Qué es la agricultura regenerativa y cuáles son sus ventajas

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La agricultura regenerativa forma parte de la creciente atención por la producción de alimentos respetuosos con el medio ambiente, cada vez más apreciada por los consumidores.

La base de está idea es que el trabajo humano debe encajar de forma armoniosa y positiva en el equilibrio natural, sin explotar la naturaleza, trabajando para recuperar la fertilidad de la tierra.

Hoy hablamos de ¿Qué es la agricultura regenerativa y cuáles son sus ventajas?

Qué es la agricultura regenerativa.

Dentro de las filosofías relativas a la producción agroalimentaria, en los últimos años se ha consolidado la agricultura regenerativa, o agricultura orgánica-regenerativa, un método de reconversión que combina técnicas modernas y conocimientos ancestrales.

En la raíz de este enfoque está la idea de colaborar con la naturaleza -abandonando el deseo de dominarla- para regenerar el suelo, sin empobrecerlo ni contaminarlo, como en cambio ocurre cuando se aplica una agricultura intensiva muy agresiva, con el uso de fertilizantes, agroquímicos y grandes movimientos de tierras.

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Un enero negro para la agroindustria: OMG rechazados en tres continentes

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Es un enero negro para los lobbistas del agronegocio y sus grupos de interés. México, Perú y Tanzania cerraron las puertas a los OGM, mientras que el gobierno italiano fue presionado por una fuerte campaña de la sociedad civil, no sólo para confirmar la prohibición a las generaciones previas de OGM, sino también a las nuevas generaciones incluyendo las Nuevas Técnicas de Cultivo (NBTs). Estos avances pueden considerarse un éxito para todos los agricultores y movimientos de la sociedad civil que luchan por mantener sus semillas y su soberanía alimentaria a salvo de las multinacionales.  De lo contrario, al imponer los OGM, las empresas pondrían a los agricultores y los consumidores a su merced al obtener derechos de propiedad sobre las semillas.

Para frenar este esfuerzo, el 1 de enero de 2021 comenzó a regir un  Decreto Presidencial en México para iniciar la eliminación del «uso, adquisición, distribución, promoción e importación» de glifosato, con un período de transición hasta enero de 2025.

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Urban Areas Need “Freedom Lawns” To Revive Their Soil

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Few people put much thought into the soil beneath their feet, but Loren Byrne does. A professor at Roger Williams University, Byrne is an expert on urban soil ecology, and he worries that humans are changing the structural integrity of soils in urban environments and limiting the ability of plants and animals to live in and nourish the earth.

“Soil is easily overlooked and taken for granted because it’s everywhere,” he said. “We walk all over it and think of it as dirt that we can manipulate at our will. But the secret of soil is what’s happening with soil organisms and what’s happening with their interactions below ground that help regulate our earth’s ecosystems.”

Byrne contributed a chapter about urban soils to a report, State of Knowledge of Soil Biodiversity, issued last year by the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization. He discussed how the ecology of the soil changes as it is compacted during construction, paved over, chemically treated for lawns, and dug up and carried away.

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The Best Way to Restore Forests Is To Let The Trees Plant Themselves

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Ecosystems have been growing themselves for hundreds of millions of years, and forests that plant themselves are better and most diverse. That’s why a group of environmental advocates in the UK from a charity called Rewilding Britain say we should let nature do its thing instead of manually mass-planting trees. Natural dispersal of seeds boosts biodiversity, costs a lot less, and may even sequester more carbon.

Rebecca Wrigley, Rewilding Britain’s chief executive, said:

People have this mindset that woodland expansion means planting trees, and that’s across the conservation sector as well. Nature is pretty good at doing this itself. Natural regeneration brings multiple potential benefits – you get the right tree in the right place, you don’t get the potential carbon emissions you get with planting on peaty soils, and you boost the complexity of the ecosystem, which builds resilience. Natural regeneration also helps species to shift and adapt to climate change. There’s growing evidence that it can sequester more carbon, although there isn’t a broad research base yet because natural regeneration is not on people’s radars.

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Livestock’s Role in a Changing Climate

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Edward Bork’s research surrounding how livestock grazing affects soil carbon has made him a believer in the beneficial role cattle can potentially play in a changing climate.

“Because their grazing contributes to the concentration of carbon in the soil – a helpful process – livestock can be a tool to help reduce atmospheric carbon and thus mitigate climate change,” says Bork, director of the Rangeland Research Institute, University of Alberta.

Cattle critics say otherwise, calling for decreases in numbers or even elimination of ruminants as a means of reducing the greenhouse gases contributing to climate change. They point to the methane cattle emit as a key polluter of the atmosphere. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas that ruminants put out as part of their digestive process.

Bork calls for a balanced view, one that weighs the drawbacks against the benefits.

