Dig - Karen Yi (she/her): So first we're going to watch a video just to introduce people to regenerative agriculture because a lot of people in the breakout rooms or at least in my, in my room said they have no idea what it is. So let's watch this for 3 minutes
Regenerative agriculture is a set of farming practices that increased biodiversity and soil organic matter currently most of agricultural practices are devastating to biodiversity.
Even organic agriculture, while not as bad, still does more harm than good. Regenerative agriculture is a way to reverse this trend to actually make a positive impact on the land.
So what does regenerative agriculture actually involve answering this question is actually pretty tricky because the practices that were best largely depend on the land that's being worked with
So the variety of different practices border of infinity, a bit more than this video can cover. However, let's look at three common forms that regenerative agriculture can take
The soil is full of organisms which are helpful for plants. Some converts soil nitrogen into a plant usable form some bring water to the plants that would otherwise be out of reach.
Others loosen and area, the soil increasing water absorption and allowing Clinton's to penetrate deeper when soil is turned over by a machine. Both of these organisms are killed the crops must rely on chemical fertilizer, which ends up leaching into the water.
Central to no till farming is to not do that instead of telling plant cover crops, whose roots break up the soil, but the worms arid the soil and bring down nutrients, keep the soil covered with an organic mulch, which will break down over time adding more organic matter to the soil.
From the release of methane to clearing forest for pasture land cattle racing is known for being very environmentally destructive.
But this is not inherent to grazing animals if the right practices are put in place enormous amounts of carbon can be sequestered into the ground swell can be built.
Even desertification can be reversed in a matter of years. Here's how it works. The growth of grass tends to start slow accelerate and slow down again.
This middle area is where the crews, the most biomass, the most efficiently if it's even before it gets to this point, its growth will never speed up
This is what happens with traditional pastured animals. They eat all the grass, which doesn't have the chance to grow back fast enough before getting eaten again and we have overgrazing
This leads to soil erosion drought and desertification, but if the animals are Captain tightly packed heard like they used to be a nature, the grasses time to grow before being eaten.
All that biomass in the grass is carbon that comes from the air. Not all the grass gets eaten. However, some of it gets pooped on and trampled which ends up creating the perfect conditions for new topsoil to be built this ends up happening incredibly quickly.
This is one of the most complex and location dependent practices. There are, I will therefore be overgeneralizing a bit
It always starts with observing a local forest and the relationships between everything in it.
The plants. The animals, the Phone Guy the landscape, the soil, the water and then recreating these relationships in a way that's just as ecologically resilient but produces more food.
Food forests are often thought of as comprising seven layers. The root layer. The ground cover layer. The herb layer the shrub layer to load tree layer. The high tree layer at the vine layer.
Every one of these layers either produces some sort of food or medicine or is in some way helpful to the system as a whole, the plants are mostly perennials and include as many native species as possible.
These three examples of regenerative agriculture, plus all the rest of them all have something in common, whereas in conventional agriculture you seek to create as many of one thing as possible.
In regenerative agriculture you seek to create as many relationships between things as possible, you are one of those things. What sort of relationship with the land. Do you want to foster
Dig - Karen Yi (she/her): So that was regenerative agriculture or at least an introduction to it. And so as a video sign
Dig - Karen Yi (she/her): On institutionally it so movement that looks to counter the negative effects of western, industrialized agriculture, which is because of a lot of different practices is pretty harmful to the environment and on the right here you can see some pictures.
Dig - Karen Yi (she/her): And this one is from a documentary called kiss the ground, which we will hopefully watch together next week, or the next couple weeks as a social and so this infographic just says that degenerative agriculture or, you know, traditional industrialized agriculture is harmful to the soil and increases carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Dig - Karen Yi (she/her): And culture is his strategies such as, you know, cover crops and that helps sequester carbon and not be as harmful.
Dig - Karen Yi (she/her): And so on the top image you see that there's a lot of sub fields and variations and ways to practice regenerative agriculture, it's more of a movement and not like a certain way of farming. Um, so there's a lot of different things that fall into this category.
