Honoring the Land, Restoring the Soil.
Written and Photoraphed by Mary Mathis For Ipondr.
Our soil is dying. This may not seem like a huge deal, but what goes under our feet is what sustains our life above ground. One third of the world's topsoil is degraded, meaning it’s been overused or eroded to the point that it’s no longer healthy for sustaining life and organic matter. Degradation of topsoil means less plant life, and less plant life means more greenhouse gases in the air. It means our ecosystem is at risk.
This is avoidable. Ethan, 29, and Zach Withers, 31, are brothers who are trying to change this on their farm called Polk's Folly, a regenerative farm in the foothills of the Sandia mountains in New Mexico. Their goal is to create healthier soil, and the way to get healthier soil, after years of drought and overgrazing, is complicated.
The two brothers will claim what they do isn’t rare at all, even though it takes a lot of passion for conservation of the land to start a regenerative farm, something they did without any farming experience 5 years ago. It’s a slow practice, meticulous, and not always cost effective. But the benefits of regenerative farming are boundless for our environment. Iit uses less water, and lowers greenhouse gas emissions. It aims to produce new, nutrient-rich plants, and biodiversity. Regenerative farming restores the land, and honors it by treating it as a natural resource.
“Most farmers would never feed this stuff to pigs. The general conventional thought is that you want to feed pigs exclusively corn and soy. If you keep pigs hungry by giving them super dense artificially fortified protein sources . . . their stomachs are never full, so they always feel like their starving . . . and you can maximize growth,” said Zach.
Here, Zach and Ethan investigate their compost heaps that have been in the sun for months. The smoke near Zach is from releasing some of the heat inside the heaps.
“It doesn’t look like much, but this is the first time in my entire life I’ve ever seen anything grow here,” said Zach. This portion of the property was really overgrazed, so for a long while nothing would grow because the soil was so damaged. Now, after years of leaving the land alone, small tufts of grass are growing.
If Zach and Ethan didn’t pick this feed up each week, the food would emit more greenhouses gasses sitting in the landfill. In this way, the pigs turn the food into soil, which is better for the environment. Here, Ethan drops off a load of fruits and vegetables that Zach and Ethan pick up from Roadrunner food bank.
The brothers bought a space for butchering that had an industrial kitchen, but the county required a retail space to be able to process the meat in the building. They started a small shop in the side of the store, thinking it would be open one day out of the week. But as things started disappearing from grocery stores at the beginning of the stay-at-home orders in March, 2020, locals flocked to their small store for flour, meat, and vegetables. “It was so crazy that we were like, okay, well I guess now we’re a local grocery store” Zach said. They’ve retained a lot of their clients from lockdown who are immunocompromised and cant go to the grocery store, or from simply falling in love with the product.
Distilleries process their alcohol with grain, like blue corn, rye or barley mixed together, and ferment it with the grain in the mash. Then they separate the alcohol and the mash mixture, and it ends up in Zach and Ethans possession in huge tubs of pink-ish mash, pictured here. “It’s high quality animal food. It’s just a pain in the butt to deal with, which is why no one uses it,” and probably why the local breweries are glad to have the unusable product taken off their hands at no cost to them.
Zach and Ethan agreed that they wouldn’t be able to afford their own food if they wanted to buy it, but they mostly produce their own food or scavenge. “If you’re comfortable putting that much of your expendable dollars towards food, yeah, you can feed yourself. . . It costs what it costs,” Zach says “It’s less meat. You just have to adapt your diet.”
Ethan uses a tractor to pour fruits and vegetables into the pig pens around Polks Folly.
Zach feeds Ben, a boar that loves eggs.
Sarah Wentzel Fisher, a family friend, is helping Polks Folly conduct soil trials that will show them the amount of soil they need to create a healthy, sustaining platform for growth of rangelands, something that covers much of New Mexico and has been susceptible to overgrazing. They’re modeling their trials off one done in California, called The Marin Carbon Project. Here, you can see flags that signal where the boundaries of each trial end.
“What’s a healthy and responsible use of water, and cultural resources, and energy resources? How do we responsibly care for the land that we settled, and was stolen, generations and generations ago? We can honor the land. We can give back to the land. We can still be caretakers of this ground. There’s not enough happening of that in the world. The dirt under our feet is seen as a commodity,” Ethan said. Here, Zach digs into a compost heap.
Zach and Ethan both live on the property with their parents, passed down from their grandparents. The brothers grew up on the farm land, which was used as a horse ranch prior to their recent farm. This image shows Zach hugging his mother, Sani Polk, as they walk to the horse barn on their farm called Polks Folly, in New Mexico.
The Campbell Ranch development had plans to build 4,000 homes behind this barbed wire fence in years prior, and was recently shut down by an Albuquerque judge because of a lack to consider where the water would come from. New Mexico is currently in a serious drought, one that’s lasted almost 20 years. “We used to have another well that got sucked dry...everybody’s about to run out of water . . . there’s no water plan,” Zach said.
Zach and Ethans grandmother bought a tractor with her winnings from a high-stakes bingo competition and dug a pond almost an acre wide on their property as a water catch. Their grandfather was a geologist, so water scarcity was always on their minds. Here, Zach and Ethan sit on a raft their grandmother built for the now dried up pond.