WATCH: Regenerative Agriculture – #SolutionsWatch
We all know the problem of The Future of Food. So, who’s ready for the solution? Today on #SolutionsWatch, James examines regenerative agriculture, one of the solutions that is already being used to wean us off the industrialized factory farming system and back toward a healthy relationship with our food…and with the earth itself.
Sources, shownotes and links – as well as audio versions and download options – can be found here. Previous episodes of #SolutionsWatch can be found here and here.
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A good link pertinent to the article.
https://organicconsumers.org/
Thanks for that, the good people at the Organic Consumers Website have actually shared some of my work in the past, here is the link to where they shared my past article:
https://organicconsumers.org/23-reasons-you-should-start-a-garden-in-2023-2/
Yes. These are among the things we can actively support and advance as solutions to centralized corporate control. Here of food. The re-localize movement, permaculture, urban gardens, local food, organic, pastured/toxics-free farming and ranching, plus a whole lot more ideas that the 99% can engage in and deploy to defund the 1%’s totalitarian grasp on society. There are so many decentralized policy ideas out there, related to every sector of life on Earth. We just need to start discussion, vetting and refining them and then deploying them ourselves as protection from the centralized theft schemes of the 1%. At the root though, is recreating protected freedom to act independently that has been/is being stolen from Humanity. Like Regenerative Ag, the solutions to all problems are holistic, non-linear system design. All the groundwork has been done by many brilliant people. We just need to focus on those solutions + 99% will-to-succeed to steamroller the greedy intent of the 1%.
I agree with your sentiment, but do you really think that >1% of the population is the only percentile robbing the soil of fertility, and us of our spontaneity? For socio-ecologic context: we in the UK were already degenerating our soil fertility by the beginning of the 19th century. So much so that we were robbing the Irish of their soil fertility, desecrating the battlefields of Europe, importing Peruvian guano in order to replenish what we had already despoiled. So much so that the groundbreaking (!!!) soil scientist Leibig called it an organised robbery system (Raubsystem). Before that there was a ~200y tree famine, right up to the point we learned to harness coal, fire, and steam…. which did nothing to lessen the impact on biomass, as noted by Jevons (aka the “Jevons Paradox”)… and the population was around 11m back then.
So: how will 67.3m of us on soil further depleted by another ~200y of ever more intensive and systemic nutrient robbery? And if we could just about feed ourselves under wartime rationing conditions, what would we do for fuel as the same land cannot be used twice (food or fuel)? As an autonomous island ecology, the current population faces a <Feed or Freeze> dilemma nobody wants to mention, let alone pay attention to.
The 1%, the elite, the PTB or the SYSTEM, whatever one wants to call it, have been the entity that creates and implements public policy, without our input, consent or authority. This capitalist authoritarian civilization has become absolutely rogue from sanity post WW2. It is not blaming them. It’s pinning cause on the generating engine. Taking in all elections, only around 40% of eligible voters vote. A vote only approves Haole 1 or Haole 2 to be YOUR Haole that makes policy in accordance with the aforementioned rat class’s demands for profit empire. We are relegated to nothings. My experience is when people are fully informed and engaged in vetting the situation to produce a collective best benefit, common sense and rationality rules the day. We need to focus on creating that problem solving environment to self-rule Humanity while restricting poverty and wealth from extremes creating disaster.
With some qualification, I agree. However, the problem remains: how will 67m survive in the UK? Remember, the land was previously made more profitable–for primary accumulation as a pre-capitalist phase–by Enclosure and Clearance… which led to the knock-on effect of settler-colonialism and the theft of Other’s land and the genocide of superfluous Unpeople. There is no more land to appropriate, which is why fertility everywhere is degenerating. All of which occurred before WW2.
The UK–as the other overdeveloped High Income Countries–got its high levels of material wealth from elsewhere, the net effect of which is and was totalised accumulative degeneration of the earth’s ecology. We created poverty by importing their surplus and displacing them from their land in order to increase our net economic gain. Calling it wealth ignores its parasitoid nature which we embodied. If we took less there would be less poverty, less environmental degradation, less wealth. and less “extremes creating disaster”… but we would still have to “focus on creating that problem solving environment” by addressing the burning question:”how do 67m of us live off the resource base of this tiny island landmass without expropriating an imperial surplus from the Rest?”
Only then are we addressing the real problem realistically. How do we maintain the fertility of our soil without expropriating “surplus fertility” from elsewhere? We just about managed to feed ~45m in WW2 (with quite a bit of help from Russian and Canadian wheat)… so how will we do that again without excessive imports, oil, or nitrogenous fertilisers given that it can take hundreds of years to fully regenerate living soil?
