Tag Archive for: Soil Health

Companies, NGOs and Scientists Come Together Behind New Definition For “Regenerative Agriculture”

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Published: February 23, 2017 

Press Release

New approach to agriculture helps create topsoil and mitigate climate change.

Representatives from over 100 countries, including virtually all areas of food production, manufacturing, retailing and soil science have, for the first time, come together on a unified definition for the quickly emerging “Regenerative” approach to growing food that has been shown to provide multiple benefits to food security, health, and climate change.

According to Tim LaSalle, PhD, former head of the Rodale Institute and co-director of the Regenerative Agriculture Initiative at California State University Chico: “Regenerative agriculture keeps the natural cycles healthy—like water and carbon—so that land can keep growing food and keep carbon and the climate in balance.”

Additionally, as the world has realized that most of the planet’s topsoil has been lost due to poor soil management, efforts are being made to rebuild soil health. “It’s impossible to feed the world without soil. The UN says we have sixty harvests left at the rate we’re going.” says Tom Newmark, The Carbon Underground co-founder. “Regenerative agriculture actually creates new topsoil, reversing the last century’s trend of destroying it.”

But perhaps the most powerful reason for the movement toward regenerative agriculture is the impact it will have on the biggest threat facing humanity—climate change. “Reducing emissions alone cannot solve climate change. We must draw down hundreds of billions of tons to succeed, and restoring our soil is the only known path to do this,” says Andre Leu, President of International Federation of Organic Agricultural Movements (IFOAM).

“Regenerative agriculture builds healthy soil, helping with challenges like climate change, biodiversity loss and water scarcity,” says Shauna Sadowski, Vice President of Sustainability and Industry relations at Annie’s Foods, “But we also see it as a critical way to strengthen our own supply chains. Healthy soil creates greater resilience for farmers and their crops, which become our ingredients and ultimately our products.”

Regenerative agriculture complements the global movement to healthier food. “Let’s face it—demand for organic food is exploding. But this is different,” says Ronnie Cummins, head of the Organic Consumers Association, “Organic food keeps people healthy. Regenerative agriculture keeps the planet healthy.”

Additional signatories include:

Dr. Tim LaSalle, Co-director, Regenerative Agriculture Initiative, CSUC

Dr. Cindy Daley, Co-director, Regenerative Agriculture Initiative, CSUC

Doug Greene, Founder, New Hope Network

Dave Carter, National Bison Association, former Chair NOSB

Anthony Zolezzi, Board Member, Wild Oats Marketplace

Dr. Elaine Ingham, Soil Food Web

Dr. Appachanda Thimmaiah, Maharishi University of Management

Will Rapp, Gardener’s Supply

Dr. David Johnson, New Mexico University

To view the definition, join as a signatory, or see the most current list, go to: www.thecarbonunderground.org/definition

For additional information contact: info@thecarbonunderground.org

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The Business Case for Holistic Management

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Author: Alexander Lykins | Published: February 17, 2017 

Allan Savory — Zimbabwean ecologist, farmer, soldier, exile, environmentalist, international consultant and president and co-founder of the Savory Institute — has a world-saving message: The answer is in the soil. In the 1960s, Savory originated the concept of holistic management, which has been popularized by several articles and a TED Talk that has been viewed nearly 4 million times.

Holistic Management is a framework, most commonly applied to grassland management, that when properly practiced has the potential to regenerate damaged land. It focuses on mimicking the evolutionary grazing patterns of cattle to regenerate soils and restore grasslands. This technique has proved effective in hundreds of areas across the globe, one of the most popular being via Operation HOPE, winner of the 2010 Buckminster Fuller Challenge.

In December, Bard MBA student Alexander Lykins sat down with Savory to discuss holistic management, how it can be applied to business and how young entrepreneurs can become involved.

Alexander Lykins: For some of our listeners, holistic management may be a new concept. Could you please give a brief overview?

Allan Savory: It’s an easy way, really, for anyone to manage their business or any management situation more successfully. Management, in any situation, always involves a web of social, environmental and economic complexity. Even managing feeding your family or living in a city involves complexity.

All management actions also need a reason and a context. If you think about that, you’ll realize that the reason is that you want to meet a need or a desire. In the case of policies, the context always has to do with the problem. There’s no other reason why governments develop a policy — it doesn’t matter if the policy is on drugs, terrorism or anything else. Whatever it is, the context is the problem.

