Left: Rootbound employs 24 year-round and seasonal workers to steward the land. Right & Bottom: Close to 300 lambs were born on the farm last year contributing to the benefits of rotational grazing. Chickens help too, aerating and fertilizing the soil as they scratch and search for food.
The Partnership for Climate-Smart Commodities grant Rootbound Farm received from Elevated Foods will allow Abell and Pearsall to increase their focus on soil health. “Sometimes on a farm, it’s hard to put certain practices in place simply from a budget standpoint,” Abell says. “Opportunities like the Elevated Foods grant give us the financial flexibility to implement those practices.” They plan to increase the diversity and frequency of their cover crops and reduce their tillage passes by about 70% by investing in an articulating spader. This machine with rotating spades is a low-horsepower alternative to plowing and preserves the soil structure while cultivating it. By maintaining the soil layers more wholly, they’re hoping to increase their soil organic matter and the health and diversity of their soil microbiome. For Abell, the farm’s future profitability isn’t about dollars and cents — it’s about reinvesting in the landscape and the 24 year-round and seasonal employees who help steward it. “We’ve got to turn that profit in order to make
Eyes to the Future
those investments, but we also have to be doing that while building our soil, building the health of our pasture land, and building the health of our cropland,” he says. “Ultimately, that’s the bank we’re really counting on to continue this operation into the future.”
“We wanted to look at the entire landscape through a lens of regeneration and how we could steward and regenerate all of our soils — not just our crop soils.”
Visit ROOTBOUNDFARM.COM to learn more.
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ISSUE 02
PASTURE, PRODUCE, & PURPOSE
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