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Farmers Eye Towards Regenerative Agriculture to Fight Dry Summer

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VANDERHOOF—This dry summer is creating problems across the province with wildfires, but it’s also taking a toll on farmers. With the lack of rain, it’s tough for farmers to maintain their soil to produce healthy crops. On Thursday, farmers met together to discuss possible solutions.

It’s been a tough summer for rancher Larry Garrett of Garrett Ranches. One that closely resembles what he experienced a few years ago. He says that grasshoppers and the drought hurt his crop growth.

To fix this problem, Garrett has been practicing regenerative agriculture.

“The newest part of science is we need to add ruminates back to the ecosystem. A ruminate expels about 80% of what it eats as manure, so it’s a really key way to build soil health,” said Garrett.

A ruminate is a mammal–such as cattle–that can specially process nutrients from grass. They expel the nutrients through their manure and the nutrients return into the soil, which is a process called grazing.

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What about Our Grasslands? Abandoning Meat May Spell Disaster for Vital Ecosystems

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Recent opinion articles advocate eliminating meat from human diets, or using artificial meat substitutes, to fight climate change. However, many experts believe that grazing animals used for meat are the key to the future health of the most altered, destroyed and endangered ecosystems on earth: grasslands.

That makes plant-based diets potential ecological disasters.

Of the 1.9 billion acres in the lower 48 U.S. states, 788 million are grassland. Globally, grazing animals and grazing land ecosystems evolved together through mutual adaptation. Human history has demonstrated that improperly grazed grasses become unhealthy, and leaving grasslands alone actually degrades them, whereas properly grazed lands become healthier.

Grasslands provide vital “ecosystem services” by sequestering carbon underground in extensive root systems, using up carbon dioxide, producing oxygen, filtering and storing water, providing habitat for other important species, and when grazed, converting cellulose that we cannot digest into high-quality protein that we can digest.

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Pairing Agroforestry with Livestock: The Major Benefits

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‘Ecology’ is the study of relationships between plants, animals, people and the environment, with a specific focus on how these elements work together. ‘Agroecology’, then, is the application of these ecological concepts to farming, specifically: using nature and natural relationships to boost your farm’s yields, productivity and more.

We have a lot of faith in agroecology, and there’s evidence to suggest that, by making agroecological practices more mainstream, we could make our food and farming systems more sustainable and healthy. It doesn’t have to be complicated to get involved in agroecological methods, either. In fact, agroforestry – the process of combining trees with crops or livestock – is something you can get started with straight away, according to farmer Nikki Yoxall. Nikki runs Howemill Farm and Grampian Graziers, and has been using agroforestry on her farm for over two years. We talked to her about what her experience of this nature-friendly farming practice has been like, the benefits to her cattle and more below…

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Grazing Cattle Can Reduce Agriculture’s Carbon Footprint

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Ruminant animals like cattle contribute to the maintenance of healthy soils and grasslands, and proper grazing management can reduce the industry’s carbon emissions and overall footprint, according to a Texas A&M AgriLife Research scientist.

Richard Teague, professor emeritus in the Department Rangeland, Wildlife and Fisheries Management and senior scientist of the Norman Borlaug Institute for International Agriculture and the Texas A&M AgriLife Research and Extension Center at Vernon, said his research, published in the Soil and Water Conservation Society’s Journal of Soil and Water Conservation, presents sustainable solutions for grazing agriculture.

The published article, authored by Teague with co-authors who include Urs Kreuter, AgriLife Research socio-economist in the Texas A&M College of Agriculture and Life Sciences Department of Ecology and Conservation Biology, was recognized at the society’s recent conference as a Soil and Water Conservation Society Research Paper for Impact and Quality.

Teague’s research shows appropriate grazing management practices in cattle production are among the solutions for concerns related to agriculture’s impact on the environment. His article serves as a call to action for the implementation of agricultural practices that can improve the resource base, environment, productivity and economic returns.

