Ep #11: The Power of Regenerative Holistic Agriculture with Rodger Savory
Can farmers escape the financial traps of traditional agriculture while restoring their land? In today’s episode, Brian Kearney talks with Rodger Savory, a leading expert in holistic and regenerative agriculture, about transforming barren land into thriving ecosystems. Rodger shares how biodiversity and holistic grazing can restore soil health, boost productivity, and break the cycle of unsustainable farming.
Listen in as he dives into the harsh realities farmers face, from crushing debt to unsustainable land management practices that push them to the brink. He explains why many only embrace regenerative methods when they’re at rock bottom—and why delaying until that point isn’t necessary. With real-world examples, he challenges conventional wisdom, proving that struggling farmers don’t have to wait for a crisis to embrace change.
Listen to the Full Episode:
What You’ll Hear About in This Episode:
How you can restore degraded land using biodiversity and holistic grazing.
How regenerative methods break the farming debt cycle.
Why many farmers only adopt regenerative practices.
Soil restoration success stories.
The importance of reintroducing biodiversity to improve soil quality, water retention, and crop yields.
Challenges in traditional farming.
The profitability of regenerative farming.
The benefits of adopting sustainable farming practices.
Ideas Worth Sharing:
“I'm not an either/or person, but what I will say is anytime something is new, we have to learn how to do it. And anytime something is old, we can look at it in history.” - Rodger Savory
“If you look at the early definitions of regenerative agriculture, they all said using holistic management to make decisions that are socially, economically, and environmentally sound short- and long-term—that's the key.” - Rodger Savory
“Two things cause desperation: one is a drought and the other is bankruptcy. And I'm sad to say, the majority of folks only changed to holistic regenerative agriculture when their backs were against the wall.” - Rodger Savory
Resources:
Rodger Savory: LinkedIn
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Read the Transcript:
Rodger Savory: Well, as a kid, it was leaving the country in the middle of the night on a train. My mother was warned that the secret police were after us, and if she wanted to keep us safe, get us out. So I had a fairly traumatic childhood. I've got big scars down the back of my head from where I was nearly stoned to death as a child. Growing up in civil wars, it's not for the weak.
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Brian Kearney: Welcome to the Land Ledger. Today, we have Roger Savory on, excited to dive into both regenerative agriculture, but also what you can do when ground is starting to succumb to desertification. So I'd love to dive into that too, but Roger, welcome to the show.
Rodger Savory: Thanks. Thanks for having me, Brian.
Brian Kearney: Yeah, excited to dive in. First, let's start a little bit with your background. How did you get involved into the regenerative agriculture and particularly grazing movements?
Rodger Savory: Brian, the easiest way to answer that is osmosis. I grew up with it. So I was born in Rhodesia, raised in South Africa, went to fancy private schools, came to America when I was 16, cowboyed on the Flying M Ranch out of Flagstaff, Arizona when I was 17.
Joined the army, finished the army. Most of my army career was up in Alaska. I went to UNM, University of New Mexico, studied desert field biology, amongst other things that I studied. And basically was always passionate about nature, wildlife, plants, animals, later fungi, and then livestock. And, kind of just because of who my father was grew up and my grandfather grew up traveling, looking at our environment the entire time. My grandfather was a top civil engineer. He built the world's largest dam, so always understanding water, nature, economies, farming, ranching. Yeah. So just osmosis. I've just been exposed to it my entire life.
Brian Kearney: Yeah. Interesting. Tell me about that transition from Rhodesia to South Africa to the States. What did that look like?
Rodger Savory: Well, as a kid, it was leaving the country in the middle of the night on a train. My mother was warned that the secret police were after us and if she wanted to keep us safe, get us out. So I had a fairly traumatic childhood, I've got big scars down the back of my head from where I was nearly stoned to death as a child.
Growing up in civil wars, it's not for the weak. So we had all that trauma. My father was involved in politics as well as being a warrior. So, we had that or what I would call it normal human aggression and conflict over diminishing resources. Wars are never fought when there's abundance.
Wars are always fought when there's a sense that we're running out of resources. No one has ever said, “Hey, you take the last loaf of bread. I'll let my family starve.” It's never happened. So if you look at all the conflicts over the last 250,000 years, they're always about resources and how do we manage our resources.
And if we manage linearly and we manage for without current thought model, which is kill, kill, kill, simplify. If we do that, the unintended consequences is we always run out of resources. We always run out of abundance and we always end up in conflict and war. I wrote about this to the United Nations, you know, that you can't do that since what was it, August 11th, 1945, real war is no longer possible.
People who follow the constitution in this country say, “Well, Congress hasn't declared war.” Yes, that's true. We've had lots of what I call population control skirmishes, but you can't have a war because no one can fight a nuke. Trust me. I was an artillery soldier. You can't fight a nuke. It's preposterous.
They have so much force and so much destructive power. So from August 11th, 1945 onwards, humans had to live within their boundaries. We had to live within our geographical regions. And so because for the last 250,000 years, all we've known how to do is simplify, destroy, and then when our ecosystem can no longer support us because we simplified it to where it was just blowing sand.
