Rebuilding Our Soil: A Cooperative Perspective
Hal Hamilton on our relationship with the soil, continuous learning, and institutionalizing sustainability
This is a feature of the Presencing Institute’s Dialogues on Soil and Society, a compilation of interviews that frame agriculture as a critical area for curbing climate change and spurring societal transformation. The goal of the series is to identify promising place-based projects and systemic interventions to support sustainable, just, and reciprocal food economies. This interview was conducted by Katrin Kaeufer and Zoë Ackerman.
Hal Hamilton founded and co-directed the Sustainable Food Lab, where he currently serves as a senior advisor, supporting the staff team, helping with leadership labs, and projects on crop sustainability. He is also a co-founder and faculty of the Academy for Systems Change. Hal’s career began as a commercial dairy farmer in Kentucky, where he led development of the first formal alliance among tobacco farmers and public health organizations, an alliance that paved the way for hundreds of millions of dollars of tobacco settlement funds to be invested in rural communities in the upper south. He has founded and directed rural development and leadership organizations, and was the executive director of the Sustainability Institute founded by Donella Meadows.
Can you share a few formative experiences that helped you move into your current work line?
When I was 24 years old, I dove out of graduate school into becoming a farmer. My grandfather had owned a little farm. My father was a city planner, so it skipped a generation. I put a downpayment for a farm in Kentucky, read a lot about organic agriculture, and was enthusiastic and relatively naïve at the same time. I had this theory that if I didn’t use pesticides, thus operating organic, everything would automatically work out great.
Every farmer knows that you need at least to keep the soil on the field. I am still learning, going on farms, noticing what people are doing, and what difference it makes. I remember being on a farm in the Netherlands, where this guy was part of an organization with companies who wanted him to measure what he was doing versus various environmental indicators. He complained about how these numbers weren’t helpful to him, and he said: “Come and look at this, Hal.” We walked out behind his barn. We looked over at a field where he had harvested onions, carrots, and other things, and he said, “water used to pool on top of the field here, and we couldn’t get into it for a long time. But now look, there’s no water. The water has soaked in instead of staying on top. I don’t need those numbers, those metric systems, because I can see it.”
I assume that measurement systems are useful. But there are all sorts of things that I’ve kept learning about building the soil and its organic matter content [which are useful]. I think some of it you learn in a vegetable garden. You notice that when you put compost, mulch, and other components on the soil, you don’t need to shovel it as often. You can just put your hand in it, and it’s so visceral. It’s harder to do that on 100 acres than it is in a garden. But it’s still the same experience.
“And mixed up with the soil for me has always been the livelihood and well-being of farmers, because I was a farmer myself and I learned everything from my neighbors, working together.”
In the upper South’s tobacco economy, where everyone had a little allotment of this cash crop, we younger farmers could pay for a farm with the tobacco check and then live off other things. One of my formative moments was when I first started poking my head out of the farm. Now and then, going to local meetings, I was part of a local farm organization. I started getting active in some policy-related actions. Among my mentors were both Wendell Berry, a well-known American agrarian poet, essayist, and novelist, and Wendell’s father, who had been a senior statesman of farm organizations in the South in the 40s and 50s.
His name was John Berry Senior, and he would call me up now and then when I first started getting involved in farmer politics. I’d hear this gravelly voice on the telephone, and he’d say, “Hal, I want you to come to talk to me, young man.” He had me come up to his office so he could give lessons about farm organization, necessary policies, in his view, to sustain the livelihood of small farmers. He was one of the architects of New Deal farm legislation in the U.S. in the 30s, during the Roosevelt administration. And then he became a defender of some of those policies after that.
Healthy soil is a crucial ingredient of healthy farming systems, and we also need the markets and policies that support farmers to sustain healthy soil along with farm economies that are good for communities and, eventually, the people that eat the food. Both are essential.
How would you describe your current work at the Sustainable Food Lab?
The Sustainable Food Lab started as a multi-stakeholder platform and learning opportunity for people related to this sphere. And it evolved to focus on market-driven ways of institutionalizing sustainability in the way food companies work.
