Dirt to Soil: One Family's Journey Into Regenerative Agriculture

Gabe Brown didn’t set out to change the world when he started working alongside his father-in-law on the family farm in North Dakota. But as a series of weather-related crop disasters put Brown and his wife, Shelly, in desperate financial straits, they started making bold changes to their farm. To simply survive, Brown began experimenting with new practices he’d learned about from reading and talking with innovative researchers and ranchers. As he and his family struggled to keep the farm viable, they found themselves on an amazing journey into a new type of farming: regenerative agriculture. Brown dropped the use of most herbicides, insecticides, and synthetic fertilizers, a standard part of conventional agriculture. He switched to no-till planting, planted diverse cover crop mixes, and changed his grazing practices. He transformed a degraded farm ecosystem into one full of life, starting with the soil and working up one plant and animal at a time. In Dirt to Soil, Brown tells the sto