(dramatic music) - [Narrator] We as a world have pumped up so much carbon into the atmosphere that we no longer can only focus on reducing emissions.

To stave off catastrophic climate change, we need to suck carbon out of the air.

- [Jeff] Do almonds get a bad rap in California?

- I think it depends on who you're talking to.

You know, what people don't really understand is that it's got a very, very nutrient dense product.

There's not very many products or commodities within California agriculture that can show the amount of nutrient density that's packed in that almond nut.

- Environmentally, when this crop is in full bloom here in the state of Illinois and throughout the whole Midwest, anywhere, I mean, it's sequestering a lot of carbon.

You know, it's really just a filter for the planet.

It's something that I think that goes in a story that's untold.

(dramatic music intensifies) - I mean, how do you take, you know, the byproducts of 1.4 million acres of agriculture and convert that into high value products that make that industry and their sister industries, whether it's walnuts or, you know, peaches or whatever, more sustainable?

That's super cool.

- Farmers do what they can to take care of the land, 'cause they're also taking care of their own families.

So when we're taking care of our own families, we're taking care of yours as well.

- There's a lot of people out there that, I think, don't understand agriculture and the value that it holds.

I think a lot of people have a preconceived notion of agriculture, that we just come out here and put as much water as we want and, you know, let it go.

- We're burning less fuel, we're making less passes in the field.

- You're touching something involved with agriculture every day.

If you eat, you're part of agriculture, as they say.

- The most fertile soils in the world are dominated by a pyrogenic carbon, carbon from fire origin.

We don't have a whole lot of that.

We're bringing fire ecology to mechanized scale agriculture, and this is a cool point, in a part of the world where burning agricultural wastes are illegal.

(Mike laughing) Isn't that wild?

- [Jeff] Do you think people understand that all this stuff growing out here is actually pulling CO two outta the atmosphere?

- No.

I mean, it's just miseducation, you know?

It's what it is.

It's any farmer from where I grew up out here is always willing to teach somebody about how they do things.

We have no problem showing people and teaching them about what we're doing.

- [Jeff] Come on out to the farm.

- Come on out to the farm.

(dramatic music continues) (western guitar music) - [Narrator] Production funding for "American Grown: My Job Depends on Ag," provided by James G. Parker Insurance Associates, insuring and protecting agribusiness for over 40 years, by Gar Bennett, the Central Valley's growing experts, more yield, less water, proven results.

We hope growers feed the world.

By Brandt Professional Agriculture, proudly discovering, manufacturing and supplying the ag inputs that support the heroes who work hard to feed a hungry world every day.

By unWired Broadband, today's internet for rural central California, keeping valley agriculture connected since 2003.

By Hodges Inc. battery storage systems.

Would you rather invest in PG&E's infrastructure or your own?

By Harrison Co., providing family farms with the insights they need to make the best possible strategic, M and A, and financial decisions.

By Sierra Valley Almonds, dedicated to sustainable agriculture and water efficiency for a brighter farming future.

By Cal-Pacific Supply, providing agriculture the safety supplies needed to keep field operations on track.

And by Valley Air Conditioning & Repair, family owned for over 50 years, dedicated to supporting agriculture and the families that grow food for a nation.

(western guitar music softens) (soft music) (soft music continues) (soft music continues) (soft music continues) (upbeat guitar music) - My whole career has been the world of scientific instruments, selling $5 million instruments to the world's, you know, pharmaceutical and ag chemical researchers, to consumable products, to having transformed a venture capital startup company that made an instrument that literally revolutionized the way scientists measure greenhouse gases in the world.

But you know, like technology, take an MRI, can tell you where you have a tumor, it doesn't solve cancer.

Technology can inform you where you have a problem, how big the problem is.

It rarely actually solves the fundamental problem unless your problem is bad analytics.

If we want to think about the climate problem, carbon cycle issues, coming from a greenhouse gas perspective, it's very simple.

We need to take carbon atoms outta the air and put them somewhere else where they add colinear value.

So when I was really leading a company that changed the way the world's atmospheric researchers understood greenhouse gas emissions and reported that to the IPCC, it realized no one's actually gonna fundamentally solve the problem.

So how do you solve that?

Governments can solve it.

Philanthropy can play a role.

You know what really changes the world?

Are big, transformative businesses that do good things for their customers.

- Actually, I mean, biochar has just kind of been out there for a long time, but I thought about it more in terms of being used like filtration systems and things like activated carbon.

