Charlotte Cosca: Wonderful. Okay, here we go. We are in the part two of regenerative farming.
Charlotte Cosca: First, we want to start with a land acknowledgement on my little speaker bars on the way. Okay.
Charlotte Cosca: Um, as an organization within a land grant institution dig the campus garden coalition at UCLA acknowledges the Gaborone now Tanga people's as a traditional land acres of Tang bar Los Angeles Basin in Southern California Channel Islands.
Charlotte Cosca: Cool. Okay, well I'll pass it off to Andrew, he is going to say a little bit about himself.
Andrew Evans (he/him): Yeah. So I already said so manager. I said, I'm a fourth year senior ecology major on campus. And so I've taken a lot of classes and I'm really interested in conservation and restoration and
Andrew Evans (he/him): Sustainability.
Andrew Evans (he/him): And recently I worked on this farm.
Andrew Evans (he/him): This
Andrew Evans (he/him): Small organic
Andrew Evans (he/him): Sustainable Farm in fly Tennessee in the middle of nowhere and flexibility so kind of in that bottom left picture. This my friend Georgie and kind of see how it goes. We had a lot of pastors, so we had
Andrew Evans (he/him): A whole flock of sheep and one goat. As you can see the goat and we had a cows and a donkey and a bunch of ducks and geese, as well as the actual garden itself, which you can kind of see down there with the caterpillar group house.
Andrew Evans (he/him): So yeah, we work with a bunch of different stuff and and i just i i really like and I've done a lot of research on regenerative agriculture and how to implement them in
Andrew Evans (he/him): And in order to make informed forums and and food systems. And so that's something that is really interested in. And so I'm here we
Charlotte Cosca: Are so glad you're here.
Charlotte Cosca: This is gonna be great.
Charlotte Cosca: Um, I wanted to begin with, just a couple of slides on why regenerative farming is so important.
Charlotte Cosca: And so to begin, I want to. There's a quote from how to save a planet, which is a podcast. And they did a podcast on regenerative farming.
Charlotte Cosca: Which I'll talk about a little bit more later, but in it. They said,
Charlotte Cosca: In the traditional sort of power based way of farming soil is just the medium, the crops are the thing that you tend, but in regenerative farming if you tend to soil than the soil will actually turn the crops, and I think that just sounds really beautiful and
Charlotte Cosca: And yeah, it's it is how like I of course have only been researching it for about, like, three weeks, but I'm from my understanding that is a pretty good way of explaining it. And also just I'm
Charlotte Cosca: Not talking about in a good way. So I open the chat so I can
Charlotte Cosca: Okay.
Charlotte Cosca: Why is it so important. It is creating an ecosystem and
Charlotte Cosca: I we talked about this last week. Sophie had an awesome video on it and she also talked about it and
Charlotte Cosca: We can see that like when you are creating a in a farm like this. You want to have all the different components of an ecosystem that can grow together can work together and create like
Charlotte Cosca: Just like yeah, an ecosystem. A great place to grow crops and
Charlotte Cosca: Also within the podcast. It said the best yield of crops and regenerative farming or the farms, I have created the most diverse feudal out and like restorative land. So you're getting more produce out of it and what you're also creating this like wonderful environment.
Charlotte Cosca: And so some examples of that are fish farming.
Charlotte Cosca: Specifically this one TED talk that I watched
Charlotte Cosca: His which is called how I fell in love with a fish. It talks about this one man's dan dan barbers on like travels through different fish farms and like understanding fish farming and he like fell in love with like this one fish, which is
Charlotte Cosca: Which is from this area in Spain where they've created like this estuary, just for fish farming, but they created in a way that creates this ecosystem where you don't have to feed the fish, you don't have to like give them any like extra like nutrients or
Charlotte Cosca: Yeah, you don't. You don't have to do anything with the fish like the ecosystem just works with them and creates it and
Charlotte Cosca: It these fish also feed the plants and animals around there and he says, like,
Charlotte Cosca: That is like better, it's creating this great ecosystem and you know it's a good ecosystem, because it's working with the land, working with the birds there and it's wonderful.
