However, I am an active person and I’ve always felt the need to do something and live in harmony within the world around me, rather than observing it from the outside. This has led me and my partner to embark on a long journey towards becoming regenerative farmers. Growing and sharing food, if we strive to see things holistically, means nothing less and nothing more than protecting ecosystems — in particular, the ones we are part of and that involve the cyclical conversion of our energy and time into food.
This puts me in the condition of looking at food production systems, and in particular regenerative vegetable growing, without as much prejudice or confirmation bias as someone who has been a farmer for generations might have developed. On the other hand, I am used to thinking analytically about complex (living and non-living) systems, where the interplay of diverse components leads to unpredictable dynamics. In this article, I will take advantage of this viewpoint to explore a big issue in very simple, non-technical, terms.
Regenerative farming is vital to ensure food security
After years of studying and observing farming practices and reflecting on them, one of the most interesting (and in my view yet completely unresolved and rarely addressed) issues in organic food production is where fertility comes from. I will refer to this as the fertility problem, which put into general terms concerns the balance of inputs and outputs required for agriculture to be an ecologically sound practice.
Food production as an ecosystemic function
In a food system, we need fertility to grow vegetables. This fertility can be easily imported from highly degenerative practices, such as the mining and synthetic production of chemical fertilisers. Moreover, the way it is commonly introduced into soils and plants is highly destructive: tilling, chemical spraying, compaction due to machinery use, fossil fuel burning are all responsible for the obliteration of wild landscapes that were home to thriving ecosystems.
It is true that we have found solutions to some of these issues, but in my understanding, we have done so only in isolated and hardly holistic ways. Even when the solution has been as holistic as possible, there still are a lot of open questions. These can perhaps be summarised in the following: how and on which scale is it possible to treat food production as an ecosystemic function, where the inputs and outputs are cycled within the ecosystem itself, without gradually leading to its degeneration and collapse?
Classically the solutions to this problem come from a well established (although for some still revolutionary and unrealistic) concept: permaculture. In the words of one of its discoverers:
Permaculture has worked as an umbrella for many regenerative design and production practices; holistic grazing management, no-till market gardening, agroforestry are only some of these. In permaculture, food is produced prioritising full harmony with nature, thus soils are not disturbed (no-till practices), insect populations are never put to risk (no-chemical policies, way stricter than conventional organic farming), and others. The goal of this design process is to manage a farm as a functioning ecosystem. In this context, “regenerative” means that the ecosystem is not only maintained in its full living glory, but also that any damage caused by human or other impacts is reverted.
This sounds ideal, and yet I want to focus on how, in practice, we rarely see this working. I won’t go into a comprehensive and long-winded discussion, because there are a lot of aspects to this, as you may imagine. I will concentrate on a very simple idea.
Plants: food needs food
Plants are the cornerstone of the earth’s ecosystems. Without photosynthetic organisms, nobody would be able to convert the most abundant energy form available to the planet (sun radiation) into anything conducive to more complex life.
However, plants need mineral nutrients in order to produce chlorophyll and organic tissues that allow them to fulfil their ecosystemic functions, one of which is to feed animals, including us. Normally, in nature, plants cycle water, gases and soil elements (carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, etc.) from and into other parts of the living ecosystem.
For instance, they fix carbon from the atmosphere into solid soil compounds; they also trade photosynthetic surpluses (sugars) with the soil food web (bacteria, fungi and other microbes that live in their root zone) in exchange for increased phosphorous, potassium and nitrogen in soluble form. As they die and decay, they feed that same soil food web and eventually become feed for new plants. Sometimes they are eaten by animals directly, which return fertility back to the soil through their nutrient-rich excrements.
At this point, it might be useful to point out that not all nutrients are the same. Carbon, oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen, for instance, are not mineral nutrients; they are present in the atmosphere (as CO2 and H2O) and plants (with the help of soil life) can easily fix them and use them. We refer to these nutrients as mobile. On the other hand, fundamental plant nutrients, such as magnesium and phosphorous are much less mobile. Iron, calcium, copper, zinc, boron are examples of immobile nutrients that are only available in mineral form and they can be hard to recycle once they become inaccessible by plants.
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