When we do that, we take this great web of complexity that we cannot avoid and reduce it to a simple context for our actions. That’s reductionist management. All of us do it — we always have, in all cultures. Unfortunately, reductionist management commonly leads to achieving our actions but also later experiencing unintended consequences. And that’s where we are today.

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The USDA Is Trying to Help Save Native Grassland in Ore

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Author: Andrew Amelinckx | January 27, 2017 

The USDA recently gave $225 million in federal funding to 88 environmental projects across the country, including a program in Oregon to help improve the soil health in Wallowa County, home to the Zumwalt Prairie, one of the last intact native grasslands of its kind in the United States.

The prairie consists of about 330,000 acres of native grassland that once covered 10 million acres stretching across the Pacific Northwest. Today, the prairie is mostly owned by area ranchers and farmers, along with The Nature Conservancy, which owns about 40,000 acres in Wallowa County.

The goal of the project is to create opportunities for private landowners to apply integrated crop and livestock production systems to improve soil health while reducing the use of chemical inputs, increase water efficiency, and prevent the further fragmenting of the native grasslands.

The Nature Conservancy, a charitable environmental organization headquartered in Virginia, is the project’s lead partner. They’re joined by local non-profits Wallowa Land Trust and Wallowa Resources, along with the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service.

According to Jeff Fields, The Nature Conservancy Project Manager for the Zumwalt Prairie Preserve, the approach involves finding the sweet spot between ecology and the local economy.

“We’ve been focusing on not just the ecology of a place but the economy as well and socioeconomic issues that surround management by private owners,” says Fields in a phone interview with Modern Farmer. “Wallowa County has an awful lot of innovative farmers and ranchers who are thinking about soil health, supply-chain diversification—including grass-finished beef products—and getting away from commodity markets.”

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Cultivating a Regenerative Food System

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Authors: Martin Stuchtey and Morten Rossé | Published: January 28, 2017

The agricultural story of the 20th century was one of unprecedented success: due to more intensive and specialized cultivation, farmers markedly improved productivity and kept food prices low. However, this industrialization has created problems of its own, and may — unaltered — be running out of steam. In 2010, for the first time in a century, the growth of global grain yields fell below that of the global population growth
That is why it is time to move away from what has become a “linear food system”: a take, make, dispose system in which, too often, synthetic inputs go into the land; the land gets overused, and a huge proportion of the food produced is wasted and ends up in landfill. In addition, many nutrients never make it back to the field, stacking up in contaminated sludge. The goal should be to move toward a regenerative model in which land is restored as it is used and in which nutrient and material loops provide much-needed inputs, resulting in a healthier food supply.

In terms of how to get started on the circular path, there are a number of promising approaches.

Retain and restore natural capital

Restoration of large, damaged ecosystems is possible and the commercial potential is already proven. One famous example is the Loess plateau in China, where 3.7 million acres of degraded land have been restored since the mid-1990s. This project lifted more than 2.5 million people out of poverty, almost tripling their income, by replacing low-value agricultural commodities with high-value products. Per capita grain output rose 60 percent and the perennial vegetation cover doubled from 17 percent to 34 percent. In addition, flood control, water use, employment, biodiversity and carbon absorption all improved.

The Savory Institute, based in Colorado, promotes a process that emulates nature. As the institute describes it, managers control the livestock so that conditions mimic the predator-prey relationships that were in existence when the grasslands evolved. This involves dividing land into smaller paddocks, putting cattle in large herds, and moving them frequently across the property. The land benefits from the cycle of use and rest — the same pattern observed in grazing animals in natural grassland ecosystems. This approach has regenerated more than 6.1 million acres.

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Berkeley Lab Awarded $4.6m for Transformational Agriculture Technologies

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Author: Julie Chao | Published: January 3, 2017 

As advanced as agriculture has become, there remains a pressing need for nondestructive ways to ”see” into the soil. Now the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) has awarded $4.6 million to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) for two innovative projects to address this gap, giving farmers important information to increase crop yields while also promoting the storage of carbon in soil.

One project aims to use electrical current to image the root system, which will accelerate the breeding of crops with roots that are tailored to specific conditions (such as drought). The other project will develop a new imaging technique based on neutron scattering to measure the distribution of carbon and other elements in the soil.