But then Mike Woelk, he came, made an effort to make a meeting at our Almond Board biomass meeting, because we had formed this whole committee on what to do with the biomass from almonds and to create more value and have it put to greater use.

And Mike came in and said, "Hey, I am thinking about moving this or setting up an operation in your area because you have the biomass that I wanna use, which is almond shell."

- 80% of what is grown on a farm is waste.

It's never marketed.

It's shells, it's pits, it's stalks, it's leaves, it's ripped up orchards that is collated at these industrial processing facilities that are all over California and the United States and the world.

Well, we call it waste because we really don't know what to do with it.

And that's almost the definition of waste.

It has no value.

We can almost think about those, really, as byproducts, or, frankly, they're are only source of ingredients, right?

You bake a cake with sugar, flour, eggs and whatnot.

Well, we bake our products with agricultural waste streams and we love almond shells.

The state of California produces almost 900,000 tons of almond shells a year that have, you know, very few economic outcomes, so we like almond shells.

It's also happens to be a great source of the biochemicals that we use.

And our process here is we buy those almond shells from various huller-shellers, and we cook them at very high temperatures, 475 degrees centigrade.

It's about 900 degrees Fahrenheit.

That's super hot.

And we convert those almond shells into a form of carbon called a biochar that is no longer digestible by microbes or animals.

And why is that important?

Because we're talking about a carbon cycle, right?

We breathe carbon out of our lungs, it goes into the air, the plants suck up the CO two, they convert that into more food, we eat the food.

That is a carbon cycle.

But if we convert those agricultural waste streams into a form of carbon that cannot be digested by soil microbes or animals or you and me, then that carbon remains removed from the carbon cycle for thousands of years.

We do that every time we make product.

(soft guitar music) - [Jeff] We're going over to the super sacks.

- Yeah.

- [Jeff] Of- - We can go this way.

- [Jeff] So what do we have here, Christine?

- This is biochar that I just picked up yesterday from Corigin.

So not only is it biochar, but it's biochar made from almond shells, which makes a very fine biochar.

And we've already used it at our other orchard down in Gustine to help with water holding capacity and, you know, greenhouse gas emissions and nitrogen leaching.

So this is gonna be used on this property and just bring up my soil quality to the next level.

The more studies I read, the more I was like, "Okay there's something to this here.

Seems like there's some pretty good science on it.

What's the best way to use it?"

And I'm thinking about a circular economy here in California.

If we can take our byproduct, which was considered waste, and then make it into something of value that gives a return to the farmer, that's really helpful.

But if it actually does something like sequestering carbon and helping the environment, that's what we need.

That's, like, the next miracle.

This is what we deal with.

These are part of the trade-offs, you know?

But interestingly, this is an outside tree and so it opened up earlier than everything else, and it's really all about timing that spray.

But I think, actually, the fact that there's only a little bit of damage and there's not a worm in here tells me I actually got it right.

- [Jeff] Yeah.

- Because the insecticide I use prevents the insect from, this is the cool science part, from molting and getting larger.

So obviously this insect came on this nut, but wasn't able to actually continue growing because it's not here anymore.

So I must have done it right.

(Christine laughing) This is the stuff that's so hard to nail down, but you wanna nail it down.

Farming is so hard.

There are so many different components to it.

It's like you have to be a chemist, you have to be an engineer, you have to be a biologist, you have to be a financier and an accountant.

You have to be all these things, and you have to work your ass off as well.

You have to just labor.

(Christine chuckling) So it's hard.

(upbeat guitar music) - This is our KG Ranch.

KG Ranch is named after the patriarch of the family that actually developed this ranch years ago, named Ken Grosime.

It's a well-known family here in California.

He had a great vision, was, you know, farming this in cereal and row crop for years and years, and slowly but surely developed almonds and some walnuts and pistachios, here in this little nestled area within Madera, right up against the San Joaquin River.

And that makes it really unique because the San Joaquin River, the soil, the alluvial fan that comes from that river, has created this really great microclimate, really great soil condition that has allowed us to grow some of the highest yielding crops in terms of almonds in the state.

We started using biochar a few years ago.

We met with some folks that manufacture biochar.

And, really, there was a question of how can we sequester carbon but also reduce the amount of intensive pesticides that we use, increase the amount of water-holding capacity, nutrient-holding capacity, and do that in a way that kind of closed the loop on some of these byproducts that almonds produce, which for holes is pretty easy; we can feed those to cattle.

The almond kernel is obviously the almighty kernel that we want and that we sell, but the shell is something that we really haven't found a home for.

So in looking at how we can use that resource in a very productive way, biochar came to mind.

