Tag Archive for: Regenerative Agriculture

Regenerative Organics: Drawing a Line in the Soil

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Author: Rose Marcario | Published on: December 8, 2016

In recent years, we’ve seen a boom in production and sales of organic foods worldwide. The global organic food market is expected to grow by 16 percent between 2015 and 2020, a faster rate than conventionally-grown foods.

This seems like good news—but in truth, organic farming makes up just a tiny fraction of the global agriculture system controlled by a few giant corporations generating enormous profits. And it’s about to get worse: If current deals in the works make it past European and U.S. regulators, three companies—Bayer, DowDupont and ChemChina—will own two-thirds of the world’s seeds and pesticides.

This unfortunate reality threatens to hold us hostage for decades as conventional agriculture continues to ravage our planet: gobbling up immense fossil fuels for production and shipping, flooding the earth with toxic synthetic pesticides and deadening our soil’s biodiversity with GMO seeds (along with the taste of our food). Conventional agriculture also generates a quarter of the greenhouse gas emissions now baking our atmosphere.

And food is just part of the picture. Consider cotton, a fiber used to make a large majority of our clothing globally: just one percent is grown organically. That figure has stayed mostly stagnant since at least 1996, the year Patagonia started sourcing 100 percent organic cotton. It’s especially appalling considering 16 percent of all pesticides used worldwide are used to grow conventional cotton—exposure to which has been linked to higher rates of cancer and other diseases. Conventional GMO farming practices also reduce soil fertility and biodiversity, require more water and large amounts of herbicides, alter the nutritional content of our food, and result in toxic runoff that pollutes our rivers, lakes and oceans.

Thankfully, the status quo isn’t our only option. Regenerative organic agriculture includes any agricultural practice that increases soil organic matter from baseline levels over time, provides long-term economic stability for farmers and ranchers, and creates resilient ecosystems and communities. Put simply, this approach presents an opportunity to reclaim our farming system on behalf of the planet and human health—while fulfilling the obvious need to feed and clothe billions of people around the world. We can produce what we need and revitalize soil at the same time, thereby sequestering carbon currently polluting the atmosphere and warming our planet.

The good news: a small but growing list of organizations with good intentions have embraced regenerative organics in recent years. In particular, this approach (and terminology) has been championed by groups like the Rodale Institute and Regeneration International, and as a result, some businesses have begun taking serious interest. At Patagonia, our interest and knowledge has grown over many years: We began rebuilding our natural fiber supply chains to include organic practices 25 years ago, starting with cotton; more recently, we’ve been prioritizing regenerative practices for apparel and with our food business, Patagonia Provisions.

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Regenerative Agriculture: Our Best Shot at Cooling the Planet?

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Author: Jason Hickel | Published: January 10, 2017

It’s getting hot out there. For a stretch of 16 months running through August 2016, new global temperature records were set every month.[1] Ice cover in the Arctic sea hit a new low this past summer, at 525,000 square miles less than normal.[2] And apparently we’re not doing much to stop it: according to Professor Kevin Anderson, one of Britain’s leading climate scientists, we’ve already blown our chances of keeping global warming below the “safe” threshold of 1.5 degrees.[3]

If we want to stay below the upper ceiling of 2 degrees, though, we still have a shot. But it’s going to take a monumental effort. Anderson and his colleagues estimate that in order to keep within this threshold, we need to start reducing emissions by a sobering 8-10% per year, from now until we reach “net zero” in 2050.[4] If that doesn’t sound difficult enough, here’s the clincher: efficiency improvements and clean energy technologies will only win us reductions of about 4% per year at most.

How to make up the difference is one of the biggest questions of the 21st century. There are a number of proposals out there. One is to capture the CO2 that pours out of our power stations, liquefy it, and store it in chambers deep under the ground. Another is to seed the oceans with iron to trigger huge algae blooms that will absorb CO2. Others take a different approach, such as putting giant mirrors in space to deflect some of the sun’s rays, or pumping aerosols into the stratosphere to create man-made clouds.

Unfortunately, in all of these cases either the risks are too dangerous, or we don’t have the technology yet.

This leaves us in a bit of a bind. But while engineers are scrambling to come up with grand geo-engineering schemes, they may be overlooking a simpler, less glamorous solution. It has to do with soil.

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Industrial Farming Threatens Food Security in the US

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Author: Dr. Joseph Mercola | Published: January 10, 2017

It is indisputable that we are negatively affecting our air, soil and water in a way that is drastically impacting the earth itself.

