Tag Archive for: Landscape Restoration

Fire Ecology’s Lessons for a More Resilient Future

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In the wake of California wildfire’s mass destruction, ecologists see radical hope in regeneration.

Author: Leilani Clark | Published: January 4, 2018

A few times a year, Edward Willie tends to the last remaining dogbane patch in Sonoma County. Situated on a three-acre preserve bordering Highway 101 in northern Santa Rosa, the patch is estimated to be centuries old and once spanned a five-mile radius. Neighboring tribes—mainly Pomo and Wapo—cultivated the fibrous, stalky native plants to make cordage for hunting and fishing nets and other tools.

In October, the Tubbs Fire burned hot and fast through the preserve on its way to hopping the six-lane highway, leaving behind a scorched landscape of Himalayan blackberry roots and the black skeletons of wild plum trees and coyote bush. Yet, for the most part, the dogbane survived. In some formerly vegetation-choked areas of the preserve, the spindly plants are all that remain.

“The dogbane needs fire—that’s what makes it grow tall and strong,” says Willie, a native Pomo, Walaeki, and Wintu teacher and a core organizer of the Buckeye Gathering, an annual nature-based, paleo-technology meeting in Northern California. Researchers have found that dogbane sproutsquickly after fire and can become more abundant. Burning actually stimulates new, straight growth.

Less than a mile away from the preserve, block after block of ruined homes, businesses, and cars stand as a reminder of the conflagration that wreaked havoc across three Northern California counties. Despite the scope of the tragedy, Willie sees regeneration and even radical hope in the region’s fire ecology.

“It’s a happy [dogbane] patch now,” he says, as he demonstrates how to peel the taut fibers from the plant’s stalk. “It’s filled with life. New sprouts are already coming up. It’s a California plant, a fire plant. It was made to survive this.”

There is no silver lining to a fire like those that struck Sonoma and Napa counties in October, or the still-burning Thomas Fire in Southern California, which has burned 281,900 acres to become the largest California wildfire in modern recorded history. But for people like Willie and Erik Ohlsen, an ecological designer and director of the Permaculture Skills Center in Sebastopol, the North Bay fires are a wake-up call, a chance to proactively address the way the plants and animals of Northern California, and most of the Golden State, have co-evolved with fire—and to rebuild these communities with fire in mind.

Others go further, saying that poor planning and land management practices turned a natural feature of chaparral landscapes into a catastrophic force, leaving in its wake $3 billion in estimated damages. The city of Santa Rosa alone has already blown through $5 million from their general fund to fight the fires and the massive recovery effort has just begun.

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Video: 50 Years Ago, This Was a Wasteland. He Changed Everything | Short Film Showcase

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Published: April 24, 2018

Almost 50 years ago, fried chicken tycoon David Bamberger used his fortune to purchase 5,500 acres of overgrazed land in the Texas Hill Country. Planting grasses to soak in rains and fill hillside aquifers, Bamberger devoted the rest of his life to restoring the degraded landscape. Today, the land has been restored to its original habitat and boasts enormous biodiversity. Bamberger’s model of land stewardship is now being replicated across the region and he is considered to be a visionary in land management and water conservation.

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Video: 50 Years Ago, This Was a Wasteland. He Changed Everything | Short Film Showcase

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Published: April 24, 2018

Almost 50 years ago, fried chicken tycoon David Bamberger used his fortune to purchase 5,500 acres of overgrazed land in the Texas Hill Country. Planting grasses to soak in rains and fill hillside aquifers, Bamberger devoted the rest of his life to restoring the degraded landscape. Today, the land has been restored to its original habitat and boasts enormous biodiversity. Bamberger’s model of land stewardship is now being replicated across the region and he is considered to be a visionary in land management and water conservation.

WATCH MORE VIDEOS FROM NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC HERE

ND Farmer Stresses Importance of Regenerative Agriculture

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Author: Elizabeth Varin | Published: December 20, 2017

Gabe Brown hasn’t tilled his land near Bismarck, N.D., since 1994.

He hasn’t used synthetic fertilizer since 2007.

Yet he said he’s still seeing yields measuring above Burleigh County averages and he’s still turning a profit profit.

