Regenerative Agriculture

 What is Regenerative Agriculture?  In a word, it is a combination of various agriculture techniques that restore the fertility of the soil.  That is it in a nutshell.

There are a whole raft of benefits that flow from adopting the techniques of Regenerative Agriculture.  In no particular order:

* Water which falls on the land is retained to a large extent in the soil where it is available for the crops.  There is less evaporation and less flow of water through the soil and into the ground water.  Irrigation demands are reduced during dry periods and less water flows off the farm during wet periods.

*The carbon content of soils increases, sequestering significant carbon from the air.

*Nitrogen in the form of nitrates and Ammonium compounds are very soluable.  When applied as simple, chemical fertilizers, they dissolve in soil water and are easily washed out of the soil and into nearby streams.  Nitrogen in soils in farms practicing regenerative agriculture are held in slow-release form which are made available over the growing season to the crop.

*Costly inputs to the farm, including feed, fossil fuel, herbicides and pesticides greatly decrease, resulting in an improved bottom line for the farmer.  After a few short years using regenerative farming methods, productivity equals or exceeds what we now call conventional (commercial fertilizer driven) farming.

*Regenerative agriculture often involves more than one crop unlike some chemical farming that is a often a monoculture or sometimes an alternation between a couple of different crops.  This increases resilience to  market fluctuation.

*Farming becomes much more resilient to changes in markets and weather.

*Possibly of greatest importance, farming becomes much more interesting as the farmer uses knowledge and smarts rather than expensive inputs to run his farm.  There is no way to become depressed or worse when your bottom line improves and you are in control rather than at the mercy of outside influences.

In order to understand regenerative agriculture, there are a whole bunch of natural phenomenon that must be understood.  Again in no particular order:

*There ain't no sunshine underground.  Pretty obvious, no?  All the energy to support the underground beasties comes ultimately from photosynthesis  by some plant the lived above ground.   

*Soil organisms are really really good at scavenging all the phosphates, nitrates, sulphates and other 'ates' in their vicinity.  All they need is a source of energy in the form of plant material, which was grown  on the surface.  But if you mix-in a whole bunch of straw, sawdust etc, your plants will starve.  The soil beasties will have taken up all the goodies.  So whada you wanda do.  I don't know. Whada you wanda do (The vultures in The Jungle Book).  You put the plant material on the surface.  There it is taken into the soil in a more gradual rate and has other benefits.

*Bare soil, when hit by great big summer rain drops, puddles the fine particles in the soil and the soil surface becomes impermeable to water.  The water runs off, taking soil with it.   Rain drops hitting organic material are stopped in their tracks and seep into the ground.  When the sun comes out and dries the surface.  It is a great insulator and shields the ground below from the heat of the sun.  The soil has absorbed more water and it retains it. 

*Rich organic soil is a great sponge.  It holds lots of water.  The deeper the rich organic layer, the more water it can hold. Pure mineral soil, if fine, doesn't absorb water.  In coarse,gravely soils the water simply flows through it into the water table below - often out of the range of the roots of the plants. If a coarse soil has been filled with organic material, there is a sponge between the coarse particles of the soil to retain water.

*Most plants exude up to 30% of the energy that they collect from the sun through their roots in the form of energy rich compounds.  They don't do this out of the goodness of their non-existent heart.  This behavior wouldn't have evolved if it wasn't worth-while for the plant. The soil organisms use these compounds and, in return, provide a range of benefits for the plant.  In the case of funguseseses, they exchange mineral nutrients which are either locked away chemically from the plant or are beyond the root zone of the plant in exchange for these energy rich compounds.  P is particularly important in this context.

*The mass of the part of a plant that is above ground is more or less equal to the part that is below ground.  When you harvest/crop/graze a plant, some of the roots die back to balance the reduced above-ground part.  Think of this as the insertion of organic material deep down where it is utilized by the soil beasties and ultimately becomes humus. Some plants have roots that reach meters into the soil so this process can be building a very deep layer of top soil.

*Organic material which is laid on top of the soil as mulch, has all the well known benefits such as reducing evaporation, stopping rain drops from disrupting the soil and causing crusting and thereby causing more run off across the soil.  Over time.  Mulch is incorporated into the soil by a number of organisms such as beetles, earth worms and fungus which live at the boarder between the mulch and the soil.

*Fungus in the soil is your greatest ally in growing crops.  Fungus accesses nutrients in two ways and transfers these nutrients to the roots of plants in exchange for the energy rich exudates from the plant roots.  First, fungus can liberate nutrients that are  fixed in the soil and that plant roots can not liberate.  Phosphorous is notable in this context.  Some soils fix P in compounds that are not available to plant roots.  Secondly, the mycellea of funguses extend far beyond the root zone of plants.  They can mobilize and transfer nutrients to the plant from far and wide.

So what are the principles of regenerative farming.

There are a few main principles and lot's of scope within these principles for some fascinating innovation.  

* All the stover is left on the surface of the soil.  Stover is all the parts of the plant that are not utilized by us.  If you have planted corn, stover includes all the stalks, leaves and if it is possible, the cobs.  If you chop it up while harvesting, so much the better.

