How regenerative farming can help heal the planet and human health | Charles Massy | TEDxCanberra

Now, what would you think if I told you that

regenerative

agriculture could save the

planet

and renew

human

heal

th at the same time? It's absurd that this guy is crazy the last time I checked no, and that's why I would like to take you on the journey that led you to To that conclusion, that journey began here on my farm in the snowy mountain region, beautiful native grasslands , a lot of biodiversity, including these guys that only Yellow Robins came after the big fires and the mountains in 2003, they are now abundant, so they clearly liked the biodiversity there. just like these black cockatoos that also arrived after the fires and are now there and painted here by my friend Richard Weatherly and Richard captured his lazy flies in that painting, so it may surprise you to know that early in my

farming

career I did very good. damage to this beautiful landscape and therefore some of its creatures, but that in turn became a catalyst for change, but first, what is

regenerative

agriculture?

What is an ecological approach to agriculture that allows landscapes to renew themselves? Radical idea that allowing and not dominating there are a variety of practices. in regenerative agriculture ecological or holistic grazing crops with biological inputs crops on native grasslands agroforestry food forestry and a variety of others such as biodynamics and permaculture as now tens of millions of hectares around the world under this approach and generally managed by families and not by fanatics Corporate, in contrast Industrial agriculture tends to simplify dominant control and usually ends up destroying natural systems and their cycles and is driven by some of the largest multinational pharmaceutical chemical companies in the world that operate under a rationalist economic philosophy of growth and greed.

Now some of their key practices are the monocultural cultivation of the land. the application of synthetic fertilizers we decide pesticides, pharmaceuticals, the manipulation of plants and animal genomes and the industrial breeding of animals, now all this is unnatural, some excessive, so how is it that a nature lover ended up adopting some of these practices? Well, I grew up an only child. on our farm and spent a lot of time in the bush near the national parks, so I was a nature lover and ended up here in Anu doing serology, but at 22 my father's illness meant I went home to take care of the management problem. nothing about management, so I sought out the best advice from the best local farmers.

The Department of Agriculture csro read many books and articles and the result was that I was introduced to the industrial paradigm or world view of agriculture and consequently at the beginning of my agricultural career I ended. I remember grazing and plowing beautiful native grasslands and I particularly remember the great drought of the early 1980s. Well, I arrogantly said, "I'm going to fight this," so I kept my animals on plenty of food and the result, like You can see, we damage. The landscape ended up with a large debt, but that began to shake the cage and the change came from a series of incidents.

I remember a few years ago on a Saturday morning driving to our local town, half an hour away, with my son-in-law Andrew and grandson Hamish to watch Hamish play football on the way we passed a farmer who was spraying his meadow with herbicide and suddenly Hamish, seven years old, said to me, Grandpa, why do we have to kill things to grow them? It was a deep question and it really made me think. and then in my later travels around Australia I met more and more regenerative farmers and discovered that they were not only regenerating their landscapes but also their finances and their family and mental

heal

th, so the result was that when I was almost 50 I ended up back at Anu doing a PhD that asked why they had changed and what they were doing and then the breakthrough came because I was forced to reflect on my own initial journey and realized that I had actually been landscape illiterate.

I couldn't read the landscape. I didn't know how it was working, I didn't realize that the landscape should have been in the hospital in intensive care, it needed healing, so as a teacher among my students and then writing a book on this topic, I came up with a model for teaching ecological literacy. Now there are many cycles in nature, chemical and otherwise, but you could simplify them to those five key functions, obviously, the solar drives are the water cycle. Psalm of biodiversity and the one that we all forget about this, the worldviews and the paradigms that we bring. to our landscape, if you look at the diagram, all those interconnected arrows, if you damage one of those systems, you damage them all because of that connection, but if you regenerate them, you regenerate them all and it is that process that drives our

health

y and

health

y

planet

. healthy

human

beings. so let me give you a couple of examples, we all know that solar energy is key, the solar cycle is key, that is why plants have many solar panels, they do photosynthesis, they capture carbon dioxide and convert it into sugars that feed everything. the biology of the soil, if it is a healthy soil, and then that biology provides nutrients for the plants and we create the plants, but that biology and the plants also establish them through that process.

Long live carbon throughout our industrial civilization relies on fossil fuels through that process. Now this guy I visited Norman Croon in a difficult country. in South Africa the left side of that fence is his farm, today on the right there is a neighbor who still farms in the desert and when Norman started a few decades ago it was all desert. 400 years of European mismanagement, then he said about ecological grazing when installing his solar system. diverse panels and plants that started the carbon and soil cycle and the water cycle and then biodiversity, you can see the result today compared to when it started a few decades ago, now it is with its animals and its production producing more three times what started with biodiversity another example a few years ago I visited some friends fresh out of Canberra who told me they are regenerating their streams with various methods and as we were driving to take a look we passed the neighbor who was into industrial

farming

traditional, so it was over grazed, there was no sign of dry land, salt, the creek was dry and there is recent erosion due to a rain, but then downriver through the fence I came across David and Jones Creek and There are hundreds of meters of lush green grass coming out of your Creek washes the vegetation and because of the protection it is stored in the soil that Creek was now running all year round and what were they talking about.