The autonomy of self-rule is grounded in the ground, in soil fertility. Whether regenerative agriculture, agroecology, permaculture (at the population wide or island scale)… only living soil can set us free from this bioaccumulative hell. Only, “not a lot of people know that” or are willing to admit it, let alone base their analysis in the ecology of the soil.
My response is that the root problem is the linear and exploitative policies of the authoritarian capitalist elite that have been running the world this way for 500 years. Their total braindead obsolete method and content of public pollicy (everything) has brought Humanity to the brink in every category of practice. We must remove them from authority-to-decide and replace them with us, via direct democracy of acceptable consensus form, and policy that approaches every problem from a holistic systems design that reverts centralzed control to localized autonomous control. Refugees can return to regions of origin when holistic solutions dictate the West get out of foreign exploitation and war empire mode, and we turn to facilitating indigenous self sufficiency everywhere on Earth. Humanity, sans Bad Parent tyrants, would have been doing this naturally all along. It’s up to us to openly advocate to this solution and make it so through the acceptance of common sense across Humanity. Imho.
back in the pending blacklist, got a note from your supervisor i guess?
Nice, can I have some land with road access please
Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes to life-affirmation grounded in the earth… <soil not oil>…. But, and it is a very big BUT… we cannot just relocalise any regenerative agronomics alone—because ALL economics is ultimately agronomics—we have to reduce the other 99% of the globalised economy down to the bioagronomic base or basal biocapacity in order to regenerate the fertility of the earth we have plundered in the last few hundred years… <regrowth is degrowth>… bye-bye to the whole of the degenerative market-economic anthropogenesis.
A truly socio-ecological bioagronomic, agroecologic, “syntropic” permaculture oecosystem can only go hand-in-hand within the food-market, and never, ever the free-market. The ecology-free market-economic excesses of production and consumption of private property was an is a totalised rejection of any ecologic “basal” or “universal metabolism” of the earth. The rejection of the ecologic agricultural base, and the urbanisation of the “post-ecologic” libidinal economy was and is the primary source of the “metabolic rift” between any ecologic compatible production-consumption cycle and the current economic incompatible production-consumption cycle base on producing ‘money’… not in universal equivalence or equilibrium with private property, but in universal equivalence or equilibrium with the soil.
So the “dialectics of nature” is the “dialectics of the earth” is one continous ecosystemic feedback cycle—or socio-ecological metabolism—between human economic production-consumption and more-than-human production-consumption as extended metabolic reproduction cycles; where the human economy is in a permanent self-reinforcing ‘positive’ and ‘progressive’ growth cycle, and the earth ecologic is in a ‘negative’—or self-balancing—state of steady-state metabolic regulation.
Despite this extended metabolic insight forming the basis of understanding of a great many thinkers—from inter alios Marx, Engels, Maus, Simmel, Bataille, Arendt, Polanyi, and so on… “Not a lotta people seem to know this”… or notice that the human organism is a production of the earth. And now the earth is a production of the human organism; rapidly accelerating toward the ultimate and untimely peak of production-consumption as excessively positive and progressive consumptogenesis-only.
So: “Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes to life-affirmation grounded in the relocalised food-markets of the earth… ” means “No, No, No, No to death-confirmation grounded in the relocalised free-market of the city” which is the only remedy we have ever needed to theorise to heal the marketised metabolic rift… since 1844. (Big shout out to John Bellamy-Foster, Paul Burkett etcetera who has been saying much the same for the last forty years or so.)
(Farewell comment, see you in two or three days… maybe.)
This is one of the best videos Corbett has done in his solutions watch series, it can’t be easy for a laymen to define something as nebulous as Regenerative Agriculture.
There still seems to be some confusion amongst the comments, although I believe RegenAg started in the Permaculture movement (Darren Doherty) it is not permacultre per se. Permaculture is primarily based on Ethics, an ethical design science to produce permanent-agriculture, permanent culture. RegenAg could be described as broadscale permaculture, but it is primarily based on economics, utilising the most ecomonical methods to build topsoil and produce healthy crops.
Many of the tools used in RegenAg have much deeper roots, actively aerated compost tea (AACT) can be traced back to Rudolf Steiner and Biodynamics, but very few RegenAg practitioners bury a cow horn filled with manure from a lactating cow to make a seed compost to brew AACT. 21st century Science uses different methods, practitioners use Johnson-Su bioreactors, or windrow turners to make their seed composts, and microscopes for quality control, using air driven compost tea brewers or extractors to increase aerobic biology, some also utilise methods from Korean Natural Farming to make extracts of facultative anaerobes.
