Farmers trying the regenerative approach see it as a way to improve soil health, increase plant and insect diversity, protect water and make land more resilient to climate fluctuations: A more sustainable way of farming, with a smaller environmental footprint.
We can sequester carbon and improve our nutrition through regenerative farming of land and sea.
Increased productivity is why more farmers — and especially younger farmers — are turning more and more to regenerative agriculture.
Former governor general Michael Jeffery says soil health and regenerative farming is essential for security and carbon emissions.
Parched soil in Harlingen, the Netherlands. Courtesy of Getty Royalty Free
Earlier this month the world’s leading climate scientists released the most urgent warning on climate change to date. It describes the implications of our current warming trajectory, including dire food shortages, large-scale human migration and crises ranging from a mass die-off of coral reefs to increasingly extreme weather events.
The Earth is warming so rapidly that most experts agree we’ll need to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere in order to avoid the worst consequences of climate change. A new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine lays out a range of options for how to do that. But the authors say developing these negative-emissions technologies requires large-scale investment from the government — and the funding has to come immediately.
How can local economies value carbon farming practices in finished consumer goods? Fibershed represents a 160-member producer community, spanning from the Oregon border to San Luis Obispo and from the Pacific Ocean to the Sierra foothills, that is managing working landscapes strategically to sequester carbon. Burgess gave this talk, transcribed and edited below, as part of the Bioneers Carbon Farming Series.
Agronomist Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin wants to transform the food system from the ground up by introducing poultry-powered, planet-cooling, regenerative agriculture. Ashoka’s Simon Stumpf caught up with Haslett-Marroquin to hear more about his approach, what his Tree-Range™ system is all about, and what’s on the horizon for the smallholder farmers in his network.
Healthy soil is the great “fix” for the food system that we should all be chasing.
A new study from the University of Berkeley in California has found that improving soil quality could make a substantial contribution to slowing down global warming.