Dig - Karen Yi (she/her): And this next picture is just an interesting infographic, I found that shows on the land use that happens as
Dig - Karen Yi (she/her): societies become more and more industrialized, I think this is a typo, the subsistence on the bottom right
Dig - Karen Yi (she/her): But you can see as you get more industrialized you get into more intensive agriculture and more intensive land use and what I think is interesting is that protective recreational lands, like our national parks are actually at the top most kind of, I don't want to say like evolution, but it comes like after urban areas. After we realized, oh gosh, we should really get some that land back. So let's talk
Dig - Karen Yi (she/her): And one thing to note is that a lot of regenerative agricultural methods to intersect with and draw from and
Dig - Karen Yi (she/her): Yeah, draw from indigenous practices of agriculture and the have existed for
Dig - Karen Yi (she/her): Hundreds or thousands of years, but
Dig - Karen Yi (she/her): The western world is just now starting to realize that
Dig - Karen Yi (she/her): And do some practices which in colonial times were seeing as primitive or
Dig - Karen Yi (she/her): You know, people--colonialists really didn't understand this so they were like, this is dumb, and they tried to suppress indigenous practices such as agroforestry, controlled burns on this having a controlled growth of the ecosystem to
Dig - Karen Yi (she/her): Suppress like poisonous plants and to encourage the growth of those that were useful to indigenous, indigenous communities and this is true for Indigenous communities all over the world and today they care for about 80% of the world's biodiversity in places like the Amazon and a lot of national parks sit on ancestral land or indigenous communities.
Dig - Karen Yi (she/her): So a brief history of horticulture and agriculture. This map on the top right shows the several different origins of our culture and the blue arrows show how our culture is spread beyond that. So it wasn't just like a linear timeline of agriculture, just like most history is all in here on agriculture first started
Dig - Karen Yi (she/her): Showing up in civilizations about 13,000 years ago, but we always started doing it.
Dig - Karen Yi (she/her): In a widespread sort of manner about 7000 years ago the 13,000 years ago was people just sporadically doing a banana systematic way for whole societies.
Dig - Karen Yi (she/her): So you can see on a certain Central America, South America, as well as the Fertile Crescent and what is now today, the Middle East, as well as China.
Dig - Karen Yi (she/her): So that's the origins of agriculture and since since then the industrial revolution started our
Dig - Karen Yi (she/her): I don't know industrialized way of farming and so here's an example of a
Dig - Karen Yi (she/her): Shoe I just forgot what it's called a type of irrigation that goes in a circle. So, Ronnie was called if you know, but
Dig - Karen Yi (she/her): So this is just what you see a lot in the Midwest. If you drive around you see these big machines, frankly, all the crops and this is an area will be on the right. So what that looks like.
Dig - Karen Yi (she/her): So, you know, social revolution.
Dig - Karen Yi (she/her): More
Dig - Karen Yi (she/her): Fertilization runoff more top soil erosion and I'll lose really fine but environmental effects.
Charlotte Cosca: And Sophie wrote central pivot irrigation.
Dig - Karen Yi (she/her): After the Industrial Revolution. There was a lot of population growth and everyone was like, Oh, how are we going to provide for all these people to eat food.
Dig - Karen Yi (she/her): And so on. People like Fred Washington Carver, who was a botanist of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, and he was trying to help black sharecroppers not rely so much on cotton.
Dig - Karen Yi (she/her): And cotton was really bad for the soil. So he's like oh, how can I help
Dig - Karen Yi (she/her): Farmers have better soil. And so he experimented with using peanuts and legumes, which are
Dig - Karen Yi (she/her): As you might have heard of their a nitrogen or they have a symbiotic relationship with nitrogen fixing bacteria. And so here's just a refresher on the nitrogen away.
Dig - Karen Yi (she/her): What's coming down cyclical. Anyways, I totally thought this was a nitrogen cycle Victor. But anyways, nitrogen is in the air.