“Both technologies could be transformational for agriculture ⎯ for quantifying belowground plant traits and where carbon and other elements are distributed⎯and will enable the next generation of predictive models for agriculture and climate,” said Eoin Brodie, deputy director of Berkeley Lab’s Climate & Ecosystem Sciences Division and a microbiologist who is contributing to both projects. “They’re windows into the soil, something that we urgently need.”

Berkeley Lab received these competitive awards from ARPA-E’s Rhizosphere Observations Optimizing Terrestrial Sequestration (ROOTS) program, which seeks to develop crops that take carbon out of the atmosphere and store it in soil — enabling a 50 percent increase in carbon deposition depth and accumulation while also reducing nitrous oxide emissions by 50 percent and increasing water productivity by 25 percent.

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Ecological Farming: A Conversation With Fukuoka, Jackson and Mollison

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Published: April, 1987 

Last August, three leaders of the global movement for a natural, permanent agriculture (also called permaculture) gathered at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, for the Second International Permaculture Conference. MOTHER EARTH NEWS was there, too, obtaining the only three-way interview ever with the men our Seasons of the Garden columnists half-playfully labeled “the Holy Trinity” of ecological farming. The following edited discussion is a head-to-head exchange between men who are taking key roles in defining our planet’s future. But first let assistant editor Pat Stone, who conducted the interview, fill you in with some background on the three subjects:

Australian Bill Mollison created the concept of permaculture in ecological farming. A gravel-voiced graybeard, Bill has a dry sense of humor, a feisty temperament, and absolute dedication to his cause. Introduced before his keynote conference speech as “a great yarn teller who’s motivated thousands of people to action,” Mollison has held every job from seaman to Tanzania bush researcher to senior lecturer in environmental psychology. He left that secure university position two years before retirement to blaze the permaculture trail.

To Mollison, permanent agriculture means carefully designed, sustainable systems in which the array, organization, and interactions of plants and animals are the central factors. Perennial plants-especially tree crops-play a large role in his multispecies landscapes. A permaculture system takes much planning, and a good bit of work, to set up, but it should then almost run itself.

Wes Jackson researches perennial crop mixes in Salina, Kansas. A hulking midwesterner with broad hands and a ready smile, Jackson combines a warm nature, down-home humor, and impeccable scientific scholarship (he has a Ph.D. in genetics). For example, his favorite lecture title is “Herbaceous Perennial Seed-Producing Polycultures: Their Contribution to the Solution of All Marital Problems and the End of the Possibility of Nuclear Holocaust.”

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Soil: Keeping Nutrients in Food and Carbon in the Ground

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Author: Lyndal Rowlands | Published: December 13, 2016 

Healthy soil not only makes food more nutritious it also helps keep carbon out of the atmosphere by storing it underground.

Yet around the world over 500 million hectares of soil has become degraded – leading to the loss of valuable nutrients as well as the release of carbon, speeding up the process of man-made climate change.

Climate change then in turn, affects crop productivity creating a negative cycle for farmers, Lucrezia Caon Global Soil Partnership Consultant at FAO told IPS.

“If we degrade soil they admit carbon dioxide (CO2), that fosters climate change, and climate change effects crop productivity,” she said.

IPS spoke to Caon at an event ahead of World Soil Day, which is marked on December 5.

The event focused on the special role of pulses in preserving soils.

2016 is International Year of Pulses, following on from 2015, which was the International Year of Soil.

Pulses include peas, beans, chickpeas and lentils. They are particularly popular in South Asia and Latin America.

Pulses are generally more popular in developing countries than developed countries, Caon noted.

“Seventy five percent of pulses are consumed in developing countries and only 25 percent in developed countries,” she said.

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Nigeria: Agricultural Policies and Climate Change

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Author: Martins Eke | Published: December 19, 2016 

Climate change has emerged one of the most challenging environmental issues of the 21st century. As a driver of many kinds of environmental changes, climate change poses risk to fresh water supply, food production and economic development. The massive shrinking of the Lake Chad in the North-East geopolitical zone of Nigeria which played a key role in predisposing the people of the zone to enlistment into Boko Haram terror group is a clear example of how far-reaching the consequences of climate change can be. Agriculture has being identified as having huge potential in the adaptation and mitigation of climate change. However, the ability of the government to formulate good climate change policies and effectively implement the agricultural sector strategies of the policies are key to the fight against climate change.

