Having been in the regenerative farming space for quite some time now I’m glad to see it is becoming more integrated into our agricultural system. Being an observer by nature I have noticed a trend that makes me wonder whether we have learnt, as a society, that hanging your hat (in this case food security) on any one approach is not a good option.
The wonderful thing about agriculture is there are endless opportunities for developing new ideas, but time and again what seem to be good ideas when implemented, at scale they tend to create flow on problems. Then we need a new solution to deal with the problem we have created, making things more complicated, and worse, more expensive.
I am sure when the Romans first started to cultivate land and turn the soil they didn’t realise the devastation it would lead to in the future. They would not have known that by tilling soil they were oxidising their carbon and destroying their soil structure. Likewise, I am sure they didn’t realise they were depleting their greatest asset (soil) of fertility, it just crept up on them slowly. At the time I am sure they had no way of knowing their land management was debilitating their soil, contributing to the collapse of their empire.
Many other examples throughout history show that when you hone in on just a few things in your food system, the result is not a good outcome. If you are looking for a good book to read or listen to about the history of turning soil to dirt then I highly recommend ‘Dirt The Erosion of Civilization’, by David R. Montgomery.
Jumping forward a few thousand years from our Roman example to a time much closer to now, the late 1800’s and early 1900’s when Nitrogen (N) became much more widely available. At the time it was an amazing breakthrough, helping push crop production through the roof, but as most of you are aware the introduction and widespread use of N we saw new problems arise.
Problems like our plants becoming more susceptible to insect attack, and plants appearing to be suffering from increased disease and fungal issues. Why was that? Instead of asking ourselves what was causing the increase in disease and pest susceptibility, the human species in its “we control all” approach developed insecticides and fungicides, which has led us to where we are now.
In my opinion, we have created food production systems where our children and our grandchildren are now eating foods that I classify as unfit for human consumption, and I am not even going to touch on how this has contributed to climate. I understand that I have simplified this down, and there are some other factors like monocultures and the oversimplification of our fertility programs which also have had a part to play. However, I am pointing out, when we focus on solving one problem (like we have done time and again through history) and not approach problems with a more holistic approach, we end up creating more problems.
This brings me to where we are now and I can see the same trend happening again. While there is an amazing group of farmers, ranchers, graziers, scientists and general public who have been more holistic in their thinking and have come to the conclusion; in agriculture, we need to bring together biology, fertility, plants and animals to create a living regenerative system. In the past we have focussed on feeding what’s above the ground, however with a holistic approach we need to think about feeding what is below the ground as well – our below the ground livestock and plants if you like.
With those who have changed their mindset to more holistic thinking finding increasing success, and with more people talking and heading in this direction (feeding the underground workforce) I can see the old human single-mindedness kicking in. Whether this is driven by our human nature, our need to be in control or worse still driven by greed, I’m not sure. However, there seems once again to be a push to develop a single solution to agriculture problems, dumbing down our agriculture system which is a complex living system that not one fix solves all.
I am starting to see companies come out and say all you need is this fungus to build carbon or these bacteria to protect your pastures after your insecticide wears off, along with many other single fixes for a single problem. My concern is if agriculture goes down that single-minded path (again), we will end up like before and create other problems to solve.
In my experience what I have seen work is diversity, diversity of biology, diversity of plants, diversity of livestock and diversity in the way we think. We need to be extremely careful about going back to the future and just relying on that silver bullet, we need to absorb our learnings from past mistakes. It’s time to move forward into a future where we can grow healthy nutrient dense food and safe fibre for our children and our grandchildren’s children. It is within our reach.
Keep Living The Regen Farming Dream.