When we get to that stage, then we say, “Oh, let's go and conquer those guys. They've still got my stuff.” Well, that's no longer an option. So now we have to learn how to regenerate our ecosystems within our national boundaries for the first time in human history. This has never happened. We're not wired for it, all of our netic passed on knowledge.
Thousands of generations tells you, “Destroy, simplify, go and take someone else's.” Well, it's not an option anymore. So we either now have migration once we've destroyed. I think we're seeing a very good example in this country where we've said, “Nope, no more migration. Stay where you live. You can't come to us.”
And war, nope, can't have war. You die, nukes flatten you. So we don't have the options of migrating or killing anymore. Well, that leaves us one option and only one option. We've got to learn to regenerate our societies, our cultures, our ecosystems, and our economies. And the only thing that will allow us to regenerate all of those is to have a solar dollar based economy based on growing more plants and having those plants grow healthier soils and have those soils produce more and have this whole economy based on the only thing that's truly sustainable. Oil is not truly sustainable. Gas isn't. Forests aren't. But if we make decisions towards abundance and getting our solar dollar economies working, that is the only thing that I think actually can give us something that we've never dreamed of.
And I really mean never dreamed of. We talk about the garden of Eden. Yeah, that was a long time ago. And we haven't got back there, but as farmers and ranchers, that's what we need to be managing for is abundance and complexity and life. And it's difficult because it goes against every one of our instincts.
You're looking at the guy who's done a lot of hunting. I've killed a lot of stuff. This is public. So I'm not going to admit how much, but I will tell you, I've killed a lot of stuff. And I enjoy hunting, but now I go, “Okay, if I'm going to hunt that, how can I have those multiply way more than the one I'm taking?”
And that's got to be our change in thinking. So, yeah, that's my introduction. Sorry, a bit bleak and a bit harsh, but I thought I'd not mess around.
Brian Kearney: No, that's great. I like to dive right in. Tell me, go a little bit deeper into, you said, solar dollar economy. Is that what you were? Dive a little deeper in that.
Rodger Savory: Yeah, so, we all study economies, but if you look at the source of economies, you've got the printed dollar economy. That's where Biden printed a lot of dollars, and that created inflation, et cetera, et cetera. So printed dollars are very wishy washy. I lived in Zimbabwe when we had a trillion dollar notes and I used my French, but I used to decide which was more valuable, a dollar note or a piece of toilet paper.
And often the dollar note was less valuable than the toilet paper when it came to doing my business. So paper dollars are kind of worthless, but we have them. The other is mineral dollars. So those are dollars based on the mineral wealth of a country, whether it's extraction of gold, extraction of silver in Timbuktu days, it was extraction of salt or the American petrochemical chemical dollar, extraction of oil.
So that's the other thing you can base your wealth on. Well, this is how much resources we can pull out of the ground. The other one you can have is paper dollars and Bitcoin or electronic dollars are one in the same. they created out of thin air and there's nothing intrinsic attached to them value wise.
And then the final one is a solar dollar. Now that's not a solar panel, that's a dollar generated from sunlight through the photosynthesis process creating growth. So seed germinates, it grows as it gets more, as it gets bigger, harvest more sunlight, as it gets bigger, harvest more sunlight. And it turns that sunlight into carbon energy.
So you can have carbon energy in the form of petrochemical dollars, or you can have carbon energy in the form of solar dollars, both are an energy form that we can trade. So your one corn seed becomes 500 seeds on a corn cob, that's quite an exponential growth and that happened over 120 days.
So we need to base our economies on getting as much solar energy harvested into the ground, harvested and converted. Now whether that's through, you know, and that all grows food, which is the abundance that we need to stop warfare and it grows fibers, which is the abundance of building materials that we need to stop warfare.
So the creation of foods and fibers from the lands and waters of the world are where we need to be generating our solar dollars to trade. ‘Cause that's all it is. It's a measurement of bargain and trade between two people. But if we base our trade based on solar dollars, that is the only truly sustainable perpetual system of wealth that humans can generate for our planet as a means of barter, that can actually support the six, seven, eight, nine, 10 billion people that are going to be on the planet.
Brian Kearney: I like that. I haven't heard that breakdown before. That is interesting. I'll be probably writing some essays internally about that. That's fascinating. For the common refrain you hear that organic and regenerative, you know, can't feed the world if everyone ate the way we did, we went to grass fed. It just wouldn't be possible. Is that true? Is that not something you've seen? What would be your response to those people?
Rodger Savory: I'm not an either or person, but what I will say is anytime something is new, we have to learn how to do it. And anytime something is old, we can look at it in history. So I only eat organic food, but now I'm going to bust organic. Okay. Two thirds of the planet was turned into desert with organic agriculture.
Brian Kearney: Okay. Dive into that.
