Regenerative Agriculture: Isn’t that Permaculture?

Imagine you have a globally popular grassroots movement that has significant traction, a trove of free documentation and millions of adherents, but you want to sell it to big business as a “scaled approach” aligned with the green agenda. First, you need a rebrand to distinguish a new commercial product.

Permaculture gained prominence in the 1970s, designing self-sustaining agricultural ecosystems that closely mimic natural systems. It shares regenerative agriculture’s goals of soil health and biodiversity, but tends to focus on small-scale, closed loop, localized, community-driven solutions. Systems like Fukuoka’s natural farming, seed saving and rural flight are aligned in terms of orientation against a counter-push from industrialized agriculture and GMO.

Regenerative agriculture takes some of these principles, mixing them with high tech innovation, scaling up for commercial farms.

What Is Regenerative Agriculture?

At its core, regenerative agriculture is a set of farming principles aimed at restoring and enhancing soil health, biodiversity, and ecosystem services, while still producing enough food to sustain populations. It’s more about regenerating the resources farming uses (like soil and water) rather than depleting them.

It includes practices like:

  • 🟩No-till or low-till farming: Reducing soil disturbance, lowering labor and fuel costs.
  • 🟩Cover cropping: Planting crops that protect and nourish the soil between harvests.
  • 🟩Diverse crop rotations: Breaking the monoculture cycle to improve biodiversity and soil nutrient cycling.
  • 🟩Integrating livestock: Using managed grazing to mimic natural ecosystems and fertilize soils.
  • 🟩Composting, mulching, and organic matter inputs: Feeding the soil so it feeds the plants.

The result? Healthier soils prevent erosion, hold more water, and produce higher yields over time without synthetic crutches.

A conceptual difference is that Permaculturists are keyed into layering. By using different types of trees, bushes or shrubs, and cover crops within the cultivated space to build a seasonal canopy, you effectively create a micro climate. This leads into making guilds, or developing compatible groups of plants, animals and soils, planted for the mid to longer term. The idea of water conservation is pivotal with terrain features like swales or ponds being built to capture or divert seasonal rains, to build in water based systems within the overall design.

By sticking to “soil,” the regenerative farming upgrade moves away from contentious topics like hedgerow cropping, wildlife diversity, rural identity politics and conservation practices, squarely back into business as usual.

“…working with, rather than against, nature” and of engaging in “protracted and thoughtful observation, rather than protracted and thoughtless labor.”

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Mollison

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