Originally published by: Groundswell
Author: John Cherry, Groundswell Host Farmer
Regenerative Agriculture is quite simple: it is any form of farming, ie the production of food or fibre, which at the same time improves the environment. This primarily means regenerating the soil. It’s a direction of travel, not an absolute.
For millennia, farmers have taken healthy soils and ploughed them and planted into the clean, exposed surface. For some years, their crops would grow well as there would be little competition from weeds and there would be plenty of freely available nutrients, but after a few years of this, the soil would lose health; crop yields would plummet so that the farmers were forced to rest and/or feed their land. The ancient Romans and good farmers ever since have had to do this but nonetheless, over time, poor farming has resulted in soils becoming so unhealthy that they’ve eventually been blown or washed away: the Land of Milk and Honey that Moses led his people to, or the North African bread basket that fed the Roman Empire are both now deserts. The dust-storms in the last hundred years in America show this is still going on.