So we've essentially gotten those almond shells, used a process called pyrolysis to break that down, and then we actually mix it with compost.

And we see a kind of a synergistic effect when we mix the biochar with the compost, and it actually helps incorporate, keep the moisture, and just help those microorganisms or that microbiome to proliferate even more when we have both together.

- The second thing that happens, Jeff, is when you heat up this biomass to these extraordinary temperatures, a vapor stream comes off.

A lot of people think that looks like smoke.

We don't make smoke.

We produce a vapor stream that we then split in our bio-refinery into high value inputs, liquids.

Number one is an aqueous acidic phase that we market and sell back to farmers that really is comprised of lots of low molecular weight compounds, most notably phenols, which are what plants produce when they're under stress.

This is like the plant's immune system that we sell back to farmers.

The vapor streams that come off on this process can be extraordinarily valuable.

And that was sort of the aha moment, which is that we're not a biochar play, we're a biochemistry play, and that this can solve all kinds of challenges in agriculture and, eventually, all sorts of other industries.

I mean, our product looks like this.

I mean, it looks like a little dram of iced tea, you know?

And farmers dilute that in their irrigation water, whether they're applying it foliarly or through drip or micro sprinklers or whatever.

So it slides right into a tank mix and is super easy to use and, you know, relatively cheap.

So we want to help farmers of all scales.

I mean, the 10,000 acre operation, the 50,000 acre operation and the five acre operation, let's say, up in Petaluma.

And all farmers stand to benefit.

(soft dramatic music) - So what we do is we farm corn and soybeans, and we farm a little bit of hay, too.

We have some customers that we've had for quite a few years that we help supply for feed for their cattle.

And I still run a small scale cow-calf operation, not like we used to back in the day.

We just had kind of grown, and corn and soybean acre so much, so that's where most of our focus went.

My generation and the next ones that are coming down the line, you know, with the resources and the technology that we have nowadays, we're way more efficient than we've ever been.

I know even with our own operation, with what we've changed over the years, you know, we're strip tilling and minimal tilling a lot more than we ever have.

And that's just what works for us.

- Well, we're a family farm operation, and they figured out here in the last year or so that 96% of the farms here in the state of Illinois are family farmed and owned, and it's a great legacy to show off Illinois with.

And I think it's just something that I know I'm very fortunate to be a part of, and I know that everybody else that's out here farming and make a living on some really good soils and pastures and such out here are very grateful to be here.

- There's this constant drumbeat of some to suggest that farmers are not environmentally conscious, that they don't know that they're wrecking the environment and they don't care about the environment.

From where you're sitting, nothing can be further from the truth.

- Well, we recognize how valuable these resources are, and stewardship is job one.

And we do our very, very best every year to manage these resources with our fertilizer or anything that we use here on this farmland to raise our crops and our families and to put bread on the table.

But, you know, it's something that in terms of conservation, we do everything in the world to protect our soils with conservation practices like no-till and strip-till and things of that nature.

And we're always conscious about it, and it's a constant planning that we go through every year that we know that we are taking care of the soil the best that we can.

- We're constantly watching what's trying to go on in the environment.

That's how we raise our crops, you know?

(Evan laughing) And so anything that we're doing, we're constantly watching it.

The farmers is the one who watches The Weather Channel the most, right?

I mean, (Evan laughing) now we have it on our phones or devices.

You know, we're watching that every morning, every night, constantly.

Whether you're getting ready to plant the seeds or you're getting ready to go mow that hay, sometimes we might just mow that hay on purpose just so we can get a rain outta something, you know?

But it's always kind of something.

We're constantly all questioning on what's going on in the environment, you know?

But we're doing the best job that we can to take care of it, you know?

We're burning less fuel, we're making less passes in the field.

You know, I think that's what is always kind of misled with some people, is that I know for a fact majority of farmers nowadays are making a lot less passes in the field than what we used to.

With the improvements of planners, technology, and everything else, you know, you can make it work with less passes and that just leads to less fuel we're burning.

- I think for the most part, you know, there's always gonna be some challenges out here environmentally.

You know, we're doing the very best job to be accountable and responsible for what we do and how we do it.

And I just think that any chance that I know that I get, or any ag organization or anyone in agriculture, if they have an opportunity to explain our story and how we do things, most of the time people learn to understand what we're doing and they just finally say it's kind of an aha moment.

But it's just something I just hope people learn to understand over time.

You know, we're not out here wasting our resources or using any more than we need to.

We're very, very conscious of managing our resources 'cause we wanna be efficient in every manner that we can.