“We’re our worst enemy, not allowing nature to function,” he said last week at the South Dakota Grassland Coalition 2017 Winter Road Show’s stop at the Dakota Event Center.

“…We cannot have ecological integrity without human integrity,” he said. “All of us need to look in the mirror and realize that our management decisions that we make every day on our operation affect thousands of people, really hundreds of thousands of people. Because they’re affecting the mineral cycle, the water cycle, the nutrient cycle.”

Brown argued in favor of looking beyond cash crops and into the ecosystem of the land farmers are using.

“It’s not that I’ve got more nutrients,” he said, comparing his land to tilled land, land with minimal crop diversity and land on which lots of synthetic fertilizer is used. “They have that much in their soils also. It’s just that it’s not available. Because they don’t have the biology and the healthy ecosystem to make those nutrients available.”

Brown spoke about regenerative agriculture, a land management approach that aims to improve soil health, crop resilience and nutrient density.

“You’ve got to think outside the box to make profit in commodity markets,” he said.

The crowd included a mix of farmers and conservationists, said Valeree DeVine, Natural Resources Conservation Service district conservationist.

“What we like to see is that they come and hear a message from another farmer and rancher,” she said. “As an agency we can talk it but we can’t show them what we’ve done on our own operation. So we feel that it means more from another farmer and rancher.”

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Sustainable Agriculture Is Not Enough; We Need Regenerative Agriculture

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Author: Robert Riley | Published: December 8, 2017

Iowa is a thermonuclear-powered photosynthetic manufacturing machine for calories and BTUs.

This is how I have thought of the agricultural industry in Iowa for many years, but it really started millions of years ago. Not just a few, but 350 million years ago. This is when the vegetation produced by this photosynthetic machine started turning into coal. We can refer to this as “old sun” since the BTUs of this “sunlight-produced jungle/prairie” were buried underground and converted to coal through time, temperature and pressure. Estimates by JH Lees in 1927 indicated we had 30 billion tons of coal in Iowa, enough to last us for 3,000 years.

Herein lies our problems. It took us 350 million years to convert sunlight to coal, and we could use it up in 3,000 years. 

Let’s look at soil.

For the last 12,000 years, since the last of the Wisconsin glaciation receded, leaving a pretty flat, slightly rolling landscape, Iowa has enjoyed a spring, summer, fall and winter. These four distinct seasons helped to produce vast prairies of biomass that grew, flourished and died every year. This natural cycle of nature resulted in building up to 12 feet of the most precious, luscious and high-animate matter topsoil in the world.

“Despite all our achievements, we owe our existence to a six-inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains,” says the farm equipment association of Minnesota and South Dakota.

Just as it took 350 million years to make the coal under Iowa, it took 12,000 years to make the soil that sits on top. Every year, we convert millions of Joules (a measurement of sunlight energy) to corn, beans, pasture, prairie and trees. That is more than 15 million megawatts of power that we convert to vegetation which stores this energy in crops until we need it. To compare this to wind energy, Iowa has the ability to produce 6,300 megawatts of electricity. 

And that is where I start the real story.

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Kenyan Farmers Reap Economic, Environmental Gains from ABCDs of Agroforestry

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Author: Sophie Mbugua | Published: December 4, 2017

KERICHO, Kenya – Less than a decade ago, the hills of Tuiyobei village in Kenya’s Rift Valley were nearly bare, with few trees or shrubs beyond the coffee plantations that yielded very little. The rain was sporadic, temperatures were rising, and crop yields and livelihoods were deteriorating. High deforestation triggered by increasing demand for firewood, lumber and charcoal had degraded the ecosystem.

These factors, plus high erosion rates after rains and chaotic winds, prompted Maureen Salim and five others to form the Toben Gaa self-help group to improve their standard of living through environmental conservation.

Some in this community are descended from the Ogiek people, a group indigenous to the Mau Forest. But they no longer practice the traditional ways of their forefathers, like gathering honey, and instead farm the land, like their neighbors. To improve their food security and nutrition, Salim says the group has embraced trees.

“We came up with a community action plan to plant 50 trees a year per household as access to energy, wind [protection] for the coffee, and improving the village vegetation cover by 10 percent,” the 32-year-old mother of five and Toben Gaa self-help group secretary told Mongabay.

