Regenerative Agriculture
For decades, farmers and scientists alike have expressed concern over the apparent loss of topsoil in the American Midwest, yet causes of soil destruction are only recently becoming well understood.
Suspicion has shifted many times over the years. When I was a boy growing up around the open range system of public land use in western states, many environmental activists loudly bemoaned the presence of cattle, claiming that grazing was stressing the soil and turning grasslands into desert. Much better, they said, to remove cattle from the land and “allow nature to take it’s course” on public lands. The only problem was that when cattle were removed from stressed areas, desertification didn’t abate, it accelerated. During this time some biologists even pointed to “overpopulation” of wild herbivores as the likely cause of grassland destruction, soil erosion and creeping desertification and advocated reducing herd sizes of deer and elk in America and elephants in Africa. (Biologist Allan Savory delivers a poignant mea culpa in his famous 2013 TED talk on this topic)
Herbicide and pesticide use, along with attendant hybridization or genetic modification of crops has been called into question more recently, with detractors claiming massive environmental and human health affects from these chemicals. Proponents of modern agriculture point out that without these amendments, “feeding the world” would remain out of reach.
Soil
“The nation that destroys its soil destroys itself.” - Roosevelt
“Regenerative Agriculture” starts with belief that farmers and ranchers can profitably restore soil fertility, environmental and human health by actively managing farmland and animal impact to mimic natural processes.
Since the invention and adoption of modern chemical fertilizer began during World War II, per-acre production of corn has increased six-fold, from an average 25-30 bushels per acre to near 180 bushels per acre (http://www.agry.purdue.edu/ext/corn/news/timeless/yieldtrends.html). While this increase has been nearly miraculous in it’s impact on eliminating famine for most of the world, it’s not been without some unintended side affects.
In the past ten years, a new approach has been proposed by a small but growing number of renegade farmers and biologists who have spent years observing natural cycles, especially in soil biology, and then put their observations to work in their farm businesses. This approach is revolutionary and controversial on two fronts: Conventional agriculture as trained and promoted by government agronomists, university classrooms and large agribusinesses, point to 80 years of success in increasing food supply and asks why we’re messing with success. Environmentalists, long trained to see the detriment of human impact on nature, are deeply suspicious of any approach that includes “management” by humans and wonder why we can’t just reduce human population let whole swaths of land “go back to nature.”
Our farm lives and works in this new, exciting and terrifying middle-ground of human management according to natural principals, as closely as we can discern them.