New docuseries highlights cattle’s climate role

Glacier FarmMedia – A new docuseries out of the United States examines adaptive multi-paddock grazing versus conventional grazing.

Peter Byck, a documentarian and professor at Arizona State University, talked about the docuseries Roots So Deep (you can see the devil down there) at the last year’s Western Canada Conference on Soil Health and Grazing.

The four-part docuseries focuses on cattle producers in southern U.S. states who use AMP practices and their neighbours who conventionally graze. The producers spoke to 10 farming families.

“Our tagline is, ‘a climate change solutions movie that doesn’t even care if you believe in climate change,’ because what we were finding just made good business sense,” Byck said.

“And the soils just kept coming up as a problem if poorly treated and as a solution if properly treated.”

Byck said while looking into this project, the film makers realized that research focusing on AMP grazing isn’t very extensive. As a result, they decided to not just tell these stories but also add to the science.

As they filmed the docuseries, a large team of scientists conducted the research and looked into soil health, arthropods, greenhouse gas emissions, soil microbiology, water and rancher well-being.

The research found that AMP grazing is better overall, especially regarding soil health and greenhouse gas emissions. Because of this improvement in the soil, ranchers who use AMP practices saw an increase in insects, birds and other wildlife, microbes, nitrogen and carbon in the soil.

“The conventional farmers, most of them, anyway, put nitrogen fertilizer down, spend the money,” Byck said.

“None of the adaptive farmers put synthetic nitrogen fertilizer down yet, because of their animals, and they’re fertilizing from the animals. They had more usable nitrogen in their soil than the conventional neighbour across the fence.”

The researchers found 33 per cent more diversity with the insects on ranches that used AMP practices. There was also 25 per cent more microbes, 13 per cent more carbon in the soil on average and 10 per cent less emissions.

“This is a body of knowledge that almost doesn’t exist for all the scientists who are very skeptical that you all are actually making the world a hell of a lot better,” Byck said.

While both AMP and conventional grazing are greenhouse gas sinks, AMP was around four times more powerful as a sink than conventional grazing. This surprised the researchers because they thought conventional grazing would be a source.

“So when thinking about climate change, the biggest bang for the buck was AMP,” Byck said

“If enough farmers choose to adopt it, AMP could be a strong solution to climate change. Farmers could help cool the Earth.”

When the researchers brought this information to the conventional ranchers featured in the docuseries, many expressed interest in trying AMP grazing on their operations.

Most of this research was done in the southern U.S., where the grazing season is longer. Byck said they are now starting to do similar research in South and North Dakota.

While he isn’t currently planning to do work in Canada, he hopes to see more research come out of Canadian provinces and that their research can inspire similar things to happen in other countries.

“Our team is very, very committed to working with any science team on Earth to make sure that we’re all doing similar methods so that all our data can fit into databases and talk to each other, and so we hope that this will get a lot of other science teams going.”

Byck has produced other documentaries focusing on regenerative agriculture, such as a series called Carbon Cowboys in 2020 and Carbon Nation in 2010.