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A Guatemalan Immigrant Takes on Big Ag, Seeks to Set Farmers Free by Starting Their Own Chicken Processing Plant in Iowa

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NORTHFIELD, Minn. — Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin crouched over a green tuft one evening in June.

He ran his fingers through a spiky strand and patted the hard dirt. Rain hadn’t fallen in weeks, and he expected to lose about 300 of his new hazelnut trees.

Still, he was upbeat.

“This,” he said, “is my first real chance.”

Haslett-Marroquin sketched his ideal farm 35 years ago, when he studied at an agricultural school in Guatemala. He wanted to build a place where animals and plants fed each other, enriched the soil and pulled carbon from the air.

He wanted to open his own school and spread his vision throughout Guatemala. He wanted small farmers to be able to rely on themselves, to be able to resist contracts with big companies. He believed laborers could earn better wages, and he believed his system would prevent anyone from feeling hungry, like he did.

The plan didn’t pan out as he expected. But Haslett-Marroquin, who immigrated to the United States in 1992, didn’t give up on the idea. In November, he bought 75 acres south of the Twin Cities and is preparing the site to become the farm he has long wanted.

Siga la vaca: una ganadería diferente para lograr carne sostenible

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Pastizales muy abundantes con distintos tonos de verde. Altos, bajos y diversos, con la irregularidad propia de la naturaleza. Bastantes vacas, pero no amontonadas. Juntas —y al parecer cómodas— en la misma parcela, donde estarán varias semanas hasta pasar a otra.

Gallinas en constante movimiento y libres picoteando al sol por todo el campo, no encerradas en un granero. Abejas, gusanos y muchos insectos por todos lados. Árboles que refrescan del calor y cultivos para alimentar al ganado. También una huerta produciendo frutas y verduras sin agroquímicos.

Casí de paradisíaco es este campo en Maldonado, a dos horas de Montevideo, Uruguay. Pero la belleza no es lo más impactante sino lo que pasa debajo del suelo y no podemos apreciar a simple vista: un suelo lleno de minerales y de vida, algo raro de encontrar en cualquier campo de producción convencional. Un paisaje completamente distinto a las miles de hectáreas de soja transgénica y corrales de engorde de ganadería que ocupan gran parte de América Latina, con tierra forzada a trabajar sin pausa a partir de químicos y fertilizantes, a pesar de que ya no tiene vida.

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Op-ed: We Don’t Need a ‘Moonshot’ for Faux Burgers—We Need To Hold ‘Big Meat’ Accountable

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In a recent New York Times opinion piece, Ezra Klein proposed a moonshot investment in “Meatless Meat.” Klein makes a cogent, fact-filled case for the government to spend a few billion dollars on public research to increase the commercial viability of plant-based and cellular (i.e., lab-created) meats.

Klein’s objective is straightforward: reduce the climate footprint of meat and dairy, reduce the suffering of animals confined in feed lots and barns, and prevent the next pandemic. He proposes use public funding to accelerate research and development—much like Tesla’s boost to e-cars or the Department of Defense’s boost to the internet—as the best way to move production and demand of alternative meats quickly and effectively.

The stakes are high. And Klein is not wrong. Cheap meat is a problem. The much-loved (recently mythologized) hamburger is brought to us by an extractive industry whose recent record profits come on the backs of disadvantaged workers, animal cruelty, mountains of manure, and a whole lot of public subsidies. But even the quickest, most superficial look at today’s U.S. food system shows the solution to the mess is not public subsidies for petri-dish proteins that will inevitably be produced (or at least funded) by a handful of large, vertically integrated food and feed companies.

 

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RI’s Response to The Ecologist’s “The Regenerative Ranching Racket”

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Brendan Montague,

Editor of The Ecologist, at brendan@theecologist.org

Re: The regenerative ranching racket by Spencer Roberts, June 14, 2021

 

Dear Brendan,

 

The credibility of the Ecologist is being seriously questioned when it engages in deliberate fraud and makes false claims in order to try to discredit the fastest growing agricultural movement in the world.

