Bellvale Bruderhof is a Christian community of about two hundred people in upstate New York. Plough’s Alan Koppschall interviews Jeff King, who runs the community farm.

Plough: Tell me about your role. What does it entail?

Jeff King: As a community we share a daily meal. My job is to provide a vegetable for each meal. I grow green beans, tomatoes, sweet corn, broccoli, cucumbers, zucchini, melons, potatoes, and other vegetables on about four acres. I work with the community’s kitchen crew to decide what to grow. We only grow things that require a reasonable amount of labor. I could grow peas, for example, but who’s going to pick and shell peas for two hundred people?

I take these production goals and come up with a planting plan for the year. Every vegetable has its own set of requirements – planting time, nutrients, insect and disease mitigation, and harvest methods. Sometimes growing mixed vegetables is like having twenty kids demanding your attention at the same time; you have to decide which one needs it the most.

I have a core crew of two each season and part of my job is to train them and assign tasks. We also run an educational program for the kids’ summer camp. My job is to plan the experiences, for example weeding carrots or picking tomatoes, and then give them instructions and oversee it. I try to make it as engaging and as interesting as possible. In the back of my mind, I’m recruiting the next generation of farmers.

And then it’s the day-to-day operations. We make compost, there’s planting, we deal with insects and diseases, harvesting, and storage. I also organize large projects. For example, we’ll have a day in the summer where most community members will show up and we’ll harvest and put away two thousand pounds of green beans for the winter.

You follow the principles of regenerative agriculture. Could you explain that?

Regenerative agriculture is simply looking at how things grow in nature and trying to replicate it with your vegetable crops. When you start looking at natural ecosystems, you realize that everything operates together as a whole. In a healthy, functioning ecosystem, everything’s balanced.

There are six principles in regenerative agriculture that we adhere to: use of cover crops, disturbing the soil as little as possible, diversifying your plant species, maintaining living roots, integrating animals into your operation, and context – practices that work for some farmers may not work for your operation.

You didn’t always employ regenerative practices. What led you to make that change and what has that transition been like?

Fifteen years ago, when I was twenty-one, I was put in charge of a twenty-acre vegetable farm. My father is an organic farmer and he had instilled in me a dislike of chemicals. But when I took on the farm, the fear of failure and the pressure to produce a successful crop made me rely on chemicals to deal with issues. We had four main insect pests and several diseases that affected our crops. We were using pesticides to deal with these problems. We also used herbicides for potatoes and carrots and chemical fertilizers as well.

At the same time, I was using regenerative agricultural practices like cover cropping, composting, and minimal tillage. The main problem was that we were using a hybrid system – part chemical and part regenerative. The chemicals counteracted the benefits of the regenerative system. We had fungicides that were killing pathogens, but they were also killing the beneficial fungi in our soil. The same with the insecticides. They were killing our pests, but they were also killing any potential predators that might have kept the pests in check. The chemical fertilizer was inhibiting that plant-microbe relationship and stopping it from functioning and thriving.

It was getting frustrating. Even with spraying fungicide, I was losing crops to disease. For a chemical system to work, you have to apply the treatments consistently and regularly. You have to start early in the transplant stage and use them weekly. You have to use a bunch of different types of chemicals as the diseases and insects develop resistance.

If you’re not going to go all in with chemicals, you’re not going to be successful with chemicals. So after ten years of a hybrid system, I realized I had to make the leap into fully regenerative practice. I had to quit the chemicals and rely on nature to provide solutions to the problems.

Do you have any specific stories or educational moments where you realized that the practices that you were employing were wrong?

In 2015 we had a guy from the Soil Food Web organization talk about root exudates. A plant creates energy through photosynthesis and releases some of this energy in the form of glucose into the soil, which feeds the microbes. The microbes then take this energy and make nutrients available to the plant in a symbiotic relationship. After hearing this for the first time, I started to understand the importance of soil biology. It has completely changed the way I’ve look at farming.

