Soil degradation is a global problem. A third of the planet’s land is already severely degraded, and soil is being degraded at a speed that threatens the health of the planet and the civilizations that depend on it (Whitmee et al. 2015). Depletion of soil organic carbon (SOC) resulting from extractive agriculture is a key driver of soil degradation (Lal et al. 2015). Much of this SOC has been released to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide (CO₂), a potent greenhouse gas contributing to ongoing climate change, including extreme weather events. Soil degradation also diminishes water infiltration and retention, biodiversity, watershed functions, and the nutritional value of food. Reversing soil degradation is a top global priority (UNCCD 2017).

Yields of major crops have increased substantially in the last century, primarily through intensive chemical fertilization. However, the greater aboveground plant biomass production resulting from chemical fertilization has usually not led to proportional gains in plant inputs to soil and soil organic matter (SOM) accrual (Khan et al. 2007; Man et al. 2021). Instead, these practices, in concert with other intensive agricultural practices such as intensive tillage, monoculture, application of pesticides, and bare fallows, have caused declines in SOM, increases in greenhouse gas emissions, and pollution of waterways (Loisel et al. 2019). However, adopting regenerative agricultural practices, such as substituting chemical with organic fertilizers like compost or manure, reducing tillage, intensifying and diversifying crop rotations, and cover cropping, often increase SOM (McClelland et al. 2021). The mechanisms underlying the positive effects of regenerative agricultural practices on SOM, however, are not well understood. Elucidating these mechanisms would advance our capacity to design agricultural strategies to reliably enhance agroecosystem SOM content, which would assist in reversing soil degradation and enhancing soil quality, food security, and climate change mitigation globally (Amelung et al. 2020).

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Regenerative agriculture in the Amazon

November 17, 2021

Regenerative agriculture in the Amazon

Meet the EcoAraguaia: Camp Farm of the Future!
EcoAraguaia Farm of the Future is a former cattle ranch in the Amazon rainforest with a big mission: to show the world how producing food, restoring nature, and creating livelihoods can go hand in hand. The key to all of this? Regenerative agriculture: a holistic system for managing the land that integrates people, planet, and profit.

Where three biomes meet
EcoAraguaia Farm of the Future is located in Caseara, on the border of the Brazilian provinces of Tocantins and Pará, in the middle of the 2,600 km long Araguaia Biodiversity Corridor along the river of the same name. The Farm is situated at the intersection of three biomes: the Cerrado (savanna), Pantanal (tropical wetland), and of course the Amazon rainforest. These climatic conditions create an incredibly lush environment teeming with flora and fauna.

*The Araguaia River is the center of a vast biodiversity corridor, giving life to many thousands of tropical species of plants and animals in the heart of the Amazon.*

From degrading to regenerative agriculture
Unfortunately, this magnificent region of the world has suffered decades of deforestation and soil degradation, largely as a result of traditional soy and cattle farming practices. To this day, as in the rest of the world, many people in the area are stuck in conventional ways of farming that are slowly but surely eroding the natural systems essential for their survival.

The Tiezzi family, owners of a 500 hectare cattle ranch in the region, decided in 2017 that it was time to move away from the traditional model of cattle farming that had been the foundation of their family business for many years…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Teaching (or Cultivating) Sustainability (or Inhabitance), Ten Years On

May 29, 2021

Teaching (or Cultivating) Sustainability (or Inhabitance), Ten Years On

For ten years now, I’ve been teaching one version or another of a class on personal simplicity and economic and environmental sustainability here at Friends University, a formerly Quaker, non-denominational Christian, small liberal arts college in Wichita, KS. Though I teach at a religious university, I don’t teach religion myself–and for that reason, I at first doubted that Jennifer Ayres’s Inhabitance: Ecological Religious Education would much that would be pedagogically relevant to me, despite my strong sympathy with her subject matter. In this, I was partly wrong. While Ayres’s book includes many intriguing (and a few borderline outrageous) educational suggestions, its greatest value to me as a teacher is the way it inspires me to take stock of what I’ve tried to do with with my sustainability class, and to perhaps rethink what my primary goals in that course should be.

