going to be treated.

One row is not.

So we can see how it's different, okay?

What is this?

This is the compost juice.

Okay?

This is the extract.

Just squeeze them on the seeds.

Yeah, a lot.

All right.

Okay.

Good job.

So now we can cover these up.

All right.

So the plants break down the nutrients, but this hel..

This helps the plants absorb the nutrients.

Yes.

Isn’t that cool?

You take some handfuls and just spread it all out.

All over this?

Yeah.

There you go.

We started a garden in our front yard to test and implement all these ideas right in front of our children.

From there, we'll grow it across the rest of the farm.

Trying to change in moderation.

Proving it, understanding it, educating ourselves and our children.

I want them to see at a young age, what I'm learning at age 42.

As I was studying soil health and starting to learn about the life in the soil, my wife was studying human health.

The more we talked, the more these two pictures lined up.

Human health, soil health, everything was a mirror image of the other one.

I learned that the immune system resides in the gut mostly, and that what we eat, what we breathe, it all matters, and it all has an impact on that microbiome.

We've been working to heal my gut health and my wife's health and learn how to raise our kids in a way that keeps them healthy.

Most of it revolves around our immune systems and how we are constantly barraging them with harmful things.

The soil is the immune system of the plant.

Before we made these changes, we were spraying insecticides at least two to three times every season, on most of the acres.

This is an industry where there's so much that's taken from you, in decision making, that you feel channeled down into, really, all I'm doing is living out everyone else's plans.

But in order to make a change, you have to stay in the game.

When we put in cover crops, they had all these flowers in them.

And you'd see the bees and all the beneficial insects that are out there.

Why am I spraying for the two or three if there's all these other ones that can balance it out and manage it?

I decided to try bees.

That was such an encouragement because I was producing something on my farm that I could share with people with a clear conscience and joy in my heart to give them.

Let's put one about every four feet today.

Okay.

We met Dan from Fed N Happy, at a conference, and he has a worm and compost business.

He's not just provided us with worms, but also with a lot of teaching lessons showing us how to do it so that we could develop our own compost.

We met some really great people as we've gotten into the reserve community that are helping us, try to find our path forward.

In 1973, my first year, I had cattle from this bash.

I remember that, when I was Farah's age.

You had a baby calf who you called Spike.

Yeah, I remember Spike.

Farah.

He was born in the wintertime.

We kept him in the garage at Grandma's house.

There she is.

I'm excited about the direction that we're going and still making it a family farm that you don't worry about your kids walking out in the field because you've sprayed it with a chemical.

I have something that I want to share with my kids.

I have something that I get to do with my wife.

I'm sorry.

I'm a big ball of emotion now.

It's impossible to separate it all.

Whenever we had hard, hard times, it's just really easier to give up, and a lot of people do, and I don't blame them.

Farming is a very hard world.

Yeah he’s our hero, and we're proud.

Right!

That’s for sure.

I believe in what I'm doing, and I'm excited about it.

I'm sharing that with my family, and I'm sharing it with the world.