Short spoken commentary by Richard Perkins arguing that the standard question "can regenerative farming feed the world?" is misplaced. He claims conventional agriculture already produces enough calories globally (enough for ~10 billion people on ~30% of farmland) but fails at distribution and nutrition; regenerative/mixed farms provide more diverse calories and ecological benefits, and small-scale, low-cost farms close to communities offer additional social and economic advantages.
Chapters
I'm constantly confronted with is people would say, well, can your type of farming feed the world? But I think that is the wrong question because what people don't necessarily understand is that conventional agriculture is not feeding the world currently. You know, most people on this planet are undernourished. And so the problem is actually about how we collect data and how we distribute resources, because we actually produce enough calories to support the world population, up to 10 billion already on actually only about 30% of the world's farmland. The trouble with, you know, with meme based thinking that we're in today is the fact that people are looking for sort of clickbait headlines and snapshot sentences. And the problem with it is you can't really compare conventional agriculture to regenerative agriculture. There's nothing. They're not on level playing field. And one of the big issues is that there's a lot of pride around, hey, I grow wheat and I grow the most tonnes per hectare in my country and that's like this great achievement. And on one level that's great, but on another level, these are empty calories, so you can't compare them to the mixed calorie outputs of a mixed farm, along with all the ecological benefits that come with that. So there really is a hope for the business. But what's, what's going beyond conventional ag is that we're doing this at very low cost. We're doing this on a human scale where we have an intimate relationship with our customers. And I feel this is the benefit of lots of small farms surrounding a community.