Dig - Karen Yi (she/her): And it gets fixed into ammonia by bacteria in the soil and other organisms in the soil and so lagoons help that process and just revitalizes the soil and George Washington Carver was a pioneer in LA.
Dig - Karen Yi (she/her): And then the Haber process of nitrogen synthesis was the first time that humans could make my children chemically instead of relying on bacteria and they used to also minus and use water, which was another word for bird poop on before we found out how to make nitrogen
Dig - Karen Yi (she/her): It was Carl Bosch and somebody Haber in around 1900 who invented it and that started the Green Revolution, which was where a lot of nations internationally tried to improve agriculture yields. I'm in order to come up under but the Green Revolution really didn't
Dig - Karen Yi (she/her): It succeeded in increasing yields, but also succeeded in having worse environmental impacts so
Dig - Karen Yi (she/her): And finally, we have mycorrhizal fungi wrong and I will hand it off to Sophie.
Dig - Sophie (she/her): Thanks.
Dig - Sophie (she/her): So just in the breakout rooms right now. Kelly. It was already you know going off on her knowledge about this. So I won't speak too much before we get into our chat with Kelly, but just to kind of introduce the idea
Dig - Sophie (she/her): So soil when you're kind of just planting the plant watering it and just letting it like get its nutrients from the sun and everything. Like, that's fine.
Dig - Sophie (she/her): But the really important thing about regenerative you know regenerating the soil and keeping it full of life is the fun guy and the bacteria.
Dig - Sophie (she/her): From those nitrogen fixing plants that Karen was just talking about, but specifically with the fun guy. So you have the mycelium which is kind of like
Dig - Sophie (she/her): The hairs almost and they stay spread out and they go where they want. It's almost like can figure out amazed or something to get to their nutrients.
Dig - Sophie (she/her): And when the mycelium connects to certain plants. They also kind of have a symbiotic relationship, they're being housed by those plants in exchange for nutrients and so there's tons of experiments that have shown that if you have soil that's super nutrient rich and then you have
Dig - Sophie (she/her): Like trees growing out of it. For example, and you have trees growing in like dead soil, the mycelium will kind of connect between both of the roots and transfer nutrients, where they're needed.
Dig - Sophie (she/her): And so you can imagine that this is going on in the ground.
Dig - Sophie (she/her): Especially anywhere you might be walking in the forest or something and you see mushrooms growing out of the ground.
Dig - Sophie (she/her): Like the soil there is just incredibly rich with nutrients and that's how you know that the plants are growing. And it's really healthy environment.
Dig - Sophie (she/her): And that's what the idea of regenerative agriculture is just kind of, kind of going back to the way that things grow naturally rather than mono crop a soil just super sterilized and not really growing in a natural environment. So that's, I mean, it's called the Green Revolution, when
Dig - Sophie (she/her): Crop yields began to go up like exponentially. But it's kind of a weird name for it because they were kind of moving away from natural processes. And so that's what this is all about.
Dig - Sophie (she/her): We have Kelly here.
Dig - Sophie (she/her): I wrote this little bio, so I'll just say Kelly is a plant lover who has dedicated decades of her life to farming in places including port Townsend Washington and on Maui, and why
Dig - Sophie (she/her): Kelly has over 30 years of experience of growing food for her community through selling to co ops farmers markets and neighborhood farm stands
Dig - Sophie (she/her): She has mentored coordinators of co op garden plots run a garden business converting lawns into gardens and taught firming knowledge in many schools on Maui.
Dig - Sophie (she/her): And most recently, Kelly has organized the cooperative work trade program for a Wolfers which is a work trade you know you work on an organic farm.
Dig - Sophie (she/her): In exchange for accommodation and meals to really cool thing. And I think everybody should try to do in their life. And so that's that her farm in Washington where she's at now.
Dig - Sophie (she/her): We met in Bali and then this is at her farm.
Dig - Sophie (she/her): Doing some weeding. That's her tomato room. She got tons of tomatoes.