Rodger Savory: You didn't have chemical fertilizers and chem and poisons and sprays before the 1950s. So two thirds of the planet was turned into a desert using organic agriculture. Okay. So that's not the answer. And I started by saying I only eat organic.
Now the reason I only eat organic is I know the extreme harm of all these chemicals and fertilizers. So is organic far superior to all the fertilizers and poisons? Absolutely. But is organic our savior? Absolutely not. Okay. So if organic's not our savior. And regular agriculture, conventional agriculture is clearly not our savior, what is?
What can? And that's why you're interviewing me, because I do regenerative agriculture, but let's back up a bit. It's actually holistic regenerative agriculture or regenerative holistic agriculture. It doesn't matter which way you put the order. If you look at the early definitions of regenerative agriculture, they all said using holistic management to make decisions that are socially, economically and environmentally sound short and long term, that's the key.
Okay. So if you're a chemical farmer, great, be a chemical farmer, but when you describe the future for your grandchildren, I don't know a single chemical farmer who's going to say, “I want my children to grow up with Parkinson's disease and cancer and tumors on their brains.” I don't know what–most chemical farmers I know have a nice organic vegetable garden next to the house.
They eat organic themselves and they sell this nonsense to everyone else. Why? Because we've been forced into that position. Remember for 70 years, since the 1954 or 55 breaking woods agreement, it was agreed that commodity food prices would be kept stable. Well, that means we've had no increase in prices in commodity foods for 70 years.
I'm sorry you just can't do that mathematically. You can't have a bushel of wheat and cost $1.22 in 1955, and a bushel of wheat in 2010 or 2020 also cost $1.22 a bushel. Are you saying that there was no inflation for 70 years for food? Nonsense. So how did farmers earn a $1.22 a bushel when they were farming their quarter section of land?
Now they farm 27 sections of land, they still only earn $1.22. Well, where did all those farmers from a quarter section of land to 27 sections of land go? Well, they moved into cities. So we had a government policy to maintain food prices, stable, I guess. So all these farmers, we lost–you're too young to know it, but in the eighties, we lost over 6 million family farms.
That was the cost of winning the cold war against the Soviets. I'm sorry, but that was an extremely high price to pay. If you go 6 million times, what, five, 10 members per family, six, fives of 30, 30 million people lost their livelihoods so we could compete against the Soviets. Why? Over a diminishing sense of resources.
Remember, we only fight conflicts over diminishing resources, but neither country was smart enough to say, “Hey, why don't we figure out in this new world, instead of how to destroy each other, how do we get so much abundance that we don't need to destroy each other?”
Brian Kearney: It’s interesting. It's a little bit more nuanced than you sometimes hear from organic and regenerative, and I think some of the pushback in our areas in the Midwest can be that people see the farmers as the bad guy.
Where I like how you're saying, it's like, well, it's the system they have to operate in. There is not many other options if you're going to farm conventionally. But what options are there for those people if there are? Have you seen many farms in my area?
Rodger Savory: Ryan,how young are you?
Brian Kearney: 29.
Rodger Savory: 29. Do you own your own farm?
Brian Kearney: I do not.
Rodger Savory: Would you like to buy a farm?
Brian Kearney: Oh yeah, everyone would.
Rodger Savory: Okay. So a hundred years ago, land was three pennies an acre. Okay. And wheat was about $22 an acre. Could you have bought a farm and made a profit farming?
Brian Kearney: Oh yeah.
Rodger Savory: Absolutely. Today, land is $30,000 an acre and wheat is about $22 a bushel. Any fool can see there's no way for you to get into farming. So what we did over the last 70 years, we allowed the price of land to go up. Well, we kept food prices stable. The farmer had to borrow more and more and more against his land, put in his crop and get his harvest. So the farmers have been subsidizing the cities for 70 years. We've been supplying cheap food to the cities for 70 years.
Why? Because if a politician, if the price of food goes up, a politician loses the election. We've known this since the French revolution. People lost their heads. I come from one of those families that escaped. We kept our heads because we bugged out. But if the price of a loaf of bread went up, you got your head guillotined off.
In politics, you lose the election. So if you look at every time we've had a price food strike, you've had food riots around the world and all governments have pushed, have squashed farmers back down to get the prices back down again. So this isn't unintentional. This is intentional. Okay. So we've played this game for 70 years. Woohoo. Now, we've got guys your age who want to get into farming. One or two things got to happen. The farmer who's 75 years old has to be guaranteed social security so that he can give you the farm and he can live out his days in luxury because you're not going to buy that farm, or the bank has to write off trillions of dollars in land assets that all the banks around America hold. Trillions. Trillions of dollars. And we've got to drop the price of land from $30,000 an acre back down to three pennies an acre. Do you see the bag our generation has been left holding?
Brian Kearney: I do.
Rodger Savory: There is no easy way out.
Brian Kearney: Yeah.
Rodger Savory: Who's going to be the fall guy? The farmer or the banker?
Brian Kearney: Probably not the banker.
Rodger Savory: Or the politician who it really belongs to.