The second moment was in 2020 when I heard John Kempf, a leader in the regenerative movement, state that plants could be completely resistant to any insect or disease. He’s proved that concept with his consulting work. He says that to date there’s no insect or disease that can’t be overcome regeneratively. It’s a matter of plants developing a proper immune system through proper nutrition, which ultimately comes from healthy soil microbes. Then plants can have what they need to create these secondary compounds – polyphenols, terpenes, and antioxidants – which are part of their immune system to fend off insects and diseases.

Regenerative agriculture takes a holistic view of nature. What does that look like in a farm ecosystem?

Everything works together because there are billions of interactions between plants, animals, trees, and microbes. Everything is interconnected. Every organism in the ecosystem has a role to play.

I’ll give you one example. Plants have stomata, which are tiny pores on the undersides of their leaves that open to absorb carbon dioxide and release water vapor. They close at night and open before sunrise. A study was done to determine what triggers a plant to open its stomata, because it happened before the sunrise. The study found that birdsong contributed to the stomata opening. Plants were using birds as an alarm clock to wake up and photosynthesize!

In a healthy ecosystem, there is a balance between insect species. Insect predators keep populations of other insects in check. Regenerative farms like ours try to maintain the same balance in their fields and we’ve planted perennials and flowering plants between crops to attract beneficial insect predators. A couple of years ago I found a wheel bug eating a Mexican bean beetle. A wheel bug is a rare beneficial predator from the assassin bug family and a Mexican bean beetle is a common bean pest. I was so thrilled that I took a picture. I had insect predators coming to my farm to deal with my insect pests! I’m seeing more of the ultimate predator, the praying mantis, in my crops as well.

Traditionally there’s been a distinction between vegetable farming and livestock farming, but you’ve brought the two together in recent years. How have you done that?

The separation is only in the last century. Before that, most farms included livestock pastures, field crops, and vegetable crops. Now the majority of livestock is confined to feed lots, the manure is a waste management problem, and our food is grown on land that’s starved of manure and beneficial microbes. But this separation really isn’t nature’s way. Every healthy ecosystem includes plant and animals.

After I had been exposed to this concept, I thought, “How can we do this on our small acreage of vegetables?” I partnered with our community’s sheep enthusiast, who had twenty sheep grazing on an adjacent pasture. About three years ago, we put them on my spring cover crops to graze using movable electric fencing. They grazed my spring cover crops before I planted my main season crops. The sheep gained from the extra forage at a time of year when the pastures were still growing slowly. My garden benefited from the increased fertility from the manure.

The following year my sheep farmer friend gave me a section of pasture to plant, so I put in a crop of broccoli. That turned out to be really interesting experiment, with some of the broccoli crop in the garden and some on this new pasture a hundred feet away on adjacent fields with the same soil type. I managed both crops the same way, with the same watering schedule. It was the same seed variety, the same transplants, just split half-and-half. On the old garden soil, I lost ninety percent of the crop to Alternaria head rot. It was a failure. But there was hardly any Alternaria on the pasture crop just a hundred feet away. It turned out to be one of the best broccoli crops I’d ever grown. The success of the pasture broccoli was probably due to the fact that grazing livestock on grass tends to improve and maintain soil health, whereas annual vegetable production typically has a degrading effect on soil health and fertility.

In Christian community everyone has a specific role and all serve a greater purpose, somewhat similar to the interconnected ecosystem on a farm. Do you have any reflections on living and working in both regenerative farming and Christian community?

The more diverse an ecosystem is, the healthier it is. Every organism has a tiny role to play for the greater good. It’s the same in a community. If we’re all the same, it’s like a monoculture. But different types of people complement each other under God’s love.

In regenerative agriculture we often talk about reducing inputs. That’s because in a natural ecosystem everything – the carbon, water, nitrogen and other minerals – is recycled. The only real input in a true regenerative system is sunlight. That’s a great comparison to how a Christian community works. Just like a farm needs sunlight, we need that daily input of God’s love to thrive.