* Stop plowing.  It disrupts the funguseseses which are the farmer's little helpers.  If you plow a field regularly, you will be hard pressed to find a worm in the soil.  If that isn't an indication of a sick field, I don't know what is.  If you have to seed the field, either use direct drilling or open a small trench of the desired depth and drop the seeds into it.  

*Never leave the soil bare.  Plant a cover crop.  Legumes are a great choice as they fix mega-bucks worth of N into the soil.  All farmers have heard of N-P-K (Nitrogen, Phosphorous Potassium).  It is not accidental that they are in this order.  N is the nutrient needed in the greatest quantities by plants.  And it doesn't have to be a sacrifice crop.  Plant soy beans, alfalfa or other cash crops that fix nitrogen from the air into the soil.  Nothing new here.  Thousands of years before the chemistry/biology  was known, farmers knew to do this.  We seem to have to relearn everything every generation.

*Rotate your crops in as random a schedule as possible, leaving as long as possible between the same crop.  Pests just can't stand this.

*If you are grazing, put the animals into a field at such a concentration that they graze down the sward in one day while trampling some of the plants into the ground and defecating and urinating on the field and then move them to a new place.  You probably have to use electric fences for this due to the cost of permanent fencing.  Let the plants recover before putting the grazers back on to the area but don't allow the plants to go senescent (old and woody).  Over-grazing and under-grazing are equally detrimental.

*Don't be bashful about putting chemical nutrients on your fields.  If a soil analysis shows that you are missing, for instance, Zn, Co, Se, Cu or whatever, apply it.  You can't grow healthy animals without the necessary macro and micro-nutrients.  Regenerative farming isn't some sort of religion.  It is farming with smarts as much as possible, replacing un-needed, costly inputs.  Oh! and when you get a soil analysis, get Total X rather than Available X done.  Once you have a vibrant rhizosphere# plus all the other wee beasties in the soil, they will mobilize what is in the soil.  You achieve this beatific situation by not plowing and by applying lots of organic material on the surface of your soil to power the soil ecology.

# funguseseses

Some interesting books

  By David R Montgomery

Dirt

The Second Half of Nature

Growing a Revolution

What Your Food Ate

 By Michael Pollan

The Omnivore's Dilemma

Omega 3 and 6 Fatty Acids

This is a book review of a small part of a book, What Your Food Ate, by David R Montgomery and Anne Bikle.  It is the most recent (2022) in a series of books including:

Dirt - what happens to a civilization that treats its soil like dirt

The Second Half of Nature - what goes on in a rich organic soil

Growing a Revolution - how to restore degraded soil, from the top, in one to three years - a process that nature  takes centuries to restore, working from the bottom up.

 

This essay is on fatty acids which is only a very small part of the book, which is jammed packed with information on the food-value of foods grown in rich organic soil, compared with foods grown in degraded soils, using chemical nutrients.  The difference is significant.  So what is a fatty acid. 

A fatty acid is a chain of carbon atoms with three hydrogen atoms attached to one end and a OOH at the other end.  All the other carbon atoms in the chain have 2 hydrogen atoms attached to it.  An omega three fatty acid has one H atom missing from the third carbon from the three-hydrogen end.  And as you might guess an Omega 6 fatty acid has one H atom missing from the 6th carbon atom from the three hydrogen end. Seems like a pretty minor difference, No?  This results in  a double bond at the location in question.  Actually, if I remember Organic chemistry correctly, the double bond  flashed back and forth between the carbon in question and the two adjacent carbons but don't take my word for it.  My Organic chemistry is pretty rusty.

Both types of fatty acid are necessary for human health.  The Omega6 fatty acid play a role in inducing inflammation.  Inflammation is part of the defense of the body against viral and bacterial invaders.  Omega 3 fatty acids play a role in shutting down the inflammation when it is no longer needed.  The ideal ratio of these fatty acids in the body is 1:1.  If there is an excess of Omega6s, inflammation may carry on and this can lead to auto-immune conditions and even cancers.  

Humans and many animals can not manufacture these fatty acids.  The ratio in your body reflects the ratio in the food you eat.  This is the same for livestock and if you eat meat that has a 1:1 ratio, you will tend toward a 1:1 ratio*.  

*Of course you don't only eat, say, beef.  The rest of your diet also contributes to your 3-6 ratio.

 

The milk, butter and cheese of a dairy cow will also reflect the 3-6 ratio in the feed of the cow.  

 

Cattle that eat pasture plants will have the ideal 1:1 ratio of fatty acids in their meat.  Cattle that eat concentrate, especially concentrate that is heavily based on corn, will have highly excessive Omega 6 fatty acids in their meat.  If a cow has been raised all her life on pasture and then 'finished' in a feed lot, it only takes a month or two for her fatty acid ratio to reflect her new feed.

 

You see where we are going with this.  I always thought that the "Pasture Fed" advertising was just a marketing gimmick.   Apparently not.  It really is far better to eat pasture fed meat  than feed lot meat.  I suppose the same would apply to animals which are hunted such as deer, pigs, birds in comparison to the same animals,  raised on concentrate. One wonders if feed lots explains the preponderance of auto-immune type conditions that seem to be increasing just as we have pretty well conquered diseases caused by micro-organisms. This seems to be particularly so in America where it seems that any prepared food you eat contains corn.