Dig - Sophie (she/her): This is her orchard.
Dig - Sophie (she/her): That was in the summertime. So it's got lots of fruit trees. This is a salad. One of the typical meals that you'd find a Kelly's farm, all with fresh flowers and veggies and everything for aged and picked from the yard really incredible.
Dig - Sophie (she/her): This is a little duck house that they were building
Dig - Sophie (she/her): And then the last picture is of a little duck keys that are at the farm. So I was lucky enough to visit the farm for a few weeks and get to see
Dig - Sophie (she/her): All of the cool things that are going on there. And so, Kelly is just kind of rebuilding the farm area in Port Townsend and I think she'll be the first person to tell you that there are new things to learn everyday about farming and, you know, working with nature, but I think
Dig - Sophie (she/her): You know she's got tons of experience. So Kelly now.
Dig - Sophie (she/her): I'll just ask you a few questions. And so I want to start off by asking so you, you said that
Dig - Sophie (she/her): You're trying to figure out how do we continue to show up as farmers developing a relationship with the land in a way where fertility flourishes, rather than drying out soil.
Dig - Sophie (she/her): And applying quick fixes of synthetic fertilization. And so I'm wondering how are you continuing to show up as a farmer. I know that you've worked with biodynamics before and all of these amazing things. So if you just want to quickly talk about that. That'd be great.
Kelley Janes: Okay, great. Thank you. Sophia And Hi everybody, my name is Kelly and I'm that that question. How do we continue to show up as farmers is very personal to me because I am reopening a farm that has been dormant for about 15 years
Kelley Janes: And I am an older woman. So there is a lot of a lot of different kinds of vegetables and things that I've done in the past, and now I'm looking at, well, what do I want to do.
Kelley Janes: And what would bring me pleasure and be fun. And what is it that I love. And so I'm really working to synthesize, you know what, I will grow.
Kelley Janes: On my farm. But the question of what does it mean to show up as a farmer and also other than the big question of what you're going to grow. It's the recognition that farming is a practice, it's something that you do every day.
Kelley Janes: Once
Kelley Janes: Really year round in the winter time, there's a point where you can take a break and you can rest a little bit, but it's a year round practice and all. And so there's a way in which there is
Kelley Janes: A relationship that for me in this isn't for everybody. Maybe, but for me is developed where I know that I need to be out there every day tending the plants and being on top of things because
Kelley Janes: plants grow every day. And so do weeds and plants fruit and flower every day. And so there's harvest and there's tending
Kelley Janes: And so farming is for me is how do we tend our plants. How do we a home show up to 10 them and what equipment do we need and I'm and how will this work for me on my farm.
Kelley Janes: I would just say for the cycle for this cycle, or the duration of the season. Um, so there's that. And then it's also the bigger question of how do we show up as farmers to feed.
Kelley Janes: The people around us and what is that relationship that we move into when we discover that we're seriously feeding a lot of people, our food.
Kelley Janes: And that is a whole nother question of how do we show up. So it becomes a long term relationship. I'm really and a home.
Kelley Janes: And development of relationship with our people in our community, at least for me, because I'm a small farmer. I'm not a big farmer at all.
Kelley Janes: And so my farm is really built on relationships of with my neighbors and my community as well as the people who come and help me grow food. So how about that. Sophia
Dig - Sophie (she/her): Yeah, that's great.
Dig - Sophie (she/her): I know that you you have. Will you say it's small, but you do have tons of crops growing. And I think that's one of the really important things about regenerative agriculture is that you're not just growing one thing you've got lots of different
Dig - Sophie (she/her): Fruits and vegetables. I wonder if you could talk about all the different things that you like to grow. And if there's any that you particularly like to grow next to each other or things like that.
Kelley Janes: I am, I am currently on the farm. I'm not doing a lot of companion planting.