“Pointing the finger at methane emissions of livestock is a convenient excuse people use,” he says. “It’s a red herring to claim that cattle are destroying the planet and ignores the fact that these grasslands evolved with grazing – and even depend on it to exist.

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Soil Conservation Plants Hope

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The soil beneath our feet might save the planet.

“If we get the soil right we can fix a lot of our issues,” Ray Archuleta says. “Healthy soils lead to a healthy plant, a healthy animal, a healthy human, healthy water, and ultimately a healthy climate and planet.”

Archuleta, a Certified Professional Soil Scientist with the Soil Science Society of America, has a calling – soil conservation. He’s traveled the United States as well as abroad to plant the seeds of thought about the negative effects of a problem that he sees everywhere he goes. That problem is soil erosion.

In the film “Kiss the Ground,” released in 2020, the problem of rapid soil erosion is said to have begun long ago when mankind invented the plow. As the plow became popular vast areas around cities were plowed to grow grain for food. As the soils eroded so did those early empires until they eventually vanished into the dust. The film describes the 1930s Dust Bowl era as the largest manmade disaster in history. By the end of 1934, millions of cropland acres were permanently damaged.

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Los oscuros orígenes del virus

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Con más de 92 millones de personas contagiadas y 2 millones de muertes por Covid en el mundo, aún no se sabe a ciencia cierta el origen del virus que está causando esta debacle global.

Hay consenso científico en que el SARS-CoV2 es derivado de un virus de murciélago, pero a más de un año de haberlo identificado, no hay una investigación internacional independiente de intereses creados, que pueda darnos certeza sobre el verdadero origen de este virus.

El 4 de enero de 2021, el New York Magazine publicó los resultados de una amplia investigación de Nicholson Baker sobre las actividades de gobiernos y científicos de Estados Unidos y China, que aporta datos fundamentales para conocer las hipótesis al respecto (The lab-leak hypothesis, https://tinyurl.com/yxkj2j35).

Así resume sus conclusiones: “He llegado a creer que lo que pasó fue bastante simple. Fue un accidente. Un virus pasó un tiempo en un laboratorio, y finalmente salió.

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From the Ground up — the Soil Can Make All the Difference in Healthy, Thriving Plants

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Gardeners can get pretty excited when choosing flowers or vegetables for their gardens, but to have success with growing, you need a strong foundation — and that is the soil.

Healthy soil leads to healthy and happy plants. It all starts from the ground up.

Soils vary tremendously from state to state and even from neighborhood to neighborhood. Some places have deep, rich native soils, while others have poorly drained clay soils, and others are a haven of rocks. Some soils are very acidic while others can be very alkaline.

Knowing what your yard contains to begin with is the starting point in knowing how to improve it. You should start with a soil test.

To take a soil sample, try to get a “core” of soil, a good trowel-full, roughly 6 inches deep from several areas in the garden. Mix the cores together and take one pint to your county office of the University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture Cooperative Extension Service (uaex.edu). Within a few weeks, you will get a computer analysis back, giving you a lot of information about your soil.

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Soil Degradation Costs U.S. Corn Farmers a Half-billion Dollars Every Year

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One-third of the fertilizer applied to grow corn in the U.S. each year simply compensates for the ongoing loss of soil fertility, leading to more than a half-billion dollars in extra costs to U.S. farmers every year, finds new research from the University of Colorado Boulder published last month in Earth’s Future.

Long-term soil fertility is on the decline in agricultural lands around the world due to salinization, acidification, erosion and the loss of important nutrients in the soil such as nitrogen and phosphorus. Corn farmers in the U.S. offset these losses with nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizers also intended to boost yields, but scientists have never calculated how much of this fertilizer goes into just regaining baseline soil fertility–or how much that costs.

“We know there’s land degradation going on even in U.S. modern agriculture, but it’s really difficult to pin down how much and what impact it has,” said Jason Neff, corresponding author on the paper and director of the Sustainability Innovation Lab at Colorado (SILC).

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Net Zero Emissions Would Stabilize Climate Quickly Says UK Scientist

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Rising seas, ocean acidification, melting ice caps, raging forest fires, melting tundra — everywhere you look, the news about climate change and the effects of a warming planet is bad. The world’s nations are continuing to spew billions of tons of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere despite all their happy talk about meeting the “spirit” of the accords they signed in Paris in 2015. Is there no respite from the dire news, no relief from the constant drumbeat of bad news and apocalyptic projections?

The conventional wisdom among climate scientists has long been that if we stopped all carbon emissions today, the climate would continue to warm for decades or even centuries. Think of climate change as a really big oil tanker. Even after the engines are shut down, its forward progress continues for miles and miles. That has led many people to throw up their hands in despair and choosing to continue doing what they have always done because if we are doomed, at least let’s have some fun while we still can. It’s like the band playing Nearer My God To Thee on the fantail of the Titanic as it slipped beneath the waves but if the message is that there is no hope, why not?

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