. . . Take in a lot of water, they use 10 bathtubs full of water; their cow burps; their cow farts, all the carbon that's put into the air, and that they take a lot of land . . .
00:10. When we manage cattle with regenerative agriculture they're actually the single best way to sequester carbon from the atmosphere into the soil because by grazing off our plants and bringing the animals in, we are managing a solar panel. Our grass is a solar panel. It needs to be green and growing so it can capture sunlight and pull carbon from the air and put it into its roots. But those plants will stop doing that if they get too tall or if they get too short. And so what we do with our cow is they come in, they graze those plants off so they reset it, they prune that solar panel so it doesn't get too tall, and then they leave and it rests. And that graze rest recovery is actually a cycle of pulling carbon from the air into the plant roots and then when those plants get grazed they actually release that carbon into the soil and in turn pick up water and other minerals from soil microbiological activity, cause our soils are living and alive instead of dead and sterilized. And so that cycle actually builds health and year after year we're pulling more carbon from the atmosphere, putting it into work soil which then produces more healthy soil, which then produces more grass, which then allows us to graze and produce more cattle. 70% of the earth's land is land that is not suitable for tillage, which is to say it is inarable. It's just grassland, and you can't do anything else with it. And so if you just say well we're not we're not going to do cattling or any grazing livestock, you've completely given up the ability to produce food on that acreage and you've lost your single best tool to actually restore that land. There are groups out there that have done these same principles in the desert and transformed completely desert landscapes into something that looks just beautiful and lush. It's incredible. Cattle can be a tool to heal that.
And in terms of water, and addressing that, they do drink a lot of water, however, they're drinking that water and then they're spreading it out on the fields as they graze. That water then filters down through the healthy soil and returns to the same aquifers. And it actually is a system that helps increase soil life and activity because the cows, by drinking that water and then spreading that water on the fields, are actually like continually watering the fields and they're not as reliant on rainwater. And so, that cycle actually builds health and builds ecology deep into the soil and there's no net loss of water in that system because it's a closed system as they're grazing and moving along.
Even methane, people say, "Well, they, you know, they burp, and they release methane, and it's a greenhouse gas." Here in the last few years has actually discovered that if you take a field that's been regeneratively grazed with cattle for several years, that soil has microbes in it that breakdown methane. They didn't think there was a microbe that could handle methane. As it turns out, they do. And when they measure the total amount of them, it turns out that the microbes in that soil that support, say, 100 cows, are actually capable of breaking down the methane from way more than 100 cows. It's all how you take care of it and manage it. They can be a tool of destruction, or they can be a tool of life. It really comes just down to how you care for them.