Lots of NGOs, researchers, and universities are supporters of that process, clarifying what sustainability is, creating common agreement across the system, metrics, and so on. One of the Sustainable Food Lab functions has always been to cultivate and support those who are leaders in this long process of evolution. We have an “under the radar” leadership program for people with sustainability jobs in companies. We also have a program for agronomists who give farmers advice across the Midwest U.S. They get together regularly and work on doing case clinics for each other — presenting challenges, problems, decisions that are coming up, or questions that they may have on the program that they’re leading.
So we alternate between a case clinic methodology and a more issue-focused conversation among peers. In one case, it’s about peers in companies. In another, agronomist peers who support farmers as they figure out how to incorporate cover crops, rotations, or livestock into their cropping systems, to build soil.
There is a [Sustainable Food Lab] project in New South Wales, Australia, where farmers are growing a particular set of grain commodities. Ever since sheep became uneconomical, they had to quit having livestock on their farms. Consequently, they had no reason for maintaining hay or pasture, thus facing a decline in soil organic matter. We then had to reintroduce organic matter in alternative ways. The most logical answer to that was our crops, such as pulses, lupins, chickpeas, and other kinds of beans.
A challenge is that adequate markets can be hard to find. In the Midwest U.S., we have a similar kind of project where oats and clovers could be incorporated into the corn and soybean rotation to rebuild soil and put roots more deeply into the ground’s nitrogen cycle. But there are not markets for oats anymore. Farmers migrated to Canada for food-grade oats, and animals are mostly fed corn and soybeans. The idea then is to look for other companies that can create more market demand for those crops. We’re working with several different companies like Oatly, which sells oat-based milk. Also, larger ones that make livestock food, where there could be more of a market pull for those oats out of that region. Finally, creating the enabling conditions for farmers to rotate with those crops.
There are quite a few projects aimed at policies. We’re developing a project to create a set of plausible future scenarios for agriculture. The idea is to enable people to see past their very particular strategy, to enrich those strategies, and act more effectively. In most cultures, people tend to get locked into their specific notions.
So, the question is: “Well, why not? Who are those necessary actors to improve the system? What kind of conversation could we create for the champions of regenerative agriculture?
We’re currently thinking that a way of clearing the path towards a change might be involving key players. From conventional farm leaders, advising agronomists, commodity buyers, to regenerative agriculture pioneers, this might be the solution for engaging more people in the process. We’ve found that it can be a bit self-marginalizing for the choir to speak to the choir, rather than for the choir to have more voices. I’ve met a lot of the early-adopter, pioneering farmers who are the regenerative agriculture pioneers.[Those actors] are people whose theory of change is mostly about sharing their truth with the more conservative incremental change people. And some of them are leaders in the mainstream commodity organizations, who have a massive influence over the broad middle ground of farmers who are not early adopters. These innovations don’t expand to the broad middle of agriculture unless a set of enabling conditions are present: market demand, technical support, financial incentives, and farmer networks in each place so that these practices become the new norm, the new way that farmers think about “success.”
So, what are the pathways into engaging that much broader group of people, or the people who are respected by that much broader group of people, in participating in this pathway towards a more regenerative system? As with any social change process, there is no one “best” pathway. Lots of things need to happen simultaneously. Our niche is to cultivate system leadership in companies, among agronomists, and with farmers who can bridge from the pioneers to the more conventional types.
Can you share a few examples that highlight the mission of the Sustainable Food Lab?
There are examples of different levels of success toward more regenerative systems. Some of them involved pioneering farmers, who then became examples to their neighbors and some related companies. Unilever, for instance, has Hellmann’s mayonnaise. Mayonnaise is a big category for them. So they have a mayonnaise plant in Iowa that buys soybean oil to use as an ingredient. And Unilever also has a global corporate commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and achieve several other sustainability goals.
