Main Street Project Chief Strategy Officer Releases New Book: In the Shadow of Green Man

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Author: Christine Lekatz | Published on: December 12, 2016

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin’s new book offers an inside look into how his vision of regenerative agriculture was formed.

Main Street Project’s Chief Strategy Officer Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin’s new book, In the Shadow of Green Man, is now available for purchase at https://www.acresusa.com/store and on Amazon.com. The book, published by Acres USA, chronicles Haslett-Marroquin’s upbringing in revolution-torn Guatemala and how he built his vision to develop a regenerative farming model that uplifts individuals and communities. Throughout the book, he also shares the fable of the Green Man, a tiny and wise Guatemalan folk character whose stories teach the importance of respecting the natural world.

In the Shadow of Green Man tells the story of how after witnessing firsthand the human suffering caused by unjust and environmentally destructive farming practices, Haslett-Marroquin set on a path of helping people lift themselves up through poultry-centered regenerative agriculture. He later applied these indigenous practices to the innovative model that is now the heart of Main Street Project’s work.

“In The Shadow of Green Man is a story telling project … a book about my life,” explains Haslett-Marroquin. “I hope this book will serve as a platform to embark on a conversation about hope and power in a new way, one that emerges from each of us and empowers us to take action to do good even in the midst of so much evil happening around the world.”

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Our Modern Food System Is Not Set up for Good Health

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Author: Paul Ebeling | Published on: Nov

Cheap food is really more of a curse than a blessing.

Agriculture has undergone huge changes over the past 70+ years. Many of them were heralded as progress that would save people from hunger and despair.

But, today, we are faced with a new set of problems driven by the innovations and interventions that were meant to provide people with safety and prosperity.

Since WWII food production has been all about efficiency and lowering cost. Today, we see what this approach has brought on heightened disease statistics and a faltering ecosystem.

The success of the processed food industry has come at a tremendous price to the people who eat it. As their lives are now at stake due to diet-related diseases. Many people have also become incorrectly convinced that eating healthy is a complicated equation requiring lots of nutritional data.

They are wrong.

It is very much simpler than one might think. Eating healthy is really about eating REAL food, meaning food as close to its natural state as possible. Avoiding agricultural toxins like pesticides is also part of the answer. But sadly this is not the kind of food American farmers are currently focused on producing.

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Drought in Southern Africa Points to Urgent Need for Climate Change Plans

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It is expected that temperatures in southern Africa will rise by between 1.5°C and 3°C due to climate change by the year 2050. This is likely to cause heavy fluctuations of weather patterns and more frequent severe weather events like droughts and floods. Agriculture will be severely affected.

In turn, many economies in southern Africa which are dependent on agriculture will feel the impact. The effects of climate change are already being felt. The 2015 agricultural season in southern African was considered the driest in 35 years.

Five countries in the region – Swaziland, Lesotho, Malawi, Namibia and Zimbabwe – declared national drought disasters. Eight of South Africa’s nine provinces and the southern and central areas of Mozambique declared partial drought emergencies.

Massive crop failures were experienced across the region. This led to a deficit of 9.3-million tons in cereal crop harvests. On top of this 643 000 cattle were estimated to have died in the drought. Because of these agricultural failures, food insecure populations increased by 31%. This implied that more than 40 million people needed humanitarian assistance.

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UNH Research: Microbial Traits, Not Plants, Determine Abundance of Soil Organic Matter

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Author: Lori Wright | Published: December 5, 2016

Healthy soil is rich in organic matter, but scientists have yet to fully understand exactly how that organic matter is formed. Now a team of University of New Hampshire scientists have uncovered evidence that microbial pathways – not plants – are the chief originator of the organic matter found in stable soil carbon pools.

The new insight provides promise for designing agricultural systems that promote microbial communities to optimize soil organic matter formation.

The research was conducted by Cynthia Kallenbach, former UNH graduate student now at Colorado State University, her advisor, Stuart Grandy, associate professor of natural resources at UNH, and Serita Frey, professor of natural resources at UNH. Their results were published in the paper “Direct evidence for microbial-derived soil organic matter formation and its ecophysiological controls” in the journal Nature Communications, and comes from work supported by the NH Agricultural Experiment Station.

In the paper, UNH scientists suggest that soil organic matter accumulates from inputs of dead microbial cells and microbial byproducts formed when microbes eat plant roots and residues, rather than from plants themselves, as previously thought.

In the past, scientists thought the best way to build soil organic matter was to slow down or inhibit decomposition using plants that soil microbes find difficult to decompose. The idea was that the undecomposed plant parts would gradually become soil organic matter, especially if the soil microbial community was inactive.

