Regenerative agriculture: Difference between revisions
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The article addresses [[Cargill]] and [[Microsoft]] explicitly and references other corporate players in citations. | The article addresses [[Cargill]] and [[Microsoft]] explicitly and references other corporate players in citations. | ||
= Academia = | |||
== MSU Center for Regenerative Agriculture == | |||
Directed by Jason Rowntree, a Savory Hub. Leading a $19 million project funded by the [[Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research]] in 2022 to research and develop the Savory Institute's EOV protocol (based on [[Allan Savory]]'s [[holistic management]] in collaboration with the [[USDA]], [[Savory Institute]], [[The Nature Conservancy]], and others.<ref>https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/msu-researchers-play-pivotal-role-in-new-grazing-soil-health-project</ref> | |||
Revision as of 20:44, 25 February 2023
Regenerative agriculture is a diverse, highly contested, and rapidly developing sustainable agriculture movement. It has been lauded for its transformative potential, and criticized for its incoherence and susceptibility for corporate co-option. At the heart of regenerative agriculture is an effort to engage with soil life rather than bypass it; this ethos and the messiness of the movement indicate that a range of novel human-soil relations may emerge within this space. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with members of intermediary organizations – research institutes, consultants, and NGOs, among others – that are active in promotion and advocacy for adoption of regenerative practices in order to explore these changing human-soil relations.
Overall, narratives indicate that a wide range of human-soil relations can be identified within regenerative agriculture, including care, exploitation, and relatively novel mechanisms of commodification and financialization of soil life through the development of soil carbon credits. Further, results indicate that this variation is produced by differences in human approaches to understanding, analyzing, and managing soil life; different approaches to producing knowledge about soils facilitates the creation of different kinds of relations. Building on the narratives, it is argued that the human should be theoretically (re)centered in the social science study of regenerative agriculture and human-soil relations, in order to maintain a uniquely human sense of responsibility to address, among other challenges, climate change. Similarly, the role of alternative ontological outlooks on soils and nature in food system transformation is discussed.[1]
Soil Grab Greenwashing
A critique of The Soil Grab Greenwashing by Agribusiness[2]:
"The corporate interest in carbon farming extends beyond simply greenwashing industrial agriculture or offsetting emissions. It provides a powerful incentive to draw farmers into the digital platforms that agribusiness corporations and big tech companies are jointly developing to influence farmers on their choice of inputs and farming practices."
"And then, there is the issue of the greenhouse gases these carbon credit farming programmes generate. Nearly all the programmes focus narrowly on quantifying carbon sequestered in the soil and do not consider the overall emissions that industrial farming produces. They do not factor in the amount of chemical inputs a farm applies or the amount of fossil fuels burnt running tractors and other machinery, or the increased emissions that can result from the first years of transition to no-till.[16]They do not account for the emissions produced by their remote verification systems either– from the energy needed to store the data these systems generate to the aeroplanes or satellites they use to monitor farms. And they are based on tweaks to a model of industrial agriculture that depends heavily on chemical inputs and that supplies a hugely wasteful and polluting corporate food system.[17]"
The article addresses Cargill and Microsoft explicitly and references other corporate players in citations.
Academia
MSU Center for Regenerative Agriculture
Directed by Jason Rowntree, a Savory Hub. Leading a $19 million project funded by the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research in 2022 to research and develop the Savory Institute's EOV protocol (based on Allan Savory's holistic management in collaboration with the USDA, Savory Institute, The Nature Conservancy, and others.[3]