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Show A-16 Sat/Sun/Mon/Tues, February 15-18, 2020 The Park Record Continued from A-1 White is working to regenerate the capacity of the soil on the farmland he manages to bear carbon, but he’s working on a lot more than that. He wants to create scalable systems that can be used in other places to tackle some of the biggest problems of our time. That’s a goal that would apparently need to be taken incrementally, and he’s identified the first step tempting to address root causes at is to fix the soil. the center of our unbalanced nat“Soil is a dynamic thing everyural systems. And he thinks fixing body takes for granted,” White the soil is the first step. said. “There’s only a little bit on “In anything and everything - top of the planet, but it’s the main talking about water quality, crop function that we need to address — quality - you can’t do anything to fix global warming, to fix nutriwithout healthy soil,” White said. tion.” The Bill White Agriculture, EdHe claims a carrot grown in ucation and Sustainability Center 1950 was fully 50% more nutrimanages about 1,200 acres in the tious than one grown today, as area; the McPolin farmland that monoculture farming has extracted is subject to the rotational graz- trace chemicals out of the soil that ing covers about 50. It’s distinct were once prevalent like boron and from his restaurant group that magnesium. has grown to employ about 600 Industrial farming, White said, people across eight local restau- also contributes to climate change rants. White describes the non- by releasing the carbon captured in profit’s enterprise as holistic land the soil into the atmosphere when management. it’s tilled. White drew an analogy between He uses a no-till seed drill to the cattle outcry to the city’s elec- minimize soil disturbance and a tric buses, with batteries that take 40-seed mixture for cover crops more energy to produce than they to encourage biodiversity. He also end up saving and that are made uses compost and manure on the with rare earth minerals that are fields and each field is planned to damaging to extract from the earth. have a buffer of pollinator gardens In both cases, despite the issues, for bees. White suggested that progress is White talks about well-estabgood. lished soil that is largely self-reg“Electric buses — they’re an ulating with fungal networks that imperfect solution to a big prob- pass nutrients back and forth on lem,” he said. “(But) a sort of funif anybody’s doing gi-assisted unanything, it’s better derground stock than nothing. Right market. now, it’s the best To White, Once you fix it, solution we have.” weeds aren’t a you’re not done, Conversations problem in themabout big problems selves, but merely that’s just how you with Bill White ofa symptom of an do it (from now ten return to soluunderlying soil on). Once you start tions incorporatimbalance. ing self-regulating “Every weed is dallying with nature, closed-loop systems communicating it’s a commitment,” that, once they’re up (something like) and running, do not there’s a calcium Bill White on holistic land require much human deficiency, a magmanagement input. nesium deficien“Everything is a cy,” White said. closed-loop system On the within nature until a human inter- McPolin farmland, White is aimvenes,” White said. ing to use rotational grazing to reOne example is the photosyn- store nutrients to the soil by adding thesis cycle in which a plant grows manure to the system, which he using the energy of the sun and re- said offers immediately available places nutrients in the soil, aiding nutrients to plant life after cows future plant growth. have broken plant material down There’s a more elaborate ex- with their teeth and the microbes ample in a farm building off Old in their stomachs. And the cattle’s Ranch Road, in which White is at- hooves physically break down the tempting to fine-tune a system to layer of thatch that built up after use fish to add nutrients to water years of haying operations ceased, that is then used to grow animal allowing nutrients to get into fodder. Eventually, the system con- the soil. verts fish food into cows. He’s also reforming the land’s White tends to take the long water infrastructure by dredging view of problems and brushes streams and adding culverts. aside symptoms in search of root Critics have debated whether the causes. idea has merit — and whether flatSome critics of running cattle ulent cows are worthy of a debate on the Park City-owned McPolin at all — but White doesn’t seem farmland have suggested planting bothered. He’s confident in the more trees to capture carbon from technique but more confident in the the air. science he and his team are planWhile trees do sequester carbon, ning to do using the land by taking White said, that carbon is released detailed soil borings to measure back into the atmosphere when carbon uptake year over year and the trees die, offering a temporary keeping a patch of land untouched solution, albeit one that may last as a control sample. decades. Cheryl Fox is the executive direcSoil can store more carbon for tor of the Summit Land Conservanlonger, and White says for a long cy, which holds the conservation time on Earth, it did. When the easement on the McPolin farmland. soil is healthy and an ecosystem She said the first year’s numbers is functioning properly, he con- looked very strong, but they’re tends, it retains more carbon. But waiting for more data to draw conthat balance has been harmed by clusions. decades of extractive land manage“(The initial results are) way betment techniques, including indus- ter than we thought,” Fox said. “We trial-scale monoculture farming. need to make sure they’re right.” Soil as savior? White said the soil samples test for a couple dozen variables, including carbon, organic material, phosphorous and others. She added they’re