Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
More than a farming method, regenerative agriculture was conceived as an ethic of care for land and life. Focusing on a “one-size-fits-all” standard for regenerative agriculture and marketing it for profits has left the concept a hollowed version of itself.
In New Zealand, forest gardening is being reshaped to fit local climates, ecosystems and cultural contexts. Drawing on years of research and practice, this work shows how place-based adaptation can support more resilient, regenerative food systems.
The global food system is both essential and unsustainable, locked into patterns that resist meaningful reform. Real change, the author argues, lies in rebuilding local, regenerative food systems that can gradually replace what no longer works.
New research shows that plants can temporarily halt root growth under stresses like cold and drought, then rapidly restart it once conditions improve. By identifying the genes behind this “pause and push” response, scientists hope to develop crops that recover more quickly from extreme weather, strengthening food security in a changing climate.
As geopolitical tensions drive up resource costs and disrupt supply, fertilizer prices may soar, endangering farming systems dependent on imports. Regenerative solutions, like green manure and community finance, are expanding across African countries, restoring local control over food systems.
In the tradition of filtering air that we’ve polluted and treating water that we’ve sullied, we now have replacing minerals in soil that we’ve depleted because of industrial agriculture.
Dublin, Ireland. We are seeing the first good days here, leading up to the golden days of mid-summer, and I’ve been talking to elderly friends here in the Irish countryside about what they used to do when the sun shone. The answer, of course, was that they made hay. When farmers heard the cry of … Read more
As it was in the beginning… farmers need protection from those who have taken privileges, not protection by the military might of those privileged marauders. The least we could do is get the story straight.
Is farming a mistake? Up until a generation or two ago, you would find no people of any background who would make this assertion — even though we’ve been farming for thousands of years and presumably if it was a bad thing it might have occurred to someone else before now to say so.
Whatever the future of this broken world, today we can attend to the work of repair and restoration. That does not require hope in what is to come but, rather, a belief in our ability to manage our lives without hierarchy and a faith in each other’s capacity for mutuality.
Not everyone is sure that today’s industrialized, globalized societies will be around long enough to define a new geological epoch. Perhaps we are just a flash in the pan – an event – rather than a long, enduring epoch.
Others debate the utility of picking a single thin line in Earth’s geological record to mark the start of human impacts in the geological record. Maybe the Anthropocene began at different times in different parts of the world.
Did you know that we can lose half our food supply and it won’t matter? That’s because agriculture is only 3% of GDP, so there’s no need to worry about the effects of climate change on farming. Or so says the latest genius to win the Nobel Prize in economics.