Brian Kearney: Yeah. That's true. And I would say for the audience listening, well, three cents and 30,000 might be a bit of an exaggeration in our area.It’s usually around 125 bucks in our area in 1920. But that's still possible.
Rodger Savory: Look at the price at the end of World War I.
Brian Kearney: Uh huh. I'll check into the 40s. I know in our area in 1920 it was about 100 bucks. But the point still stands. I mean, 100 bucks and still $3 corn, or still 1.25 wheat, you could make a living on a pretty good one. Now it is much more difficult. So, we've talked a lot about the problems.
What would you say potential solutions are is it possible without actual change in policy? Is it something that people can push back on? Have you seen that? What would your opinion be there?
Rodger Savory: The history of the world is its revolution. That's the history of the world. I think we're actually living through that revolution right now. Now, how it comes out in the end, we've got to stick with principles so you can expect hyperinflation. At the end of hyperinflation, so the kind of rules of the game are during hyperinflation, never lose your land to a bank. Never lose your land to your bank. How do you prevent that? You've got to be on a fixed interest rate.
Anyone on variable interest rate is guaranteed to lose their land. I mean, one of the farmers I worked with during the hyperinflation in Zimbabwe, he literally bought his ranch, paid off his whole ranch for the cost of a hamburger. He was on a fixed interest rate. He waited till the inflation, walked into the bank manager and gave $50,000 cash, which was what he would have bought a wimpy hamburger for.
And the bank manager tried everything possible to get out of that and didn't succeed. Up in Zambia, what we had was when the inflation went crazy and everyone was going to lose their farms to the bankers, there was one chap who. owed no money to the bank. So everybody sold their ranches and farms to him for a dollar each.
And then when the bank came to claim the realized value of these ranchers, they all handed over a dollar to the bank because they had a bill of sale saying, “No, it was sold. Here we are, this is all we could get for your land.” And then after that, he transferred the ranchers back to these farmers after the chaos was over.
But the bottom line is the banks lost all that value. Now we can wait for chaos or we can voluntarily say to the government, “Right. In 2008, you saved the big banks by writing off all that value. How about saving all the farms across America and we write off all the value of the bonds? Fantastic, right?”
Okay. No, that 75 year old man, his entire life savings is in that. So now you wiped out his whole life savings. Okay. I'm not saying what America will do to solve this problem, but I am saying it's a mathematical certainty that we have to solve it. And there'll be politics and there'll be give and take. And hopefully a bunch of smart guys can figure it out, but it has to be solved. And or we can keep punting it down the road. It never goes away though. It's a mathematical certainty. It can't not go away. It's basically the entire foundation of our entire economic system. All starts with agriculture.
Nothing in a city happens without agriculture. Nothing. All those clever guys work on their computers, eat a hamburger. Nothing happens without agriculture. They all drink coffee, nothing happens. Okay. So how do we get agriculture stable again? Now, the last 20 years, it's really been a thing to corporatize agriculture and to get people, corporations to buy. The problem with corporatization of agriculture is corporations by their very nature lack common sense, lack humanity, and are impervious to change. Okay. So when we see the land turning to deserts, they will fail to react. A family that has to pass this land to the son will go, “Yeesh, I need to do something different otherwise I've got nothing to hand over to my son.” The corporation will say, “No, it's not a problem. We'll just sell the ranch at a profit to another corporation.”
And we see this in Australia where it's very, it's much more obvious than in this country. But in Australia, the big cattle stations, on average, they're on the market every three years. And every three years they get resold. And they always go for several tens of millions more dollars than what they were bought for.
So it's just a land money play. Land money play. The ranches never got more profitable. They never produced more livestock. The land never improved, but the corporation bought for 10 million, sold for 15 million, resold for 20 million, resold for 25 million. And you look at all these pastoral companies and they're, “Oh, they're making a fortune. Look at all this profit on their books.” It's smoke and mirrors. There's nothing there. They didn't produce one more cow while their value went from 10 million to 30 million. In fact, if anything, they're carrying less cattle because they're desertifying. So very clever people sitting in cities are playing the money game and they're playing it very smartly to the detriment of every human on this planet. To the detriment of every human on this planet.
Brian Kearney: For that farmer making the decision, what do they do though?
Rodger Savory: Get out of debt. Transfer your debt into fixed interest. And then make decisions to get out of debt. I'll give you an example of farmer I worked with. We cleared nearly nine, I think about $960,000, $970,000 of the operating note. They had about a $960,000 operating note.
They could never clear it. And they'd been trying for 13 years. With a change in management and doing holistic financial planning, we got rid of that operating note in one year, one year. 13 years of regular conventional agricultural planning and financing, they could never get rid of that debt and it was killing them.
They hated being nearly a million dollars in debt at all times. And just with a change in management, we cleared that date in one year. So much so that family now, one, two, three son, at least three sons. They're like, “Oh, no, we can now buy a new property for each one of our sons ‘cause we've learned this trick,” how to manage holistically and then how to so increase the carrying capacity of your property that you're just printing money, solar dollars, lots of that.
