Tag Archive for: Regenerative Agriculture

Regenerating Soil Can Double Corn Farmers’ Incomes

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Author: Emma Bryce | Published: March 2, 2018

Farming sustainably isn’t just good for the planet: if it’s done right it can double profits too, finds a new study published in PeerJ. But this requires a paradigm shift that champions crop diversity over monoculture, and quality over quantity–a way of growing food that’s known as ‘regenerative agriculture’.

Currently in the United States and many other countries, farming is characterised by monoculture, heavy pesticide use, and tillage to rid the soil of weeds. These contribute in different ways to several environmental ills–such as climate change, water and soil pollution, and the quashing of biodiversity. A fraction of farmers practice regenerative methods, designed to boost biodiversity and increase soil nutrients by reducing tillage, planting cover crops on exposed soil, enabling livestock to graze amongst crops, and cutting out pesticides.

But little has been done to explore whether the perceived benefits of these regenerative methods really stand up to the test.

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Regenerative Farming Starts Here—with Chickens

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Are you ready to say goodbye to the monocrop industrial approach to agriculture and hello to regenerative farming?

Check out this Main Street Project video which tells a story about restoring our land and our relationship with plants and animals, and valuing the power of small farmers—all while deploying a small-scale system that is “accessible, productive and economically viable.”

How does the Main Street Project do all that? As the makers of this video explain, “the path to healing our food and agriculture system is a path walked on by chickens.” That’s right. Main Street Project has developed a poultry-centered regenerative agriculture system that can change how food is produced around the world.

Well-managed paddocks and rotational grazing—practices that regenerate soil, eliminate erosion and increase production—play a big role in Main Street’s well-planned 100-acre farm ecosystem in Northfield, Minnesota.

According to the video, chickens “contribute to the farm ecosystem by providing an affordable entry point for long-term economic investment and help transform that investment into a wide array of marketable products,” all while contributing to a “vibrant farm economy.”

Main Street Project’s goal is to provide a “revolutionary approach to eliminating harmful practices in the poultry industry while healing the land and relationship to the labor force.” The project’s founders want to solve the nation’s food crisis by equipping and uplifting the “next generation of consumers, farmers and investors in regenerative agriculture practices.”

Main Street Project’s Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin describes the project’s approach:

“We are advocating for a farming approach that brings back ancient knowledge, wisdom and techniques that farmers have survived on for a long time. What we are doing is restructuring those techniques so we can meet current demands in a way that the farming system that we deploy is good for the people, good for the landscape and the ecology, and is good for the economy.”

It’s part of the project’s “ecological, economic and social triple bottom line.” And the beauty of it is that the regenerative-poultry and grain model can be adapted to different climates in different parts of the U.S and the world. And it can operate on a small scale, or can be scaled up to meet the growing demand  for organic, regenerative poultry.

If a lot of this sounds familiar, it’s because of the steady drumbeat led by Regeneration International (RI), which works to build a “healthy global ecosystem in which regenerative agriculture and land-use practices cool the planet, feed the world, and promote public health, prosperity and peace.”

As Organic Consumers Association’s International Director Ronnie Cummins explains in a recent blog post, the regeneration movement is “the one movement that we believe has the power to address all our individual and collective concerns, the movement that holds the most hope for resolving the multiple and deepening global crises of hunger, poverty, crumbling political systems and climate change. The movement that begins with healing our most critical resources—soil, water, air—through better farming and land management practices. And ends with healing our local communities and global societies and restoring climate stability.”

Want to get involved? Help us rapidly scale up the signatories of Regeneration International’s 4 per 1000 initiative, which calls for countries to draw down more carbon than they emit, and to store it in the soil. Connect us with your local farmers, NGOs, agencies and companies that would be interested in signing on.

Increasing the number of those committed to healthy soil is the first step toward building a regeneration movement in your community.

Sign up here to keep up with news and alerts from Organic Consumers Association. Posted in full with permission.

Peter Byck – ‘The Power of Being Heard’

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Author: David Witzel | Published: February 26, 2018

In our first episode of Designers of Paradise host Erik van Lennep talks with filmmaker and storyteller Peter Byck. Peter is associated with both the Schools of Sustainability and Journalism at Arizona State University. He released Carbon Nation in 2010 and has since produced a series of short documentaries exploring the impact of adaptive multi-paddock grazing on farms and ranches called Soil Carbon Cowboys.

