The Core Tenets of Regenerative Agriculture

If I look at nature, I see everything is looking after its own needs in the service of all. Everything is patterned to be of benefit to the whole, but not without taking care of its own needs first. Soil is the foundation of civilization as we know it. Each one of us eats 400-450 kg of food a year. And yet modern agriculture degrades around 10 tons of soil to produce that meager portion. If we look at history, we can see that every civilization that debased its soil resources is now extinct. Incredibly, humans move more soil around every year than was created in the last ice age. Even in organic agriculture, it's deemed acceptable to maintain a certain amount of soil loss annually. Think about it. It's not good enough. That is not sustainable. The short of it is that soil, whilst being easy to destroy, is also easy to build. This remains the farmer's prime responsibility. We can do that most rapidly with animals and grasses, we can do it through perennial crops, and we can sometimes accelerate it with machinery and build carbon very easily on a garden scale. If we want to term what we're doing regenerative, then the baseline is that we need to be improving soil and managing holistically, leaving the land and community in a healthier state than we found it. Sequestering carbon out of the atmosphere supports many aspects of production. Carbon drives the soil food web as food for fungi and bacteria. And here, from the soil up, we witness life and death as merely two sides to the same coin. Carbon in humus also holds water, relieves compaction, buffers ph and also plays other vital roles in soil chemistry. We have to find ways to meet our needs whilst building thriving habitats. And building carbon into the soil is the very basis of that managing holistically. When we consider that organic production and grazing animals on grasslands are all that humans have ever had for most of history, it is easy to deduce that it is management of the tools available to us that is largely responsible for the problems we face environmentally, economically and socially. Thanks to the tireless work of Alan Savory and holistic management, we now have the tools available to clarify the context within which we make decisions, to allow us to fully consider complexities that we must automatically deal with as farmers and land managers. I personally attribute much of the success and rapid installation of our farm, with our shoestring budget and challenging conditions, to effective decision making using this framework. Whilst the way we operate here also requires the huge and delicate task of people management, the clarity around the context within which we make decisions has made the process of major decision making. Surprisingly swift and easy, this clarity translates to smooth and effective day to day running, even with large groups of people, often from incredibly different cultures and backgrounds, who come here for training. Mimicking ecosystem processes, Every organism is linked to every other organism in the web of life. Deepening our awareness and understanding of how nature functions in wholes is ongoing through an attitude of openness to learning and deepening our insight through continual observation. We can apply this learning to whatever we produce, from raising animals, tending trees to perennial crops, to market gardens. We can even apply nature's patterns to our social systems and business structure. The main point is that if we are not following the natural laws and patterns that govern the growth, energy, cycling, physiology and psychology of all the things in nature, we're fighting a losing battle. Essentially, that means we are likely doing more work than is perhaps necessary and spending more money, time and resources to do so. All the key principles of ecological design are an invitation to see the world through a different lens. If you wish. This journey is intriguing because it never stops. You can go on gleaning insights over the years as we observe both how our own ecosystems and the natural systems around us act and respond over time. The basic principle becomes of utmost importance when we're working with a production scale. For if we can allow animals to take on some of the work of a machine, for example, then we save both time and investments. Time is what we're limited by on the farm. And so much of running a farm is about really monitoring your time and designing ways to shave small amounts off those daily tasks to allow for the flourishing of the life quality. We're aiming for locally managed inputs and outputs. Regenerative agriculture is based as much as possible around local inputs as well as local outputs. We're aiming to create the markets to sell high quality produce locally to reduce transportation costs and unnecessary use of diesel or petrol. Besides saving costs, time and fuel waste from one enterprise are often resources for another. This is one of the great benefits of a diversified farm, where we can integrate winter bedding for our annual production, or fertilize our silver pasture lanes with the passing livestock who benefit from their shelter. The old adage, don't let anything off the farm that can't walk or fly off on its own is a good one to keep in mind here. Reduced oil, financial and technological inputs. Modern agriculture in our part of the world is based around ever bigger machines and farmers in ever increasing debt, relying on technology to deal with what are essentially biological challenges. This is where small regenerative farms can have the upper hand. Whilst we cannot reach the same economies of scale, we can achieve much higher profit per land unit by not taking on more land than we can effectively and intensively manage by designing integrated systems. We can often work at very low cost with low initial investments while producing very high value and high quality produce. Innovative new tools and techniques that require far less initial investments have opened up all kinds of potential enterprises suitable for new farmers. Creative ways to access land make the possibilities tantalizing for anyone dedicated to this. As a career In a society of general specialists, we need far more specialist generalists as farming in this way requires a diverse skill set. The wider the skill set, the more you'll naturally think far outside the box. For us, this results in always asking how do we make that whenever we need something? One example