Kelley Janes: I have done companion planting, especially when I work with clients who are putting in their small gardens and that's really fun. But right now, what
Kelley Janes: I am actually moving towards a few very specific crops. One is a large rasberry crap for you pick and
Kelley Janes: Um, and for selling raspberries for local co op and farmers markets and places like that I grow for tomatoes, also for selling to restaurants and
Kelley Janes: I'm several different varieties, based on the requests of restaurants and this internet grow Apple. I have a orchard of a battle hundred trees of apple, plum, pear, Asian pear. And so I haven't moved into selling those. But maybe this next year. Um, I press
Kelley Janes: Gallons and gallons and gallons of cider for drinking and making vinegar and wine, so I I made 20 gallons of wine and so that will go in my little farm stand up for people to buy. Um, the other crops. Today I grew this last year, G, potatoes, garlic, onions, several varieties of onions, because
Kelley Janes: I'm choosing not to grow a lot of produce for selling
Kelley Janes: But I am feeding all the people that are here on the farm. And last year we had between six and eight people at any given time helping out our foreign six or eight i don't i don't remember it was fun. That's all I can say. But, um, lots of varieties of onions, some fresh eating.
Kelley Janes: Some for winter stores. So every, every plant type has a varieties of different things you can choose from. So with the onions. I'm still eating them and they're stored up in our barn and they're delicious and they're great.
Kelley Janes: I also plant broccoli and cauliflower and celery and peas and beans and
Kelley Janes: Oh, several different varieties of beans is smokey
Kelley Janes: Oh and basil, love basil for pesto.
Kelley Janes: carrots, beets, um, I didn't grow turnips. This year, I grew brussels sprouts. I won't grow brussels sprouts, perhaps next year. I'm kind of OD'd.
Kelley Janes: Lots of bok choy, napa cabbage.
Kelley Janes: parsley, cilantro,
Kelley Janes: This year, moving into to mean a couple of plantings have a few varieties of lavender for distilling and
Kelley Janes: Let's see lots of plants and just lots and lots of things that we grow because we eat a lot of different things. So to eat a lot of different things means you have to plant the diversity of it. And it's really fun. I did let us several varieties of romaine and butter on
Kelley Janes: radicchio.
Kelley Janes: A rubella.
Kelley Janes: mizuna lots of different greens for salads and
Kelley Janes: Calendula lots of people here on the farm this last year, they may
Kelley Janes: They tincture Calendula flowers and oil for making a beautiful calendula oil and
Kelley Janes: This year this winter. My daughter and I made a cleanser calendula St. John's wort south from while crafting the St. John's for that was fun and home. I'm now being that on my year to looking at adding an herb section to one of my gardens for long term are growing, and I will
Kelley Janes: Continue to grow all those vegetables, but it didn't even smaller scale as I am. I've planted a couple of varieties of garlic.
Kelley Janes: That will I think my account is about 350 garlic praise that I will make and so I'm also growing dried flowers to um
Kelley Janes: To use in the garlic braids and also variety of onion. That's a small flat onion that I can also do make onion braids so my strategy for food will be
Kelley Janes: Um, I'll have my farm stand. I'm talking to several different restaurants in our co op and a couple farmers markets for selling the garlic braids I'm
Kelley Janes: The restaurants will be for selling a home tomatoes, maybe bazell and I will have our little farm stand here for any leftover veggies that I sell
Kelley Janes: And the word went wild Last summer I had people coming up and using the farm standard lot a home. And so I will continue doing that. And then the you pick raspberries, or the raspberries have one more year before they really produce um so
Kelley Janes: I also have daffodils in the ground that I will be harvesting this spring for co op. So that's, and I am considered a small scale farmer I grow probably under a quarter of an acre. I used to grow up to four acres of vegetables and
Kelley Janes: We're like three and a half. So maybe what I'm doing right now is between a quarter and a half an acre. Um, but it's very small comparison to a lot of organic farmers and people who run CSA or farmers markets for me. I am looking at
Kelley Janes: A price point and a home and then doing the things that I love on the side so Sophie.
Dig - Sophie (she/her): Okay, great. I have just a couple more questions. Um, you don't have to, you know, expand too much, but people are wondering
Dig - Sophie (she/her): How did you get into farming and how, how have you gained your knowledge about growing plants.
