For those that may be new to the term or concept of Regenerative Agriculture I will give a brief explanation of it and quote some definitions for it from some individuals that I have learned a lot of what I know from. For me, and I think for many others, Regen Ag starts with being good stewards as we are called to be good stewards of everything we are given whether that is our money, time, or land. There are many “conventional” or “mainstream” farming practices that while they may provide a benefit in the short term, over the long term they become very detrimental. It is important to note that for many years these have been the best practices that were available given our understanding at the time. Over the past few years there has been a lot of ground breaking research and new understandings of how things work and relate to each other that has shown us this better system. The point of Regenerative Agriculture is to replace the harmful practices with ones that will heal, rebuild, and repair all of the damage that has been done over the years.

 

On our Farm we have done the majority of the practices that you want to move away from. The only thing we haven’t done is provide a regular application of synthetic fertilizer to the fields simply due to cost and feasibility. We have used herbicides on our fields to kill broadleaves, we've disked up fields to kill everything, and we’ve used fungicides, and insecticides to kill fungus and pests to hopefully protect our crops. This focus on what we need to kill next has caused us to miss and discount the synergistic side of nature, so instead of working with nature to solve our problem we tried to work against it and only really succeeded in making the problem that much bigger. 

 

Our focus now is to stop these damaging practices so we no longer use any herbicides or sprays and are working on restoring the health of the soil to combat standard issues of “weeds” and pests that are really only the symptoms of the true issue which is the health of the plants and soil. 

 

In our Hay fields we are working to carefully time our mowings and are using timed mowings and grass pressure to choke out brambles in fields that we are working on bringing back into production. Recently we have put a small swale into one of our fields to help better manage our water flow and address some uneven distributions. In all of these fields we are working on overseeding a variety of species to increase our diversity and put more pressure on the species we don’t want in our hay mix. Our next step for these will be to incorporate livestock in some capacity in order to further boost the microbial life in the soil and work on increasing the carbon content as well.