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Session 2: Regenerative Agriculture & Thriving Local Economies

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Food is Life

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From Nnimmo Bassey’s opening speech at Oxford Real Farming Conference in January this year:

“Food sovereignty is the key to the future. Food is not just a thing for eating, or for celebration. Food is Life. We must halt the loss of complexity and meaning in food systems. Because... Agriculture is Life. And food is a celebration.”

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Food is a gateway to healing the whole system.

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Every patch of Earth unencumbered by concrete

Where soil and atmosphere meet

Is a portal to presence, a terrain of remembrance

A vote for survival in an unpromised future

These gardens are blueprints

Of interdependent destiny, intergenerational memory, saving seeds for food as remedy

See, my people know what it’s like to eat and still be starving

So we turning hardship into harvest, schoolyards into gardens, home-grown bounty in our palms

We come from soil and stardust.

And so we conjure,

Giving props to hood magicians who grow provisions for our kitchens

We smuggle spinach into prisons, transform the places that we live in

Trade psychosis for symbiosis and stay focused

We sprout sunflowers that tower our neighbourhood blocks

Harvest raindrops on rooftops to water our crops

Propagate plant medicine for the metropolis guarding our plots, because our gardens are not for profit or loss

Cross-pollinate the promise fam - we got this

Take a deep breath, Restore commons

With lemon balm bounty in our palms, hot peppers in our pockets, black-eyed peas spiralling up the big corn stalks, with buttercup squash carpets

Three sisters, symbiotic, topping stories of solidarity, our native territory

Migratory monarchs… transcend borders, morning glories… ascend fences

Pay attention to the lessons Mother Nature keeps expressing, how to multiply our blessings

For justice and sustenance, amid glaring disparity

Every seed saved will set us free, in an age of opulence and scarcity

Every seed saved will set us free, in a time of intensifying violence and climate calamity

Every seed saved will set us free

Hold on tight to the source…

We have all that we need

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Can Agriculture Be Life?

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Agriculture: what happened?

Loss of complexity - increase of control

Monocropping
Genetic loss of diversity
Huge areas of land
Land ownership
NPK fertilisers, pesticides, herbicides
Mechanised workforce
Fewer people on the land

GREEN REVOLUTION - or AGRICULTURAL REVOLUTION

1950-1960s

INCREASED AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTION WORLDWIDE - initiatives developed by the Ford Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation resulting in the ADOPTION of NEW TECHNOLOGIES - high-yielding varieties of cereals, chemical fertizilers, agrochemicals, newer methods of cultivation, including mechanization.

All of these together were seen as a 'package of practices' to supersede 'traditional' technology and to be adopted as a whole.

Key figure - NORMAN BORLAUG - won Nobel Peace Prize “FATHER of the GREEN REVOLUTION”

Credited with saving over a billion people from starvation.

Technology to save the world… little did we know the impact it would have --- hubris

SOIL AND LAND AND FOOD IS A COMPLEX WEB ---- and we disrupted it

The advent of artificial fertiliser in the last century promised a new approach, by providing the three essential nutrients – nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium (NPK) – directly to the soil. Farmers embraced it eagerly, with an immediate rise in fertility in some exhausted soils, but indiscriminate use has effectively undercut its value, mining soils for their nutrients and allowing excess fertiliser to run off and poison waterways.

We tried to squeeze the soil for all it’s got

WE TOOK A COMPLEX SYSTEM AND MADE IT LINEAR

SO NEXT: SOIL

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Soil

The soil is a complex web of billions of microorganisms working in symbiosis to sustain life on earth and it is also a giant carbon sequestering sponge.

SOIL IS A COMPLEX SYSTEM AND BY “SOILING” IT MEETS SO MANY NEEDS

Soil is the key to reversing climate change - biggest sink for carbon. AND provides us with 95% of the food we consume

Stores carbon and nutrients. Stores water - so crops are more resilient in the face of drought. Ensures supplies of clean water - filters the water

If we TEND THE SOIL we will have more NUTRIENT DENSE food, more rich and nutritious, more COMPLEX SUGARS because the MICROBIOME CREATES more COMPLEX SUGARS

Healthy soil is a healthy microbiome - connection between soil biodiversity and gut microbiome diversity and scientific research showing links between gut microbiome and mental health, allergies, gluten intolerance, IBS, etc

SOIL IS ENDANGERED

Soil takes hundreds of years to form from rock. Astonishingly rapid decline.

