When we farm with nature, when we're using our livestock in a way to improve the land, it's not only good for the livestock, good for the land, but it's a pretty awesome way to make a living.

And there's a lot of peace and there's a lot of fulfillment that comes from watching an ecosystem come back to life.

I'm Jonny Kilpatrick.

I'm the director of Regeneration at Heifer Ranch in Perryville, Arkansas.

We're part of the Savory Institute network of Hubs, and we're a 1200 acre working ranch.

We raise four species of livestock on pasture and in woodlot settings, and we train people how to farm regenerative way.

Yes, our regenerative farming practices are really based on principles that in my opinion, revolve around ecosystem health.

So it's looking at things like your soil health, it's looking at things like your wildlife.

You want you want animals to come back, which is something we've really seen.

And there to be a balance between all of those things.

So working together, symbiotic relationships, but it's really about ecosystem health and diversity.

Like when we look out in this pasture, everything in this past year has a purpose.

You see no bare soil, and that's the main thing in terms of regenerative agriculture is really focusing on keeping your soul covered.

It's like your skin.

You don't want your skin to be off your arm.

You really need that.

It has a purpose.

It protects, you know, our holistic plant grazing.

We're really looking at getting the animals to the right time and the right place with the right behavior.

What makes this easy is that it's planned out.

Does that mean that we stick to a ABCDE ETF and don't vary?

Absolutely not.

In holistic management.

You're always planning, but you're also always considering that you're wrong.

Yeah, I love my job because I get to get to train farmers.

I get to help an ecosystem get better and more healthy.

I get to help slow down climate change.

But I honestly, it's it's the people.

So we've got a team of four farmers that I get to work with on a daily basis, and they're just in terms of their knowledge base and their commitment and their drive.

You know, I supervise them, but I don't have to supervise them because they know exactly what they're doing.

They just come with a passion that's unusual.

And we're really blessed to have them.

I just can't say enough good things about them.

I grew up in a small town outside of Asheville, North Carolina, North Carolina.

My grandparents on my mom's side were farmers, but more ro crop farmers.

So cotton, tobacco, soybeans, that kind of thing.

But I used to love going to their farm in the summertime and just being on the land.

There was something always about the land that really drew me to just being there, horseback riding, dirt, bike riding, all of that playing with cousins.

It was just something really special.

So I always had an affinity for it, but didn't see myself as, Oh, I'm going to grow up and be a farmer.

Where that switched is, I went to a small liberal arts college for undergraduate called Warren Wilson College, and it was like one of those things in life where you find your tribe, you find your thing.

It was like my world opened up.

And then throughout my life and through working with agriculture, it was just a realization that the standard way of farming wasn't, in my opinion, really good for people, good for the land, and in some cases not even profitable.

And I think that there's a real need to look at some solutions that can combat climate change.

And I feel like regenerative agriculture is one of the main ways to do that.

I think that regenerative agriculture, in addition to just being able to watch nature flourish, which is very fulfilling, especially through the holistic management planning process, you learn how to not be reactionary and reductionist and you're not reacting to chaos.

So this is our grazing plan, holistic grazing chart from last year.

These are the moves we actually ended up making.

We write what we think we're going to do and then we just chart out our moves based on the size of the pasture, the quality of pasture, how they managed last year in that pasture and our stocking density.

So the yellow is the sheep, purple is the steers, and then the rams are blue, so they sort of stay down on the main part of campus and didn't move that much.

This type of management requires you to be engaged.

You got to set up the fences, you got to move the cows, you got to have your eyes on the livestock and your feet on the ground.

And that's how it works, because farming is complex.

It really takes, in my opinion, a sort of a mind shift.

It's not necessarily throw away all these tools and grab these tools.

It's more of like, Oh, okay, I can have a better quality of life by farming in this way.

I've been planting cover crops in this field for a couple of years, basically annuals that are extremely diverse.

So planting cover crops into pasture is really a challenge because you're not plowing it and discarding it and then planting it.

That'd be simple, right?

Simple for the human, terrible for the environment.

What we're trying to do is build the soil structure, the sponginess of the soil.

You do that through having different route systems.

So all of these plants have different depths of root that they go down.

They bring different qualities to the to the soil.

In this past year, we've got sunflowers for the pollinators, we've got sorghum.

Sudan, grass of different varieties.

We've got two kinds of millet that the cows really love.

So they're the sheep.

Collard greens, okra.

I mean, it's incredibly diverse.

It's like a garden.

Holistic management.

We're always thinking about the social impact of it, the ecological impact of an economy.

It can be very profitable.

You're cutting down on your inputs when you get rid of chemicals, when you get rid of, you know, all the machinery.

I mean, we have some machinery, but it's less than most folks.

All the heavy equipment, you're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars when you stack that stuff up.

I think that there's a real problem.

We know that our ecosystem is in a dire situation.

I work in a profession in agriculture that can either radically help the situation or continue hurting it.

I feel really fortunate that the commitment here is on ecosystem health and on farming in a way that works with nature instead of against it.

And that our charge is to train farmers to adapt principles and practices towards that goal as well.

I can't think of anything more fun than to farm in a way that you can see the ecosystem responding and getting better and just getting out of the way of nature.

So what we try to do is like, stop, observe, listen to what nature is telling us, and then try to farm in harmony with that.

This program is funded through a farm and Ranch Stress Assistance Network grant provided by the United States Department of Agriculture and administered by the Arkansas Department of Agriculture.