If you look down while on an airplane, you can’t help but notice the vast exposure of soils into perfectly-carved squares below. These exposed soils are a tragic sign of an unsustainable practice that leads to erosion, runoff pollution while also decreasing soil organic matter and impacting our air quality.

Please use my search engine to find previous interviews with experts like Gabe Brown, Joel Salatin, Will Harris or other articles related to regenerative agriculture.

Agriculture has undergone massive changes over the past several decades. Many of them were heralded as progress that would save us from hunger and despair. Yet today, we’re faced with a new set of problems, birthed from the very innovations and interventions that were meant to provide us with safety and prosperity.

For decades, food production has been all about efficiency and lowering cost. We now see what this approach has brought us — skyrocketing disease statistics and a faltering ecosystem.

Fortunately, we already know what needs to be done. It’s just a matter of implementing the answers on a wider scale. We need farmers to shift over to regenerative practices that stops depleting our soil and fresh water supplies.

Frustratingly, farmers are often held back from making much needed changes by government subsidy programs that favor monocropping and crop insurance rules that dissuade regenerative farming practices.

Will American Farming Create Another Dust Bowl?

The Great Depression of the 1930s was tough for most Americans, but farmers were particularly hard hit. Plowing up the Southern Plains to grow crops turned out to be a massive miscalculation that led to enormous suffering.

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Why Better Farming Is Vital for Textile Companies Like Patagonia

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Author: Seb Egerton-Read | Published: January 5, 2017 

Creating farming techniques that don’t use heavy amounts of chemical fertilisers and pesticides or tillage –preparation of soil for planting through mechanical agitation of various types, such as digging, stirring and overturning – is becoming increasingly regarded as crucial for an abundant and secure food supply in the future. The development and scaling of regenerative agriculture may be just as crucial for the clothing sector, where cotton, which is dependent on the same linear growing practices, is a critical material input.

There are some positive signs that clothing companies are taking notice. Patagonia CEO Rose Marcario recently wrote that regenerative organic farming, “includes any agricultural practice that increases soil organic matter from baseline levels over time, provides long-term economic stability for farmers and ranchers, and creates resilient ecosystems and communities”.

Defining regenerative agriculture, as Marcario has aimed to do, is particularly important in a context where the words restorative, regenerative and organic are used frequently, interchangeably and without attachment to a clear set of principles. Highlighting the confusion caused by these inconsistencies as one of the reasons for the slow growth of regenerative practices, she makes the case that the conversation needs to be introduced into the clothing and textiles sector.

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Regenerative Agriculture Redefined

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Author: Ethan Roland | Published: January 3, 2017

The term Regenerative Agriculture is cropping up all over the place. The annals of the internet are growing almost daily with articles, blog posts, tags, and tweets about farmers, corporations, and foundations shifting their attention toward the new hot thing: Regenerative Agriculture.

It is wonderful to see such a broad-scale conversation happening about agriculture, ecosystem health, and soil carbon. Unfortunately, in all the buzz, some of the definitions of Regenerative Agriculture that have emerged do not live up to its full potential. Many focus solely on soil carbon, ignoring biodiversity, water cycles, and human wellbeing. And while soil fertility and carbon sequestration are hugely important to our planet’s capacity to grow food, they are the tip of the iceberg as far as what Regenerative Agriculture can mean and do for us.

After months of consultation with hundreds of farmers, ranchers, designers, and companies around the world, Terra Genesis International has developed a new and holistic definition of Regenerative Agriculture:

Regenerative Agriculture is a system of farming principles and practices that increases biodiversity, enriches soils, improves water cycles, and enhances ecosystem services.

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Eat the Vote

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Author: Stett Holbrook | Published: December 21, 2016 

Eating is a political act, so says Michael Pollan, in that it offers three opportunities a day to choose what kind of food system you want, even more if you’re really hungry. That sentiment takes on new significance as a KFC-loving proto-fascist is about to take office in Washington.

As of this writing, Donald Trump has yet to name his nominee for secretary of agriculture, which says something about how much importance he places on the position. There have been a few names bandied about, but I’ll go out on a limb and say whoever gets tapped for the job will be a staunch defender of oil-addicted Big Ag and factory farms and no friend of small, regional farms, the likes of which help define the North Bay and support its rural economy.

While current Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack has helped increase funding for the organic industry and provided more support for vegetable growers of all types, America’s food industry and the farm bill that drives it is still dominated by fat-cat commodity farmers and the lobbyists and Farm Belt politicians who do their bidding. That’s not about to change, and the gains made by sustainable agriculture in the North Bay and beyond will need more politically motivated eaters than ever.

