The professional agricultural community – government employees, extension workers, and academic researchers – are struggling with the question of the decade: What are “Regenerative agricultural practices”? There’s an agreement that most regenerative farmers use certain practices… compost, cover crops, animal grazing, low- or no-till. What is the impact of these practices on soil health?
This blog will share our personal experience at Persephone Market Garden. But before I will start this first-person plural narrative (“we” because my wife made most decisions), I would like to offer an analogy.
Introduction
What instrument is the best instrument to make an audience happy, and what melody should it play? Well, the answer is simple – it depends. Could it be the world’s best violin player, playing the most beautiful first violin of Beethoven’s symphony? Well – no, if the rest of the orchestra plays Bach. In contrary – adding Beethoven’s violin would totally ruin the Bach experience (except for that teenager couple, who love musical chaos and have a wonderful time!). But even if the violin integrates well with the rest of the orchestra, an AC/DC audience may cringe and run away… This analogy reveals: in order to make an audience happy, we need to know (1) the preferences of the audience, and (2) what else is happening on the stage. We cannot find any “perfect best instrument and melody” without asking about the larger context – our audience (the surrounding ecosystem), and other musicians on stage (our past and ongoing other activities on a farm).
Regenerative Agriculture is focused on rebuilding local ecological systems on farms. Aspects include healthy soil, healthy predator populations that avoid massive pest outbreaks, an effective soil sponge that regulates the local water cycle, and a balanced microclimate. There are many levels of complexity that characterize every living organism – soil act as one organ of this organism, plants and animals as other organs. Each organ needs to be healthy and fulfill its role within the entire organism. The needs of all organs must be met, otherwise the balance destabilizes and eventually collapses. And us humans – the farmers and the eaters – are other organs within this system. Farming must be profitable so farmers can make a living. It must be energizing so that the farmer can regenerate his/her soul. Eaters must be nurtured in a healthy manner. Then, our agriculture is regenerative.
Our road toward becoming “regenerative”
On our farm, my wife Kristine and I started 11 years ago. Among the two of us, we had ample idealism, excellent academic training without practical applicability, some highly sophisticated theoretical understanding of lots of technologies. Kristine learned from her father, a dairy farmer, how to organize a farm day effectively and how to organize her energies, how to bring up our children within this farm organism. Beyond this general preparation, we needed to learn lots of practical lessons – especially in vegetable growing. From the get-go, we wanted to do the right thing – but we lacked in awareness, guidance, community, and a near-by “sanga” – a group of peers that shared our path. We started off market gardening, and we have never changed our basic farming strategy. Just about everything else has changed though, especially from an ecosystem perspective. Only for three years now, we believe that we are truly regenerating our soil and our farm ecology!
We started our market garden with a system of rotating blocks, intercropping that avoided homogeneity within our blocks, plus compost, hand tools, a BCS, a tractor. We are determined to farm our plot more or less continuously: we leave around 20% of our production field in cover crops, plus a few beds later in the season – all of this has never changed.
Yet, within these parameters, just about everything has changed for our farm system. Five years ago, we had a difficult weather year – very similar to this year. Both times, the farming seasons started unusually dry and later turned very wet. Five years ago, our production was diminished by a series of hits: Poor germination, and seedlings remained weak despite drip irrigation, due to mediocre soil that did not hold the water. Then plants were attacked by hordes of pests that targeted the weakened yet juicy-irrigated plants. Once the weather shifted to daily rainfall, weeds took over – we could not get in with any equipment, not even our hand-pushed wheel hoes. Hand weeding was a Don Quixote battle, doomed to fail from the beginning. It was a mess, depressing. We maybe had one third of the production that we ought to have. This year, the same weather pattern repeated itself – the drought was maybe more extreme even but the rain came earlier – again, the fields are too wet for any machine-based weeding. Yet, production is better than it ever was! Somehow, our system now works and this year, neither drought nor wetness derailed the garden.
We had done all the good things five years ago – we used cover crop, row cover, drip irrigation, compost, organic mulch, and a few agroecological recipes to micro-manage particular problems. We would have checked the same “regenerative practices” on a checklist. But things were not in tune – we were not regenerating, in the contrary. Also, we still cultivated our fields. In desperation, we sometimes used our roto-tiller for rapid weed control. Carefully and shallowly, but still. We were still killing the soil.
