Regenerative Agriculture, the term is now used widely, but how well is it truly understood? At its core it means to renew or restore, yet many of the practices used under the Regenerative label can't even be considered sustainable, rather they do further harm to the soil and wider ecosystems. The Regenerative term is also being considered for application in a much wider context than just a soil health restoration, but also a food system and planetary restoration principals.
The Master Class Series aims to help people everywhere learn how the soil really functions, how it is vital to the health of our planets climate and the things we can do to support that soil to regenerate.
Photosynthetic rate can be assessed by measuring Brix with a refractometer. An increase of around 5 percent in global photosynthetic capacity and/or photosynthetic rate would be sufficient to counter the CO2 flux from the burning of fossil fuels, provided the extra carbon was sequestered in soil in a stable form. This is feasible. On average, global cropland is bare for around half of every year (9). If you can see the soil, it is losing carbon!
In a creative stroke inspired by Hollywood wizardry, scientists from the Kishony Lab at HMS and Technion (www.technion.ac.il/en/) have designed a simple way to observe how bacteria move as they become impervious to drugs. The experiments are thought to provide the first large-scale glimpse of the maneuvers of bacteria as they encounter increasingly higher doses of antibiotics and adapt to survive—and thrive—in them.
But the balance of this natural cycling tipped when people began to extract and release increasing amounts of carbon for human advancement, starting with the dawn of agriculture 10,000-plus years ago.
The advent of tillage and deforestation released excessive amounts of carbon dioxide from our soils. The problem worsened when we became dependent on fossil fuels to power our lives.
But we can take that excess carbon from the atmosphere and put it back underground.