Charlotte Cosca: Yeah, he's awesome chef or Easter farming, there's this company called the green wave which they can restore and also create
Charlotte Cosca: Areas for fish to live. So like if you have, if you have see seaweed or other species of algae. It's great place for fish to hide. You can also have bivalves there which are like oysters and clams like
Charlotte Cosca: Yeah bivalves like two shells holding together. And those are creatures who will like their filter feeders. So they'll also create
Charlotte Cosca: A better ecosystem by filtering the water so creating more clean water and seaweeds giving them places to live.
Charlotte Cosca: And so you're creating this great ecosystem, but from it. You're also taking the produce which you're taking the bivalves so people can eat them, and you're taking the seaweed to be for people to eat them. So it's great.
Charlotte Cosca: Again with this podcast. Sorry. I like loved it.
Charlotte Cosca: And how to save the planet they talked to a fourth generation farmers who in this generation have switched your dress regenerative farming practices.
Charlotte Cosca: And they began noticing the birds and the bees and other organisms returning to their land and in that they were also noticing that they didn't have to put in fertilizers, they didn't have to put in
Charlotte Cosca: Herbicides or pesticides, they since the birds were there, they eat all the pests and they realized that they didn't have to put work into the land because the like the land is working itself and and through that they were also getting more crops and lastly agro forestry.
Charlotte Cosca: There we go. Um, this was from the video that we showed last week. It's just like you're creating this food forest where there's there's larger trees smaller trees, there's
Charlotte Cosca: Herbs shrubs and like there's some things that you can eat. And there's also some things that are there just to create this great ecosystem.
Charlotte Cosca: And of course you want to include perennials and native plants to the region that you're in, which will also just like creative environment. So, yeah.
Charlotte Cosca: Cool. Sorry, this is like so much information and I'm going through it really fast, but you can of course
Charlotte Cosca: Go back or
Charlotte Cosca: You can also go, I'll give you a list of resources afterwards for you to continue looking into regenerative farming.
Charlotte Cosca: Last slide on white regenerative farming so important. Um,
Charlotte Cosca: So there it increases soil by biodiversity organic matter and soil health. It's more resilient to climate change. If I, if anyone has taken like I don't know AP Bio in high school or AP Environmental Science in high school, or if you take an environmental science classes.
Charlotte Cosca: You know that like the most really resilient.
Charlotte Cosca: Ecosystems are the ones that have a lot of
Charlotte Cosca: Had a lot have a lot of biodiversity. So an ecosystem will become more resilient if it has more so by biodiversity and it also become more resilient to climate change, because
Charlotte Cosca: It will decrease runoff and erosion, which
Charlotte Cosca: It will decrease runoff and erosion through
Charlotte Cosca: Um, so when soil health is higher, you can actually when it rains, the soil will be more oxygenated. You know, it won't be like squish down and through that you can
Charlotte Cosca: More rain will filter through and it can hold so there won't be as much runoff and aversion.
Charlotte Cosca: And there will be no more telling, which is great because until tilling not only brings carbon back into the atmosphere by, you know, like ripping up the soil and like letting it go. But I'm telling also
Charlotte Cosca: tilling also
Charlotte Cosca: It like ruins the ecosystem that you've created you know all the by all the
Charlotte Cosca: All the worms and all the micro organisms are in doing their thing, they're doing their job, what they're supposed to be doing. And then you come until and you're just like messing up the ecosystem and
Charlotte Cosca: ruining what they could be doing for the soil and then to fix it. You have to put in fertilizers and pesticides and herbicides to try to fix the environment, but instead of doing that, you could just not tell you could
Charlotte Cosca: sequester carbon, keep the carbon in the soil and you could just let the microorganisms do what they gotta do.
Charlotte Cosca: So yeah, there's so many amazing reasons.
Charlotte Cosca: And I'll hand it off to Andrew now to talk about ranch style regenerative farming.
Andrew Evans (he/him): Yeah, so
Andrew Evans (he/him): I think so. Animal Agriculture is pretty controversial for like environmental reasons and ethical reasons, but I think with regenerative farming.
