Regenerative Agriculture

Aligning with nature’s perfect systems

Over the past decade, sustainability moved from a buzzword to a movement to a culture within leading communities, universities and businesses. Significant strides were made in zero-waste practices, renewable energy technology, and reduced carbon | water footprints. Yet the glaciers continue to melt, the ocean acidification levels are increasing, and desertification is escalating.

To avoid a doom and gloom perspective, it is important to simplify the scenario and discover regenerative solutions. Beyond sustainability and resilience, regeneration focuses on rebuilding and restoring nature’s perfect systems.

Simply: there is too much carbon in the atmosphere and ocean pools. To restore balance, excess carbon must transfer to the fossil, biosphere and/or soil pools. The RiA Magazine article, Carbon Crisis: simply a matter of balance, explains the carbon cycles and the current out-of-balance scenario.

Before industrial agriculture equipment was introduced to commercial farming, the soils were tilled with hand tools (shovels, hoes, picks, etc.) or with draft-animal-powered equipment. Simply, tilling is turning over and breaking up the soil. By its intent, tilling destroys the soil infrastructure built and maintained by mycorrhizal fungi network and results in degraded, unhealthy soil.

Without the soil infrastructure designed to hold moisture and nurture roots, plants lack the necessary nutrients to produce abundant, healthy crop yields. Plant immune systems weaken often resulting in disease and insect infiltration. 

Another strong contributor to desertification was the introduction of monocrop farms where the same crop is grown year after year on the same soil with no plant species rotation. Fallow fields left barren with no crop cover contribute to the deterioration of soil health.

When livestock graze in confined fields without movement over the land, the plant life is destroyed due to excessive excretion and hoof disruption. With plant life destroyed, the soil is left uncovered and the deteriorated soil washes or blows away eventually leading to desertification. In nature, herds graze over vast lands constantly moving and nurturing the land with balanced excretion and hoof disruption. 

By restoring soil health via no-till farming with crop rotations and livestock grazing that mimic natural herd movement patterns, healthy plants “suck” carbon from the atmosphere into the soil via photosynthesis. Ei chooses to explore how regenerative agriculture practices may be applied to urban landscapes at public parks, roadway medians and shoulders, and corporate, university, and government campuses.

Ei Farm Tours focus on the many success stories where farms restore broken soil systems through regenerative agriculture.