Soil science is also employed, some of the tests can be traced back to the 1930’s and the Albrecht system, you won’t find many in the RegenAg commuity who disagree with Albrechts 7:1 Ca:Mg ratio, but few will know where that ratio originated. If you have tight, easily compacted soil, it’s very likely you have a Calcium deficiency, or excess Mg. It’s remarkable I couldn’t find a UK soil lab that utilises the tests that mimic how plants get their nutrients, the Mehlich 3 and saturated paste test don’t seem to be available in the UK, I had to send samples to the US (Logan Labs)!
John Kempf has a completely different approach, his system employs sap analysis of the crops and utilises foiliar feeds to provide chelated nutrients, working on the premis that healthy plants produce healthy soil, rather than the other way around, where healthy soil produces healthy plants; both approaches can work very well.
Dan Kittridge (Bionutrient food Association) has yet another approach, he uses a plethora of different rock dusts applied annually as the only source of added fertility, this can only work if soil microbiology is present, and soil conditions are maintanied to keep the microbiology healthy, to extract the nutrients and make them available to plants.
How to remidaite soil to produce nutrient dense food?
1. Test the soil, Mehlich 3 and saturated paste test cost ~£/$100, these tests mimic plant root interations and give you the potential nutirents available in your soil profile.
2. Amend the soil based on the test results, add organic matter, remove compaction.
3. Choose you remidiation methods, AACT, Korean Natural Farming inputs etc.
4. Maintain a soil environment conducive to healthy microbiology, stop using chemicals, minimise disturbance, keep the soil covered with cover crops or mulch, maintain moisture levels, keep it adequately watered.
5. test again (at least every 3 years). Observation is a key ingredient, a skilled observer can negate soil testing.
6. Re-evaluate remidiation methods
7. continue the cycle.
Hope that provides a little more insight, if you would like more info just ask.
Excellent advice Pete.
Thanks for this post!
Do you have a link with more details please?
If you give me some more context I can give more specific resources, are you a gardener, market gardener, arable farmer, pasture farmer, mixed farmer, or just generally interested? Would you like info on specific resources, AACT, KNF etc?
Here’s Dan Kittridges seminar on High Bionutrient Crop Production (9 parts) which is a brilliant general primer, it goes pretty in depth, his channel is a massive resource on it’s own, have a browse of the video library.
Thank you for this very informative and perspicacious comment.
If you were to characterize and describe Regenerative Agroforestry, Syntropic Farming and the Food Forest design techniques (that were utilized by the indigenous peoples of Turtle Island for centuries- millennia prior to contact with Europeans) in relation to Permaculture and Regenerative Agriculture, how would you describe those practices, techniques and mindsets? And how do they relate to each other?
My next book is going to be aimed at offering practical and scalable temperate climate focused regenerative agroforestry and food design information that offers a full “seed to table and “seed to apothecary” journey for growing one’s own food and medicine in the context of a multi-layered forest ecosystem.
I look forward to learning more about your work on these topics in the future.
RegenAg Forestry has a lot of potential, I believe intelligently designed and managed timber and/or fruit/nut crops in rows between conventinal organic crops and/or pasture would benefit the wider eco system in many ways, and provide a resiliant sustainable income for the farmer, it would be ideal to design such systems on watershed scales, although difficult in the modern system of land ownership.
I know Darren Doherty is working on a large scale project in N.India where they’re planting 5 million trees! My biggest project was a 7 acre site with only 4500 trees, 500 of which were incorporated as a food forest, it was a logistical conundrum, rather than a design problem, I can’t imagine the logistics for 5 millon! I hope his project is is being recorded, I’d love to see how it develops.
I find Syntropic Farming very interesting, it seems especially suitable for regenerating particularly degraded lands in the tropics, using succession to create microclimates that can support higher plants is ingenious design. I’m not sure such high density planting is ideal in temperate zones outside the tropics with much higher rainfall, with harsher seasons and varying sun angles, Geoff Lawton has spoken about syntropic limitations outside the tropics also. I follow Dario at Orto Foresta (on YT in italian) who is employing syntopic design into his market garden in Italy, it’s a relatively new site with it’s own issues, this is only his second season.
It’s difficult to charaterterize these systems in a simple paragraph, and even more difficult to equate them to designs utilized by the indigenous peoples around the world. I think we have a lot to learn from all these indigenous sytems, and when we can identify individual elements of their designs we can adapt and incorporate into our own sytems, we should, classic examples would be biochar being copied from Tera Preta in Amzonian soils, or chinapas from Aztec farming in Mexico, maybe hugelkulture from Eastern Europe too. Though we should strive to take our main design inspiration primarily from Nature, Allan Savory and Holistic Management (mob/time controlled grazing) comes to mind as a good example.