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Africa: Climate Finance for Farmers Key to Avert One Billion Hungry

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Author: Fabíola Ortiz | Published on: November 21, 2016 

Marrakech — With climate change posing growing threats to smallholder farmers, experts working around the issues of agriculture and food security say it is more critical than ever to implement locally appropriate solutions to help them adapt to changing rainfall patterns.

Most countries consider agriculture a priority when it comes to their plans to limit the rise of global temperatures to less than 2 degrees C. In line with the Paris Climate Change Agreement, 95 percent of all countries included agriculture in their Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs).

“We need to find solutions that allow people to live better, increase their income, promote decent jobs and be resilient.” — Martial Bernoux of FAO

“The climate is changing. We don’t have rains that we used to have in the past. In the last decade, we had two consecutive years of intense drought and we lost all the production. The animals all died because they had no water,” Ahmed Khiat, 68, a small farmer in the Moroccan community of Souaka, told IPS.

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New Report Shows Continued, Dramatic Losses of American Grasslands

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Published: November 23, 2016

For years, grasslands across the country have been plowed up to make way for the production of commodity crops, such as wheat, alfalfa, corn, and soybeans. The loss of grasslands is devastating for local ecosystems, and also has long-term, negative effects for ranchers, the hunting industry, and for communities that depend on them for flood prevention and water filtration.

Last week, the World Wildlife Fund published its annual Plowprint report, which uses National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) data to track grassland conversion. The report’s primary finding is striking:

“Since 2009, 53 million acres of grassland—an area the size of Kansas—have been converted to cropland across the Great Plains alone. That represents almost 13% of the 419 million acres that remained intact in 2009…In 2015, 3.7 million [additional] acres were converted to cropland.”

The highest conversion rate over the last year was found in northern Texas, which is in the southernmost portion of the Great Plains. Grassland conversion rates were also high in parts of North Dakota, Montana, Minnesota, and Kansas.

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Regenerative Grazing Improves Soil Health and Plant Biodiversity

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Published on: November 28, 2016

Regenerative practices improve soil quality and pasture diversity, as the European LIFE Regen Farming project, due to end this year, has shown. The last few decades have seen the gradual abandoning of grazing practices in many livestock systems, as the problems of sustainability have become increasingly clear. Likewise, the growing environmental concern and the need to produce quality food in a sustainable, environmentally friendly way are shaping the agri-food sector as a key sector. The LIFE Regen Farming project, developed under these premises, seeks to determine the viability of regenerative practices as an alternative for the sustainability of livestock farms.

The regenerative management put into practice in the three areas in the study—on NEIKER land in Arkaute, INTIA land in Roncesvalles (Navarre), and in Orduña, on commercial farms with pastures used by beef cattle—was based on direct sowing using perennial and leguminous species, organic fertiliser from the farm itself and grazing schemes adapted to each farm.

These pasture management techniques produced 10 to 15 percent more grass. The production of more grass reduces the need to purchase fodder and highlights the technical and economic effectiveness of regenerative management. Furthermore, the sheep managed under regenerative grazing have the same milk yields and composition, so the flock’s production parameters were not altered.

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Characteristics of a Regenerative Global Diet

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Author: Corinne Hanson | Published: November 28, 2016

We need to create, prepare and consume food differently. In every part of the food value network, we need to create system value, not system decay. In an earlier post, we established that today’s food system is falling short. What, then, do we propose as an alternative? How can we heal our food system and what can and should a healthy food system look like?

We are a long way from this Regenerative Diet on a global scale. Yet we know that there are several guiding elements that would support our decision-making as we rehabilitate the way we produce and enjoy food. Here is a proposed set of characteristics

  • The eater—not the consumer—comes first: We propose our future diet should be “eater-centric”, which is different from “consumer-driven”. We need to shift the conversation from being consumer-driven (“They like sugar, so we sell them sugar…”) to being system-driven (“We know that if people eat this, their health will be sustained as will the ecosystems which made the food possible”).Corporations’ license to operate in the food and agricultural sectors will be based on their ability to nourish people well. The improvement of human health will be the primary goal of any company in the food value chain.
  • Eating food heals the system: The question, “If more people ate this, would the world around us be better off?” has to be asked, and the answer has to be, “Yes.” This still allows for regional, cultural and personal diversity and breaks out of the divisive “meat bad, plants good” dichotomy. It shifts the equation from “what we believe” to “what we can demonstrate is creating the conditions that support life”.We know that farming practices that reduce biodiversity or do other damage to natural systems are detrimental to the wider system. Therefore, they need to change. Successful actors in a regenerative system will proactively ask and answer the question, “How is this contributing to overall human and ecosystem health, without undermining it?”
  • The business model incentivizes healthy eating: A regenerative diet requires that the business model of any food value chain company goes beyond how it is “increasing productivity” (e.g. a biotechnology that requires pesticide use in order to be profitable) or “improving consumer access and choice” (e.g. a floating grocery store of processed foods on the Amazon) and calls on a company to determine how—or even if—it is enabling eaters to be healthy without undermining other aspects of any social or environmental systems.There is room for interpretation and absolute answers will always be elusive but we can make more informed, purpose-driven decisions than we currently do. A regenerative business model creates financial value by intentionally contributing to human health, and while not being financially rewarded in any way for undermining human health or the health of other life on Earth.