What changed? Using the analogy of the orchestra again, our instruments were not tuned to each other, and the timing of musicians was off. Also, we modified the acoustic properties of the room itself – we added a drainage ditch that protects our field from runoff from the municipal road and neighboring fields. We dug a pond close to our field, giving us more habitat for predatory insects and a continuous water source that attracts and supports these critters. The pond somewhat moderates the temperature in the field and adds some moisture to the air; it takes up excess water that, in early spring or after dramatic rainfall, ran from the road onto our fields. We entirely stopped plowing or cultivating – we realized that our efforts of “healing the soil” are doomed as long as we keep on disturbing it with tractor steel (“With less killing of soil, less healing is necessary!”). We mulch more than ever, and weed less than ever. Mulching is an act of healing nature, while weeding is an act of fighting nature – we are tired of fighting. And the soil now heals, visibly.
After 8 weeks of almost no rain at all, we got almost 4 inches in a 48 hours. The soil – almost totally covered by plants or mulch – easily absorbed all of it, not a single puddle on our field. Last year, we even had 5 inches in 48 hours – heavy erosion on our gravel lane, but not a puddle in the field. We now harvest earlier than ever – we prepare beds in autumn with compost and cover them with landscape fabric. When the snow melts, we simply pull back the fabric and transplant into it – no need to wait for “tractor accessibility”. This puts us 4 weeks ahead of schedule with planting, and massively reduces the time where soil is bare. We actually needed new marketing venues for our earliest crops – our local online farmer cooperative Eat Local Grey Bruce came in helpfully.
Not everything is easy, of course:
- Hiring: With almost triple the production on the same plot, we need to manage more seasonal staff. Yet, whenever we are happiest with staff, chances are we lose her or him to self employment. So we have to hire and train three locals each year, and sometimes re-hire after a week – this is emotionally stressful and physically tiring.
- Climate vulnerability: We have become more weather–resilient but not weather-proof. This year, for the first time we lost 99% of our tomato plants and more than half of our peppers to a late frost: a side-effect of those new droughts are desert-like day-night-fluctuations of temperature! A great shout-out to our farming community, who passed along replacement plants and saved us!
- Marketing is once again high on our priority: We are seeking community members who love good ingredients and cook from scratch (and, during COVID, have not opted to grow everything for themselves in their garden)!
- No “regenerative verification” to substantiate our claim. While we believe we have turned the tides on our farm, we cannot say this with certainty. There is no formal definition of regeneration, no measurable, objective criteria. Some methods, like Savory’s Ecological Outcome Verification, are emerging – but so far, not applicable to our production strategy.
We are only a small part within the larger community and rely on peers, customers, and supporters! This are three reminders how our whole-system farm is always part of a larger system. Regeneration can only succeed with a whole-system approach that includes our entire society.
What was our “regenerative breaking point”?
For me, it is impossible to pin down a single practice that shifted the tides from “degenerative” to “regenerative” farming. There wasn’t a single moment of epiphany, no great shift of awareness. If anything, we owe our shift to a workshop at EFAO conference by Paul & Elisabeth Kaiser from Singing Frog Farms – these two inspired us at just the time when we were ready to listen. We realized that the most sophisticated efforts in healing are ultimately fruitless, as long as we don’t stop damaging our natural infrastructure year by year. We never used agrochemicals, but still cultivated our fields… so no more tractor steel to the soil! Also, we have become quite scale-consistent and lean, a combined effort of my wife Kristine’s clarity and my building skills: now all of our gadgets are almost fully utilized, but nothing is overused. And, we are well integrated into our neighborhood: make use of several resources that we can access for free in our community – compost from our horse-loving neighbor, and coarse wood chips that a near-by arborist dumps at our place. Our farming system now is “in tune” – and we farmers have developed a better awareness for its melody.
In a way, Persephone Market Garden is no longer “our” farm. Instead, we farmers have become part of the larger Persephone Organism. We can shape this organism as conductors but cannot enforce our control. Visitors and guests sometimes have struggled understanding why we cannot do certain things! We can’t out of respect for this larger organism. This shift has nothing to do with a practice, a tool. It’s something in our heads, in our self-perception, in the role that we assume on our land.
And a shift in our awareness: Bare soil is no longer a sign of our control over our land – we now perceive this bare soil as a gushing wound, an area where Earth’s flesh is exposed without protective skin. Weeds are not an evil that we should fight to re-establish control: what our society calls weeds is really the earliest succession plants just helps to heal bare soil, as signs of starting regeneration. Weeds provide first scaring that covers Earth’s exposed flesh, a response to our farmer’s neglect. (PS: Bind weed is an exception; they come straight from hell down under! 😉 ). Along the same line, we no longer regard insect pests as an enemy that we should fight. Pests are a symptom for unbalanced plant ecology, for plants that have not achieved their fullest health. (PS: Potato beetles are our exception … but even these little devils seem less bad now, as plant health is improving). The big shift was in our mind – not a single click, but a series of gradual revelations that are slowly peeling off layers of our inherited culture, slowly progressing to expand our awareness. Now, the sky seems the limit – we sense that we can achieve so much more on this journey that we have only begun.
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