It’s not often that a scientist will transition from the narrow-focused science of genetically modified crops to the natural systems approach of regenerative agriculture. But that’s what happened to Laura Kavanaugh, who worked as a scientist for biotech company Syngenta for 12 years helping to develop GMO crops. Today, she is the new chief science officer for Advancing Eco Agriculture (AEA), which works with farmers to help them transition to regenerative agriculture.
While working at Syngenta, Kavanaugh began to see the problems with the GMO approach.
“We create something as a GMO to try to overcome something in nature, but nature never sleeps,” says Kavanaugh, who has a PhD in genetics and genomics from Duke University. “There are billions of microbes, billions of everything that are eventually going to eventually crack that (GMO) code.”
She realized that the GMO approach wasn’t a good long-term solution because it produces a short-term impact.
Faced with the combined climate, food security and biodiversity crises, there is a growing interest in agroecology. Until today, however, we could not easily track the volume and quality of these funds globally and were left with the question: how much money is actually invested in agroecology?
At a crucial junction for international discussions around how to make our food systems truly sustainable, during the Committee on World Food Security (October) and ahead of the UN Climate Change Conference COP28 in Dubai (December), a new tool has just been launched today. The tool had previously been presented at the Agroecology Donors Convening in Rome on 21st October, gathering governments, donors and investors.
The new Agroecology finance assessment tool, aiming at improving the tracking and assessment of funding streams for agroecology, is founded on an innovative methodological framework.
https://regenerationinternational.org/wp-content/uploads/5M7A8558-2-scaled.jpg17072560Agroecology Coalitionhttps://regenerationinternational.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/RI-Logo-New.pngAgroecology Coalition2023-11-12 12:18:162023-11-13 12:30:03Press Release: A New Tool to Track Agroecology Funding Streams
Pollinators play an essential role in our food system, with an estimated three quarters of crops depending on them. Yet, due in part to the impacts of intensive farming practices, their numbers are in decline. Here, beekeeper and Chair of the Bee Improvement and Bee Breeders Association, Jo Widdicombe, looks at the issue of genetic diversity and why it is critical to safeguarding the future of one of our key crop pollinators – the honey bee.
In the last 50 years, we have seen a decline in many insect populations including some bumble bee and solitary bee species. In 1992, the varroa mite was found to have reached Britain and the number of honey bee colonies and beekeepers declined rapidly. After a campaign by British Beekeepers Association (BBKA), and others, highlighting the plight of the honey bee, the number of beekeepers and colonies started to rise again.
https://regenerationinternational.org/wp-content/uploads/5M7A1544-scaled.jpg17072560Jo Widdicombehttps://regenerationinternational.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/RI-Logo-New.pngJo Widdicombe2023-11-09 10:04:252023-11-10 10:25:59Safeguarding the Genetic Diversity of the Honey Bee
A neighbor once asked me, “When are you going to spray out all your weeds?”
I replied, “Never, because we do not have any weeds. They are all cover crops that give us multiple benefits, such as increasing soil fertility, better water infiltration, and pest and disease control.”
Of course, he did not understand a word I said.
NATURE FIGHTS AGAINST BARE GROUND
Bare ground is the best way to encourage weeds, as most weeds are pioneer species. They rapidly germinate to cover disturbed and bare ground. Nature always regenerates disturbed soil by rapidly covering it with plants. Weeds are nature’s way of healing disturbed soil. Living plants feed the soil microbiome with the molecules of life so they can regenerate healthy soil.
This is the cover crop on our farm after the summer rainy season. The mixture of grasses and legumes are around 10 feet (3 meters) high, producing tons of rich organic matter, nitrogen, and other nutrients— the molecules of life—to feed the soil microbiome and our cash crops. Our neighbors regard these as out-of-control weeds and wonder why we don’t spray to stop them from growing so we can have “nice bare ground.”
Our current weed management strategies are designed to fight this powerful force of nature, and they are the reason most farmers are constantly battling weeds.
Instead, we must learn to harness this powerful force of regeneration by turning weeds into cover crops that give us multiple benefits.
Covering ground is the best way to prevent weeds, and the most logical way to do this is with ground cover species that benefit our cash crop.
The Concepts of Mutualism and Synergy
We need to throw away simplistic, reductionist approaches to agriculture. The natural world is complex and dynamic.
The simplistic dogma that all plants other than the cash crop are weeds that compete with the crop and lower yields is not correct. This dogma originated more than 10,000 years ago in the neolithic age when farming first started. Science and technology have progressed considerably since then, yet, remarkably, mainstream industrial agriculture is still stuck in neolithic mythologies when it comes to weed management.
The current ecological and biological sciences show a very different picture. In many cases, plants are mutualistic and synergistic. Mutualism is where two species assist each other and both benefit. Synergy is when this benefit is greater than the sum of the whole. Instead of 1+1 = 2—the usual result of addition—in synergy, 1+1 = 3 or 4 or much more. The benefits of the species working together are significantly greater than simple reductionist monocultures. Examples of this will be given later in this chapter.
The current dogma on weed management has led to some of the most destructive practices in agriculture, resulting in massive soil loss, the decline in beneficial soil biology, and the residues of toxic chemicals in our food, bodies, water, air, and environment.
Standard agronomy says that all plants that are not cash crops are weeds because they are competing for nutrients and water and therefore lead to lower yields. But instead of taking the reductionist approach of “nuking” all weeds with either tillage or herbicides, we can take a holistic, ecological approach to managing them. We can turn them into beneficial cover crops that will improve our cash crops!
