Why Regenerative Agriculture
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Why regenerative agriculture?
We live in a world in which every feature of every ecosystem worldwide is deeply degraded and obviously worsening. Although there is much public quibbling over this fact, it remains a fact which can be measured at virtually any point on all of Earth.
Many refer to our current global predicament as climate change, and propose to treat it by focusing on the carbon which comes from our various energy systems. Yes, the climate is changing; mostly it’s getting hotter and more violent. This is one symptom of a collapsing ecosystem, but it’s only one. We must drastically reduce our CO2 emissions, many of which do come from burning fossil fuels, but this is by no means our only “must.”
Industrial annual rowcrop agriculture, the method of agriculture which currently produces much of the food and plant fiber produced worldwide, is an ecological disaster. Most of the topsoil is already gone from most of the world’s farm fields. Groundwater is disappearing. Agricultural chemicals are killing off the world’s pollinators as well as the basis of the global food web,
While current agricultural practices do produce vast amounts of a handful of annual grasses and legumes, thereby feeding much of the world’s populations, they are by no means the only way to feed ourselves, and in fact are rapidly moving us toward a world where we can’t.
Industrial agriculture is based on a mechanized system where a top priority is to remove humans from the food production process. This is absurd. In a world with over 8 billion humans, a world where the phrase “bullshit jobs” is widely understood, a world where every new act of ecocide is justified because it will produce “jobs,” there are no more honorable, and few more enjoyable, ways to employ our numbers than in healing ecosystems while producing food for humans and all other living things.
There are many terms, and many schools of thought, regarding non-industrial, non-destructive agriculture. We here at Richmond Regenerative Agriculture have chosen the term Regenerative Agriculture, because our objective here is to recreate, or regenerate, as much as possible the rich, food-bearing ecosystem which was here prior to the colonization of our region. We take much of our inspiration from the system called Permaculture, and from one specific regenerative farmer, Mark Shepard at New Forest Farm in Wisconsin.
Fundamental to this process is regenerating topsoil, capturing water in the soil, and growing perennial food crops native to our region. We live and farm along a seasonal upland creek, where reintroducing beavers by itself would do more to enrich our biosphere than I can easily say. Yes, beavers, if they lived here, would cut down trees which I have planted. Yes, we would have to adapt to their construction. Yes, if they got too close to the boundaries of our land the outer society would hasten to destroy them if possible. Meanwhile, while they were here, they would recharge our ground water, make our seasonal creek permanent, bring in populations of fish and birds, provide water for all of life, and catch the neighbors’ topsoil before it found its way to the Gulf of Mexico.
At any large scale, regenerative agriculture will require a regenerative diet. The diet which goes with industrial agriculture, and indeed with any annuals-based annual crop agriculture, is based on about five grass seeds and three or four legume seeds. Rice, wheat, corn, millet, sorghum, soybeans, various dried beans and a few in which we eat the pods too, like green beans.
Perennial staple crops are mostly nuts. Under annuals-based agriculture staples tend to be grass seeds, while under perennial agriculture staples are mostly tree and bush seeds. Where I live, primary pre-colonialization staples were acorns and hazelnuts. Many of the peoples of the eastern half of Turtle Island relied heavily on chestnuts. Fruits and vegetables varied by locale, and were often seasonal.
There is no regenerative way to grow large yields of annual grass seeds or bean seeds under monocrop management. A healthy ecosystem is a wildly varying complex tapestry of grasses, shrubs, trees, vines, forbs, and animals. Humans can eat and prosper on diet which contain mixes of every class of plant and animal which their ecosystem provides. We did, after all, evolve here.
We’ll do better if we act like it.
