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