Why aren't more ranchers practicing regenerative agriculture?
Photo credit: Kent Wuthrich
I dream of a world where regenerative agriculture is main stream and has real market power. Where biodiversity flourishes, clean water flows, the soil is healthy, carbon is sequestered deep below the surface and life exudes from the landscape. It’s come a long way in the past decade plus since I started my own journey into regenerative agriculture. There are certainly more farmers and ranchers practicing regenerative now than there was a decade ago. But I find myself often asking the question ‘why hasn’t regenerative agriculture really caught on?” This is a question I think about a lot because I am in fact out there practicing regenerative agriculture in some form or fashion every day. Do I ask this question simply because I was an early adopter? Or are there other reasons? This is a really big subject and I am going to break it down into multiple blogs. Here are some of the hurdles that I see:
Labor intensive and tends to exploit
Scale is too small to impact greater ecosystem function
Scale is too small to achieve economies of scale
Products are too expensive for most consumers
Requires a massive amount of capital to achieve scale
Let’s focus on the first hurdle I see - that regenerative agriculture is labor intensive and tends to exploit laborers. Regenerative agriculture thus far has been dominated by homesteaders and small, family farms. I have decided that the small family farm is fundamentally a myth. I honestly don’t believe that small, family farms have ever been sustainable. I am talking about financially sustainable (profitable). They are certainly a critical segment of our farming society. Subsistence farming has a place within our agricultural society. These days small, family farms are for the weekend ranchers and mostly recreational (hobby farms). To be honest with you there is nothing wrong with that. My point is for regenerative to move into the mainstream with real market power it must move beyond that model. A farm business must be financially sustainable first and foremost, and the rest will follow. If it’s not financially sustainable then at some point that farm business will cease to exist. Beyond that it’s simply a homestead and that’s okay. Let’s just not get it confused with real businesses that have market potential. We have been through the trials and tribulations of being a small, family farming operation. We operated Parker Creek Ranch on about 1,000 acres of leased land and in our last year of operation the gross income was somewhere around the $700,000 mark. We were working 80 hours a week, exhausted most of the time and burned out. Good help (labor) was really hard to come by at a price we could afford. We took on too much expensive debt because I thought we needed to continue growing. Ultimately after the year was said and done we only put about $30,000 in salary into our own pocket (plus $18,000 in health insurance). Ten years of hard scrabble, building a farm business and our delivery driver made more than we did (and he typically worked only 8 hour days). Don’t get me wrong because I understand that to build a business it takes determination and sacrifice. Ten years down the road that should not be the case.
There are certainly a few unicorns such as the speaking circuit gurus of regenerative agriculture. The small, family farm was and still remains a type of farming that leverages labor models that either exploit or are unsustainable. Those folks all leverage cheap or free labor on their farms. I know because we utilized that same, cheap labor in the early years. My mother, myself, Mandy, WWOOFers and many more people worked endless hours for our business without pay in the early days. Regenerative agriculture is labor intensive and there’s no way around it. Yes, it stoic to see people working the land and the community that develops around it. Most of often these people are paid far below a livable wage that typically never includes benefits such as health insurance, dental or retirement. Wake up if you think you don’t need those things some day. I have always said that farming or ranching can’t just be something we do in our twenties when we are full of piss and vinegar. I would work 14 hour days without flinching, cook dinner, have a few beers and wake up the next day at 5 AM to start all over again. The point is you just don’t have that kind of energy forever. There has to be a way to access cheap, readily available capital to grow and provide long-term employees with real salaries and benefits. This is and has been a problem within agriculture for a long time. I don’t have the answers other than it requires a business that operates at a certain economic scale, and that scale is far beyond the small, family farm. Regenerative agriculture is fundamentally not mechanized like conventional agriculture, which ultimately means it’s labor intensive. I embrace the fact that regenerative agriculture has the potential to provide more jobs within the agricultural industry. We must be able to take care of these people!
It all changed for me when we had our first son, Jack, who is now 6 years old. I quickly realized that my wife, Mandy, could no longer dedicate her time fully to our farm business. I also could no longer work 14 hour days without sacrificing those precious early years of his life. Regardless I pushed through it and continued to farm as my relationships deteriorated. Then our second son, Max, who is now 3 came along and that was the proverbial “straw that broke the camels back.” I came to the realization that farming 14 hours a day was no longer going to suit my lifestyle and personal needs. Something had to change or I was going to break. Having children can evoke all sorts of feelings. We could have survived for the time being on our meager salaries from the farm, but we needed things like a new family vehicle we simply couldn’t afford. I don’t mind driving an old, beat up truck. It’s not about the ego, it’s about the practicality. My old Chevrolet 2500 had 290,000 hard miles on it. The lifters were no good, fuel gauge didn’t work and there was no hope of buying a newer truck with that kind of salary. Too often the farms needs came before our own. It put a lot of stress and anxiety on both Mandy and myself.
Then drought struck us hard in the year 2019 and 2020. We made the decision to destock the cattle on our operations in South Texas in June of 2020. There was no grass left and I wasn’t about to fall back into the trap of supplementing their feed with imported hay. I’ve done that before and there is no hope or money to be made when you have a hundred plus head to feed. COVID paranoia beginning in early 2020 was good for our meat business. We shifted on a dime to start offering home delivery services and that model was hugely successful in regards to our sales volumes. The downside was it was expensive to operate and time consuming. It was a very proud moment for us when we could feed people and the grocery store shelves sat empty. Folks sent us emails and hand written letters thanking us for our services and product. It was a blessing, yet a curse in disguise. The year prior we had worked hard to get the business functioning on an 8 hour work day and had almost achieved that goal. Then COVID came along and business skyrocketed. With that it rapidly degraded into waking up at 4 AM and getting home by midnight. We did that for months on end. The growth was consuming so much cash that I couldn’t afford to hire more employees. It was unsustainable growth and ultimately it burned us out.
My personal experiences led me to the revelation that regenerative agriculture had a serious problem with it’s utilization and exploitation of labor. Enough of the cynical. How do we fix this problem? Because I truly believe the world desperately needs regenerative agriculture. The only answer I have is that regenerative agriculture needs to achieve economies of scale and build real business models. It’s a simple answer with very complex solutions.
Thanks for reading. If you have questions or comments please feel free to post below or send me an email: travis@grazinglands.com
,Travis Krause
CEO & Founder of Grazing Lands
