5 Principles of Regenerative Agriculture
- Media Manager
- Jan 28, 2024
- 1 min read
Groundswell
Written By: John Cherry
Photo Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain
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.
A healthy soil is a fabulously complex ecosystem, comprising countless billions of microscopic organisms all working away in their own little niches, feasting on each other and sugars exuded from the roots of growing plants. The whole system is ultimately fuelled by growing plants, whilst at the same time the system helps the plants grow.
