Learning About Regenerative Agriculture

Happy accident of learning everything I didn't know I needed to know about saving the earth by farming.

• Farming
• Regenerative Agriculture
• Local Food

A couple years ago, the Lynden library was having a book sale for old books that they no longer needed for circulation. We happened to be driving by and we can’t say no to a good book sale, so we stopped in to see what the selection was like. One of the books I picked up was “You Can Farm” by Joel Salatin.

I picked it up merely because it looked interesting and I thought it might be a good idea if I understood a little about what my local economy was dealing with, how and why (and if) they were struggling, and what farming looked like in the 21st century. As it turned out, it was a 25+ year old book, so a few things were out of date, but one thing was pretty clear: successful farming wasn’t just about turning a profit, but about increasing the richness of the earth itself and treating the farm (the soil, the plants, the animals, the buildings, the people) as an ecosystem to be nurtured, not a factory to be driven and squeezed for every ounce of output. If you treat the farm right, the outputs would come because that’s how nature works.

I was shocked at just how relevant the book was for being so old and, as it turned out, other people in my circle had also been reading Salatin’s work and watching his Youtube channel, coming to very similar conclusions and putting them into practice in their own homesteads and hobby farms.

Inspired by this revelation, I picked up a few other books at the local Village Books — one on beginner homesteading, one called “The Basics of Regenerative Agriculture” which goes really deep on quite a few aspects, and one by a local author called “Dairy Farming in the 21st Century”. Even if that last one ends up not being about regenerative agriculture at all, I know it’ll still fit into the framework I’ve established for how I’d like to garden, farm, and promote the health of our planet and food supply.

My first course of action? Building a compost pile.