Brian Kearney: What changes were made?
Rodger Savory: So they didn't have, obviously they had a million dollars of debt, so they didn't have money to buy more cattle.
Brian Kearney: Right.
Rodger Savory: So in this situation, I just said to them, “Well, why don't we, you've got tons of forage that you're going to burn, why don't we turn it into money instead?”
So instead of burning the land at the end of the dry season, we brought in, I think, about 5,000 in that country, they call it adjustment cattle. Here, I think we call it custom grazing. So we brought about 5,000 of other people's cattle in. And they managed those and the monthly charge per head, one year, money cleared.
So they didn't have to buy anything. They got 5,000 additional cattle, which completely healed their ranch because that many hooves trampling and dung and urinating. And I mean, the pictures are lovely. I mean, it was shoulder to shoulder cattle. And I taught them how to run animals at ultra high density, and they were in paddocks for 10 minutes, next paddock, 10 minutes, next paddock, 10 minutes. But if you want to clear a million bucks, that's what you do.
Brian Kearney: Wow, interesting.
Rodger Savory: And we cleared it very quickly, and then, now they were debt free. With increased biodiversity and biomass, now their options were basically unlimited. You want to buy your own cattle, keep running other people's cattle. I think if memory serves me right, they ran other people's cattle for about three more years as they built their herd up.
Brian Kearney: Interesting. 10 minutes. That's very intensive. I've heard of one or two days, but–
Rodger Savory: I'm the guy who runs big herds, my own ranch, 2000 cattle.
Brian Kearney: Wow. Fascinating. And then how do you manage the labor on that? Because I imagine that would–it's not bad?
Rodger Savory: Piece of cake. Piece of cake.
Brian Kearney: By using electric fences and you just have to open the gate and they move or?
Rodger Savory: I've done different things. We're using virtual fencing, electric fencing, just herding, cowboys on horseback where, you know, that you solve based on your habitat, terrain, et cetera, et cetera. But labor has never been the issue. Water has never been the issue. We've always been able to solve the weak links.
Brian Kearney: Okay. So the issue you would see most of the time is the debt on the farm or what would you see the issue being?
Rodger Savory: Yeah. Yeah. It kills people. I mean, they commit suicide over it. It literally kills people.
Brian Kearney: Yeah. Yeah. It does. It does.
Rodger Savory: So, I have what I call my Friday clients. These are people who come on Friday saying, “Thanks for closing on Monday. What do we do?” And then we sit down for the weekend and we come up with a financial plan. How are we going to get you out of the dwang you're in? And that presented to the banks on Monday and the banks don't want to foreclose.
They don't want another empty property. So, if the bank gets presented a good plan, they'll generally not full close and buys you some time. And as long as you make the management changes, normally in six months to a year, we see people have spun their operations around, but it's only–people are only willing to change when they're desperate.
If you're not desperate, you're going to do what your granddaddy always did until your back's against the wall. And two things cause desperation. One is a drought and the other is bankruptcy. And I'm sad to say but the majority of folks only change to holistic regenerative agriculture when their backs were against the wall.
I mean, there's a very good, famous person in the industry by the name of Gabe Brown, and he tells everyone, “My back was against the wall. That's why it changed.” his son came and interned with me up in Canada many years ago. So I know the family very well. This is a story we see over and over and over again.
And the sad thing is there's no need for it. But humans fear, fear of the unknown, won't allow them to change until they're forced into it, until they've got a gun to their heads.
Brian Kearney: Yeah. For the people listening, 2,000 cattle, what size do you need as far as acres for something like that when you're managing this intensively?
Rodger Savory: Look, you're asking me how long is a piece of string? I'll give you an example. It depends on rainfall, habitat, et cetera, et cetera. One of my clients run 350 mother cows on 55 acres.
Brian Kearney: Wow. Where's that located?
Rodger Savory: Georgia.
Brian Kearney: Wow. Okay. Interesting.
Rodger Savory: Okay. So now out in New Mexico, you could never do that.
Brian Kearney: Right. Right.
Brian Kearney: Yeah. So, but they, oh God, I mean, yeah, Georgia it's raining all the damn time. It's like, “God, it's raining again.” Yeah. So it depends on the habitat. Now I will say the rest of that sentence is Georgia should not have any cattle. It should be forests and pigs and chickens under the forest. We shouldn't be clearing forests to run cattle. We've got lots of grassland that needs to be grassland.
So, yeah, that's where in holistic management, we look at the brittleness scale and how many months of atmospheric moisture do you have? Yeah, and based on the atmospheric moisture, should you be a grassland or should you be a forest? And if you should be a forest, you should literally be a forest.
Brian Kearney: So would that be like a move towards silvopasture or what would that look like?
Rodger Savory: Yeah. Yeah. And depending on where on the brittleness scale, but if you're in the Amazon, not even silvopasture, just flat on jungle. It depends on where you're on the brittleness scale, but even really far out West in the grasslands, all the research shows, if you've got trees in your pastures, the livestock do better.