They started with the farmers, engaging with the ones who supplied this particular mill where most of the soybean oil for the mayonnaise in the U.S. comes. They started by engaging these farmers with a sort of a measurement calculator. The farmers were willing to do that. Unilever got useful data, but it didn’t produce much change on the ground. So they have evolved towards aiding farmers with techniques for common issues they face. From rebuilding the soil, covering it, protecting it during winter, from rains — the examples are plentiful.
Unilever then started to provide agronomic advice to the farmers; they pay an organization called Practical Farmers of Iowa, a local farm association. They’re paying for the financial help, and they’re providing a bit of a cost-share regarding new farm investments.
Now they’ve recruited some other companies to participate. Still, they’ve hit the limits of who they can reach, and how much change can be created with what they’ve done so far. They’re wondering, “Well, what would it take to scale up or increase the spread of these better practices?”
A couple of summers ago, we had a learning journey on one of these farms, conducted by a man named Jared. We had a group of people standing around between the house and the barns and looking out over the fields. I stood near Jared, and the vice president of one of the companies was standing there, too. Jared described how enthusiastic he was about growing oats in between crops of corn and soybeans and covering crops during the winter. He said, “I’d like to do my whole farm that way, but I’ve taken as much risk as financially I’m able to do. I’m putting at least 30% of my acres in cover crops every year, but it’s a cost, and when I go to town, my neighbors think I’m a little bit weird. And so, I need markets for the rotation crops, and I’m getting an enormous benefit from participating in Practical Farmers of Iowa. I need more of that.”
The vice president from one of these companies standing next to me said, “Well, how can I help? I just buy corn. I don’t buy oats. I don’t buy these other things.” So she closed her notebook and walked away. And it was kind of a crystallizing moment for me. And we said to ourselves, “Well, so what’s our strategy? We’re working with these companies who have these sustainability commitments, and they’re trying to figure out how to operationalize those commitments. But they just buy one ingredient at a time, for a particular product. How can we use leverage with all these relationships to create the kind of integrated change needed?”
So the solution is multifold. One, trying to get some of the companies that could provide market pull for rotation crops in the game. It’s also to get all the players around particular mills, or regions, to all work together.
This requires collaboration, sometimes among competitors, which is not in the culture of these companies.
And it’s also to get a more productive learning environment among the farmers. They get advice from the people who want to sell them stuff. The fertilizer chemical, and seed dealers have field days, meetings during the winter, and so forth. They bring the farmers together. But unfortunately they’re all geared towards selling farmers inputs.
A different kind of convening engine is slowly being created, and the Food Lab works with local organizations. In Iowa, we use “Practical Farmers of Iowa.” In Illinois, we work with another group created by the local Corn Growers Association, which is trying to forward sustainability. In Australia, we work in New South Wales with the existing farm organizations that are learning networks for farmers.
Why do you think “organic” should not be used as a banner for the movement?
Organic farming is still confined to a niche that is too small for the magnitude of this challenge. We frame it as conservation, or as soil health. Soil health, or soil building, soil organic matter, are pretty quickly obvious things for farmers. Although, even that is a stretch somehow. Organic farming is still confined to a niche that is too small for the magnitude of this challenge.
I was with one of my colleagues talking to farmers in Australia. We asked this guy if he thinks about soil health, and he said, “Oh, yeah, I think about it every day, because we have to get as much out of the soil as we can every year. Otherwise, you go broke.” And he wasn’t talking about building soil. He was talking about really extracting value from it, which is the core problem.
I think the importance of healthy soil is primarily being resilient to climate change. Although some don’t call it climate change. Some farmers refusing to use the word climate change will talk about the summers getting hotter, drier, or more erratic. So, the whole point is, are we going to be able to get decent yields with weather that is undesirable, or volatile? I think conservation agriculture is generally speaking what sells best in sort of mainstream farming systems.