My original aim in the design of this class–about which I’ve probably shared my thoughts about too many times already–was always primarily getting students out of the classroom and into the growing, producing, fecund Kansas ecosystems all around us, showing them that there are patterns of life that can keep people fed and housed and happy without committing oneself to the rat race. It shouldn’t have been a shock to me, after I’d lived in Kansas for a few years, to realize how many of my students really had no connection with farming or food systems–but it was, nonetheless. Sometimes broad popular stereotypes about “living in the heartland” would be confirmed as I talked with the students taking the class, and some of them would end up taking the lead in teaching me about cattle ranching or winter wheat or regenerative agriculture…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Monsanto, Big Food, and Big Ag Move to Co-opt the Organic and Regenerative Movement

March 26, 2021

Monsanto, Big Food, and Big Ag Move to Co-opt the Organic and Regenerative Movement

There’s one skill that Big Food and Big Ag corporations have in abundance: taking control of every situation and corrupting it into an opportunity for profit.

For example, as consumer interest in the terms “natural” and “sustainable” increased, industrial agribusiness began to use these unsubstantiated terms to market greenwashed products. These products were, in fact, just the opposite—made with pesticide-laden, factory farmed, and/or genetically engineered ingredients. Even the powerful Organic movement, which actually is based on specific certifiable practices and inputs, has required constant safeguarding against corporate attempts to dilute its meaning.

Now, we will also diligently have to defend the up-and-coming Regeneration movement against attempts by agribusiness corporations to co-opt it and undermine its transformative power.

In the past few years, Big Food and Big Ag corporations such as Bayer/Monsanto, Cargill, Walmart, General Mills, Danone, Unilever, and others have jumped on the bandwagon and publicly presented themselves as leaders in the regenerative agriculture movement. But something smells fishy. For one, these companies are completely leaving out organic practices in their definition of regenerative agriculture. As long as a farm uses certain conservation practices such as reduced tillage or cover crops, these companies seem to think that toxic pesticides, synthetic fertilizers, biotechnology, and corporate control of farms and farmers are all A-okay.

Seriously? Aren’t these all things that helped propel us into our public health and environmental crises in the first place? Their motives make sense, though, when you consider that these companies derive a significant portion of their profits from these destructive industrial agriculture technologies and inputs in the first place. If these companies can keep making profits off of destruction while putting on a good public image of being “regenerative,” this win-win for them must appear appealing indeed.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Julia Kloehn, organic consumers association, greenwashing, big food, big ag, regenerative agriculture, industrial agriculture, organic food production, organic agriculture, organic farming

Regenerative Agriculture part 3 | Working With Nature, Not Suppressing It

March 6, 2021

Regenerative Agriculture part 3 | Working With Nature, Not Suppressing It

In the third and final installment in this series on regenerative agriculture, Peter Dunne explains how regenerative agriculture is about working with nature, not suppressing it. We’re often told nature and agriculture can’t share the same space. But we urgently need a paradigm shift, because true resilience only comes through diversity. Full series will be available to download as a pdf.

The Insidious Agrochemical Treadmill

The backdrop for the emergence of regenerative agriculture, and its emphasis on soil as a fulcrum of farming has been the ongoing, worsening ecological crisis and the phenomenon of climate change. Both are anthropogenic. At the farm level, declining economic returns have become commonplace. Although sometimes influenced by the first, perhaps it is the last issue which is persuading increasing numbers of farmers that the current agricultural paradigm is not working.

Over the past handful of decades, farmers have found themselves resorting to ever-increasing inputs to improve production to maintain financial income as the real farm-gate price fell. It has long become a downward spiral. It is the classic treadmill created by the continual adoption of technology. To ensure a viable farm business, the system had come to favour yield above all other considerations.