Kelley Janes: I wanted to farm since I was young, really, actually, um, I went to a--I left home early. I was, I left home when I was 17. I wound up in a Quaker school
Kelley Janes: And the first and it happened to be on farm and the first day I was in the barn in their work house and I just showed up the next day and started milking. And it was a biodynamic farm and I want
Dig - Sophie (she/her): Can you tell everyone what biodynamics is really briefly.
Kelley Janes: Oh yeah, biodynamics is um
Kelley Janes: I don't know if you heard of Rudolf Steiner, he's from the late 1800s, early 1900s time period. He's written a lot of books Waldorf education kind of comes from Rudolf Steiner, he wrote a book on agriculture and
Kelley Janes: He's really looking at all the formative forces of how plants and plant systems grow and really takes the idea of the farm and turns it into an organism.
Kelley Janes: Um, and a relationship with a farm working with all the formative forces of your, your environment to help grow. So one of the things that he did with this vision of his was to develop different kinds of what we call now agricultural preps that you you can spray on your land and on your plants that help
Kelley Janes: Invite these different formative forces into the system of your farm and I grew and bio dynamics.
Kelley Janes: is amazing. A lot of the wine growers are going in that that direction because you can literally taste the difference in the grape in in the wine and you can see it. Um, once you develop the eye and understanding. You can, you can see a difference between a a biodynamic farm in a non biodynamic farm. Oh, at least I can
Kelley Janes: But, um, it's, there's a whole philosophy. There's techniques and some of them aren't that different than being organic farming. There's a lot of overlays, but there's just a few things that are different that
Kelley Janes: A home make something by dynamic and that's a whole that's a whole type of study with with having culture. So the question, what was the question Sofia. You asked me to talk about bio dynamics and I forgot the rest of the question.
Dig - Sophie (she/her): It was just about your own personal coming into farming and the knowledge that you gained
Kelley Janes: Okay. That's right. Thank you. So I'm I wind up
Kelley Janes: milking cows for the next four years, actually, while I was there and they wind up hiring me to help work on the farm. And, um, and it paid my tuition and we have big gardens and
Kelley Janes: I was the primary worker with the cows, the goats. I had milk 20 goats sometimes twice a day, and six cows and there were two draft horses and I love to hook them up to their draft worse equipment and
Kelley Janes: Hey hating is so much fun with horses and learn how to work with them in the woods. So that was my early relationship. And then from there I moved into um
Kelley Janes: You know, being young, I wind up doing a lot of my work picking apples and lift out of a backpack for two years and I developed the are actually longer
Kelley Janes: almost double that for years. I'm picking apples a home.
Kelley Janes: And hey, hey. Season gathering bales of hay for people
Kelley Janes: Picking strawberries planting strawberries.
Kelley Janes: In the winter maple syrup thing. Also, I worked on a horse team with logging and later to slogging in the woods in the dead of winter on the East Coast. I've done a bunch of different things, but the
Kelley Janes: That taught me speed and um, and it was after that, as I grew older, and I went into construction and a bunch of different things that I just as like
Kelley Janes: An activism. A lot of that I just realized that for me, agriculture is the most political thing I could do, and I love my relationship with nature. There's no other place. I really want to be which is connected to nature with my work.
Kelley Janes: I knew I wanted to be a farmer, but then I made kind of the
Kelley Janes: The so there is a heart knowing, but I made the mental decision a little bit later and
Kelley Janes: began looking for farm after college, actually. And it didn't show up right away but I returned to it.
Kelley Janes: Saying that, though I continued to farm everywhere I went and so everywhere I went I gained knowledge. So I was in that life practice before I have my own farm.
Dig - Sophie (she/her): Amazing. Thank you so much. Kelly.
Dig - Sophie (she/her): This has been really great for everyone to learn about and people actually have tons of questions for you that I'll email you later on today, because unfortunately we're nearing the end of our time.