Worldwide the production of food under our current systems erodes our soils, damages the environment and is responsible for 24% of greenhouse gas emissions.
The combination of ploughs, chemicals and fertilisers applied by farmers for the past 75 years has depleted our soils to where they now produce nutrient poor food. These depleted soils and chemicals impact human health.
The solution to both these problems is simple. Its carbon, the fact that it is in the atmosphere rather than in the soil. The Green Revolution and industrialisation of agriculture have been everything but green. In the quest for yields our soils have been destroyed, the crops and vegetables our farmers grow are nutrient poor and drowning in chemicals, our cattle and sheep eat grain rather than grazing grass as they evolved to and the whole system is powered by fossil fuels rather than the sun. Incredibly Regenerative Agriculture, in fixing our soils, fixes both the health issue and a wide range of environmental issues including desertification, the carbon cycle, the water cycle and mitigating climate change.
Why we have to change to Regenerative Agriculture
We lose 0.3% of our soil per year, that's 30% in the last 100 years
We are putting carbon into the atmosphere rather than storing it in the soil
We use 10 times more energy to produce our food than the food contains
We are producing nutrient poor food (plants and meat)
We are eating nutrient poor food and our health is suffering
"What's good for the earth is good for us." - Professor David Montgomery
"There can be no life without soil and no soil without life, they have evolved together." - Charles E Kellogg, USDA 1938
The United States is the world leader in conventional /industrial agriculture, they are also the world leader in per capita health expenditure and yet they are repeatedly ranked below 25th in the world in terms of health statistics. The average person in the US is now spending twice as much on health care as on food and children being born in the US today have a lower life expectancy than their parents. This is what happens when the system rewards scientists and farmers for yields rather than nutrition. This is what happens when you poison your soil biology and deplete your soils.
"The biological component of the soil unlocks the mineral component, no body taught me that in soil science." - Professor David Montgomery
Regenerative Agriculture goes back to working with rather than against natural systems; grazing animals in ways that mimic plains game on grasslands, using old methods of crop farming, from before the time of chemicals, when the sun was the only source of energy, monoculture didn't exist and the carbon and water cycles were still intact. Regenerative Agriculture is about farm management that works with nature rather than against nature, forming carbon loops rather than a series of carbon emissions that take carbon from the soil into the sky. This rebuilds the soil, stimulating the microbiology and fixing the water cycle. All of which maximises the photosynthetic potential of that soil capturing more carbon and cooling the planet. Agriculture has the greatest potential for cooling the planet as photosynthesis both draws down carbon and is nature's air-conditioner cooling the environment via transpiration.
What is regenerative agriculture?
Fortunately in parts of the world alternative systems still remain for us to study and mavericks who transitioned to regenerative agriculture before knowing what Regenerative Agriculture was have already discovered that we can re-build topsoil at much faster rates than we ever imagined and given the opportunity, even though so badly damaged, nature can fix the carbon and water cycles. The upside of this is the cost of production falls as demand for costly inputs is reduced.
"The key person to restoration/ regeneration at scale is the farmer." - Prof James Blignaut
"A massive campaign and policy agenda to transform agriculture and restore ecosystems globally is needed right now." - Professor Jem Bendell, Stanford University
Industrial Agriculture argues that we need chemicals and fossil fuels to feed the world's burgeoning population but these giant companies, that poison the world while producing nutrient poor foods, feed less than 40% of its population. Small farmers, using only 20% of the land feed more than 50%. More US industrial corn is used to feed cars than people. India, Africa and South America don't need chemical dependant monocultures they need their farmers and consumers to be protected from Industrial Agriculture.
"Not 1 hectare of Industrial Agriculture is being used to feed the 1 billion hungry people of the world who live off less that $1 per day." - Miguel Altieri, Professor of Agroecology at the University of California, Berkeley
The choice is yours, do you choose healthy soil or do you choose dust?
Regenerative farmers are already producing yields that compete favourably with their Industrial neighbours, as Dr Kris Nichols says "... we have the capacity to feed 14 billion people nutrient dense food ..."
Climate change is a massively daunting issue but here is a simple, significant contribution each of us can make. Join the movement to reduce the carbon footprint of the food that we eat. Farm regeneratively, shop regeneratively, eat regeneratively and improve our planet.
"Agriculture has a critical role to play, both in dramatically reducing emissions and by providing a sink to draw down carbon from the atmosphere." - Christiana Figueres, United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
Regenerative Agriculture what is it?
In short Regenerative Agriculture is farming with nature rather than against nature. There are really only two types of agriculture, destructive and regenerative, all agriculture that does not build soil biology and reinstate natural mineral and water cycles is destructive. Regenerative Agriculture blends the latest learnings on soil biology, the soil microbiome, with enduring technologies from the era before Industrial Agriculture. Given the dire condition of our soils across the planet sustainable agriculture can no longer be our goal, we can't merely sustain we have to regenerate.
"We can't sustain C minus / D soils ... if we start with the soils and regenerate the soils everything else follows." - Dr. Kris Nichols
In rebuilding soil Regenerative Agriculture heals the environment, rebuilds human health, decrease input costs and rebuilds farming communities. Regenerative Agriculture is a win, win, it enables us to have our cake and eat it, we can regenerate our soils, heal the environment and feed the world's population.
Things than destroy soil
Ploughing
Chemicals
Fertilisers
Monoculture
Continuous grazing
Indiscriminate burning - grass and crop residue
Things that help build soils
No-till
Cover crops
Diversity
Organic matter
Stimulation of soil micro-biology
Reintroducing animals into crop rotations
Regenerative grazing
What good soils do?
Hold carbon
Infiltrate water
Hold water - Its not how much water you get its how much you hold onto
Support microbiology
Need no synthetic inputs
Produce nutrient dense plants
"We need to have programmes that absorb the risk for family farms when they want to transition to regenerative agriculture." - John Ikerd, professor emeritus of Agricultural Economics at the University of Missouri
