26: Support Regenerative Farming
For this week’s #52climatesolutions, we encourage you to learn more about where your food comes from. Can you find producers who apply regenerative practices? Apply regenerative practices at home.
In Australia, 11% of greenhouse gas emissions come from agriculture. Globally, the figure is closer to 14%, with 65% of this coming from cattle. The cause of emissions depends on the type of farming, e.g. for cattle it mostly comes from cow burps and land use change (e.g. clearing forests). Another massive problem with industrialised agriculture is the harm caused to topsoil. When you mess with soil by adding synthetic fertiliser and pesticides, it harms the soil biome, and this disrupts soil structure and can cause erosion.
Fortunately, there are lots of solutions to these problems, including better feed management, applying interventions that improve animal health (allowing for smaller, more productive herds), and for us, modifying our diet to eat more of the foods that cause less harm. Another solution relates to turning soil on farms into much more of a carbon sink, using regenerative farming.
Regenerative farming applies techniques that restore the functioning of landscapes, increase nutrient and water cycling, and sequester carbon in the soil. These techniques involve things such as keeping 100% ground cover (with decomposing litter), integrating animals in a way that builds soil rather than eroding it, and using diverse crop rotations. And pumping more organic matter back into the soil (which means more water-holding, which means resilience through tough times). Think of it as a farming system that self-nourishes. It prioritises soil health, whilst raising stands for animal welfare and worker fairness. And when it is applied, it is usually to areas that have been degraded by past land use (hence, it is “regenerative”).
Regeneration International claims that transitioning 10% to 20% of agricultural production to best practice regenerative systems will sequester enough carbon dioxide to reverse climate change. There are clearly massive benefits to be had from providing stronger support to farms that apply regenerative methods.
For this week’s #52climatesolutions, we encourage you to learn more about where your food comes from. Are you able to find producers who apply regenerative practices? Can you switch to supporting them and buying their products instead?
Read on for some great books to read and films to watch and get inspired, and regenerative-farming-inspired practices for your own food garden.
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