We hope so. We are doing our best on our organic smallholding here in south west France, but we are surrounded by fields and fields of monoculture; corn, sunflowers, oil seed rape, tobacco. Thanks for your video.
@@LearningfromNature Arrived on our 33 acres 3 years ago. It was in serious drought time and had been a lot of poisons used on our place. The only thing really alive was nine banana stubs. We revived them and now have over 300 thriving. 50 different types of fruit trees. Multiple other things. A small vineyard. Now running 7 cattle , 35 sheep , 50 chickens, 10 geese and various other animals. On arrival we planted over 10,000 seeds of which none grew. It was a tough start but slowly things came to life. Now we have enough food coming off our place to sustain our diet .But over the next 12 months will be our biggest transformation because I now have a nursery which propagates trees for us. As we don’t have much money and have never been able to buy much. I currently have thousands of trees growing. Mostly fruit trees but also some natives to set up a green area for our livestock.
I planted 8 jeruselum artichoke last spring, i now have 32 jeruselum artichoke. The extra 32 j.a surface area creates more opprtunities of soil life . Tractor compact
Thanks for sharing your experience with Jerusalem artichoke - they’re a great source of food for our soil organisms - adding diversity will further help!
That sounds like a wonderful future, but how can those struggling farmers transition to such a different growing method? It takes courage, time, and money to radically change the way of growing food for the masses. If the government provided suitable financial incentives I'm sure many farmers would jump at the chance. But that seems unlikely. I'm posting this as a small-scale gardener that practices these methods. Not a farmer. Thanks for this video.
Thank you for raising this important issue. It would be interesting to hear more about how you apply these practices to your garden. It's interesting that where there is more urgency, change is happening to a greater extent, even without government incentives. Psychologically, it is challenging to go against the norm. But practically, it's actually fairly easy to do once you understand what needs to be done.
Great video and vision of the future. The cost of buying predatory pest control (like insects that eat pests) at 3:01 to 3,14 is currently quite expensive for small scale growers. As demand for them increases, their costs will hopefully decrease. It would be nice if Governments subsidised biological pest control production. Win, win virtuous circle. The abundance of thriving pest predators would keep pests numbers down everywhere = less insecticides, cheaper food (later, not at first), healthier people, etc.
I appreciate your feedback! I didn't talk a lot about pest control in the video except to mention growing plants to provide beneficial connections, i.e. food and habitat for the predators and parasites of our insect pests. One of the main take-home messages I would like people to benefit from is that in growing food in thriving ecosystems we can rely more on Nature's FREE ecological services rather than substituting with fertilisers, pesticides and bringing bugs to control bugs.
@@LearningfromNature I think that introducing pest parasites undoubtedly brings significant success, compared to hoping they just turn by themselves before the organic crop has been entirely decimated. In the UK, lots of pest predators get killed during the cold winters. In this video you mentioned new types of pest plagues. That is where high quality, dynamic global pest predator production will be most important. Also helping poverty stricken countries establish pest parasite production in a charitable way.
I am trying to follow this model in a little veg patch in a communal garden, it is difficult to explain to my fellow gardeners who are steeped in post-war gardening practices that what they are doing is damaging to the soil but I do know my efforts are appreciated and they respect my growing spaces and resist their instincts to ‘tidy’ it up, but I get very sad when I see the flower borders with so much bare brown soil that has been endlessly hoe’d, raked and sprayed. I am hoping that slowly, slowly, attitudes will shift and we can look after this precious gardening space and allow nature to thrive at the same time … there are no quick answers to this
Will these new growing systems feed 8 to 10 billion people? How many people will it take to feed us all? I am a very keen backyard farmer and i get the interelatedness of different elements and ecosystem services but we need data to back this up. It might be say fifty percent of us engaged in food production?
John, there is data to back this up, particularly from research carried out on farms. We highlight some of this research in other videos and in our Ecological Farming and Ecological Gardening Handbooks. Will these new growing systems feed 8 to 10 billion people? We will probably only know for sure by trying! However, the limited research that has been funded into regenerative agriculture demonstrates improved yields, especially when farmers repair their ecological support services and remodel their production systems from single to multi-layered production systems.
Regenerative ag is huge especially and ironically in the US. Mob grazing, permaculture, syntropic agroforestry, biodynamics just to name a few. The huge problem is lack of understanding of how to care for the soil.