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Wendell Berry once said:

“The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.” - Wendell Berry

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Soil Health

Ecosystem Health

Gut Health

Community Health

Whole-being Health

Mental Health

The FAO (Food and Ag Organization) estimates we may have as few as 60 harvests left, so depleted in nutrients have our soils become.

The Earth loses roughly 23 billion tons of fertile soil every year. At this rate, all fertile soil will be gone within 150 years, unless farmers convert to practices that restore and build soil organic matter, an essential component of soil fertility.

Massive soil erosion

Soil is a complex, living being - soil microstructures take years and years to build up complexity, microbiome diversity, water storage, sponge like nature - completely decimated by TILLING and USE OF CHEMICALS that KILL the soil MICROBIOME

Soil becomes THIN - erodes - washes or blows away by rain or wind.

Other threats…. Pollution, along with acidification, salinization and the loss of organic carbon in soil. Excess nitrogen in soil, from fertilisers, is the main cause of soil acidification and salinization. It also contributes to water pollution.

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Beyond “Organic” to Regenerative Agriculture

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Agroforestry

No-till farming

Holistic management

Pasture fed livestock

Holistic grazing

Permaculture

Biodynamic

Heritage grains

Rewilding

Seed saving

Polycropping

Land justice

Community Supported Agriculture

Urban farming

Returning land to indigenous peoples

Community sovereignty

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Permaculture, Biodynamic

and Paludiculture

Some farmers go further, and embrace concepts such as permaculture and biodynamics.

PERMACULTURE

Permaculture is an approach to land management that adopts arrangements observed in flourishing natural ecosystems. It includes a set of design principles derived using whole systems thinking. It uses these principles in fields such as regenerative agriculture, rewilding, and community resilience.

BIODYNAMICS

Biodynamics takes a different approach, following the precepts of Rudolf Steiner and incorporating a spiritual aspect, for instance in some cases aligning planting and harvesting to lunar calendars. No scientific evidence it works, but yields measured are higher.

�PALUDICULTURE

Peatlands, which around the world have been grossly degraded, can also be managed organically through paludiculture. This requires re-wetting dried-out peatlands and looking to alternative plants that grow well there, including forestry and medicinal plants such as sphagnum moss, and allowing animals to graze.

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Example: No-Till Agriculture

A regenerative agriculture practice that restores and builds soil organic matter, an essential component of soil fertility.

Tilling involves turning over the first 6 – 10 inches of soil before planting new crops. Undisturbed soil resembles a sponge, held together by an intricate structure of different soil particles and channels created by roots and soil organisms. When the soil is disturbed by tilling, its structure becomes less able to absorb and infiltrate water and nutrients - therefore gets ERODED.

Tilling also displaces and/or KILLS MICROBIOME - kills off the millions of microbes and insects that form healthy soil biology. The long-term use of deep tillage can convert healthy soil into a lifeless growing medium dependent on chemical inputs for productivity.

Tractors also COMPACT the soil

No-till farming MINIMISES SOIL DISTURBANCE (and keeps plant residues underground, rotting, instead of combining with OXYGEN to make CO2) which helps keep carbon in the soil. It also ENRICHES SOIL BIODIVERSITY, reducing the need for chemical fertilizers that emit greenhouse gases. Studies have shown that organic no-till practices, when combined with cover cropping and organic management, help increase soil organic carbon by up to 9 percent after two years and 21 percent after six years.

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Example: Holistic Management

https://savory.global/holistic-management/

Holistic management describes a systems thinking approach to managing resources. Holistic management was originally developed by Allan Savory for grazing management, but is now being adapted for use in managing other systems with complex social, ecological and economic factors.

Beef is bad? Livestock is unsustainable?