There’s something about curiosity, on the one hand, as compared with certainty, on the other. Every time you can see a pioneering innovator with this sense of confidence that they have the answer — in a way, saying, “Look at this, isn’t it just obvious that I found a better method? So you should do it this way.” That rarely works as a method of spreading innovation. Rather, it’s about the attitude or personal characteristics that a person carries into a conversation that makes a difference. Some of those regenerative agriculture pioneers are enormously inspiring and exciting. Sometimes they’re lovely spokespersons for their neighbors. [Other times] they are off-putting: they say, “Well, I’ve been showing them. How come they don’t do it my way?” That is a block to progress happening faster.
“I believe that genuine, curious questioning, like, “What have you been trying? Is it working? What are the obstacles that you’ve been facing?” is incredibly contagious.
What do you think is the potential of soil to sequester carbon?
It’s an excellent question. I think I’ve been susceptible to this eagerness to read and convey the message that organic matter can sometimes be built more rapidly in the soil than once believed. And that soil carbon can accrue and be sequestered more quickly than some once thought possible.
If we just extrapolate from that, take this example, and blow that out into hundreds of thousands of hectares, look at what a difference it could make. But then the trouble is that there is a bevy of extremely reputable scientists who say, “Well, sometimes it doesn’t work, and we can’t quite measure that properly yet.”
So there is disbelief. It’s not necessarily about the importance of building soil organic matter, but instead around claims of how much carbon can be sequestrated. And there are people like us, encouraging others to adopt the paths of regenerative agriculture, which consists of building organic matter and protecting grassland and forests.
And if one expands the notion of regenerative agriculture to include regenerating the social conditions of rural agricultural regions, societies, communities, and villages, it becomes vibrant and exciting. And it doesn’t need any extravagant claims about climate change for that. As for policy circles, it can be tempting to give stakeholders a high end, an optimistic scenario of carbon sequestration. Even so, this approach can make you vulnerable. Once a naysayer starts to poke holes in your arguments, affirming that you’re “exaggerating,” it might generate more damage in the long run.
I’m not a scientist. I dive into science sometimes, and the debates about how much carbon can be sequestered. But I’m certainly not an expert on it. And I keep getting swayed, to one direction or the other.
There’s a guy I’ve gotten to know who’s doing amazing work in Africa. He’s proving that smallholders can build carbon in their soil on hundreds of thousands of hectares, even in a tropical environment. All of that by multi-cropping, using green manure, cover crops, always leaving the soil covered, and integrating trees and bushes in the system along fence rows. It is amazingly inspirational.
The important lesson here is that soil organic matter is absolutely crucial to resilient, healthy farming systems. It’s probably a mistake to oversell the carbon sequestration benefits, even though those are also important. Academics like to argue. Farmers like to grow good crops even when the weather is too hot.
What do you think is possible by 2030?
There’s no reason why it shouldn’t be possible to create a knowledge support system around farmers, land managers, and decision-makers supporting regenerative farming systems. There’s no reason we can’t marshal both public policy and private-sector incentives, premiums, crop insurance, knowledge support, agronomic support, and local farmers to farmer learning circles.
The how is not complicated. There are enough models around, enough examples, farmer’s circles, and good soil scientists. We have people who think about the relationship between supply chain policies, farm bills, combinator cultural policies, and all sorts of incentives. Economic incentives are a vital part of this. Indeed, through the COVID crisis, we’ve seen that if there’s something significant to enough people, they can do it, and just do what needs to be done.
I’m sort of congenitally optimistic. Of course, the obstacles are huge. Nobody thinks they have money to pay for this stuff, even though they have money to pay for lots of other things. And now, I guess all the government budgets are going to be drained. But this is crucial. It’s about survival.
“And the benefits of organic matter in soil are not just about carbon sequestration; they’re about holding moisture and holding nutrients where they’re needed. And they’re about eliminating the need for fossil fuel fertilizer. They’re about diversifying that ecosystem in a field, so that pest pressures are much less. Huge benefits. It’s not just about carbon.”
It’s a long term kind of deal. Even on the farm, it pays off over time. That’s why individual farmers have a hard time making these transitions because the short term benefits are slim. But the long term benefits are enormous, financial and otherwise. So I’d say it’s the same old problem, short-term investments in knowledge and other things to earn long-term benefits.
