Brent Preston is the owner of a farm near highway 124 and Sideroad 6 & 7 Nottawasaga, Creemore, Ontario. I was at a lecture he gave today that was very informative and inspiring. His website is https://thenewfarm.ca. He has a book called The New Farm: Our Ten Years on the Front Lines of the Good Food Revolution. The link is to Amazon.ca. What is the book about? It’s the inspiring and sometimes hilarious story of a family who quit the rat race and left the city to live out their ideals on an organic farm, and ended up building a model for a new kind of agriculture.

The New Farm is a certified organic (by Pro-Cert) family farm located on the crest of the Niagara Escarpment just west of the village of Creemore. The farm is not just about growing food in a sustainable way, it’s about regenerative farming, education and advocacy for political change. They’ve been farming for about 20 years and now it is transitioning to The New Farm Centre, which is a not for profit centre for research, education, demonstration and advocacy around regenerative agriculture. It will continue to be a working farm that sells to restaurants and retail stores. The New Farm Centre is now a registered charity.

Regenerative Farming

The good news is that only after a few years, the benefits of regenerative farming outweigh the initial costs. For example, you’d need to pay for cover crop seeds to get started on cover crops. Those benefits continue on into the future, indefinitely. What is regenerative farming? It’s not sustainability – it’s better than sustainability.

• Keep the soil covered.
• Have living roots year-round.
• Minimum soil disturbance.
• Integrate livestock.
• Maximize crop diversity.

In his talk, here are the five principles.

• Least Disturbance (the soil)
• Living root
• Soil armor(never have bare soil; cover it), convert from til to no til
• Animal integration (have animals roam the landscape)
• Increased biodiversity (it is always a good thing)

You can go to the Ecological Farmer’s Association of Ontario for more information. The EFAO supports farmers to build resilient ecological farms and grow a strong knowledge-sharing community. The EFAO brings farmers together so they can learn from each other and improve the health of their soils, crops, livestock and the environment, to steward resilient ecological farms.

• Nothing we do as human beings has a greater impact on the environment than agriculture.
• February 1985 was the last month in which global temperatures were below the 20th century average (NASA)
• Canada lost over 23,000 farms in the past five years and 33,000 farmers.
• The average farm size in Canada is now almost 800 acres.
• The top 20% of Canadian farms produce 80% of the agricultural output.
• Obesity now kills three times as many people as malnutrition, worldwide.
• The US loses 1.7 billion tons of topsoil every year.
• In the last 40 years we’ve lost one third of the farmable land on the planet.
• Food is at the intersection of climate, the environment and human health.
• Agriculture produces all three of the main greenhouse gases: CO2 (carbon dioxide), CH4 (methane) and N2O (nitrous oxide)
• A lot of emissions come from cattle and nitrogen fertilizer.
• We need to sequester carbon from the atmosphere and store it in the soil (pedosphere)
• Soil is made of of sand, silt and clay. There is also air, water and organic matter.
• Soil organic matter (SOM) binds particles together, and also to keep them apart.
• The more SOM in the soil, the more air and water that will exist in the soil.
• You want to increase the SOM in your soil, but how?
• Through photosynthesis, plants take carbon dioxide from the air and uses solar energy to convert that to carbohydrates to function and grow, but a big portion of the carbohydrates are used to feed the microorganisms that live in the soil. The microrganisms in return provide minerals and water.
• There is amazing biodiversity in the soil itself, and crucially we have fungi, which grow right into the roots
• Nitrogen is the most important nutrient for plant growth and we have lots of it in the atmosphere.
• There is a process called fixation. This is where certain microorganisms can take nutrients and convert them to a form that plants can use.
• For example, they can take nitrogen in the air and turn them into a plant-usable form.
• We get a lot of greenhouse gas emissions from clearing the land (till), slash and burning, drain and cultivate, fallow, fertilize, and use biocides (pesticides, insecticides, fungicides)
• Agriculture is destroying animal habitat, biodiversity, water quality (chemicals, algae blooms), water quantity (uses by far the largest quantity of fresh water), and toxins in atmosphere.
• As an alternative, we can turn to regenerative agriculture, which has exploded in popularity in the last five years.
• We are currently in a degenerative agricultural cycle, meaning that our farmland is becoming less productive over time.
• Sustainability means we are just maintaining the status quo in terms of land productivity.
• Regenerative agriculture means that the soil health is improving over time and it is becoming more productive.
• The definition of regenerative agriculture is in debate.
• CAFO = confined animal feeding operation – farms should be doing both animals and plants

Back to the farm. What do they do? Increase soil health, increase soil organic matter, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, cover crops, reduce dependence on off-farm inputs, enhancing biodiversity, sequestering carbon, and making the farm more profitable. The farm The main takeaway is that the more you focus on building healthy functioning ecosystems, the more profitable the farm became!. Economics and the environment are not in conflict. The more we take care of the environment, the more it takes are of economics.

When it comes to cover crops, the farm often planted sun flowers, peas, oats tillage radish. They plant 10 or 11 different seeds at once. It’s a called a cocktail crop. You do not harvest it. It feeds the soil and drives carbon into the soil and increases the SOM. The radish provides the soil with phosphorus and the tuber dies in winter to provide air in the soil. Peas are a legume, which means they fix atmospheric nitrogen, and save on purchasing nitrogen fertilizer (which uses a lot of energy). Biodiversity is a priority.