A Farmer Takes a Stand for Soil Health — And Pays a Steep Price

The challenges Fuller met echo challenges encountered by farmers globally. This is the focus of the Naandi Foundation’s work in India: to try to make regenerative agriculture convenient and affordable, and to be able to see the results quickly.

Fuller was environmentally aware as a child, influenced in part by birding trips with his grandmother. At age six, he saw images of the polluted Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio, on fire. He couldn’t imagine how a river made of water could burn.

A desire for better yields inspired him to try no-till in the 1980s, “but there was not widespread knowledge about how to do it yet, and we failed.” He tried again in 1994 but his yields were still dropping, so he gave up the effort again. Then he began to experiment with cover crops. Not seeing results, he quit again in 2000.

“Eventually I realized me removing carbon from my system was causing my system to collapse. I realized I knew nothing about soil. I didn’t know soil was supposed to be alive. I didn’t know earthworms were good for anything except fishing. But I came back to cover crops in 2003 and everything clicked.”

And then came 2012. “It was the second hottest and driest year on record, the kind of year that insurance was designed for,” Fuller said. “I was in a real bind. It was a major drought, and my corn fields were burning up and I needed field for the livestock. I needed the insurance company to come appraise it so I could get the cattle on it.”

“It was an ugly time. I went downhill pretty fast, physically, mentally and spiritually. With no employees, I was working by myself. And operating on very little income. Meanwhile from Oct. 29 until mid-May 2014, I’m spending 10 hours a week just on the legal battle, digging out of paperwork, talking on the phone. You become very isolated very fast.”

He missed a crucial family gathering: his family found his grandfather’s tractor, and his brother and son cleaned it up and presented it to his dad on Father’s Day. “I wasn’t there because I was planting,” he says. “My kids were pissed at me. My brother was killed in a farm accident a few months later so these were our last family photos with him, and I wasn’t there. It was a horrible time.”

Even when he won the case, all the insurance company was required to pay was what they originally owed Fuller, though he’d lost much, much more in the interim. And in 2014, when he needed crop insurance for two fields of soybeans, they denied again for the same reason.

“I called them and said the rules have changed and this is no longer valid, but it was going to be another fight, so I quit, downsized to 400 acres and left the game.” He has now gone to direct marketing through Circle 7 by Fuller Farms.

“All of this struggle gave me the push to do what I’m doing now. I also know regenerative farming is the right way to go. But some things I would have done differently,” he says. “I gave ten years of my life to this battle when I could have watched my kids become adults and my parents grow old. If I were to do it over, I would just declare bankruptcy from the start, not fight to survive.”