Regenerative Agriculture is a Win for Producers, Consumers, and the Environment: A Promotional Rant

Regenerative agriculture is in everyone’s best interest.  This is true for the producer, who reap a variety of benefits from fully regenerated soil. The general idea being healthy soil is more resistant to environmental stresses; ranging from drought to disease, and will therefore produce healthier plants. This is true for consumers, who stand to gain …

How to Build a Vermicompost Bin: Cheap and Easy Worm Castings

Over the last few years we’ve been hearing great things about vermicast (i.e. worm manure). And when farmers are talking up one kind of shit over all the other types of shit they have access to, we’ll it’s time to listen up — cause farmers know their shit.  What makes worm castings so special — …

Vermicompost Feedstock Recipe: How to Make Worm Food and Why You Should Do It

if one can consistently feed the worms the exact same food then the castings produced should be of a consistent quality and thus consistently bestow the same benefits upon the crop

Regenerative Farming: Why the Focus on Soil Health?

A hundred years ago, Canadian pioneers could break a fresh plot of land and grow a healthy, high yielding wheat crop just by putting seed in the ground.  Fifty years ago, second and third generation Canadian farmers began to realize that the land just wasn’t producing like it used to. Lucky, synthetic fertilizer was now …

Pioneers of Regenerative Farming: The Miraculous Dr. Northen

“Do you know that most of us today are suffering from certain dangerous diet deficiencies which cannot be remedied until the depleted soils from which our foods come are brought into proper mineral balance?” These words were spoken by Rex Breach, a gentleman farmer from the state of Florida, in his 1936 address to the …

The Chaos Garden: Year 1

Some call it a mess. Others contend it’s natural order. Technically, it’s referred to as polycropping but we call it a chaos garden and it’s the perfect microcosm of a regenerative farm. Regenerative agriculture is focused on restoring natural nutrient cycles in the soil by emulating the natural ecosystem. The goal is to create an …

Rethinking Success: Soil, profit and regenerative farming

Traditionally, farmers have correlated yield to success. That is to say, on a field by field basis, yield is often the primary determining factor used to judge whether a crop was successful or not.  And for good reason. To begin with, yield is fairly easy to measure (e.g. bushels/acre) and can be calculated during harvest. …

Soil as an Ecosystem

Healthy ecosystems produce healthy organisms. It’s really that simple. From gardeners to agriculturalists, it’s becoming increasingly important to understand the role of the soil microbiome in relation to soil health and land rejuvenation. Traditionally, farmers tend to disassociate their target crop from land that it is grown on, focusing on production processes which produce immediate …

On Micronutrients: Liebig’s Law

It’s called Liebig’s barrel. The contents of the barrel represent a crop’s yield potential, while each wooden slat represent a different nutrient required by the plant. The barrel is meant as a visual representation of Liebig’s Law of the minimum – a crucial concept when calculating the nutrient needs and yield potential of any field …

If it ain’t in the ground, it ain’t in the food

“You’d think, wouldn’t you, that a carrot is a carrot – that one is about as good as another as far as nourishment is concerned? But it isn’t; one carrot may look and taste like another and yet be lacking in the particular mineral element which our system requires and which carrots are supposed to …