is on our farm with the poultry slaughter unit, which is one of the cheapest approved slaughtery facilities in Europe. After all, not spending money is one of the best ways to keep your small farm profitable. Mobile and Scalable Infrastructure the equity locked up in land and farm infrastructure is a major problem. Older farmers often feel they cannot retire so easily and a new generation of farmers cannot get in the game. Single use infrastructure with high initial outlay is undesirable on many levels. In the way we farm, we are investing in management and information, not infrastructure. We have built up our farm with portable and scalable infrastructure for several reasons. It affords great flexibility in management and decision making. It allows us to stack enterprises and to expand by taking out leases on neighboring land if required. It allows us to move animals in a way that mimics nature and benefits not only the animals, but the pasture too. Converting an agricultural barn for accommodating farm apprentices would require a change of building use and a huge cost to meet regulations. Whilst old worker cabins bought for €200 require simple permits and can be moved or expanded whenever we like. A network of water pipes around the farm means we can simply and effectively bring water to animals wherever they are moved onto the farm certified by customers. We follow and usually exceed official organic standards here at Ridgerdale, but we fundamentally disagree with paying money to a regulating body to grow the best produce anyone can find. Instead, we operate an open farm gate policy where our customers are welcome to come and see our production systems on regular summer tours. This has multiple benefits besides saving us money as it allows us to build up personal relationships with our customers. So many people today lack connection with the food they eat and the farmers that produce it. We are offering a tangible experience for our consumers who understand the thought, care and quality that goes into the farm produce and processes. With this openness and personal connection to us, we would have to go out of our way to break that trust when we are offering an experience and quality that you simply cannot get in the shop around here today, Customers become your best marketing strategy. If we have happy and returning customers, there's no doubt that some of them will be telling their friends where they got these beautiful pastured eggs, chicken, pork, beef or vegetable box. Word of mouth is a very powerful and effective marketing tool, especially on the local level. The producer consumer connection creates a support network and allows us to educate customers and introduce new products that might better suit our long term context. For example, if we had arrived here and set up trying to sell a thousand pastured geese in the first year, it would not have worked. There's no market for geese yet. Whilst chickens require more grain inputs than we would like long term, they're also a staple part of the local diet. This has allowed us to create a stable customer base with reliable quality products and it's now much easier to build upon that product base with something that suits us better in the long term in terms of a Holistic context Multi Capital Abundance to really achieve the quality of life laid out in our holistic context requires that we build up multiple forms of capital. Whilst many folks probably relate to capital as primarily financial capital, nothing has freed up my relationship to capital more than considering the eight forms of capital laid out by Ethan Rowland and Gregory Landau in their short work Regenerative Enterprise, which eloquently defines eight different forms of capital and the relationship of them to a regenerative economy. We're all trading different forms of capital all the time and getting clear about this in my own life has been really beneficial, especially in my relationship to business. I meet a lot of folks every year who are distressed in their relationship to financial capital. In particular. For me personally, a big step towards my desired quality of life was losing that distress. Practically no decisions at the farm are purely financial, although nearly all of them involve financial considerations. In order for farms to be regenerative we need to work to a triple bottom line that puts our business, the regeneration of the land and our customer satisfaction on an equal footing. I would highly recommend reading the short book Regenerative Enterprise and getting familiar with the different forms of capital as it's been extremely helpful in my own business practices and decision making for the benefit of all successful farm businesses that will last and thrive revolve around creating win win win situations. If everyone is winning, everyone will want to keep playing. We must make enough profit to enjoy the quality of life we desire, and our customers must be returning that is happy with the value and quality of our products, but also our landscapes must be regenerating. The three pillars of ecological, economic and social regeneration underpin our context, and we make all decisions within that context. For me, this is the essence of regenerative agriculture. There are various ways people relate to this subject, including academic attempts to classify and label different approaches, and the new phenomenon of mainstream agriculture trying to co opt the word regenerative to describe the terrible and paradoxical no till broad acre operations that work solely on broad spectrum herbicide applications. I'm a simple farmer and I do not care for further elaboration. The basic premise is clear and simple. If you are managing holistically, positively improving soil in a demonstrable manner whilst creating epic food for local and returning customers, and making a living doing it, then that fits the bill in my mind. If you're managing reactively, eroding your topsoil through conventional tillage practices, feeding animals with feed that they haven't evolved to eat, and relying on government subsidies to stay afloat, then I cannot see how that's even sustainable, even on a single or double generation, let alone moving towards the sort of future that we hope our children will grow up in. Regeneration implies a holistic approach to life and farming and business, and it's these three pillars that need to be intact and held with equal regard that we'll likely be successful in reaching our objectives.