Andrew Evans (he/him): It's pretty clear. I mean, you really have to acknowledge. I mean, if we're trying to emulate an ecosystem, at least the ecosystem processes to, you know, restore
Andrew Evans (he/him): The environment to sequester carbon animals are part of almost every ecosystem, especially like in America, where we have massive prairie landing grassland grazers or a major part of it. So instead of trying to like shut them out and trying to implement
Andrew Evans (he/him): Garden agriculture that some, to some extent, like it's pretty cool to include like praising and hurting animals as part of your agricultural system to benefit the processes, you're trying to get out of it.
Andrew Evans (he/him): But something that you really got to consider with this is that
Andrew Evans (he/him): Contrary to the like industrial animal agriculture which confines animals to really small space, you need a lot of land.
Andrew Evans (he/him): For good rad chick. So you can actually spread out the impact and it's not wearing it down. It's actually building it up and
Andrew Evans (he/him): So you can have a massive plot of land and just let the animals roam on their own coordinate magically
Andrew Evans (he/him): As they were down the grass, they find a new spot or you can do it manually as the rancher, you can
Andrew Evans (he/him): section off different areas of land and drive the cattle or or sheep or bison or whatever you're hurting to the next pasture to let that first pasture have enough time to recover and so you're cycling it in a very timely manner.
Andrew Evans (he/him): And something cool to consider is how you can incorporate indigenous practices and native grass and communities with ranching practices.
Andrew Evans (he/him): So maybe instead of doing cattle ranching you can actually just go straight to the bison themselves, you know, the largest North American land animal mammal at least
Andrew Evans (he/him): You can bring them back to the habitat that they were originally part of and help rebuild that habitat because bison do a lot
Andrew Evans (he/him): It's layer like considered eco system engineer, so they allow a bunch of other grassland animals and plants to thrive as well as well as you know making your economy off of it and also allowing indigenous people to control their original food source and have some
Andrew Evans (he/him): Control over their land and their own natural resources. Pretty cool idea and and then for predator mitigation and I wanted to mention a big conflict with animal agriculture is obviously the animals that eat your and
Andrew Evans (he/him): So the you know the most standard process or a lot of
Andrew Evans (he/him): agricultural history is just to kill off the the wolves and mountain lions to basically have no predators to conflict.
Andrew Evans (he/him): But I mean those predators also have a really important part of that surrounding ecosystem. So there's a lot of ways you can incorporate or at least allow those predators.
Andrew Evans (he/him): To live. I mean, we're going to have to actually put a lot of effort actually just physically bring them back. But then allowing them to live by using guard and also on my farm like we had to guard dogs and made a guard donkey.
Andrew Evans (he/him): Garden llamas are also a thing. And there's a lot of different practices like flagging on fences or little like strobe lightning machines to deter predators, so that they don't actually conflict with your economy.
Andrew Evans (he/him): And also I did want to mention down here. It's a cool idea. The bottom right is is like if you're talking about like a green. Green New Deal green economy and fully regenerative economy.
Andrew Evans (he/him): This is an example of solar panels which, you know, renewable energy source, but then you have grass i mean it's it's using up land. So then grass will grow and cover up the
Andrew Evans (he/him): And block the sun from the solar panel. So you need to get rid of grass. So instead of mailing, you can have sheet to go and
Andrew Evans (he/him): They're not goats that they won't climb up on the solar panels, but you can have a renewable energy sources as well as a regenerative agriculture, food source of using the same land. So it's a really cool idea to
Andrew Evans (he/him): Combine industry industries like that. Yeah. So this was my little brief overview of ranching
Charlotte Cosca: That was wonderful.
Charlotte Cosca: Now to ocean farming agriculture, since I love marine biology. I've been reading about this for a while now. So
Charlotte Cosca: First, it's
Charlotte Cosca: By those fish and seaweed farming are the most common
Charlotte Cosca: Um, here's a photo from the video that I was talking about earlier, the TED talk, and this is at the regenerative fish farm so
Charlotte Cosca: When Dan barber got there he was, like, why are you allowing all these flamingos to eat up all your product and the scientists there said that's exactly what we want to happen. We want to create this ecosystem, we want
Charlotte Cosca: This to be like a true ecosystem. And these flamingos would actually fly from like super far away every single day to get to this fish farm and eat like 20% of their product and
Charlotte Cosca: Then bivalves and seaweed farming. You can either do it separately or together. This is from the green wave in the green wave company that I was talking about earlier where they'd create
Charlotte Cosca: An ecosystem through cleaning the cleaning the ocean water and also creating habitat for these fish. And yeah, so they're creating a better functioning ecosystem, but then here we have
Charlotte Cosca: Can you all see my notes.