In contrast, regenerative agriculture is about returning to systems reliant on an understanding of how natural ecology produces without anthropological intervention. The latter is then about working with nature, not governing it, or suppressing it to the degree where, as often now predominates, nature and agriculture cannot share the same physical space. It has become an either or. Monocultures devoid of nature have become commonplace whereas true resilience, in fact, only comes through diversity.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Regenerative agriculture

June 4, 2020

Regenerative agriculture

Living in a city or out in the suburbs one might not think too much about what it takes to produce the food we eat and why healthy agriculture is so important. But conventional farming is unsustainable: substantial amounts of topsoil are being lost by erosion. Arable land is being degraded and lost.

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization has protested that “we must stop soil erosion to save our future”. Conventional farming methods also cause significant emissions of greenhouse gases–which contributes to climate change. A 2016 OECD report estimates that 17% of global emissions come directly from agriculture, while an additional 7 to 14% of emissions are caused by land-use practices such as clearing forests for farming.

Agriculture is the single greatest contributor to biodiversity loss and the largest consumer of increasingly limited freshwater resources—consumption that will increase over the next few decades. Conventional farming methods have led to financial hardship for many farmers due to the costs of inputs such as synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. Moreover, food production contributes significantly to diseases such as COVID 19. The future of agriculture lies in tackling these problems while at the same time increasing yields to feed a growing global population.

Enhance and regenerate

Regenerative agriculture (RA) is farming which goes beyond just doing no harm to the environment–like sustainable agriculture. It enhances and regenerates the natural environment. A good definition of RA from the consultancy Terra Genesis International is: “a system of farming principles and practices that increase biodiversity, enrich soils, restore watersheds, and enhance ecosystem services”, and which helps “reverse current global trends of atmospheric accumulation of carbon, offers increased yields, resilience to climate instability, and higher health and vitality for farming and ranching communities.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Regenerative Agriculture Is So Good In So Many Ways

November 15, 2019

Regenerative Agriculture Is So Good In So Many Ways

Welcome to Terra Firma by Courtney White. I’ve spent my life prospecting for innovative, practical, and collaborative answers to pressing problems involving land and people, sharing them with others. I’d like to share them with you!

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I’ve been involved with save-the-world work for over thirty years (yikes!) and I can say unequivocably that one of the most hopeful, truly amazing stories I’ve ever come across is regenerative agriculture. It is also one the least widely known, especially to anyone who isn’t involved with food production – which is nearly everyone!

I thought this important topic would be a great way to launch this newsletter.

First, a quick definition (by yours truly): Regenerative Agriculture is both an attitude and a suite of practices that restores soil health and fertility, expands biodiversity, protects watersheds, and improves resilience in nature and ourselves. It focuses on creating the conditions for life, especially in the soil, and takes its cues from nature which has a very, very long track record of successfully growing things.

Resilience, by the way, is a 64-cent word for ‘bouncing back’ after a shock or disturbance, such as a forest fire. This will be increasingly critical to the world. Oh! I should also mention that regenerative agriculture fights global warming.

If this sounds like regenerative agriculture has Super Powers – that’s because it does! It has the ability to grow healthy food and repair damaged land using special powers supplied by sunlight, carbon dioxide, water, minerals, and an army of tiny super heroes: soil microbes. It’s an unstoppable force in a righteous cause.

Don’t take my word for it. Before his death last year, Stan Lee, the legendary founder of Marvel Comics and creator of Iron Man and Spider Man, was working on a new super hero character called DirtMan. I kid you not! (see)

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

A fixed meat ration is not the path to sustainable food systems

November 15, 2018

A fixed meat ration is not the path to sustainable food systems

“We should eat less meat in order to save the planet”, has almost become a dogma. There is no doubt that industrial animal production is harmful for animals and nature. But the framing of the path to a sustainable agriculture system in terms of how many grams of potatoes, wheat and meat per day we should eat is to start in the wrong end of the stick. Instead we should focus our interest into the transition to a sustainable and regenerative food and agriculture system. Such a system would exclude or substantially reduce those foods which are wasteful regardless if those are eggs from caged hens or asparagus flown from one side of the globe to the other. With the right design animals, especially ruminants such as cattle, sheep and goats, can be companions in this transition rather than a problem.