In Australia, they did trials and they showed that there was 10% more weight gain in pastures that had trees compared to pastures that they cleared all the trees out of. And I mean, it's so–that's why I said, we've got to stop the kill, kill, simplify, kill, simplify, kill philosophy. You’ve got to manage for biodiversity. You've got to manage for biomass. That ranch in Georgia, I mean, in the summer, he's growing 13 foot tall forage, 120 species. In the winter, he's growing waste high forage, also 120 species. So there's so much biomass and so much biodiversity on that ranch that it can support 330 mother cows.
And we built, we went from red clay to black topsoil in one year, we had 10 inches of black topsoil. Because we had so many plants pumping carbon into their roots. This is stuff we know. We've been doing it for 30 years. We're getting really good at it. All the guys who followed Gabe Brown, those are guys who have big farms and no livestock.
Okay, do the cover crops, do the no till because you don't have livestock, but if you want to turn your operation around, figure out how to get your livestock into that operation. If I want land to be profitable, I try and plan for at least five incomes per year of each acre. So that's the crop. That's the, let's say the corn crop, then we graze the corn crop, that's weight gain on the cattle. Then we bring the pigs in behind and they get the roots and everything out of the bulbs that were grown. That's weight gain on pigs. Then we have the chickens come behind and they clean up what the pigs have left behind.
So that's one, two, three, four. And yeah, let's say we put an egg layers behind that as well. And then the corn, we value add to it and we turn it in whiskey and the beef we value add to it and we slaughter it and process it ourselves. Remember, because you can't be part of the commodity markets. Yeah, and the pork, we value add to it and the chickens, now we're running a restaurant.
Is it just sit on a tractor all summer and then phone the agent and say, “Hey buddy, you make the money this year. I don't need money. I'll get another loan from the bank.” Or do we manage our ecosystem, our families and our farms to make profit for ourselves?
Brian Kearney: Yeah, that's interesting. Let's dive a little bit into that makes sense on ground. That's already producing pretty well. Something that is maybe you've got debt, maybe the system's kind of stacked against you, but it is ground that is perfect for agriculture. let's dive a little bit into what you all are doing with the ground that looks like there'd be nothing you could possibly grow on it.
Those are the ones that just the before and after pictures stunned me sometimes really, they almost don't look real. It's kind of insane. I want to dive a little bit into that.
Rodger Savory: Okay, so let's change gears and go, “Okay, the regular farmers who are slowly desertifying. Okay. There's a solution for you.”
How about the guys in West Texas or wherever, New Mexico, Arizona, who've, yeah, through no fault of their own, a hundred and 200 years, a thousand years later, it's just bare blowing sand. And I really do mean through no fault of your own the 1936 decision by the Soil Conservation Service and the USDA to eradicate the sheep flocks and the cattle herds in the American West because cattle and livestock were overgrazing and causing desertification.
That was based on a flawed study and we killed millions of cattle and goats and that was a huge stain on the American government, a massive stain where it's a hundred years late and we've never recovered from it. So, let's start by saying it wasn't those farmers' fault. It was the government and some scientists from East Coast universities who had never lived in a brittle environment, who did the flawed research and then all government policy got based on that flawed research.
So that's everyone's get out of jail free card. It was academics and government that caused the desertification of the American West. Okay. Now that that's out the way, okay, so we're down to desert. Now, find the best way to explain it to anyone is, and sorry, Brian, you're going to be my guinea pig.
Brian Kearney: Perfect.
Rodger Savory: Please don't be embarrassed. I'll help you as much as I can. What's the difference between sand and soil?
Brian Kearney: Carbon matter would be my guess, right?
Rodger Savory: Nope.
Brian Kearney: Holding capacity?
Rodger Savory: Nope.
Brian Kearney: I don't know.
Rodger Savory: Yeah. So we'll give you, like I said, I'll help you. Third choice is life. It's sand until there's life in it, then it becomes soil. Now you've got the direction. What's the difference between a fertile soil and an infertile soil?
Brian Kearney: Right. That would be carbon matter, right?
Rodger Savory: Nope.
Brian Kearney: The amount of nutrients and water it can hold maybe?
Rodger Savory: Nope.
Brian Kearney:Okay. You stumped me.
Rodger Savory: Quantity of life.
Brian Kearney: Huh? Okay.
Rodger Savory: So the more life that's in soil. The more fertile it is, the less life that's in soil, the less fertile it is. Okay, now, we're not doing too well here. What does all life need?
Brian Kearney: Well, water, nutrients, air and to not be killed energy. Yeah.
Rodger Savory: Okay. What is the majority source of energy on the planet? And I do say majority because there's deep ocean energy coming from volcanoes that keeps life down there, the sun. Okay.
Brian Kearney: I got one,.
