Tag: farming

‘The Advantage Is Real’: Regenerative Agriculture Pays Off, Indiana Farmer Tells RFK Jr.

U.S. farmers could dramatically reduce their reliance on synthetic fertilizers, pesticides and other chemicals much faster than most people think — and without sacrificing profits, regenerative farmer Rick Clark said last week on “The Secretary Kennedy Podcast.”

“I’m pretty confident that we could go just about anywhere in the U.S. and reduce inputs by 30% tomorrow and not see a change in profitability,” Clark said.

The fifth-generation Indiana farmer isn’t speaking from theory. He manages 6,500 acres of crops and livestock and said the chemical-free approach saves his operation more than $2 million a year.

Yet Clark said the biggest obstacle preventing more farmers from making the switch isn’t economics. It’s education.

For skeptics who assume regenerative agriculture is too expensive or impractical, Clark had a simple response.

“Let’s talk money. The advantage is real,” he told U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

While many farmers focus on maximizing yield, Clark argued that profitability matters more. Harvests may dip during the transition period, but significantly lower input costs can more than make up the difference.

“I didn’t say yield, I said … profitability. They’ll be more profitable,” Clark said.

“The risk-to-reward is the simple fact of, I don’t have all of those inputs purchased and lying out there at risk of what Mother Nature’s gonna give to us,” he added.

By avoiding synthetic fertilizers, pesticides and other inputs, while also cutting fuel costs, Clark estimates his operation saves roughly $2.4 million annually.

‘The crossroads that we’re at now is the teaching’

If the financial case is compelling, why haven’t more farmers made the transition?

Clark said crop insurance rules, lending requirements and decades of conventional farming practices make change feel risky.

“You have to get the proper teaching,” he said. “The crossroads that we’re at now is the teaching.”

Clark understands that hesitation. He didn’t set out to become a regenerative farmer. He said concerns about soil erosion first pushed him to question conventional farming practices.

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8,000 years of human activities have caused wild animals to shrink and domestic animals to grow

Humans have caused wild animals to shrink and domestic animals to grow, according to a new study out of the University of Montpellier in southern France. Researchers studied tens of thousands of animal bones from Mediterranean France covering the last 8,000 years to see how the size of both types of animals has changed over time.

Scientists already know that human choices, such as selective breeding, influence the size of domestic animals, and that environmental factors also impact the size of both. However, little is known about how these two forces have influenced the size of wild and domestic animals over such a prolonged period. This latest research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , fills a major gap in our knowledge.

The scientists analyzed more than 225,000 bones from 311 archaeological sites in Mediterranean France. They took thousands of measurements of things like the length, width, and depth of bones and teeth from wild animals, such as foxes, rabbits and deer, as well as domestic ones, including goats, cattle, pigs, sheep and chickens.

But the researchers didn’t just focus on the bones. They also collected data on the climate, the types of plants growing in the area, the number of people living there and what they used the land for. And then, with some sophisticated statistical modeling, they were able to track key trends and drivers behind the change in animal size.

The research team’s findings reveal that for around 7,000 years, wild and domestic animals evolved along similar paths, growing and shrinking together in sync with their shared environment and human activity. However, all that changed around 1,000 years ago. Their body sizes began to diverge dramatically, especially during the Middle Ages.

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