Sophie (she/her): No.
Charlotte Cosca: I'm okay. And lastly, if this is in Zanzibar where they've started
Charlotte Cosca: Creating these are seaweed farms where you're just like you put seaweed onto a strand and
Charlotte Cosca: Yeah, so then it grows in this strand. And they're actually improving the water quality, because it's
Charlotte Cosca: Sucking up and excess nutrients that are in the surrounding environment from industrial farming on the land. So, and it is also creating a habitat for the fish as well. So there's so many positive ways of using the system.
Charlotte Cosca: And next we have market garden.
Dig - Shelby - she/her: So Mikey gardens are basically like small scale farms, people often have these on their own properties and they can be as small as an acre, which would be just a little bit smaller than a football field.
Dig - Shelby - she/her: And oftentimes they're even smaller than that they produce fruits, vegetables, flowers, and all kinds of other products like maple syrup or other things that they
Dig - Shelby - she/her: Get from their farms and they're sold directly to consumers in their community, many of them will have like a market stand
Dig - Shelby - she/her: Which is pictured here for their produce to sell to the community. And for those of you who are at our workshop last week, Kelly James mentioned that she had a markets and just like this for selling some of her produce
Dig - Shelby - she/her: So their customers are often local restaurants or grocery stores or they sell it at farmer's markets, or even just directly to like neighbors and other members of their communities.
Dig - Shelby - she/her: And the benefits of this or that their costs are often a lot lower than larger industrial farms, because they don't have to pay for heavy machinery or like wages for a ton of workers, which means that in comparison, the profits for the farmers are a lot higher.
Dig - Shelby - she/her: And they typically use traditional organic growing methods, not all of them, but most of them do. And they use manual labor, which, unlike large scale industrial farms.
Dig - Shelby - she/her: Which might use like machinery or pesticides or other practices that are harmful to the soil, the plants and the workers.
Dig - Shelby - she/her: And they prevent environmental issues, such as those caused by like industrial farming mono culture when they have many plants have the same crop in like one field, which can be taken over by like pests and disease and decrease the soil health overtime.
Dig - Shelby - she/her: And then they also can prevent problems caused by pollution due to like the transport of the produce over long distances are the use of chemicals and having large amounts of livestock in unhealthy conditions.
Dig - Shelby - she/her: So essentially the small scale nature of these market garden supports the local community, but it also supports the health of the environment, the plants, the ecosystems and all of the workers that are involved.
Justin Haggard (he/him): And then you could also implement regenerative practices into urban gardens. So this, these can be kind of similar to market gardens and just you're not selling the produce and stuff.
Justin Haggard (he/him): And they can also take like kind of the form of community gardens or personal like residential gardens and yeah and so you're just going to kind of think of
Justin Haggard (he/him): These five key principles that I listed on the side there. So thinking of Sign You Want To obviously design it
Justin Haggard (he/him): And so that's getting the maximum amount of sun but then you're also going to think about the lack of sign
Justin Haggard (he/him): Because you don't want sun in some places, otherwise you get a lot of leads and your soil health kind of deteriorates so using like a lot of plants to cover the soil for the most part.
Justin Haggard (he/him): And or using mulches like I include a picture there where there's some mulching the pathway and then
Justin Haggard (he/him): Yeah, keeping the soil covered is going to kind of help build up the soil quality and also provide like the ideal habitat for soil micro organisms. So it's just going to build up the soil over time.
Justin Haggard (he/him): And then also thinking of water.
Justin Haggard (he/him): Designing the garden and ways that conserve water and so like Charlotte was saying earlier, you want to reduce run off evaporation and limit like flooding.
Justin Haggard (he/him): Possibilities. And yeah. And then the third one is soil. So you want to aim to create the ideal habitat for soil organisms.
Justin Haggard (he/him): And because these soil organisms will help create a healthy soil for you. And so it's kind of a cycle process.