Rodger Savory: You got one, you're doing well. Okay. So now if we know that to have a fertile soil, we need more life and we know that the sun is the source of energy for life, what do we need as anyone seeing the sun shine below the ground?
Brian Kearney: None.
Rodger Savory: None. So how does that energy get from the sun to below the ground for that soil life to get its energy?
Brian Kearney: Some sort of plant would have to be.
Rodger Savory: Photosynthesis. Okay. So if we want fertile soils to build a nation on, what decisions do we need to be making to get fertile soil where we previously had sand?
Brian Kearney: Livestock back on the ground, putting some sort of plants in there. How would you start to do that with something that's just sand though?
Rodger Savory: Well, let's just back up a bit. We've got to make decisions to get as many plants growing as possible.
Brian Kearney: Right.
Rodger Savory: Okay. And we said that sunlight doesn't shine below the ground. In fact, what we discovered was that ultraviolet light in sunlight sterilizes and kills soil microorganisms. So the enemy of soil is sunlight. Remember soil is a complex living organism. The enemy of soil is sunlight, but soil cannot get its energy without sunlight. So what's the difference between soil below the ground and sunlight?
It's photosynthesis. So we have to get plants sending the energy down to feed the microorganisms. But we've also got to now protect the soil, the living soil organism from the sunlight. And that's the role that plants fulfill by putting layers of lignin down. So grass, grass leaves have lignin in, forbs and legumes don't have too much lignin, so they break down completely.
So the grass is what covers and protects the soil and living organism from ultraviolet light and from heat because if we get above 60 centigrade, it dies. So in a desert that's blowing sand, we go, “Okay, hold on. We want to turn the sand into soil, a living organism. What do we have to do to protect the living organism from ultraviolet light?”
And that's where I pioneered this thing that I call biological carpeting or biocarpeting. And what we do is we graze what we feed cattle in the desert by moving the food grown in other areas, irrigation areas near deserts. We grow the food there, we move it into the desert, we feed the livestock in the desert, on the mine tailing, whatever, where there is no life in the sand, and we get a layer of dung and urine on top of the sand that then becomes the ultraviolet light barrier.
Once the ultraviolet light is now blocked, then the fungi can germinate and grow away from the sunlight on the bottom edge of it. And we know from the research that the fungi, when they've got their whole network out, they actually literally tap on seeds and they say to the seed, “Okay, it's time to germinate.”
The fungi control it. And they tell the plants when to germinate. That is why we inoculate seeds in commercial agriculture. The inoculant is the fungi. So we already know that, but what we didn't know is that in the desert, what do fungus need? Warm, wet, and dark. Where is it warm, wet, and dark on a hot sand dune?
Nowhere. So that layer of dung takes it from hot to warm, stops the ultraviolet light. Now the seeds can get tapped when to germinate and that biocarpet will stay on. It's like a dried on cow patty, but it's millions of them to where they're all interlocked. And when that dried on cow patty finally gets rain after nine months, a year, two years, three years, it doesn't matter, when it finally gets rain, it's a giant sponge. And the moisture that used to fall into the sand and then just with the heat, dissipate and evaporate almost instantly, now gets absorbed by the sponge, can't evaporate it immediately, and triggers the fungi to grow. The fungi then trigger the seeds to germinate. As soon as the seeds are germinating and growing, literally as soon as they're up, they're now shading the biocarpet.
And as they get bigger, they create more shade. Now they create what we call the micro water cycle and there's this little vaporish moisture that evaporates out of the biocarpet and goes up to the leaves and it circulates and it gets sucked back in. And the micro water climate is what we humans had never understood as we created deserts across two thirds of the planet. So when we fix the micro water cycle, then when the plants are six feet tall, that then fixes the small water cycle and then, yeah, the large water cycle, but it all starts at that micro level. And it's literally as simple as that. And so what we figured out is that we can now cost effectively and profitably turn deserts back into grasslands. Obviously, you've got to pick the right spots. But you start where it's the low hanging fruit, the easy spots, you fix those and then you expand out from that.
And we know we can do it. We just, hell, we have a hard time fixing regular agriculture, let alone fixing the deserts. But when you understand the importance of why we've got to now invest in this and actually get it done. You need to understand this, all humans used to cover the planet. And gradually, we turn two thirds of it into a desert.
So that's our planet. And we turn two thirds into a desert. Now we're all remaining on this one third, but our population's increased. So now we've got a higher population living on a smaller piece of land. Oh, and by the way, we're currently turning 70% of the last third into a desert. So now we're all on this top little piece.
We're all crammed in here and we're saying human population control, kill a million people in Rwanda, Burundi, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Palestine, wherever, pick a spot, Vietnam, kill a million people because there's too many of us. Okay, we can reuse regenerative agriculture to fix that 70%, but we can only use biocarpeting to fix the real issue.
If we can fix that, that's what we've got to do to guarantee humanity a success. And we can only do it by understanding that we can create abundance in the deserts again, and we've got to start.
Brian Kearney: I guess two questions there. Are there areas where that isn't possible? Is there a certain amount of yearly rainfall that makes this most optimal or does it not matter?
