Regenerating
Here there be dragons
A lot of folks are getting wrapped around the axle these days about the definition of regenerative agriculture. Then the conversation moves pretty quickly to certification. How do we know all these untrustworthy farmers are doing the right thing and not trying to kill us? We need boxes to tick, scorecards to fill up, metrics to metricate (I think I just made up a new word).
None of that helps a farmer to run their farm very well. Yes, we need to follow the law (and not kill people), but the levers and block and tackle under the hood don’t look so pretty in a slide deck. They’re not “investible”. They can’t be “rolled up” into a single figure for say cocoa from Central America, or vanilla from Madagascar that can be presented in a board meeting after 27 Zoom calls to prep.
We’re now just beginning to realize the complexity that is farming, which got lost in the Great Simplification of the Green Revolution. Every farm is different, every farmer’s approach is different, their access to capital and markets, their team, their neighbors.
Tino and I have been trying to figure out what is important, what we can track, and what simply can’t be shoehorned into a spreadsheet but represents improvement. Sometimes we’re better off telling stories than presenting graphs.
Here’s our first attempt. We’re not going to win any certification or graphic design awards, it’s more about illustrating our approach in the hope that people in our circle and other farmers may learn from our mistakes.
There are no quick fixes. It’s time, boots on the ground, observing, adjusting, experimenting without a rule book.
Since we started this, I find myself becoming very skeptical about the seductiveness of ag-tech that reduces things into zeros and ones, its cut and paste and its infernal “portals” – that’s my last quotation marks, I promise. However, I am a big fan of soil and sap tests, and running lots of trials and making biological control agents from material from the farm. They’re like blood tests, without the doctor telling you to cut down on junk foods. Here, the farmer is the doctor, figuring it out in real time.
So my definition of regenerative? It’s like pornography – you know it when you see it. I hope you see it in this report.