Your journalist conducted outright fraud and lied when registering a false farm on our Farm Map and openly admits this. He further deliberately misrepresented the purpose of our Farm Map.

The Farm Map is a free service that connects thousands of farmers around the world to hundreds of thousands of potential customers. It is a self-regulating service not a certification system. Customers can let us know if farms are making false claims and we can remove them from the map. This service is particularly important in the developing world where farmers are the lowest socioeconomic group, in part, due to not being paid fairly for what they produce.

The same journalist that openly lies and commits fraud, then goes on to try and discredit various leaders of the global regeneration movement. We have the verified published data to show that these farmers and their various systems sequester more CO2 out of the atmosphere  than they emit. Unlike industrial farming which, depending on the methodologies used, accounts for up to 50% of global emissions, regenerative agriculture has solid published science to show that it sequesters more CO2 than it emits. We can change agriculture from being a major problem to becoming a major solution for the climate crisis.

32 countries, many regions, UNFAO, IFAD, GEF, CGIAR and hundreds of NGOs support changing farming from being a major CO2 emitter to becoming a major mitigator of CO2 by storing it in soil as soil organic matter. They have signed on to the 4 for 1000 initiative that was launched by the French Government at the Paris Climate Change meeting Dec. 2015. The UNFCCC recognizes this initiative as part of the Lima – Paris accord in the Paris agreement.

Industrial agriculture in its various forms has the most significant effect on land use on the planet. It is responsible for most of the environmental degradation, biodiversity loss, forest destruction, toxic chemicals in our food and environment and a significant contributor, up to 50%, to the climate crisis. The degenerative forms of agriculture are an existential threat to us and most other species on our planet. We have to regenerate agriculture for social, environmental, economic and cultural reasons and that is exactly what we in the global regenerative movement are doing.

 

Yours Faithfully,

 

André Leu, International Director,  June 19, 2021

Could Beef Be Good For People and The Planet? Regenerative, Grass-Fed Beef May Offer A Solution To Our Health, Climate Crisis

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Kacie Scherler was a vegetarian on-and-off for 10 years, but when she was diagnosed with a rare autoimmune disease, the only diet that could heal her required her to eat animal meat — and she had to raise it herself.

Now the founders of Re:Farm, Scherler and her husband look to regenerative farming as a means to produce beef in a way that benefits human health and the environment.

Scherler’s Story

Scherler, a Pepperdine alumna, grew up on her family’s farm and ranch in Oklahoma and said she had no intentions of moving back home or being involved with food or agriculture.

After marrying her husband Zach Abney in 2018, they decided to renovate a home on her family’s property in Oklahoma and continue working at their jobs remotely. Their goal was to use the fixer-upper as their home base but travel around the country in an Airstream to stay connected with friends and family.

Two months into their marriage, Scherler lost feeling in her lower body and could no longer walk. She was told she had a 30% chance of recovering from her autoimmune diagnosis. The couple’s dream crumbled.

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Ganadería regenerativa, reverdecer el planeta sin renunciar a la carne

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Román Jiménez tiene en su nuca un tornillo estrella. Es un implante microdermal; su alegoría personal sobre no perder la cabeza. Este geminiano de 44 años y dragón de fuego, según el horóscopo chino, nació en una finca cerca de Pereira, Risaralda, en la que creció, estudió y permaneció hasta los 12 años. Tras mudarse a la ciudad, le dio la vuelta al mundo y regresó a Colombia al reconocer que su destino sería el mismo de sus ancestros: ganadero. Aunque un ganadero diferente.

Su padre falleció cuando Román tenía 11, por lo que terminó siendo el eje en un hogar de mujeres. Aunque su familia era conservadora, a los 14 años se realizó su primer tatuaje y —poco después― se dejó el cabello largo que aún conserva. Hoy, entre la galería de figuras grabadas en su piel, sobresale en su antebrazo izquierdo una flor alusiva a su mamá, fusionada con una triqueta que representa la unión de cuerpo, mente y espíritu; así como la vida, la muerte y el renacimiento.

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