Here, the term “regenerative” refers to restoring land, ecosystems, and communities to optimal health, with a focus on soil health, biodiversity, ecosystem functions, human well-being, and the climate. Rooted in Indigenous and peasant knowledge from all over the world and supported by modern science, regenerative agriculture practices involve cultivating an understanding among producers and land stewards, emphasizing soil care and interconnections.
By adopting practices like cover cropping, crop rotation, intercropping, reduced tillage, integrating livestock, and increasing biodiversity, farmers are rebuilding soil fertility, carbon sequestration, and water retention while making their farms more resilient. The benefits extend beyond individual farms, potentially revolutionizing food production, and fostering collaboration between farmers, scientists, and policymakers to promote innovation.
It’s a movement that unites ecosystems, producers, chefs, scientists, and conscious consumers alike. Each blog post in this series peels back the layers of regenerative agriculture, revealing the ten guiding principles of regenerative agriculture that drive Regeneration Canada’s mission.
IZMIR, TURKEY — While efforts have focused on reducing waste, brands and designers are increasingly endorsing projects in regenerative agriculture to help reduce the emissions produced in the manufacture of classic textiles, such as cotton and wool.
In between rows of sprouting cotton crops, the dried-out stems of wheat and sugar beet carpet a stretch of farmland near Turkey’s Aegean coast, helping to lock in soil nutrients and moisture — even in the scorching heat.
In nearby fields, where cotton is being grown without the protective blanket, the plants wilt and wither under the sun. “Healthier soil means healthier cotton,” said Basak Erdem, the farm manager of cotton fields owned and run by cotton
manufacturer SOKTAS, which is based in the Soke municipality of Aydin province.
Four years since SOKTAS first converted one hectare (2.47 acres) of land for regenerative farming — using nature-based methods to restore the land and improve its carbon storage capacity — the soil absorbs more than 18 tonnes of carbon per hectare a year.
https://regenerationinternational.org/wp-content/uploads/fashhh-scaled-e1698689536258.jpeg11962560VOA Africahttps://regenerationinternational.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/RI-Logo-New.pngVOA Africa2023-10-31 10:00:122023-10-30 14:12:29The Fashion Industry Goes Green with Sustainable Agriculture
The food agriculture sector faces mounting pressure to reduce its contributions to climate change. While agriculture accounts for around 34% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, mainly from farming, deforestation and transportation activities in supply chains, the F&B sector recognizes the imperative to act on climate change, sparking interest in regenerative agriculture’s potential to restore ecosystems and sequester carbon.
Concurrently, 60% of consumers globally now rate sustainability as an essential purchase factor, driving demand for sustainably sourced products ever higher, according to FoodChain ID, a company that has been providing integrated food safety, quality and sustainability services to the global agrifoods industry since 1996.
Food Ingredients First speaks to FoodChain ID ahead of the company’s webinar on regenerative agriculture, which will be broadcast on November 8, 2023.
Dr. Ruud Overbeek, senior vice president of corporate development and strategic relationships at FoodChain ID, says agriculture is under pressure to demonstrate and improve its sustainable credentials.
In November 2019, I found myself on the other side of the planet, at Yandoit Farm, in the middle of the Australian countryside. I was part of a cohort of around twenty eclectics who had come to learn the concepts and applications of permaculture (and the joys of spring camping) over a two-week period. From these fourteen intense days of training, I came away with a head full of inspiration, ideas and projects to transpose onto the plot of land awaiting my arrival in Quebec a few months later. In spite of my enthusiasm, there was still an uneasy feeling in the back of my mind: how could I, as a proud descendant of five generations of farmers, combine permaculture and its principles with modern dairy and livestock farming?
Life has more than one twist and turn, and now, almost exactly four years later, I find myself in New York State attending a course in regenerative dairy production offered by Soil Health Academy.
“As I approached 40 years of age my view of how I should treat my land, my herd, and my community radically evolved… in ways that I would never have expected. My perception of what is good land stewardship. and what is good animal welfare, and what is good community service turned upside down. Good land management came to mean giving up utilizing harmful industrial reductionist science tools like pesticides and chemical fertilizers. Good animal welfare came to mean moving from merely not treating animals with cruelty to allowing them to express their instinctive behavior.
Good community development came to mean evolving my hometown [Bluffton, Georgia] from a literal ghost town into a delightful little village. I realized that what I had done was good, and important, and highly replicable. I understood that if I could tell my story to other farmers and ranchers, they too could find the courage to step outside the horribly damaging commodity agricultural production system.I wanted to share my 30-plus-year journey with others who might decide to make the same choice.”
When I arrived in Mexico City nine years ago to research the effort by citizen groups to stop multinational seed companies from planting genetically modified corn in Mexico, the groups had just won an injunction to suspend planting permits. Monsanto and the other companies, supported by the Mexican government at the time, appealed and the farmer, consumer and environmental groups were awaiting a judicial ruling.
I asked their lead lawyer, Rene Sánchez Galindo, how he thought they could hope to overcome the massive economic and legal power of the companies and government. He said with a smile, “The judge surely eats tacos. Everyone here eats tacos. They know maize is different.”
He was right. The next day the judge upheld the precautionary injunction. And he is still right: Ten years after the Demanda Colectiva, a collective of 53 people from 22 organizations, filed their class-action suit to stop GM corn, the precautionary injunction remains in effect despite some 130 company appeals.
https://regenerationinternational.org/wp-content/uploads/cornnnnn-1-scaled-e1697736503461.jpeg13122560Timothy A. Wisehttps://regenerationinternational.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/RI-Logo-New.pngTimothy A. Wise2023-10-19 13:28:402023-10-19 13:28:40Mexico’s Corn Defenders Honored with Environmental Prize
