Regenerative practices can feed the earth, and don't permit anyone tell you otherwise. Here are 2 examples of food production intensified sustainably – and intensification will be the key to feeding a growing global population.

The get-go example is a rancher named Sam Montoya who ran 220 head of cattle on 93 acres of land profitably and sustainably for years.

When I commencement visited Sam on his tiny farm, located on Sandia Pueblo, a Native American reservation located a few miles north of Albuquerque, New Mexico, I was astonished – 220 cattle on merely 93 acres of land?! In the arid Southwest, that many cattle typically demand 10,000 acres or more than to be managed properly. The difference is water – Sam's little farm was irrigated, but that merely makes his story even more intriguing.

Most irrigated land in the Due west produces hay or alfalfa for animals, non food for people, and those farms that run cattle instead practise so at a stocking charge per unit of about i cow per acre. Sam'due south stocking rate was more than twice that, which means Sam produced twice as much food per acre on irrigated ground than could accomplished past conventional management. And his method often resulted in more grass on his little subcontract than his cows could eat!

This is important considering the human population of the planet is on grade to grow from 7 billion to 9 billion by 2050, raising a critical question: how are we going to feed an extra two billion people without destroying what's left of the natural world, especially under the stress of climate change?

It's not about poor people either. The food well-fed Americans eat comes from a global production organization that is already struggling to find enough arable land, adequate supplies of water and drought-tolerant plants and animals to feed seven billion people today. Add 2 billion more and y'all accept a recipe for a devastating raid on the natural globe. Where is all this extra food and water going to come from, especially if the climate gets hotter and drier in many places equally predicted?

Industry has an answer: more of the aforementioned. More chemicals, fertilizers, GMOs, monocropping and heavy fossil fuel use. A second 'Dark-green Revolution' is required, they say, even though the consequences of the first one are at present haunting us.

Sam Montoya's little farm provided a completely different answer: regeneratively intensify food production on the same amount of acreage.

How did Sam double the stocking rate while growing more grass? Here's how: After retiring from a career with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Sam decided that he wanted to return to his agricultural roots. Upon receiving permission from the tribe to rehabilitate 93 depleted acres of a onetime sod farm, located a short distance from the Rio Grande, Sam light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation-leveled the land, built a central watering source, planted a variety of grasses, and then divided the ground into 33 paddocks – 3 acres each – with electric fencing. When the terminal dairy in the area close down, due to subdivision pressures, Sam scored an economical supply of manure for fertilizer. So he turned the water on. When the grass grew lush, he turned the cattle out.

The animals grazed as a single herd in one paddock for only one day. When the 24-hr period was upward, Sam walked over from his house in the nearby pueblo, lowered a gate in the electric fence, watched the cattle walk into the adjacent paddock, secured the fence when the move was consummate, and went abode. The entire process took less than half-an-hour, meeting Sam's requirement that he "not work too difficult" in his retirement, as he explained to me.

The rotation of the herd through the entire sequence of paddocks took a little more than a month. By advisedly managing the irrigation water, Sam bodacious that the grass was fix for some other harvesting by the fourth dimension the herd came dorsum to a particular paddock. And he repeated this cycle all yr round, fifty-fifty through the winter.

"I'm trying to mimic what the bison did," Sam told me. "They kept moving all the time. You, me, the land – everything needs a break. Only yous shouldn't sit down on the sofa all week. Too much residuum is equally bad as too much work. It'due south all about residuum."

Pursuing that balance, Sam didn't employ pesticides, herbicides or other chemicals. Eventually he stopped adding manure as well. He recycled everything and wasted nothing. Better notwithstanding, other than the delivering and hauling abroad of the cattle, Sam's performance required NO fossil-fuel dependent machinery either – a fact that pleased the economically-minder farmer.

"I don't want anything that rusts, rots or depreciates," said Sam, grinning. "Plus, I feel expert that I'm not polluting the air."

That included not emitting greenhouse gases (other than cow belches). He was likewise sequestrating CO2 in the soil as well – by building new soil on farm country that had been stripped of it. It all meshed together considering his functioning worked on the original solar power: photosynthesis. In fact, Sam called himself a "grass farmer" – which meant he considered grass to be his principle product, non beef. The cattle were his "lawn mowers," equally he put it.

Perhaps as chiefly, Sam made money. Profits from the sale of cattle – Sam was a studious observer of business cycles in the livestock industry – immune him to speedily pay back the loan he took out to get the farm started. In only a few years, he operated in the black, due to his very low costs. Eventually, he switched from running his ain cattle to custom-grazing cattle from other pueblos for a fee.

The but serious challenge he had was staying ahead of all the grass he grew – not that the large flock of Canadian geese I saw in his field were complaining! In fact, he grew so much grass that at one betoken Sam considered adding more cattle to his herd, which would take raised his stocking rate even higher.

"It works pretty well," Sam said the last time I visited. "Information technology's been pretty good to me. And I know it'southward been practiced for the land."

And good for us.

Although Sam is retired at present from his subcontract, what he accomplished on his 93 acres. With 2 billion more than people to feed in simply two more than decades, Sam's lesson is an option was certainly should listen.

Here's a picture of Sam that I took:

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Another practice that can feed the globe is pasture cropping, which I learned well-nigh while visiting Colin Seis on his farm in New Southward Wales, Australia, a few years agone. I quickly learned that pasture cropping has the potential to feed a lot of people regeneratively – meaning information technology can replete, rather than deplete, land and people.

Colin and his farm were living proof.

In 1979, afterwards a wildfire burned the family unit sheep subcontract, Colin decided to rethink the way he had been practicing agriculture. His new goal was to rebuild the soil's fertility after decades of practices had unwittingly depleted information technology. Colin decided first to take up holistic management, which is a mode of managing animals on pasture that mimics the graze-and-go behavior of wild herbivores. But it is what Colin did adjacent that really caught people'south attention.

After a word with a neighboring farmer, Colin decided to explore a radical idea: what if he no-till drilled an annual crop into his perennial grass pastures? Meaning, could he enhance two products from one piece of land: a grain crop and an animal product? This was way, mode out-of-the-box thinking. Co-ordinate to conventional agricultural practices, crops and grazing animals were supposed to be kept separate. Only that'southward because the traditional practice on cropland is plowing, which eliminates the grasses. Merely what if you lot no-till (no turn) drilled oat or wheat or corn seed straight into the pasture when the grasses were dormant? Would they grow?

Fast forward to the present and the answer is a resounding 'yep!' Pasture cropping works well and has spread beyond Australia to some 2000 farms. Today, Colin produces grain and wool – and, if he wanted, a harvest of native grass seed, which was an original nutrient source for the Aboriginals of the area. It's all carefully integrated and managed under Colin's stewardship. Talk virtually win-win!

For a full description of pasture cropping: http://www.awestthatworks.com/essays.html

Listening to Colin, I thought "What claiming could exist bigger than feeding nine billion people?" Fortunately, pasture cropping is just one case of regenerative practices that build topsoil, increase yields, and conserve the natural environs. There are many others, involving soil, seeds, h2o, plants, livestock, trees, organics, and people as the stewards. Building topsoil, for example, stores more than water, grows healthier plants that can feed more than people while sequestering carbon – which is good for nature too.

Is this all pie-in-the-heaven stuff? Perchance, but consider the alternative: more of what got u.s.a. into trouble in the kickoff identify. With ii billion more people to feed, clothe, business firm, warm, and slake thirsts, contemplating alternatives is crucial. Fortunately, answers be – equally Sam and Colin accept demonstrated.

Here's a movie of Colin in 1 of his pasture cropped field:

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