https://www.wired.com/story/carbon-farming-regenerative-agriculture/
"Patrick Holden strolls across the field, pausing from time to time to bend and
point out a bumblebee, or a white butterfly, or a dung beetle. A wide expanse
of blue sky stretches above. Beneath, undulating green hills, sprawling
hedgerows, a horizon broken only by the jagged tips of Wales’ Cambrian mountain
range. Sun-soaked goodness.
“Can you see that bumblebee working the clover?” he asks, voice breathy with
exertion. “The bird life, insects, butterflies, small mammals, and bats ... the
biodiversity of this place is unbelievable.” This is all here, he says, because
he’s farming in harmony with nature.
The secret to this small oasis, Holden says, is the way he works his land. He
is one of a growing number of farmers shaking off conventional methods and
harnessing practices to rebuild soil health and fertility—cover crops, minimal
tilling, managed grazing, diverse crop rotations. It is a reverse revolution in
some ways, taking farming back to what it once was, when yield was not king,
industrialization not the norm, and small farms dabbled in many things rather
than specializing in one.
Holden’s main crops are oats and peas, sown in rotation with grassland to build
soil fertility. These are then turned into a “muesli” used as additional feed
for his grass-fed cattle and his pigs. The pigs’ manure fertilizes the land.
The glossy Ayrshire cows are milked and the milk curdled into the farm’s
award-winning cheddar cheese. Woven through everything is the intention to work
with and mimic nature.
The purported benefits are profound: Healthy soil retains water and nutrients,
supports biodiversity, reduces erosion, and produces nutritious food. But
there’s one other, critical gain in our rapidly warming world: these farming
methods suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and store it back in the
soil. As well as making cheese, Holden, with his regenerative practices, farms
carbon."
Via
Positive.News
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