Thank you for your comment. I think the problem with lack of understanding how to care for the soil stems from the focus of regenerative agriculture on treating the symptoms instead of tackling the root cause. I explain more here: ruclips.net/video/HeNFtdugXAU/видео.htmlsi=SweF41WK_8j_E9yH
The mere fact that we have to ask this question now hurts me.... Of course we can! We did so for millennia before modern agriculture! We've just forgotten how much is actually edible and now focus on a small amount of well known varieties.... I've been doing research into edible wild plants and now see that I'm literally surrounded by free food~ The real problem is that people have gotten lazy, including myself. We don't trust nature and so rely only on what we produce ourselves. That will be society's downfall. I'm working to change my habits so that my family won't suffer and I hope to share what I learn like others before me so I can help change this... but it's taking time. I know I'm being unkind by making these generalizations and that this isn't true for everyone.... I'm just speaking from a mainstream perspective.
Thank you for your thoughts. What gives me hope is that in getting the ecosystems within our farms and gardens working better again we can rely more on Nature's free ecological services making it easier for us to grow food. We work with Nature's expertise rather than struggling to make all the decisions ourselves! Your research on edible wild plants is so important - I would be interested to hear your thoughts on integrating them into your garden.
Great discussion until you mentioned climate change. I think growers should focus on adapting to different weather conditions, because they are variable, and leave the climate discussion to the climatologists.
Bradley I agree! We have a Drought Hub in this region. Set up by the Australian government to reduce the impacts of the drying climate that's been predicted for this NE corner of Australia. But they are now having to also support farmers with other types of extreme weather after record flooding rains in Nov 2023. I firmly believe that we our response should be to repair the ecosystems underpinning our food production systems. They then become intrinsically better at withstanding and recovering from all types of extreme weather.
Keep sharing. Maybe one day humans will hear. Thanks for sharing
Regenerative agriculture is one of the few subjects that gives me a lot of hope.
Me too ❤
Me too!
We hope so. We are doing our best on our organic smallholding here in south west France, but we are surrounded by fields and fields of monoculture; corn, sunflowers, oil seed rape, tobacco. Thanks for your video.
We often don't say much to our neighbours about what we're doing, but people are now starting to ask questions...
We are doing our part and it’s exciting to see our small farm coming back to life.
Thankyou 👍
Thank you for doing your part! We'd love to hear more about your project.
@@LearningfromNature
Arrived on our 33 acres 3 years ago. It was in serious drought time and had been a lot of poisons used on our place. The only thing really alive was nine banana stubs. We revived them and now have over 300 thriving. 50 different types of fruit trees. Multiple other things. A small vineyard. Now running 7 cattle , 35 sheep , 50 chickens, 10 geese and various other animals. On arrival we planted over 10,000 seeds of which none grew. It was a tough start but slowly things came to life. Now we have enough food coming off our place to sustain our diet .But over the next 12 months will be our biggest transformation because I now have a nursery which propagates trees for us. As we don’t have much money and have never been able to buy much. I currently have thousands of trees growing. Mostly fruit trees but also some natives to set up a green area for our livestock.
I planted 8 jeruselum artichoke last spring, i now have 32 jeruselum artichoke.
The extra 32 j.a surface area creates more opprtunities of soil life .
Tractor compact
Thanks for sharing your experience with Jerusalem artichoke - they’re a great source of food for our soil organisms - adding diversity will further help!
That sounds like a wonderful future, but how can those struggling farmers transition to such a different growing method?
It takes courage, time, and money to radically change the way of growing food for the masses.
If the government provided suitable financial incentives I'm sure many farmers would jump at the chance. But that seems unlikely.
I'm posting this as a small-scale gardener that practices these methods. Not a farmer. Thanks for this video.
Thank you for raising this important issue. It would be interesting to hear more about how you apply these practices to your garden.
It's interesting that where there is more urgency, change is happening to a greater extent, even without government incentives. Psychologically, it is challenging to go against the norm. But practically, it's actually fairly easy to do once you understand what needs to be done.