The action plan came as a result of training in the Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) approach by the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF). The group has now grown to 46 members, 22 of them women. ABCD aims to empower communities to develop themselves through the assets they already have access to, along with some minimal support such as the sharing of skills and knowledge.

Today, trees species such as acacias, Casuarina, silky oak (Grevillea robusta), Nile tulip (Markhamia lutea), moringa (Moringa oleifera), agati (Sesbania grandiflora), neem (Azadirachta Indica), Tasmanian blue gum (Eucalyptus globulus) and mwalambe(Terminalia brownii) are intercropped with coffee, fruit trees such as guavas and tree tomatoes, and crops such as maize, beans, watermelons, papayas and pumpkins. Depending on an individual farmer’s interests, animal fodder such as Calliandra plus Boma Rhodes and Napier grasses are also intercropped. Others invest in woodlots for lumber and charcoal. Silky oak is widely planted along farm boundaries, with mwalambe grown in higher areas susceptible to soil erosion.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) states that by 2050, food production will have to increase by over 60 percent to meet the increasing global demand for food, as the world’s population swells to 9.3 billion people. The FAO recognizes agroforestry — farming using trees — as one of the means to help meet the rising demands for food and fuel.

Trees also store carbon dioxide and improve microclimates through the capture of moisture, and improve soil fertility as leaves fall and decompose, while providing habitats for creatures such as birds, insects and fungi, as well as providing shade and shelter from wind for animals, plants and humans.

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Scaling-Up Investment into Land Restoration: Getting the Biggest Bang for the Buck

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Author: Andrew Stevenson | Published: September 23, 2017

Land degradation has long been recognized as a major problem which threatens ecological health, social stability and economic prosperity. For several decades, a series of solutions have been devised and attempted with varying degrees of success. However, efforts to combat land degradation have been hampered by a lack of resources and the sheer scale of the problem. According to the UNCCD’s new flagship publication, the Global Land Outlook, from 1998 to 2013 approximately 20 per cent of the Earth’s vegetated land surface declined in productivity; and 1.3 billion people, most of whom live in developing countries, currently live on degrading agricultural land.

Two of the biggest challenges facing efforts aimed at avoiding, reducing or reversing land degradation are therefore how to tackle degradation at a massive scale, and how to ensure that any investment generates the ‘biggest bang for the buck’. This was the subject of an event at the recent UNCCD COP13 in Ordos, China, and which was organized jointly by the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF), the European Commission (EC), and the Economics of Land Degradation initiative (ELD) on 13 September. The event took place at the outset of a new European Union-funded project aimed at uncovering pathways for large-scale restorations across the world.

The EC’s Bernard Crabbé introduced the new project, which involves eight African countries and focuses on two components. First, the project will work with ELD to help participating countries assess the costs and benefits of investing in different approaches aimed at combating land degradation, raising agricultural productivity and restoring land health. Second, the project will work with partner organizations including the World Agroforestry Centre and local NGOs to implement low-cost, high-impact Sustainable Land Management (SLM) measures. As Mark Schauer of ELD explained, project activities would draw upon ELD’s experience in providing toolkits for economic analysis and stakeholder integration “to keep scientific information both credible and usable for decision-makers”

Dennis Garrity, Senior Fellow at ICRAF, laid out the scope of the challenge at hand: “for any serious hope of success, we must provide solutions that are applicable, desirable and affordable for massive populations of smallholder farmers and pastoralists”. Yet he emphasized that not only is this achievable, it is already happening, in some of the poorest countries in the world. Over the past two decades, millions of hectares of farmland in Niger and other countries in the Sahel region of Africa have been transformed by the adoption of Farmer-Managed Natural Regeneration (FMNR). This approach encourages farmers to select and protect existing tree stumps and stems, pruning them to promote growth alongside other crops, which then benefit from increased soil fertility, organic matter and moisture. As a result, FMNR provides a low-cost, low-risk method for large scale restoration of degraded landscapes while supplying farmers with valuable benefits such as fuelwood and fodder. According to Dr Garrity, similar ideas have taken root in several African countries including Sengal, Mali, Ethiopia, and Malawi, resulting in vast increases of tree cover: what Garrity called “the biggest single positive environmental change ever witnessed in Africa”. In addition, new tools such as Collect Earth enable non-scientists to access high resolution satellite data in a free and user-friendly manner, raising the exciting possibility of farming communities being able to track changes in tree cover in their landscape.

