Soil health journey worth the work, speaker says

Gail Fuller stood before a few dozen people on Jan. 23 and urged them to begin telling their stories.

The diversified farmer of 162 acres from near Severy in southeast Kansas, almost insisted that growing food should find a different direction.

It’s all about “turning inedible energy into edible energy,” he said on the final day of the third annual Soil Health U.

The event was staged by Dodge City, Kansas-based High Plains Journal, and brought roughly 600 people to the Tony’s Pizza Events Center in Salina.

They came from as far away as Australia and France.

The needed change is simple, Fuller told his audience, “growing nutrient rich food without hindering the next generation. What will you leave to the next generation?”

He was among a dozen or more speakers from all over the planet advocating paying most of their attention to the soil, and melding their actions with nature, instead of working against it.

Like most of those wearing royal blue speaker shirts, Fuller said, “we need a spiritual and cultural transformation. It’s you and me. We in this room are the ones who are going to put integrity back in agriculture.”

Farming and ranching business models of today focus more on “pounds,” or production.

“We’ve got about all yield our little farms can handle,” Fuller said. “We’re growing more than enough to feed the world.”

Getting food to starving nations is one of the problems, he said, along with politics.

“I’m going to feed my own corn, wheat, beans, chicken and eggs that are grown in our environment,” he said. “Where does your food come from?”

The former large-scale farmer talked of his disgust when producers are fed fast food while they’re working in the field, when in fact they’re in the business of growing food.

“We are farm people. We are food,” Fuller said. “We’ve lost sight of who we are.”

Speakers talked of sensing a shift.

“Bigger farms, fewer farmers. Is this the world we want? I want more farms that are more profitable,” Fuller said. “To me, it’s about re-growing rural communities.”

Convenience stores and discount chains that have replaced grocery stores and service stations in small town are “a nail in the coffin” to Fuller.

Food is medicine, he said.

“Growing fake food in a lab, don’t laugh. We need to take it as a serious threat to regenerative animal agriculture,” Fuller said.

Today, he said, 46% of American children have a chronic disease, compared to 4% in 1960.

“More people are making a living from cancer than die from it,” Fuller said. “Soil is life.”

He advocates totally supporting two families on his farm, and that doesn’t mean one spouse earning off-farm income. His other partners include his wife, Lynnette Miller, and Sarah and Zack Bell.

“We have to make money, but when profit becomes priority, our days are over. Social, environmental and ecological aspects have to go hand-in-hand with profit,” Fuller said. “Our farm is designed to promote life. We have to quit killing everything on our farm.”

He showed pictures of all sorts of critters that are in the wild for a reason, including snakes and mice.

“Let them live and Mother Nature will balance it,” Fuller said.

Tim Unruh can be reached at [email protected].