Justin Haggard (he/him): And you can improve your soil by adding organic matter and then balancing water eliminating the harsh son, like I just talked about. And over time, the soil structure will improve and then that will improve water retention and the fertility of this one.
Justin Haggard (he/him): And then all of those components will eventually lead to more biodiversity and you could also plant a lot of diverse
Justin Haggard (he/him): Plant species in your garden, and you kind of want to do
Justin Haggard (he/him): Like plantings were there together instead of keeping them in separate rose, because when you do companion planting where you plant plants with similar needs together.
Justin Haggard (he/him): And it also increases like the biodiversity of insects and some plants can even provide like natural pest repellent benefits for other plants.
Justin Haggard (he/him): And you also want to make sure you're planting for pollinators, because obviously those are really important and a diversity of pollinators also will really help your garden.
Justin Haggard (he/him): And then obviously, I kind of put in parentheses because it's kind of like obviously plants can live on their own but humans can definitely help guide these principles and
Justin Haggard (he/him): And then also part of regenerative agriculture is kind of thinking about how to sustain your local community. So that's more of, I'd say like the market garden side of this, but I did include a picture of the learning garden here which is in
Justin Haggard (he/him): Venice. I think it's in LA. And that's kind of an example of a garden that was made from like a, I think it was an empty lot at first and then over time.
Justin Haggard (he/him): Using kind of these regenerative practices. Now there's like this really lush garden there and it's really cool. And then in the bottom.
Justin Haggard (he/him): Right hand corner I include a picture of Ron Finley, which I'm sure a lot of you know who he is or at least heard of him, but he's kind of like a a gardener legend in LA.
Justin Haggard (he/him): We could probably like talk about him for an hour, but he grew up in South Central LA, which is, it was a food desert when he was growing up, and still has a lot of problems with that.
Justin Haggard (he/him): And he decided to grow his own food in the park way like between the street and the sidewalk and to kind of grow food for his community and for himself.
Justin Haggard (he/him): And the City of LA actually like had I think they find him because it's technically city space, even though it's like out in front of his house and he actually went and like
Justin Haggard (he/him): He took it to court and eventually like the city backed off. And so now he's starting this movement kind of any has been doing this movement. He's been doing this for a while.
Justin Haggard (he/him): Where he's kind of taking over empty spaces in urban settings and planting a lot of fruits and vegetables so
Justin Haggard (he/him): I don't know if like he would call it regenerative agriculture, necessarily, but I think it's a great form of regenerative agriculture and it's just another way of like kind of incorporating plants into urban landscapes.
Andrew Evans (he/him): Okay, I can effectively then um so we thought it'd be a cool idea to to kind of dive into these ideas more
Andrew Evans (he/him): And so basically what we're gonna do is we're going to create for breakout rooms and depending on which one you get assigned to and
Andrew Evans (he/him): You will be either assigned a branch and ocean farm or agriculture farm market gardener and urban food system. And basically, and
Andrew Evans (he/him): We want you to go through these questions and basically brainstorm or mentally build a business or an or like or a farm and
Andrew Evans (he/him): And kind of really think about how regenerative stuff goes into that. So I think in this case because yeah market garden urban three systems are pretty similar. You can think of the urban food system.
Andrew Evans (he/him): More like the Ron Finley kind of guerilla style either like on sidewalks are on rooftops are either going to market garden which could be more like open land available. So basically want you to in your teams come up with how your farm will be regenerative
Andrew Evans (he/him): You know, all those practices that we've been talking about this whole time and just come up with a name for your farmer business and make a mock mission statement and how it will acquire funding besides just selling goods. Because, I mean, that is a really
Andrew Evans (he/him): big challenge for regenerative farming is getting the funding to sustain the business.
Andrew Evans (he/him): And what good you will raise your produce you know what you're selling what you're growing
Andrew Evans (he/him): How the products will be sold and distributed. So how you're getting it to your consumers, and then how your farm will incorporate community involvement. So how it will actually engage
Andrew Evans (he/him): The local people around there to make it you know self sustaining and involved and then you don't have to make a slide. But just like have someone be able to present kind of what you all come up with in your group and
Andrew Evans (he/him): And we can do that.
Charlotte Cosca: Yay. Great. I will send the questions in the chat. So everyone has them when we set out on our own.