Meat, and in particular, cows, have got a really bad name. This is mainly because of:

Land use - you effectively “farm twice” because you need the land to grow the plants (often corn or soy, large monocultures, and soil depleting) to feed the cows, and the land for the cows themselves.

�Research shows that without meat and dairy consumption, global farmland use could be reduced by more than 75% – an area equivalent to the US, China, European Union and Australia combined – and still feed the world. Loss of wild areas to agriculture is the leading cause of the current mass extinction of wildlife.

The water consumption - a beef burger takes as much water as a month of showers to produce
The chemicals used in antibiotics, and the pollution from the run-off, acidifying soils, causing algal blooms in waterways
The ethics - the majority of the meat on the market is reared in unethical conditions - male cows are separated from their mothers at birth, and killed because they don’t produce milk or give birth to new cows
Cow flatulence - methane

“A vegan diet is probably the single biggest way to reduce your impact on planet Earth, not just greenhouse gases, but global acidification, eutrophication, land use and water use,” said Joseph Poore, at the University of Oxford, UK, who led the research. “It is far bigger than cutting down on your flights or buying an electric car,” he said, as these only cut greenhouse gas emissions.

Livestock grazing on pasture can support soil health and carbon sequestration, and manure can provide soil fertility for other crops.

Holistic planned grazing is similar to rotational grazing but differs in that it more explicitly recognizes and provides a framework for adapting to the four basic ecosystem processes: the water cycle, the mineral cycle including the carbon cycle, energy flow, and community dynamics (the relationship between organisms in an ecosystem), giving equal importance to livestock production and social welfare. Holistic Management has been likened to "a permaculture approach to rangeland management".[11]

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What can we do immediately & locally?

Seek out your local urban farm, volunteer hours
Connect with local farms, gain on-farm experience
Support your local farmer’s market
Seek out and join your local Community Supported Agriculture scheme or farm veg box scheme
Sign up to The Open Food Network
Try and buy local and seasonal food where possible
Cut down meat and buy from sustainable sources

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Right Relation

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Land and Food Justice

Revolution is based on land. Land is the basis of all independence. Land is the basis of freedom, justice, and equality. (Malcom X)

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Soul Fire Farm

Leah Penniman

Soul Fire Farm is an Afro-Indigenous centered community farm committed to uprooting racism and seeding sovereignty in the food system. We raise and distribute life-giving food as a means to end food apartheid. With deep reverence for the land and wisdom of our ancestors, we work to reclaim our collective right to belong to the earth and to have agency in the food system. We bring diverse communities together on this healing land to share skills on sustainable agriculture, natural building, spiritual activism, health, and environmental justice. We are training the next generation of activist-farmers and strengthening the movements for food sovereignty and community self-determination.

Penniman explains how the current agricultural system reinforces racial inequality, and she also gives would-be farmers the tools they need to break free from it.

Penniman began farming with her husband Jonah when they could not find fresh vegetables in their Albany neighborhood. Today they run Soul Fire Farm, a highly diversified 80-acre nonprofit organic farm in the nearby town of Grafton, New York, which has become an important training center for farmers of color. “We use Afro-indigenous and regenerative practices—fancy words that essentially mean we’re trying to farm using the best advice of our ancestors and we’re trying to farm in a way that actually makes the environment better and not worse,” she says.

“Black land matters.”

Land justice is at the centre of racial justice

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Thriving local economies

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Greener,

More reliable,

More resilient &

More affordable?

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Greener: Distributed small-scale solar (price plummeting)

More reliable: Energy storage is becoming cheaper and more diverse, from various kinds of batteries and fuel cells to thermal storage in hot water or ice. Software, AI, and machine learning are enabling intelligent integration of diverse energy sources

More resilient: What makes a microgrid a microgrid is that it can flip a switch and “island” itself from its parent grid in the event of a blackout. This enables it to provide those connected to it with (at least temporary) backup power

More affordable: 'Prosumers' generating energy through their own renewable resource can transact energy autonomously in near-real time with consumers on the platform in their local marketplace

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"When users meet, the system syncs their local databases using a gossip protocol and replicates the data. Encrypted data is transported from peer, to peer, to peer until it reaches its intended recipient."