A recent white paper from the Rodale Institute demonstrates global adoption of regenerative farming can sequester more than 100 percent of human-generated carbon emissions. That is a welcome piece of stunningly good news amidst all the eco gloom.
Regenerative agriculture is farming practices that rehabilitate entire ecosystems by returning nutrients to the earth rather than depleting them. Regenerative is farming without synthetics and chemical sprays, diversifying crop rotations, cover cropping, and, where appropriate reintegrating large ruminants with rotational grazing.
Industrial agriculture wants everyone else to pay up and shut up. Even in matters that directly impact our families’ well-being and their future – like how they produce our food. It is no secret the industrial mono-cropping agricultural system is seriously depleting the nation’s soils. What may not be as widely known is the food grown today is less nutrient-dense with lower amounts of vital items like protein, phosphorus, iron, calcium, riboflavin, and vitamin C than just half a lifetime ago. Robust, healthy soils make robust, healthy human populations. Agricultures’ most valuable asset is healthy soil, but industrial agriculture treats this vital asset like dirt.
The industrial mono-crop agriculture system is a politically entrenched apparatus supporting heedless aggressive exploitation of the land, massive chemical application, and waste. They are driven by greed that obstinately obstructs the change consumers so ardently desire.
What we can do about it is purchase regenerative or organic foods and speak out. We can no longer shut the folk up and eat whatever is put in front of us.