These are tall orders; however, several companies have already been delivering progress. Marks and Spencer’s Plan A has long been lauded for aggressive ambitions across key products and ingredients in its food. They’re working directly to prevent food waste in the field, at manufacturing, and on shelves.

They blend business experience, Life Cycle Analysis, stakeholder input and benchmarking to inform approach and use science to clarify complicated tradeoffs, e.g. packaging vs. length of product life. There is still a significant shift required to induce healthy eating and a truly sustainable system contained within such a plan, but it’s pointed in the right direction.

Panera has increased their commitments to animal welfare and to removing artificial ingredients and antibiotics from all products, now sourcing 100 per cent vegetarian-fed and antibiotic-free chicken, with a brand focus on “food you can feel good about” and “good eating”.

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Diverse Groups Call for a Bold, New Vermont Agriculture Issue- Open Letter to Governor-Elect Scott

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Author: Regeneration Vermont | Published: December 6, 2016

Today a group of more than a dozen Vermont farm, environmental and business leaders issued an open letter to Governor-Elect Phil Scott calling attention to the serious issues facing the state’s conventional dairy industry and proposing a solution to begin a necessary statewide transition toward regenerative and organic dairy production.

“We are deeply concerned about the dire economic conditions that continue to face Vermont’s conventional dairy producers and their families and the impact this is having on the economy, the working landscape, farmers and farm workers, the environment, and our rural communities,” the letter begins. “These are hardworking families and your leadership is needed to address what we believe requires a bold, new economic model that will result in a viable dairy sector in Vermont that lives up to our ideals and solves many of our farm-related issues.”

The letter was co-authored by former Vermont Secretary of Agriculture Roger Allbee and the team from Regeneration Vermont, a new nonprofit organized to promote agricultural solutions to the state’s environmental, climate and economic problems. The list of co-signers includes the Conservation Law Foundation, Lake Champlain International, Vermonters for a Clean Environment, VPIRG, NOFA-VT, Sierra Club (VT Chapter) and business leaders like The Alchemist Brewery, Butterworks Farm, and Chelsea Green Publishing.

The letter points out that, currently and for the foreseeable future, “Vermont’s conventional, non-organic dairy producers are getting paid less than it costs them to produce their milk — an economic travesty that is not only forcing farms out of business but is also giving rise to a host of ecological, worker justice, and animal welfare issues.”

The impacts from relying on this economically crippling, commodity-based model go far beyond just bankrupting farmers, but also include causing nearly half of Vermont’s water quality woes, promoting the use of GMO-derived feed, toxic pesticides and climate-threatening nitrogen-base fertilizers, giving rise to social and worker justice issues relating to farm and farm workers, and causing cow burnout and ill health from the dramatic push for more and more production of cheap milk.

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From Designing Biomedical Devices to Harvesting Spinach: Interview with Yosef Camire

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Author: Rachel Kastner | Published: November 7, 2016 

Yosef Camire used to be a biomedical engineer. Today he is pulling beets, harvesting spinach and making compost on his family’s regenerative vegetable farm in Peyton, Colorado, USA. In 2014, Camire and his family founded Ahava Farm because they wanted to have an impact on climate change, land restoration and food security. The farm’s mission is “to produce the purest food possible while creating a positive environmental impact by utilizing biodynamic and sustainable farming practices that benefit our earth, our air and our soil.”  The Camire family produces an impressive 40,000 lbs of produce per year on one acre,  using regenerative and biodynamic farming methods.

RI recently interviewed Yosef to learn more about his experience as a regenerative farmer, the challenges small-scale farmers face and how we need more regenerative farmers. Ahava Farms is one of the newest members of the Regeneration International Network.

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Interview with Yosef Camire, November 11, 2016

Regeneration International (RI): Tell us why you decided become a regenerative farmer.

Yosef Camire (YC): The only way that I will ever farm is if I can make a difference. This includes making a difference in the lives of people as well as the quality of the environment. Conventional agriculture, or even “sustainable” agriculture just doesn’t make the impact that I am so passionate about making. I don’t want to simply give my children the same land I have now. I want them to have something that is much better,  land that has  been “regenerated” to something really special.