Great video and vision of the future. The cost of buying predatory pest control (like insects that eat pests) at 3:01 to 3,14 is currently quite expensive for small scale growers. As demand for them increases, their costs will hopefully decrease. It would be nice if Governments subsidised biological pest control production. Win, win virtuous circle. The abundance of thriving pest predators would keep pests numbers down everywhere = less insecticides, cheaper food (later, not at first), healthier people, etc.
I appreciate your feedback! I didn't talk a lot about pest control in the video except to mention growing plants to provide beneficial connections, i.e. food and habitat for the predators and parasites of our insect pests. One of the main take-home messages I would like people to benefit from is that in growing food in thriving ecosystems we can rely more on Nature's FREE ecological services rather than substituting with fertilisers, pesticides and bringing bugs to control bugs.
@@LearningfromNature I think that introducing pest parasites undoubtedly brings significant success, compared to hoping they just turn by themselves before the organic crop has been entirely decimated. In the UK, lots of pest predators get killed during the cold winters. In this video you mentioned new types of pest plagues. That is where high quality, dynamic global pest predator production will be most important. Also helping poverty stricken countries establish pest parasite production in a charitable way.
I am trying to follow this model in a little veg patch in a communal garden, it is difficult to explain to my fellow gardeners who are steeped in post-war gardening practices that what they are doing is damaging to the soil but I do know my efforts are appreciated and they respect my growing spaces and resist their instincts to ‘tidy’ it up, but I get very sad when I see the flower borders with so much bare brown soil that has been endlessly hoe’d, raked and sprayed. I am hoping that slowly, slowly, attitudes will shift and we can look after this precious gardening space and allow nature to thrive at the same time … there are no quick answers to this
Hi Izzy, I often find that by simply digging in the soil and showing people the differences, is a great way to explain the benefits.
Maybe show them this video.
Great video!
Cheers!
Will these new growing systems feed 8 to 10 billion people? How many people will it take to feed us all? I am a very keen backyard farmer and i get the interelatedness of different elements and ecosystem services but we need data to back this up. It might be say fifty percent of us engaged in food production?
John, there is data to back this up, particularly from research carried out on farms. We highlight some of this research in other videos and in our Ecological Farming and Ecological Gardening Handbooks.
Will these new growing systems feed 8 to 10 billion people? We will probably only know for sure by trying! However, the limited research that has been funded into regenerative agriculture demonstrates improved yields, especially when farmers repair their ecological support services and remodel their production systems from single to multi-layered production systems.
Regenerative ag is huge especially and ironically in the US. Mob grazing, permaculture, syntropic agroforestry, biodynamics just to name a few. The huge problem is lack of understanding of how to care for the soil.
Thank you for your comment. I think the problem with lack of understanding how to care for the soil stems from the focus of regenerative agriculture on treating the symptoms instead of tackling the root cause. I explain more here: ruclips.net/video/HeNFtdugXAU/видео.htmlsi=SweF41WK_8j_E9yH
The mere fact that we have to ask this question now hurts me.... Of course we can! We did so for millennia before modern agriculture! We've just forgotten how much is actually edible and now focus on a small amount of well known varieties.... I've been doing research into edible wild plants and now see that I'm literally surrounded by free food~ The real problem is that people have gotten lazy, including myself. We don't trust nature and so rely only on what we produce ourselves. That will be society's downfall. I'm working to change my habits so that my family won't suffer and I hope to share what I learn like others before me so I can help change this... but it's taking time.
I know I'm being unkind by making these generalizations and that this isn't true for everyone.... I'm just speaking from a mainstream perspective.
Thank you for your thoughts. What gives me hope is that in getting the ecosystems within our farms and gardens working better again we can rely more on Nature's free ecological services making it easier for us to grow food. We work with Nature's expertise rather than struggling to make all the decisions ourselves! Your research on edible wild plants is so important - I would be interested to hear your thoughts on integrating them into your garden.
Great discussion until you mentioned climate change. I think growers should focus on adapting to different weather conditions, because they are variable, and leave the climate discussion to the climatologists.
Bradley I agree! We have a Drought Hub in this region. Set up by the Australian government to reduce the impacts of the drying climate that's been predicted for this NE corner of Australia. But they are now having to also support farmers with other types of extreme weather after record flooding rains in Nov 2023. I firmly believe that we our response should be to repair the ecosystems underpinning our food production systems. They then become intrinsically better at withstanding and recovering from all types of extreme weather.