planning to do studies over the next three years. Fox is a believer in stewarding land to try to achieve pre-Columbian levels of naturalness and biodiversity, a goal she allows is made challenging by the conveniences of modern life, like roads. Still, she said, “we’ve gotta get back to balance.” Fox explained that rotational grazing mimics the movements of early herd animals like bison and elk that would pause in an area to eat and then be chased away by apex predators, forest fires or other types of potential calamity. Fox said visiting land where White’s land management style has taken hold has a palpable effect. “The wildlife that has come back to other properties that Bill is working on in the area as result of regenerative agriculture — from the bees to the microorganisms all the way up to elk,” Fox said. “You go out in these fields with the cover crops, the different watering systems — it’s unbelievable. It’s cooler, it’s lush — again, the biodiversity is so apparent. These are important things if we’re going to figure out how we’re going to fit however many billions of us on this planet.” White refers back to a handdrawn chart that shows concentric and overlapping circles of what he sees as the goals of the Bill White Agriculture, Education and Sustainability Center. As the circles get larger, they show how the work is in conversation with other aspects of the foundation’s mission, including supporting the community and education. Smaller circles denote individual projects, like composting, biochar and intentional grazing. At the middle is the goal to reconnect our human spirit to the natural earth and to each other. White said the food grown at Bill White Farms goes first to frequent charity dinners to raise money for other nonprofits, then to the food bank and then to his eight restaurants. According to the director of the Christian Center of Park City, White donates about 400 pounds of food each month to the nonprofit, where he also serves on the board. After years in the restaurant industry, White said land management takes the majority of his focus these days. He said it rankles him to have so many projects unfinished, but there are seemingly infinite challenges to take on and solutions to find, like mycelial remediation that uses mushrooms to take heavy metals out of soils, sequestering the carbon from deadfall and landscaping debris using techniques like biochar and heading off the disastrous trend of bee colony collapse. Only two of his 15 hives survived last year, and he’s redesigning the structures. “I think it’s something to do with the condensation,” he said. For now, though, White is concentrating on holistic land management. He recently agreed to manage 700 acres near Woodland that will be the winter home for the cows, saving the stress on the animals and the carbon impact of shipping them to Skull Valley in Tooele County. Eventually, he’d like to breed a heartier strain that can better survive winters here. When White was working on the fish-to-fodder system, he bought a pre-fabricated piece of equipment that cost thousands of dollars to SHOOT TO serve as the structure of the irrigation system. The flimsy trays are now in a loft in the barn, and he uses a system he designed with parts from a home improvement store. That sort of incremental improvement — learning from a lackluster solution and improving it through trial and error — is at the heart of White’s land management enterprises. “It’s an ongoing process, not like you’re finished. Once you fix it, you’re not done, that’s just how you do it (from now on),” White said. “Once you start dallying with nature, it’s a commitment.” FISH TO FODDER COURTESY OF BILL WHITE FARMS AND RANCHES This indoor farm off Old Ranch Road uses fish to nutriate water that then feeds plants. Eventually, Bill White envisions growing rainbow trout in the 100,000-gallon tank and using the water in a fodder system that will feed livestock throughout the winter. A cluster of farm buildings off Old Ranch Road houses what Bill White referred to as “the laboratory,” home to some of White’s indoor-farming experiments. There are hundreds of chickens pecking at piles of restaurant scraps, including, incongruously, orange peels. The chickens’ eggs go to the bakery, and the unsold bakery items come back to the chickens, one more example of the closed-loop systems White prefers. Perhaps the grandest example in White’s portfolio of that type of thinking is the fish farm and fodder system in one of the farm buildings. A 100,000-gallon tank holds hundreds of goldfish that naturally excrete ammonia, a potent plant food. The water is circulated through a system where it feeds germinated seeds of animal fodder like oats and rye, which can then be fed to livestock throughout the winter. It creates sod-like mats that White envisions rolling up and throwing on the back of a four-wheeler to take to the animals. A 50-pound bag of seed will yield 250 pounds of food, and the growing time is only seven days. Each day, White predicts, the system could yield 3,000-5,000 pounds of animal feed, with the major inputs being fish food, water, sunlight, time and labor to germinate the seeds. It’s also grown inside a relatively small building and is not beholden to changing seasons, which White said will become increasingly important as more farmland is developed. The goldfish are “canaries in the coal mine” White said. Once he gets the ammonia cycle dialed in, he said, he envisions using rainbow trout and selling them as food. Fish Food Goldfish produce ammonia (NH3 ) Nutrient-rich water used to grow fodder crops like barley and oats Fodder fed to livestock throughout the winter GRAPHIC BY BEN OLSON Hello. helloparkcity.com THRILL! 1 Scott Maizlish 435.901.4309 scottmaizlish.com scott.maizlish@sothebysrealty.com We’re Park City’s Public Always Welcome! 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