Peter and Erik’s discussion moves from stories about telling stories to the story and science mix needed to explain the potential of healthy soil and the repercussions of new soil management approaches. They talk about Peter’s unique approach to emphasizing listening – “the power of being heard” – and serendipity to create powerful video.  Peter suggests farmers were the first scientists and that soil offers “common ground” for understanding even across political divides. They conclude with discussion of some of the thinkers who have guided Peter’s work.

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Impacts of Soil Carbon Sequestration on Life Cycle Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Midwestern USA Beef Finishing Systems

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Author: Paige L. Stanley, et. al. | Published: February 24, 2018

Beef cattle have been identified as the largest livestock-sector contributor to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Using life cycle analysis (LCA), several studies have concluded that grass-finished beef systems have greater GHG intensities than feedlot-finished (FL) beef systems. These studies evaluated only one grazing management system – continuous grazing – and assumed steady-state soil carbon (C), to model the grass-finishing environmental impact. However, by managing for more optimal forage growth and recovery, adaptive multi-paddock (AMP) grazing can improve animal and forage productivity, potentially sequestering more soil organic carbon (SOC) than continuous grazing. To examine impacts of AMP grazing and related SOC sequestration on net GHG emissions, a comparative LCA was performed of two different beef finishing systems in the Upper Midwest, USA: AMP grazing and FL. We used on-farm data collected from the Michigan State University Lake City AgBioResearch Center for AMP grazing. Impact scope included GHG emissions from enteric methane, feed production and mineral supplement manufacture, manure, and on-farm energy use and transportation, as well as the potential C sink arising from SOC sequestration.

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Video: Regenerative Agriculture — A Solution to Climate Change

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Author: TEDx Talks | Published: December 4, 2014

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Soup-To-Nuts Podcast: Going Beyond ‘Sustainable’ with Regenerative Farming

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Author: Elizabeth Crawford | Published: February 9, 2018

Sustainable often pops up in marketing to describe how products are made or packaged, and while consumers increasingly buy these products at a premium, some in the natural products industry fear the concept is becoming greenwashed while others say the term – even in its purest form – doesn’t go far enough.

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Natural Products Expo West Trend Preview: Regenerative Ag

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The conversations to have, education sessions to attend and products to see at Natural Products Expo West to get the full view of this macro trend.

Author: Jenna Blumenfeld | Published: February 13, 2018

For first-timers and seasoned Natural Products Expo West attendees alike, developing a show floor game plan is a dizzying experience. Here, we narrow it down by showcasing exciting new products that exemplify the regenerative ag trend identified by New Hope Network’s 2018 Next Forecast report.

It’s important, though, to remember that products don’t drive change. People do. Strategize Expo West by learning more about what’s trending and prioritizing deeper conversations. Instead of asking if a brand is sustainable, ask why. And ask how. Use our suggested questions within each trend to break the ice, make lasting connections within the industry and have your best Natural Products Expo West ever.

What is regenerative agriculture?

Doing no harm is an imperative, but healing the harm that’s already occurred is among the richest opportunities for agriculture and the food industry. This includes building soil health, scrubbing waterways of fertilizers and sequestering carbon through deep-root perennials.

Questions to ask vendors

Ask potential vendors these questions to see if their regenerative practices align with your standards.

  • How do you define regenerative agriculture?
  • How do you ensure that your suppliers follow regenerative practices?
  • How do you communicate your regenerative practices to customers?
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No-Till Farmers’ Push for Healthy Soils Ignites a Movement in the Plains

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No-till farming started as a way to keep costs down for conventional farmers in danger of losing their land. Now it has become a subculture and a way of life for outsider farmers all over rural America.

Author: Twilight Greenaway | Published: February 13, 2018

Jimmy Emmons isn’t the kind of farmer you might expect to talk for over an hour about rebuilding an ecosystem. And yet, on a recent Wednesday in January, before a group of around 800 farmers, that’s exactly what he did.

After walking onstage at the Hyatt in Wichita, Kansas to upbeat country music and stage lights reminiscent of a Garth Brooks concert, Emmons declared himself a recovering tillage addict. Then he got down to business detailing the way he and his wife Ginger have re-built the soil on their 2,000-acre, third-generation Oklahoma farm.