RI: Can you introduce us to your farm?

YC: We grow 75-plus varieties of heirloom-only produce. This includes everything from carrots to tomatoes, mustard, lettuces, cucumbers, peppers and everything in between. We also have 225 chickens and 30 ducks that we raise for eggs, and a few top-bar beehives that we have for pollination and honey. Finally we have 14 alpacas that we raise specifically for biodiversity and for manure. We also sell their wool.

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RI: What makes your farm unique on your area in Colorado?

YC: Sincerely, I am not aware of any farm in Colorado, at least not in our area, that produces as much as we do, and  that is doing anything close to what we are doing. I say this regarding everything from our completely 100-percent solar-powered operation and environmentally regenerative practices, to the amount of varieties we grow, to our pay-what-you-can philosophy and more.

RI: Since you didn’t come from an agricultural background, where did you learn the regenerative techniques that you use on your farm?

YC: A lot of reading. I am about 95-percent self-taught through all the books I have read (probably somewhere in the 40-plus range) and the conferences I have attended, like the Quivira Conference in New Mexico. I’ve also learned a lot along the way by making mistakes.  This is the hardest way to learn, but it’s the truest learning method  if you want  to make lasting change.  Occasionally a friend may give me pointers or advice here or there, but I’ve also learned a lot by studying my surroundings and engineering my own creative approaches to increasing production and restoring the land, through trial and error.

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RI: What is regenerative vegetable farming and how is it different from organic vegetable farming?

YC: The two are like night and day. On the one hand, organic farming is much better than conventional farming because it takes into consideration the health of the person eating the product by excluding the use of  GMO seeds and harsh chemicals. The farming practices are superior to conventional agriculture,  because in order to succeed, organic farmers generally rotate crops and take better care of the soil. However, regenerative agriculture takes organic and sustainable agriculture much further. Not only do regenerative farmers take into account all of above, but they also take into account things like the environment, climate change, the watershed and the soil to a much greater degree than organic farmers do.. Our goal is not to be carbon-neutral, it is to be carbon-negative. Our goal is not to be water-neutral, but to be water-negative. Our goal is not to simply care for the soil by not destroying it, but to build it up and restore it to be the best soil possible.

RI: What specific challenges do regenerative vegetable farmers faced on the production front?

YC: I would not consider there to be challenges as much as I would say that there are disadvantages compared to conventional farming. Conventional growers use all the technology at their disposal, while regenerative farmers naturally try to do as much labor by hand. This is a disadvantage when it comes to the time and cost of the produce. I wouldn’t consider this to be a challenge, though I think farming at all is challenge enough. Regenerative agriculture might simply be more challenging, but not in and of itself, only in comparison to conventional farming.

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RI: What are the largest challenges small-scale regenerative farmers face?

YC: Finances and support. This goes for all small-scale growers, including conventional, regenerative, organic and others. There simply are not enough resources, training and infrastructure to support the small-scale growers like myself. Can we overcome this? Sure, I have and many others have as well. However, for every  small-scale farmer that succeeds, there are 10, 20 or more that fail. Propping up the industry and the local food movement, creating financial resources for small-scale growers and offering educational opportunities through government and non-government organizations alike could have a major impact. Couple this  with leveling the playing field by removing government subsidies, and limiting the scope of our agricultural trade agreements that import cheap food,  and small-scale growers of all types would be more successful.

RI: What does the small-scale regenerative farmer movement need in order to expand on a global scale?

YC: Everything I mentioned in the previous question. The small-scale regenerative farmer is critical to the future of our world. Our farm grows approximately 40,000 lbs of food on one  acre of land per year. This is an incredible amount of food that would require conventional agriculture many more acres due to their use of tractors. If we are to feed the growing population,  we are going to need to learn how to replicate thousands of small, bio-intensive farms, instead of  simply spreading out our current conventional systems.

RI: How has your family’s life experience changed since you’ve become full-time farmers?

YC: I would need a book to answer this. In short, we absolutely love what we do, we love making a difference in people’s lives, and we are enriched by knowing we are making an impact on our environment. Our children are raised with real-world experiences, understanding the fragility of our planet, the cycle of life. And they’re gaining an unparalleled work ethic. We wouldn’t change it for the world!

 

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Here’s how you can reach Yosef:

Yosef Camire
Founder and Farmer of Ahavah Farm
Peyton, Colorado, USA
www.ahavahfarm.com
contact@ahavahfarm.com

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Rachel Kastner works with Regeneration International, a project of the Organic Consumers Association.