John Kempf lays out three goals for regenerative agriculture: crops healthy enough to resist pests without chemicals, food nutritious enough to act as medicine, and soil that actually improves over time. He argues regeneration has to come first, not just sustaining what's already broken.
Chapters
Here's what the term regenerative agriculture means to me. It means a combination of three goals are being met.
Goal number one is that we're producing.
Plants that are so healthy they're resistant.
To diseases and insects. Number two, when you have plants that have that level of health, you're also producing nutritious food.
That is food as medicine, extremely high quality, doesn't spoil, doesn't degrade in storage.
Nearly the same speed, depending on which crop you're talking about. Number three, you regenerate soil health at.
The same time you are growing a crop. Not separately from growing a crop. Not you grow a crop and degrade.
Soil as part one, and then as part two, you grow a cover crop and you sequester carbon.
But you need to have an agricultural ecosystem that accomplishes all three of those objectives while you are growing a crop.
Whether it's a corn or soybean crop.
Or whether it's stone fruit or tomatoes, it doesn't matter.
We need to beyond the pathway to achieving each of those three goals.
A decade ago that the buzzword was.
Sustainable agriculture, I made the point of.
Why would you desire to sustain where we are today? We have such a degraded ecosystem, we have such degraded soils. Why would we have any desire to sustain our present model of production? Instead, we first need to have a regenerative system that reaches a much higher plateau of performance, can achieve all these.
Results, and then at that point, and only at that point, can we have.
A true conversation about sustainability. So I would say that this regenerative.
Agriculture is regenerating the ecosystem on the.
Pathway to true sustainability.
And the metrics that I see for.
That, that are so broad, they encompass and cover everything else, are those three pieces.
Achieving disease and insect resistance so you.
Can be sustainable, no longer dependent on.
Pesticides, achieving nutritious food, that is food as medicine, so you can sustain a.
Healthy human and animal population.
And third, regenerate soil health so you can sustain this agriculture ecosystem for millennia.