One major policy of the Nigerian government in the fight against climate change is the National Adaptation Strategy and Plan of Action on Climate Change for Nigeria (NASPA-CCN). This strategy envisions a Nigeria in which climate change adaptation is an integrated component of sustainable development, reducing the vulnerability and enhancing the resilience and adaptive capacity of all economic sectors and of all people particularly women and children to the adverse impacts of climate change, while also capturing the opportunities that arise as a result of climate change. Some of NASPA-CCN strategies for the agricultural sector includes: Increase access to drought-resistant crops and livestock feeds; adopt better soil management practices; provide early warning/meteorological forecasts and related information; increase planting of native vegetation cover and promotion of re-greening efforts. Considering the huge adverse effects of climate change, Nigeria has no other option than to move from business-as-usual model of agriculture to climate-smart agriculture. Capturing the opportunities arising from climate change entails taking full advantage of the employment opportunities arising from climate change in terms of the new and sustainable jobs it will create through use of new and improved ways of doing things. Planting of native vegetation cover and promotion of re-greening efforts will provide employment for those producing nursery bags as well as those on the field who plant and nurture the trees.

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The New Water Alchemists

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Author: Judith D. Schwartz | Published on: November 29, 2016

Australia is the world’s driest inhabited continent, and a nation cursed by headline-grabbing weather extremes. In 2013, Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology famously added dark purple to its weather maps to denote over-the-top heat waves, the no-longer-rare days when air temperatures breach 122 degrees Fahrenheit (50 degrees Celsius). Australia’s history since European settlement has been riddled with droughts and floods so dire they’re etched in the books as significant natural disasters. The millennium drought, known colloquially as the “Big Dry,” persisted for 15 years until finally doused by epic rains and floods that lasted from late 2010 into early 2011.

As for wildfires, the most devastating since 1851 have names, including Black Christmas and Black Tuesday. Most recently and most deadly were the Black Saturday bushfires of 2009 in the southeastern state of Victoria, which killed 173 people. The sheer extent of Australia that goes up in smoke is mind-boggling. An estimated 60,000 bushfires, many of them extensive, flame through Australia each year. (Between one-third and one-half of these are attributed to arson.) According to several tallies, between 130 and 220 million hectares (or 321 to 543 million acres) are burnt each year by either wildfires or intentional controlled burns. That’s a patch of earth somewhat bigger than the nation of Liberia. The carbon emitted from these conflagrations dwarfs the amount spewed by fossil fuels.

“I think of this as solar real estate. And I look at myself as a capitalist,” says Chris Henggeler, referring to his land in a hot, desolate corner of Australia. And his cattle? That’s “middle management,” he says. “They’re our plumbers and electricians.”

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UNH Research: Microbial Traits, Not Plants, Determine Abundance of Soil Organic Matter

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Author: Lori Wright | Published: December 5, 2016

Healthy soil is rich in organic matter, but scientists have yet to fully understand exactly how that organic matter is formed. Now a team of University of New Hampshire scientists have uncovered evidence that microbial pathways – not plants – are the chief originator of the organic matter found in stable soil carbon pools.

The new insight provides promise for designing agricultural systems that promote microbial communities to optimize soil organic matter formation.

The research was conducted by Cynthia Kallenbach, former UNH graduate student now at Colorado State University, her advisor, Stuart Grandy, associate professor of natural resources at UNH, and Serita Frey, professor of natural resources at UNH. Their results were published in the paper “Direct evidence for microbial-derived soil organic matter formation and its ecophysiological controls” in the journal Nature Communications, and comes from work supported by the NH Agricultural Experiment Station.

In the paper, UNH scientists suggest that soil organic matter accumulates from inputs of dead microbial cells and microbial byproducts formed when microbes eat plant roots and residues, rather than from plants themselves, as previously thought.

In the past, scientists thought the best way to build soil organic matter was to slow down or inhibit decomposition using plants that soil microbes find difficult to decompose. The idea was that the undecomposed plant parts would gradually become soil organic matter, especially if the soil microbial community was inactive.

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