What’s the problem with agriculture?
The root of the problem...
You want to know my main frustration with conventional agriculture? Where I really want to see it grow and change?
It's this idea of efficiency over sustainability.
Consider your body.
A gut with thousands of species of bacteria, complex needs in the form of vitamins, minerals, fiber, protein, and carbs.
Despite being able to isolate each of these "inputs", you can't simply take supplements to meet your nutritional needs and produce energy. Bodies require fruits, vegetables, grains, and meat, with all their complex nutritional structures, to really keep a body healthy.
Your body is not efficient; it is complex, beautiful, adaptive, and ingenious.
Introduce an infection and your body, functioning properly, can mount a targeted, specialized response to address it. It can adapt to stressors in its environment. The healthier your gut, the better the response.
Nature can do the same thing if we treat it like the system it is, not as a machine. It needs food, not just targeted "supplements" or inputs.
Agriculture, a system of an innumerable number of complex elements, organisms, and interactions is so often reduced to inputs and outputs; the goal being to input enough acres, seeds, and nutrients to produce as much food as possible.
This reductionist view of agriculture has resulted in grain fields depleted of nutrients, soils unable to hold enough water, and lagoons of manure thousands of miles away from the land that needs it.
This is where regenerative agriculture proposes something controversial, it asks "Is agriculture and food production inherently destructive or is there a different way?"
Personally, I think there's an alternative.
I believe regenerative agriculture is the beginning of an answer, and we're going to explore why together over the next few weeks.
We'll start below the soil where all the magic happens, progress up through the plant cover and into your communities to talk about the ways regenerative agriculture can change how our eating impacts the world around us.
Don't miss this series, add my email address to your contacts so the emails end up in your inbox (not the promotions tab).
You're going to enjoy this one.
See you at the market!
-Ellen