By the by, what foods besides pasture raised meat are rich in Omega3 fatty acids.  It included many nuts such as walnuts, oily fish at the bottom of the food chain, Other fish - especially wild caught ones,  flax seeds, chia seeds, cold pressed Olive oil, pumpkin seeds, soy beans, eggs if fed on Omega3 rich food, spinach, papya and Brussle Sprouts.

I would heartily recommend getting the four books mentioned at the start.  They explain so much.  By the way, there are no references in What Your Food Ate.  Including them would have increased the size of the book by 50 pages so the authors put the references on line.  The URL, if you want to have a look at them is www.dig2grow.com 

There is much more information on fatty acids in What Your Food Ate and on the nutrient quality of food grown on rich organic soil compared with food grown on degraded soil with the nutrients provided from chemical fertilizer.  In a sentence, the concentrations of minerals, vitamins and phytochemicals in plants grown in rich organic soil are considerably higher.               

My Nissan Leaf

I love my Leaf.  I have never been a petrol-head, even as a teenager.  I just wanted a car to get me from A to B (and of course with my girl friend by my side).  But my electric Leaf is something else again.  I'm a very conservative driver and drive gently but when I want to get out into traffic or pass someone with limited space to do it, man! does my Leaf get up and go.  It's a real jack rabbit.  I can understand why some electric car owners have to change their tires more often than when they drove and ICE car.  

And while we are at it, let's look at the cost of driving compared to an ICE car.  My Leaf has a range of 300km (actually more like 350 but let's keep the numbers simple) with a 60kWh battery.  Dividing 300 by 60, we see that I can drive 5km per kWh or for the sake of comparison, 10km per liter of petrol.  Now here a kWh cost me 25c so I pay 50c per 10km.  (actually I have solar panels but that is another story).  

A similar size ICE car gets about 10km per liter of fuel.  Here a liter of fuel costs $2.50.  Ergo, it costs me a fifth as much on electricity than it would on fossil fuel.  Add to that, that I hardly ever use my brakes and have no oil to change.  On the other side, I think I may need a new set of tires more often with my Leaf.

I think the Leaf could become the iconic  car of this century.  That is if they changed their business model.  For me, at least, their car is excellent and is all the car I will ever need or want but their business model doesn't put the customer first.

For instance, if you have one of the early 24kWh (kilowatt hour) batteries, the battery is probably getting a little tired by now and you won't have the range you once had.  If you can fine a wrecked Leaf with a 24, 30 or 40kWh* battery, it is a matter of about an hour's work to change out your battery for the one in the wrecked Leaf.  Suddenly the range of your Leaf has jumped way up.  And the chemistry back then was not what it is now.  Your new (used) battery is likely to last  longer than the original.  

*A 60kWh battery is apparently a real hassle to fit to the earlier models.  Possible but Quite difficult.

But the Nissan company doesn't make it easy to buy a new, higher capacity battery for your Leaf.  In fact, at least here in New Zealand it is virtually impossible.  This is not a company thinking of the best interests of her customers.

My second gripe is about the temperature control of the battery.  Apparently, too high or too low temperatures are bad for the battery and cause the battery to degrade more quickly.  Nissan should start to put temperature control around her batteries.

So what could Nissan do, even now, 22 years into this century, to make her car the iconic one instead of Tesla.  Actually, she would only make the Leaf iconic for one portion of the market but I suspect this is a huge percent of the market.  There will always be people who want the latest with all the bells and whistles.  Here is Nissan's advantage.  A whole bunch of us don't want this.  We want a reasonable looking car with very good range, ease of repair, nice handling but most of all a low price tag.  How does Nissan achieve this and still make a great profit.

1/  Keep the leaf the same from now on.  The only innovations should be ones that make the car cheaper or with better battery chemistry.  

2/ Decrease the cost of manufacture by, for instance, adopting Elon's mega-casting machines.  With the way you have your battery in the Leaf, you might be able to cast the whole chassis in one go, unlike Tesla that does it in two parts.  And while you are at it, make the underneath of the car flat.  At the back is a hollow that probably held the spare tire when they used the frame from one of their ICE cars for the Leaf.  If the bottom of the car was flattened out, there would be a huge increase in the trunk space.  An added advantage is that apparently a flat under side of a car improves its streamlining.

3/ Keep all the controls tactile.  No touch screens.  The radio in my Leaf is great.  It has a knob on the left for tuning and one on the right for volume and turning on.  Also there are volume control buttons on the steering wheel.  I never have to take my eyes off the road to operate my radio.  All controls should be similarly tactile.

4/ Produce a van for the 'tradie', the plummer, electrician, builder and so forth.  Provide a 220V AC outlet that the tradie could use and lots of attachment points inside the van for attaching shelves and things.  Make it with two sliding doors. Adopt every bit of kit possible from the Leaf.  Only innovate when necessary for the function of a van.