{"id":100,"date":"2016-02-08T20:35:03","date_gmt":"2016-02-09T01:35:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/harvestpartners.farm\/connection\/?p=100"},"modified":"2022-03-25T10:28:41","modified_gmt":"2022-03-25T14:28:41","slug":"whats-different-about-regenerative-ag","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/harvestpartners.farm\/connect\/2016\/02\/08\/whats-different-about-regenerative-ag\/","title":{"rendered":"What’s Different About Regenerative Ag"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Foreground: Maple Valley Farm’s multi-species herd moved daily to fresh grass is followed across the landscape by turkeys (background)<\/p><\/div>\n

A lot of people get the funny idea that small family farms like ours are a throwback to the kind of agriculture popular in the days of our great-grandparents or\u00a0beyond.<\/p>\n

There are some likely similarities: \u00a0smaller acreages, diversified products, families working together. \u00a0But there are some important distinctions that may help us\u00a0better understand how we’ve arrived here and where we’re going.<\/p>\n

First, most of the pioneers and settlers of this country brought with them practices common to Europe’s small holders. \u00a0Modifications were certainly made in light of the abundant resources here, especially in the vast stretches of Western rangeland, but generally speaking, the Europeans practiced a very stationary (versus nomadic) style of agriculture. \u00a0Slave plantations in the South were a scaled-up version of this approach. \u00a0 Crops were grown in rotation, harvested, stored and brought to the animals in their (mostly) stationary barns, pens and pastures.<\/p>\n

Second, after WWI, the rise of fossil-fuel intensive agriculture, both for running\u00a0machinery and for fertilizing crops, marked a major departure from holistic and systems-oriented approaches to farming. \u00a0Gone was the need to make the farm’s enterprises synergistic and interdependent upon one another. \u00a0External inputs could be used to massively multiply the farm’s outputs. \u00a0Instead of farms adding value to free sunlight and recycled soil and water resources, they converted\u00a0cheap oil and chemical nitrogen into food for the masses. \u00a0It’s easy to see how the soil, the water, the breeding stock, indeed, the farm families themselves, became less integral to the farm. \u00a0They became “pass-throughs” whose increasing depletion could always be crutched up a little more or a little longer with fossil inputs.<\/p>\n

Nowadays, on our way to our jobs, we drive by raging brown rivers and swollen creeks each spring with hardly a thought about the megatons of soil from area crop fields and pastures being carried to the Gulf of Mexico. \u00a0But somehow, the corn still grows. \u00a0Somehow, the cattle still fattens.<\/p>\n

But here’s the point. \u00a0Regenerative, systems-based, holistic agriculture as we’re trying to practice it at Maple Valley Farm, is radically different. \u00a0You, intentionally or not, are one of the radical revolutionaries spurring it on. \u00a0We’re painfully aware of how far away we are\u00a0from a truly self-sufficient, or even an interdependent, system of farming. \u00a0But we can already see the early fruit of our efforts. \u00a0Here is a short list of some of the seemingly simple principles upon which this radically different kind of farming is based:<\/p>\n