The article Options for keeping the food system within environmental limitspublished in Nature 10 October 2018 has the following key messages according to the lead author, Marco Springmann:

Climate change cannot be sufficiently mitigated without dietary changes towards more plant-based diets. Adopting more plant-based “flexitarian” diets globally could reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of the food system by more than half, and also reduce other environmental impacts, such as those from fertilizer application and the use of cropland and freshwater, by a tenth to a quarter.
In addition to dietary changes, improving management practices and technologies in agriculture is required to limit pressures on agricultural land, freshwater extraction, and fertilizer use.
Finally, halving food loss and waste is needed for keeping the food system within environmental limits.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Fight Climate Change in Your Own Garden

November 14, 2018

Fight Climate Change in Your Own Garden

Your backyard could be the next front in the war against global warming.

During World War I, Americans were encouraged to do their part in the war effort by planting, fertilizing, harvesting, and storing their own fruits and vegetables. The food would go to allies in Europe, where there was a food crisis. These so-called “victory gardens” declined when WWI ended but resurged during World War II. By 1944, nearly 20 million victory gardens produced about 8 million tons of food.

Today, the nonprofit Green America is trying to bring back victory gardens as a way to fight climate change.

That’s according to Jillian Semaan, food campaigns director at Green America, who added that the organization wants “to allow people to understand shifting garden practices towards regenerative agriculture and what it means for reversing climate change and sequestering carbon out of the atmosphere and putting it back into the soil.”

The organization is doing that through an educational video and a mapping project. Recently, more than 900 people added their gardens or farms to the Climate Victory Garden map that tracks U.S. agricultural activities that use regenerative practices.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said—and continues to reiterate—that carbon sequestration accounts for a large portion of global agricultural mitigation potential. Globally, agriculture accounts for 11 percent of greenhouse gas emissions caused by humans, according to the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Waiting on amber: a note on regenerative agriculture and carbon farming

March 22, 2018

Waiting on amber: a note on regenerative agriculture and carbon farming

This post offers some further notes on the issue of carbon farming and regenerative agriculture, arising out of the discussion in this recent post of mine, particularly via the comments of Don Stewart. Don set me some onerous homework – a lengthy presentationby Elizabeth and Paul Kaiser of Singing Frogs farm in California, another lengthy presentation by David Johnson of New Mexico State University, and an interview with Australian soil scientist Christine Jones. Diligent student that I am, not only have I now completed these tasks but I’ve also read various other scientific papers and online resources bearing on the issue and am duly turning in my assignment. I hope it’ll provide some interest and a few points for discussion.

I started out with considerable sympathy towards carbon farming and regenerative agriculture, but with a degree of scepticism about some of the loftier claims made on its behalf by regenerative agriculture proponents (henceforth RAPs). And in fact that’s pretty much where I’ve ended up too, but with a somewhat clearer sense of where my grounds for scepticism lie. I hope we’ll see a shift towards more regenerative agriculture in the future. But if that’s going to happen, the RAPs will have to persuade a lot of people more inclined to scepticism than me about the virtues of their proposals – and if they’re going to do that, I think they’ll need to tighten up their arguments considerably. Anyway, in what follows I define what I understand regen-ag to be and then critically examine some of the claims about it.

Defining regenerative agriculture and carbon farming

Doubtless there are numerous possible emphases, but the fundamental idea revolves around restoring or maintaining the biological life of the soil, in particular the fungal component. Working as symbionts to plants and other soil organisms, fungi are able to deliver nutrients to plants that are otherwise unavailable, and also to sequester carbon by absorbing carbon dioxide from the air and turning it into stable organic carbon compounds in the soil. In order to achieve this, it’s essential to avoid tillage, since this destroys the fungal hyphae in the soil, and to keep the soil covered with living plants at all times so that there’s a healthy rhizosphere (root zone) interacting with the soil food web. It can also be necessary to inoculate the soil with the right kinds of fungi – apparently, not just any fungi will do¹.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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