A high point of the presentation came when the 50-something farmer—who now raises cattle and grows alfalfa, wheat, and canola along with myriad cover crops—described a deep trench he’d dug in one of his fields for the purposes of showing some out of town visitors a subterranean cross-section of his soil. After it rained, Emmons walked down into the trench with his camera phone, and traced the way water had infiltrated the soil. Along the way, the Emmons on stage and the Emmons behind the camera became a kind of chorus of enthusiasm, pointing out earthworm activity, a root that had grown over two-and-a-half feet down, and the layer of dark, carbon-rich soil.

“It was just amazing,” said Emmons in an energetic southern drawl. The water had seeped down over five feet. And the other farmers in the room—a collection of livestock, grain and legume producers mainly from Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas, as well as several Canadian provinces who had gathered for the 22nd annual No-till on the Plains conference—nodded their heads in a collective amen.

Most had travelled for hours to hear Emmons and others like him share their soil secrets, their battle scars, and their reasons to hope. And they knew that getting rainwater to truly soak into farmland—instead of hitting dry, dead soil, soaking an inch or two down, and then running laterally off—is a lost art.

The previous morning, the controversial grazing guru Allan Savory had stood on the same stage before the enthusiastic crowd and described the enormous quantity of spent, lifeless soil that erodes into the ocean every year in terms of train cars. “A train load of soil 116 miles long leaves the country every day,” said Savory, quoting the Natural Resources Conservation Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

Or to put it another way, erosion accounts for the loss of around 1.7 billion tons of farmland around the world very year. As that soil escapes, so does an abundance of nitrogen and other nutrients that are slowly killing vast parts of our oceans and lakes. And as agricultural soil dies and disperses, it also releases greenhouse gases like nitrous oxide and carbon dioxide.

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Earth Talk: Regenerative Agriculture

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Published: February 11, 2018

Dear EarthTalk: What is so-called Regenerative Agriculture and why are environmentalists so bullish on it?
– Jess Mancuso, Montgomery, PA

Regenerative Agriculture (RA) describes farming and grazing practices that help reverse climate change by rebuilding the organic matter in soil and restoring degraded soil biodiversity.

“Specifically, Regenerative Agriculture is a holistic land management practice that leverages the power of photosynthesis in plants to close the carbon cycle, and build soil health, crop resilience and nutrient density,” reports California State University’s Regenerative Agriculture Initiative (RAI). “Regenerative agriculture improves soil health, primarily through the practices that increase soil organic matter. This not only aids in increasing soil biota diversity and health, but increases biodiversity both above and below the soil surface, while increasing both water holding capacity and sequestering carbon at greater depths.” The net result is a drawdown of atmospheric carbon dioxide, and the improvement of soil structure to reverse human-caused soil loss.

According to Terra Genesis International, which helps businesses integrate sustainable farming practices into their everyday operations, key principles guiding the implementation of RA include: progressively improving whole agroecosystems (soil, water and biodiversity); creating context-specific designs and making holistic decisions expressing the essence of each farm; ensuring and developing fair and reciprocal relationships among all stakeholders; and continually growing and evolving individuals, farms and communities to express their innate potential.

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In the Gambia, Building Resilience to a Changing Climate

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Published: February 6, 2018

UN Environment will implement the largest natural resource development project in the history of The Gambia to help the West African nation tackle climate change impacts and restore degraded forests, farmland and coastal zones.

Funded by a $20.5 million Green Climate Fund (GCF) grant and $5 million from the Government of the Gambia, the “Large-scale Ecosystem-based Adaptation Project in The Gambia” (EbA) was launched in January in the capital Banjul.

“This project is the single-largest natural resource development project ever launched in the history of the development of this country and funded by the GCF”, Lamin Dibba, The Gambia’s Minister of Environment, Climate Change and Natural Resources, told fellow ministers, representatives from the UN and GCF and other stakeholders present at the launch.

Minister Dibba said the project was designed to build the climate resilience of Gambian people made increasingly vulnerable by a loss of soil fertility and agricultural productivity due to environmental degradation, more frequent and severe droughts and rising sea levels.

“The livelihoods of [the] majority of rural Gambians are eroding as a result of the degrading environment and the country’s dwindling natural resource base, on which most of these communities depend for their survival,” he said.

“The EbA project shall rehabilitate up to 10,000 hectares of degraded forest and wildlife parks through reforestation, enrichment planting, conservation of rare or endangered species as well as the restoration of 3,000 hectares of abandoned and marginal agricultural lands”, he added.

The six-year project should directly benefit up to 11,550 Gambian households and potentially reach a further 46,200 households indirectly. The beneficiaries will be spread across four target regions lying along The Gambia River in a small country of seven regions, and over half of them will be women.

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