I noticed a patch of tall Phragmites reeds and suddenly out of those reeds came this beautiful call of a Common Warbler that guy no bigger than a wine glass and I suddenly realized it was probably the first time in a hundred and fifty years. of European mismanagement that a Common Warbler had returned to that valley and all because that family had begun to love and care for their land so how does this relate to our planet? Well, it is related because what we do in our landscapes is directly extrapolated to the planet and there she is, it is unique, there is only one blue-green planet where life itself created the conditions for life and that maintenance of those conditions means that today we have nine integrated self-organizing systems that maintain those conditions, climate being one of them.

The problem is that our industrial society has now begun, as we hear today, to greatly destabilize all of those systems because of our own fossil fuels and all the rest and that is why there is a growing consensus among scientists who say that the Earth has now entered a new epoch that they call the Anthropocene man-made anthropocene and if we look at those systems up there, the red and the yellow show that some of those systems are entering highly dangerous states, possible runaway events and the The key point I want to make if you look at all the research is that industrial agriculture practices are a key factor in the destabilization and danger of most of these systems, but there is a flip side to the coin. that, because we turn that on its head, regenerative agriculture can play a very important role, so you get back to normal and the crown farms on the right, the continued degradation of carbon dioxide, the continued degradation of the other cycles to the left, backwards, and that is extrapolated across huge landscapes and we are starting to get some numbers on this recently one of the world's major agents of environmental and social change over the last few decades.

Paul Hawken has launched a study in which 70 or more scientists and analysts analyze the hundred best methods for extracting carbon dioxide. away or preventing it from going up now I looked at all this, there are some approaches to regenerative agriculture in the sense that everyone is doing the same thing, so I made a grenade and called it regenerative agriculture and by almost two and a half times the next best method regenerative agriculture It is the best way to reduce carbon and bury it in the soil and that is why I say with great confidence that regenerative agriculture can heal and save the planet, but this in turn is related to our modern health crisis, mental and biophysical, because With the rise of In the Anthropocene there has been a parallel rise in poor human health for several reasons: the way industrial society processes its food adds fats, sugars, salts and generally destroys all micronutrients and major nutrients that we have co-evolved for our health. and immunological for millions of years, but a key stabilizer of those nutrients and health is industrial agriculture, the way we play our etcetera and here is a cross section of the crucial element of soil biology that simply shows one of the players key that the root The micro fungi embrace the micro fungi of the house, so they feed on the sugars of the plant and are a source of nutrients that fuels the entire process, but if we plow, fertilize, spray, poison, pesticides, We decided that we killed most of the soil biology, so all that huge array of micronutrients. they don't come back and we are left with drug addicted plants waiting for their industrial dose of just a few restricted nutrients and the evidence shows that there is a high correlation between that process and the increase in industrial diseases after World War II. but there is even another dangerous element to this and it is coming at us like an express train and that is the widespread use of the most used herbicide in the world known as glyphosate and a brand name that you would be familiar with, roundup, and since it is water soluble, now We know that it is widespread in our environment, almost a million tons of this substance come out every year, so it is in our groundwater, in our surface water, in our industrial foods, tests show that it is now in the majority of our bodies, even in breast milk. when it enters our bodies, research confirms that it is now having a devastating impact. enters this critical microbiome of our gut.

It destabilizes a crucial pathway of essential amino acids for our immune function. It is soluble in water. crosses some of our body's critical barriers. stop toxins from entering, crossing the intestine that lines the blood-brain barrier, etc. and again the research shows a huge escalation, particularly since the 1990s, in which glyphosate use is highly correlated with many modern mental and biophysical illnesses. Well, let's leave the negative aside. because now we have regenerative biological replacements and methods for agriculture and biological replacements for non-agricultural inputs and we can change things and now I can go back to my grandson, who asked a profound question, grandfather, why do we have to kill things to grow things? and Hamish might say to you, we don't have to kill things, we just have to feed them, and that's a seven-year-old boy, a tree warbler, and, in fact, the planet that we're all called to, called to care for and care for. for this land because I can tell you that the solutions will not come from the big end of the city, they will not come from the government, it depends on us and that is why they call us to do three things, one for us, the farmers. move to regenerative agriculture, two so that we all grow and consume healthy food and nourish our communities and three so that we all begin to truly love and nourish that unique blue-green planet, and that is why I can tell you with the utmost sincerity Conviction that agriculture Regenerative can save the planets and renew human health at the same time.