There are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground; there are a thousand ways to go home again. —Rumi
The way to stop climate change might be buried in 300 square feet of earth in the Venice neighborhood of Los Angeles, amid kale and potatoes. A half-dozen city youth are digging through the raised bed on a quiet side street, planting tomato seedlings between peach and lime trees. Nineteen-year-old Calvin sweats as he works the rake. There’s a lot at stake here. The formerly homeless youngsters are tentatively exploring farming through a community outreach program started by a California nonprofit called Kiss the Ground. More importantly, they are tending to the future of our planet.
“Soil just might save us,” filmmaker Josh Tickell says, “but we are going to have to save it first.” He wrote that in his 2017 book, also called Kiss the Ground, after becoming deeply invested in the potential of soil to reverse climate change. (The nonprofit supports the book and Tickell’s upcoming documentary about it, though he has no role with the organization.) He […]
Regenerative agriculture is one of the most promising and most effective methods we have for remediating climate change. But …implementing regenerative agriculture would require us to change our commercial agriculture system. At the meeting of COP21 in Paris in late 2015, the French Minister of Agriculture announced a program based on these principles. The USG, however, voted against this initiative in favor of a model of agriculture proposed by Monsanto and its allies which featured GMOs as a way to solve the climate crisis (this, despite the chemical industry’s own studies showing no added carbon to the soil using the Monsanto plan).
Let’s face it – U.S. agricultural policy has always been about the profits, rather than the health of the soil, the food, the environment or the communities.
While many of America’s farmers are adopting specific elements of regenerative agriculture (i.e., no till planting), few will ever implement the entire program. They can’t afford it. After decades of following misguided U.S. Department of Agriculture policies (planting “fencerow to fencerow” and applying increasingly lethal amounts of herbicides and pesticides), America’s farmers are teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. They hang on from year to year by relying on federal agricultural subsidies and crop insurance – programs that have strict rules on what is and isn’t allowed.
Those farmers who decide to transition to regenerative agriculture can expect their yields to be down for a period of three or more years while the land recovers and the soil is built up. Many of them will also need to invest in new equipment (i.e., tractors that can handle the heavy work of planting in a field covered in crop residue). But since many of the practices involved are not addressed by the USDA’s present-day subsidies and insurance programs, by doing so those same farmers would go bankrupt.
In order to encourage regenerative agriculture, we need is a crop subsidy/insurance program that is specifically designed to support farmers during their regenerative agriculture transitions. A program that that will account for inter-cropping, reward grass strips and pasture management, require coverage of the soil at all times and cover low cost loans for the necessary equipment, etc. Such a program would not only improve the lives of America’s farmers, it would sequester carbon and be a major step in healing the environmental breakdown our planet is suffering.
Simple enough, but vested interests would definitely oppose it.