The meeting also heard from several speakers who shared their countries’ experiences of reversing land degradation. Cai Mantan of Elion Resources recounted Elion’s efforts to transform the Kubuqi desert near Ordos, noting that private-sector involvement could bring important resources and ideas. However, he also emphasized that private companies need to be incentivized to pursue restoration efforts over long-term timescales, potentially lasting several decades.

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Soil Superheroes in Children’s Book

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Author: Erica Quinlan | Published: December 15, 2017

INDIANAPOLIS — Mighty Mini Microbe is smaller than the average superhero.

That’s because she represents the billions of tiny soil microbes that play an integral role in soil health.

Mighty Mini talks about her adventures in a 24-page children’s/coloring book combo produced by USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service.

Ron Nichols, co-author of “Mighty Mini Microbe’s Tale,” shared his side of the story with AgriNews.

What inspired you to create Mighty Mini?

We wanted to give soil microbes a face and make it fun. It’ll be used as a teaching tool for that next generation of farmers, conservationists and scientists – to learn more about this incredible symbiosis that is happening underground.

What’s the story all about?

It’s a story that explains what microbes do – all of the benefits they bring to plants and to us. Things like cover crops, diverse rotations and no-till enrich the microbe’s habitat.

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Could Young Organic Farmers Stop Climate Change?

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The next generation of organic farmers doesn’t just want to grow food-they want a better food system. And they need our help.

Author: Betsy Andrews

It’s difficult to exaggerate the beauty of Harrison Topp’s orchard. Not far from the town of Paonia on Colorado’s Western Slope, Topp farms 6 acres of organic stone fruit-plums, cherries, and newly planted peaches. His family’s property stands at 5,800 feet along the north fork of the Gunnison River. The orchard is ringed by majestic mountains under an enormous sky.

Pruned so that air and sunlight flow through their branches, Topp’s plum trees resemble upside-down brooms. Magenta-hued Elephant Heart plums swell on the branches, as do small oblong Stanleys, crimson Bloods, and Santa Rosas. All around them, cover crops grow: nitrogen-fixing legumes; brassicas and grasses; Queen Anne’s lace, asters, and buckwheat, their flower attracting pollinators. Thistle, wild roses, lavender, and asparagus thrive there, too. Hawks wheel overhead, and wild turkeys pop their heads up from out of the sea of greenery. The place is crazy with abundance.

Despite that, and also because of it, Harrison Topp would like other young farmers to know that organic agriculture isn’t a walk in the park. In his five years of farming here, he’s climbed a steep learning curve, and he’s had his share of heartache. The first year, he grew no fruit at all; he spent his time ripping out ailing trees he inherited from the previous farmers. In his third season, he watched as sawflies devoured his orchard, transforming healthy leaves into filigree within days. And this year, he lost the cherries to frost. He knows that three bad harvests in a row would ruin him, and, as it is, he holds down what amounts to three full-time jobs in order to make it work.

“‘Young farmer’ is a sexy title,” he says.  “But it’s tough, especially with organics. When we lose a crop, we lose a crop. It’s sad and painful, but I put a lot of thinking into how to make this a long-term deal.”

At 30 years old, Topp is fiercely committed to this organic life-to cover crops and beneficial insects, to carbon sequestration and soil health, and most of all, to “producing substantive amounts of food for a substantive amount of people.”

To do that, he has devised a business plan that involves outside employment. Small and wiry with a broad smile, Topp works as membership director for the Rocky Mountain Farmers Union. When he’s not tending fruit trees, he travels from town to town organizing chapters and listening to growers so he can advocate for their needs. He’s met all types in the ag business. He will not disparage any farmer. But from his vantage point deep in the community, he sees the ideals of organic agriculture “moving closer and closer and closer to the future for many farmers.” An farmers like Topp are leading the way.

KEEP READING ON RODALE’S ORGANIC LIFE

Video: Using Trees to Fight Climate Change and Improve Croplands

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Author: Regeneration International | Published: November 10, 2017   

UNCCD Drylands Ambassador Dennis Garrity talks regeneration and the use of trees to boost yields and fight climate change at CO23 in Bonn, Germany.