Mindset is a difficult subject to address, the more we’re ensconced into these subjects and devlop our own gardens, and the more aligned with nature we become, it’s possible our mindset becomes more aligned with our ancient ancestors symbiotic realationship with Nature, but very few of us manage to have these opportunities given the pressures of the “outside” world and the parasite classes determination to keep it that way. In some respects this is why RegenAg has such massive potential, being driven largely by economics it has huge potential to take back control of the land at the same time starving the big chemical companies et al of profit and control.
Regenerative Lab Culture
This guy wouldn’t even make good compost…way too toxic!
If he is hoping for immortality, it doesn’t look like that meat suit has much mileage left in it.
All that money and can’t afford a gym membership?
He looks a bit like the avatar I got stuck with here in OG, fresh from the lab.
More like Beluga, Dom Perignon and truffles.
Recently US president Biden went a-wandering from a gathering
of VIPs, and was lassoed back into the pack by an Italian Cowgirl…
We’re told subsequently “It didnt happen ! The footage was Deep
Fake, generated by AI.”…
And there’s also the claim that Israeli PMs psychiatrist of 9 years
suicided, a claim subsequently dismissed as ‘being generated by AI.”
Could it be that the use of ‘dis-information’ has begun to lose its
usefulness, and we’ll be hearing more actual facts being countered
by the claim they were generated by AI ?
If you’re going to the Paris Olympics (26 July – 11 August)
remember, Paris can get awfully hot that time of year…
Remember: In 1911 a Heat Wave killed 41,000 over 70 days…
If it gets too hot, if a heat wave occurs during The Olympics, no doubt
claims that Global Warming (aka – Climate Change) is to blame will
abound, and will be believed, ably assisted by Historical Amnesia…
https://notrickszone.com/2019/07/02/frances-70-day-heat-wave-of-1911-killed-41000-in-uninterrupted-heat-most-were-babies/
Don’t get Jabbed, but even if you did. most of the clot shots were effectively blanks, and had no effect..
All of the ‘died suddenly’ where asymptomatic!!
Your a idiot Tony
Here in Australia, we call it Permaculture.
Conceived by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren back in the 70s, it has been adopted and adapted all around the world, because it works on both small and large food supply systems.
In a nutshell, it’s a design method where one allows the landscape, nature and the weather to guide how the land is utilised.
A veritable glut of information can be found on the www.
FKA – Agriculture…
an offshoot of which is Hugelkultur- if you use twigs…
😉
I doubt they conceived it. Rural farmers across the world have been doing it forever, based on local conditions, resources and crops.
Permaculture also integrates things like solar passive house design, compost toilets, woodlots and small scale animal farming.
The whole box and dice, so to speak.
Well, the problem is we cant feed and deed 10 mio in NYC with compost toilets, chicken shit, solar energy and Permanent culture, unless you want these people out of the way. Dreaming.https://youtu.be/B885n08hOmw
Your alternative update on #COVID19 for 2024-06-19. Alzheimers up 22.5% and MCI up 238% . Kansas is suing Pfizer over safety and efficacy claims of its jab (blog, gab, tweet, pic1, pic2, pic3, pic4).
From your Link (search “Kansas”)
“Andrew Bridgen @ABridgen) The state of Kansas is suing Pfizer over the safety and efficacy claims of its MRNA Covid injections. The action accuses Pfizer of “falsely representing the benefits of its COVID-19 vaccine while concealing and suppressing the truth about its vaccine’s safety risks.” (tweet).”
That’s the way to go. Use the Law. Pay a good Lawyer to take your case to a true judge and expose false judgments.
“Thou shalt not utter false judgment” — The Good Book.
I doubt whether any regime (eg, Westminster) has the right to override due process of Law by pardoning in advance any act of Medical Malfeance due to administration of a Dodgy Vaxx. Take Oxford/Zeneca to court.
“Jun 13, 2022The AstraZeneca [alleged] vaccine is [allegedly] safe and effective at protecting people from the [allegedly] extremely serious risks of COVID-19, including death, hospitalization and severe disease. Read the 16 April 2021 statement of the WHO Global Advisory Committee on Vaccine Safety”
The above WHO statement is liable for damages in any court in the world, under the Misrepresentation of Goods Act.
Always deflect blame from the government. If you must, blame a business.
Also see bio-dynamic farming (agriculture)…
https://www.biodynamics.com/steiner.html
It was Ghandi’s ideas too. Small self-sustaining communities. Nothing can beat such a country. But off course the big usury bankers didnt like it.