But we're always welcome to tell that story, whoever's willing to listen to us.

(soft guitar music) - I always say that, you know, we have this opportunity.

I mean, I look at us as the frontline workers of climate change, and I've heard a lot of people say that, but I've always thought this.

And we also have the opportunity to make the biggest difference, because we have the land to do it.

Like you can do all these great things on your home property, you know, and if you live in an urban area, and that's great, and we should all be making those efforts, but you're doing it on a quarter of an acre.

I have the ability to do it on 135 acres.

Some other guy I know has the ability to do it on 2,000 acres or 10,000 acres.

And those are the kind of numbers that we need to make a difference.

I mean, we're already doing, you know, growing the plants and taking carbon out of the air in that way, but there's so much more potential for us to even take it the next step further with some of these new technologies and this new science.

We're looking at putting that carbon back in the ground where it belongs.

And it's not just benefiting, you know, us, in that we're taking carbon and sequestering it, but it's also doing all these other things.

It's building soil health, it's helping us conserve water, which in California, we desperately need, and building healthier soils for healthier plants.

- [Mike] Look!

Oh, you got some on your- - This is a hideous picture of me.

This is what I looked at the end of every day of doing that project.

Look how big it makes my nose look, but I, mean, look at me.

- [Mike] Oh my gosh!

That's- - This is, okay, there's another picture, like, I don't know, it's like really kind of creepy looking, actually.

- There's a lot of people out there that I think don't understand agriculture and the value that it holds.

I don't know if many people know that when they get food from their grocery store, it doesn't come from the grocery store; it comes from out here, right?

And it's our job to really educate and inspire people, not only consumers, but I think the next generation of, you know, young entrepreneurs or people within science or STEM that can really help us solve a lot of these problems.

And it's exciting.

You know, I think a lot of people have a preconceived notion of agriculture, that we just come out here and put as much water as we want and, you know, let it go.

And it's become such a nuanced, technical career that, you know, I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world.

(soft guitar music continues) - You know, in this day and age, somebody's gotta find somebody to hate and then they become haters.

And so often people want to point to industrial scale agriculture as being the bad guys.

They're not.

They control the land.

The average size farm in the United States is between five and 600 acres.

Elsewhere in the world, it's two or three acres.

The landowners, the big, industrial-scale farmers, they produce the food that we eat and take out of a box or whatever.

We have to find solutions that help those farmers transition away from fertilizer and synthetic intensity towards more biological intensity.

And if we can do that and help those farmers make more money by growing more nutritious products and reducing fertilizers and synthetic chemical use, and that is basically their expense, then the farmers will listen to us.

And if we reduce their overall input costs and increase their revenue by marketable yield, well, then, that spread drops to the bottom line.

And we should all celebrate that, because America's farmers deserve to make a fair profit.

We want them to make a fair profit.

And frankly, we all require farmers to increase the level of food that they produce per cultivated acre in the world.

That's essential.

Why?

Because we're gonna add a few billion people extra in the world in the next couple of years or decades, let's say.

40% of the world's land mass is already farmed or grazed.

We're not gonna go to 80% of the world's landmass farmed or grazed.

We want to preserve those wild systems, those ecosystems.

And the only way we're gonna be able to do that is by increasing the productivity of currently cultivated soils.

And who owns the soils?

It's industrial ag.

They're the good guys.

They're the saviors.

Let's get off of our high horse and help them solve our problems.

(soft guitar music continues) (no audio) (western guitar music) - [Narrator] Production funding for "American Grown: My Job Depends on Ag," provided by James G. Parker Insurance Associates, insuring and protecting agribusiness for over 40 years, by Gar Bennett, the Central Valley's growing experts, more yield, less water, proven results.

We help growers feed the world.

By Brandt Professional Agriculture, proudly, discovering, manufacturing, and supplying the ag inputs that support the heroes who work hard to feed a hungry world every day.

By unWired Broadband, today's internet for rural central California, keeping valley agriculture connected since 2003.

By Hodges Inc. battery storage systems.

Would you rather invest in PG&E's infrastructure or your own?

By Harrison Co., providing family farms with the insights they need to make the best possible strategic, M and A, and financial decisions.

By Sierra Valley Almonds, dedicated to sustainable agriculture and water efficiency for a brighter farming future.

By Cal-Pacific Supply, providing agriculture the safety supplies needed to keep field operations on track, And by Valley Air Conditioning & Repair, family owned for over 50 years, dedicated to supporting agriculture and the families that grow food for a nation.

(western guitar music softens)