Rodger Savory: No, it really doesn't matter. And the proof of that is all of these deserts historically were called the breadbaskets of civilizations.
Brian Kearney: Yeah, that's true. And Mesopotamia was the breadbasket of the world. That's interesting.
Rodger Savory: Yeah. So it was North Africa. So it was, yeah. I mean, New Mexico, a hundred years ago, the Rio Pueco Valley was the breadbasket of America.
It's just desert now. Yeah. So the rainfall is plenty. If you have 84% or 86% evaporation of the precipitation that falls within a half an hour of it raining because you've got bare sand, that's the issue we've got to deal and with a biological carpet, we just don't have that evaporation.
Brian Kearney: Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense.
Rodger Savory: It's not a rainfall issue. It's a non functioning micro water cycle issue. And we now know how to fix the micro water cycle.
Brian Kearney: Is that something that is also profitable at the end of the day for someone who wanted to get into it and just buy ground? I'd imagine that ground's pretty cheap. Is that something that can be done profitably? Or is this something that has to be done maybe with someone who already has money and are looking at it.
Rodger Savory: So there's four different business models we've looked at. And there is one where you use other people's land, other people's cattle. And yeah, so it's everyone has team humanity working together where they all get their little piece of the pie.
And then there's other models where investors buy up the land, buy up the cattle and do that. and there's good vegan options where vegans buy up the cattle, buy up the land and look after the cattle till they die of old age. Yeah, we've run all the different scenarios to keep everyone happy, but bottom line is all of the models work because they're all based on solar dollars.
And if you get a cow coming in at a thousand, at a 500 pounds and steer the meat coming in at 500 pounds and it leads at 1,200 pounds ready for market. And it came in at a thousand dollars and it leaves with a meat value of $8,000, there's money for everyone. The economy is based on the fact that we–and there's already a billion hungry people.
So there's no shortage of demand for meat. So you can't say, “Well, supply and demand…” Nonsense. The demand's already there. There's a billion hungry people. It's only instinctual fear that has prevented us launching already. Whenever you tell people this, they're like, “Oh, no, I can't do that. For 12,000 years, we've only known deserts to spread... There can't be a solution.”
So there's fear of the unknown, but I'm pretty sure as soon as we get started at scale doing any of these projects, there'll be lots of people mimicking and copying, and the idea will spread quite quickly. But to get the first chicken to put his head on the block, it's very difficult. No one wants their head chopped off.
Brian Kearney: Right, right. I wonder, is there a link we could put in the show notes for some pictures for people as well, where they can see before and after?
Rodger Savory: Fixedassets.com and then also Fixed Assets on Facebook. But Fixedassets.com is where we post a lot of information.
Brian Kearney: Perfect. Well, we'll be sure to have that in the show notes and some contact information. The last part I want to dive into here, the last advice I'd love to hear for a recent college grad coming out of one of the land grant universities, they're 22 trying to decide what they want to do, where would you recommend they look? What area is most exciting for you in ag?
Rodger Savory: Look, regenerative holistic management is, it's like where the Wright brothers were at Gideon. Yeah, it's just starting out. We're about 30 years into a new field of study. And there is not a day that goes by that I'm not learning something new, that we're not figuring out a new piece of this puzzle, socially, economically, environmentally, how everything fits together, how holes function, how conventional thinking and linear thinking, the scientific method don't work and how they're actually detrimental to our survival as a species.
This is the new way of thinking. So if I was young and wanted a better future for my grandchildren, I would be learning and thinking and starting to study smuts and holism and evolution and savoury and holistic management and all the regenerative agriculture stuff, depending on whether they're more philosophical thinkers or practical people, but there's room for everyone. This thinking needs to infiltrate economics, agriculture, policymaking, how to create laws holistically.
It's such an exciting field. There's so few of us who are thinking deeply and doing stuff. And I think this is a great field. All the young kids I encourage and work with, everyone's having fun learning and yeah, it's a good place to be. It's a new way of thinking.
Brian Kearney: Yeah, that makes sense. It's been fascinating diving into this and I'm sure we're going to stay in touch over the years. I'm sure we'll do more of these down the road, but for the audience, I ask everyone to maybe have an open mind, dive in, look into this. I think it is interesting and it's something that everyone knows something needs to be done in ag.
All farmers know that something needs to be done. There's an interesting potential way. So yeah, I appreciate you jumping on.
Rodger Savory: I'll end, Brian, by saying that most of the people who've come to field days or whatever, where they've seen what we've done, have walked away and done nothing for three years because they go into such shock.
They cannot believe what they just witnessed. And it takes him about three years of processing what they saw before they come on over from the dark side and come into the light and start managing holistically. So if anyone's fearful and everything, just come on over sooner, it's better than waiting until it's later. And thanks for having me on.
Brian Kearney: Yeah. Thank you for jumping on. It's been a great conversation.
And that’s a wrap on this episode of The Land Ledger.
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