Why Regenerative?
The ‘R’ word. By now you’ve probably seen it, and if you’re like us, another buzzword is the last thing you need to see on the food you buy. Just another marketing gimmick to make a standard product seem new or exciting, right? Well, yes and no. Here’s the scoop.
The idea of regenerative agriculture is by no means new. Shortly after humans all around the world developed land management systems we’ve come to know as agriculture, those same people began to see that the continued cultivation of crops led to lower yields over time. Enter the simple yet elusive concept of soil fertility. Clearly the reduced yields and increased pressure from weeds and pests was tied to soil fertility, but what did that really mean, and how could this problem be overcome? Rather quickly, two strategies emerged for dealing with diminished soil fertility. The first, driven by traditional knowledge and values was to give back; to nurture and care for the land in a relationship of reciprocity, a cycle of both giving and receiving. The methods used in this first strategy were diverse, based more on principle than practice, and adapted to local environments and customs. The second strategy, was to simply move on to new and better soils. With their enigmatic ‘fertility’ still intact, new lands were ripe for the taking in the late stone age periods. Nearly everywhere people went new arable land was to be found and cultivated, until such a time that yields shrank so much that it was time to move on again. Allover the earth, while many farmed in balance with the land, many more simply moved along when they’d taken what there was to take. This second group grew, and grew fast, eating up more land as quickly as their rapidly developing technologies would allow, an agricultural revolution, if you can believe it. If the new lands in questioned were already populated, it was no matter, for they could now feed armies to acquire new lands.
This is a familiar story, the march of progress, the dawn of civilization. Through the centuries the winners of the agricultural revolution spread their seeds far and wide. Their descendants carried on their traditions, they tilled more land and had more children. Wash, rinse, and repeat. By the time the plantation societies of the American south were in power they were exhausting the fertility of their soils so rapidly that they needed to establish new states, and move westward each generation, to maintain their wealth and status. After roughly 10,000 years, finally, there was no new land left on earth. No arable piece left untouched, no virgin soil, no free fertility to exploit. What next?
Across that great span of time, technology advanced beyond the wildest dreams of those early neolithic farmers, and by the mid twentieth century we had new answers – military technologies developed for use in modern warfare and land acquisition were adapted to create synthetic fertilizers. We could now extract a yield from dead soils, with little or no fertility left, all we needed were the inputs. The munitions companies who produced the chemicals were all to happy to rebrand as agricultural companies, and maintain their sizable profits in times of peace as well as war. Good for business, very good.
By now many are recognizing the unintended consequences of the path chosen eons ago. Our modern foods have a fraction of the nutrition of those eaten by our grandparents. Our waters are not only unsafe to drink, today most are unsafe to swim in. Porch lights which once drew our childlike wonder along with the incredible diversity of insects each night now buzz dully with a miniscule sampling of tiny moths and mosquitos. Our small towns and farms wither and die as our economic surplus feeds a war machine of incomprehensible scale.
But let’s step back a bit, remember those other farmers? The ones who gave back, the one's who saw ‘fertility’ not as a resource to be mined, but as a state of being to be nurtured… what happened to those farmers and their ideas, and why do we know so little about them? The sad and brutal answer is well known, even by those who refuse to acknowledge it. The armies that arose in tandem with extractive agriculture could not allow an alternative, it threatened their very existence, and the eradication of people and ideas moved in lockstep with the eradication of ecology, with the loss of that tangible but elusive concept we distill into the word – fertility.
Wait a minute now, it seems like we’ve gotten a bit offtrack. What does any of this have to do with regenerative agriculture? For us, everything. Because despite this long violent history, and the apparent victory of those who take rather than share – from their neighbors and soils alike – those old cultures of reciprocity still linger, and grow. They reside in the remote places of the earth whose destruction has not yet presented an acceptable profit margin. They reside in the displaced refugee communities around the world torn from their ancestral homelands. They reside in urban gardens and food hubs transforming industrial decay into centers of community and resilience. They reside in the growing number of farmers bucking the trends of their ancestors, embracing ecology and focusing once again on building fertility – focusing on regeneration, not just of soil but of community, of family, of life. We believe they still reside within us, no matter how far removed from the knowledge of our ancestors, if we allow ourselves a deep and honest look inside, and allow that look to guide our path forward.
For us, regeneration is everything. Yes, it’s a flashy new word, but it’s roots are anchored deeper than the language we use to speak it. It’s an acknowledgement of our place in the world, both of our past and the future we seek. Though regeneration must be realized far beyond our food system to generate the change we require, it starts with us and the soil at our feet. Rebuilding soil fertility as we rebuild community, through reciprocity. Acknowledging our history, not as a story to hide from, or to write off as an inevitable outcome of those first furrows in which seed was planted, but as place to learn and grow from.
You don’t need to use the ‘R’ word to support our movement; the real are separated from the fake in that place rooted deeper than the labels. You don’t need a marketing campaign to know when something is good for you. Everything modern life affords us can be tied back to the soil, and you don’t need statistics or computer modeling to know we’ve lost something important along the way. You don’t need to have a definition for ‘soil fertility’ to see when land is alive and full. You only need to care, and move forward from that place of caring – to regenerate. That’s what we commit to in our work here.