Michelle Obama’s organic garden on the White House south lawn will be hard to remove because it was recently fortified with cement, stone and steel, but don’t get too attached to it. As a fan of McDonald’s, and with the belly to prove it, Trump will probably not eat much produce from the garden. Replacing the garden (which reportedly produced 2,000 pounds of produce a year for the White House kitchen and local food banks) with an artificial grass putting green would be much more his style.

To be sure, shopping at the farmers market, buying organic lettuce and growing your own food is not going to starve the beast that is Trump. But it’s a good place to start and one of the better-tasting forms of protest available for those who want to defend a host of social, economic and environmental goods produced by an environmentally sound local agriculture.

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2017 Hot Food Trends a Good Fit for County Farmers

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Author: Gillian Pomplun | Published: December 30, 2016 

Crawford County farmers could score big wins in growing the farm economy, protecting the unique and fragile ecosystem, and mitigating public safety threats from flooding, by taking steps on their farms to cash in on growing trends in the food industry.

Anti-inflammatory foods, regenerative grazing, and purple foods are among the top food trends for 2017 listed by food industry leaders. In addition, continued growth in demand for organic foods is creating growing demand for organic hay, which commands a premium price.

While 2015 and 2016 food trends focused on “antioxidants,” consumer awareness has evolved to an understanding that antioxidant-rich foods are part of a larger dietary focus of reducing inflammation.

Chronic inflammation is linked as an underlying cause of many chronic health conditions such as heart disease, obesity, autoimmune disorders like arthritis and lupus, cancer, and more. Increasingly health practitioners see dietary changes as a key way to combat chronic inflammation, and prevent or slow development of these conditions.

Regenerative production methods such as grassfed, pastured and free-range meat, grassfed dairy, and organic meat and dairy have been increasing trends with consumers for years.

The most passionate advocates of these farming and food production systems will tell you that they have encapsulated the concept of “regenerative” all along, and for the most part that is true.

What has shifted is less in the world of farming and more in the world of consuming. The trend of “regenerative agriculture” is an indication that consumers are increasingly concerned about not only “is it good for me,” but also about “is it good for the environment?”

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Vital Changes to Farming Practices Remain a Tough Sell

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Author: Lisa Nikolau | Published on: December 9, 2016

Environmentalists have long been pushing for the use of regenerative agriculture, an alternative approach to farming they say can help the world’s poorest farmers and fight global food insecurity. Some experts say the biggest limitation of the approach may be just convincing enough of the world to adopt it.

Proponents of regenerative farming say the root of the world’s food insecurity problem is the way we grow food. According to the the U.N.’s 2013 Trade and Environment Review, the most widely used farming system is responsible for 43 percent to 57 percent of human-generated greenhouse gas emissions and results in the loss of 50 percent to 75 percent of cultivated soils’ natural carbon content.

The loss of vital nutrients in soil is due in part to overuse of pesticides and chemical fertilizers. The additives can also reduce resilience to flood and drought by removing the protective barrier provided by organic carbon.

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Where There’s Muck, There’s Money

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Author: Dave Chambers | Published on: December 14, 2016

Spier, in Stellenbosch, has earned R204,000 in carbon credits for reducing its carbon dioxide output by practising “regenerative farming”.

Twenty-seven farmworkers have shared half the money, receiving an average of R4,000 each.

“The farm has acquired the credits for sequestering 6493 tons of carbon dioxide in its soil, which is cultivated in as natural way as possible by using regenerative farming practices like high-density grazing,” said Spier livestock manager Angus McIntosh.

“This is a technique that involves frequent stock rotations aimed at using livestock to mimic nature by restoring carbon and nitrogen contained in livestock and poultry urine to the soil profile.”

The credits were bought by a South African bank, brokered by Credible Carbon, a business that facilitates carbon-trading through credits earned for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and global warming.

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Farm Workers Earn Through Carbon Credit Programme

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Author: Megan Van Wyngaardt | Published on: December 13, 2016

Twenty-seven employees of the Spier wine estate, in Stellenbosch, have, through a climate change mitigation initiative, shared half the R204 000 paid out from carbon credits – derived from practicing regenerative farming on a section of the organically certified wine farm.

An average of R4 000 was given to each worker, with those managing the cattle component receiving a larger portion of the credits.

“The farm acquired the credits for sequestering 6 493 t of carbon dioxide in its soil, which is cultivated in as natural a way as possible by using regenerative farming practices like high-density grazing,” said Spier Wine Farm livestock farm manager Angus McIntosh.

“This is a technique that involves frequent stock rotations aimed at using livestock to mimic nature by restoring carbon and nitrogen contained in livestock and poultry urine into the soil profile.”

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