Regenerative Agriculture: The Path the Climate Change Resilience?

Want to practice regenerative agriculture? Daniel Rath, Agricultural Soil Carbon Scientist at Natural Resources Defense Council recommends that you start by asking what you want to regenerate. Beneficial practices including integrating livestock, crop rotations, cover cropping, minimizing tillage, increasing diversity, improving soil health, adding organic matter, and reducing external inputs will vary site to site.

A long-term study found that these practices improved above and below ground biodiversity, increased water storage and infiltration, bolstered resilience to climate change, increased carbon and organic matter storage, and, impressively improved human health.

Listen to the end to learn how soil metagenomics has the potential to not only tell us what is living in the soil but how the organisms interact.

Resources:

• 231: Stacking Regenerative Practices to Create a Healthy Vineyard
• Daniel Rath
• Daniel Rath on Google Scholar
• Daniel Rath on National Resources Defense Council (NRDC)
• Healthy Soils Playlist (podcast play list)
• NRDC Regenerative Agriculture 101 page
• Soil Biodiversity in California Agriculture
• What the Soil Can Teach Us | Daniel Rath | TEDxBelmopan
• Wine grape grower perceptions and attitudes about soil health

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Craig Macmillan: Our guest today is Daniel Rath. He is a soil scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council. And today we're going to be talking about regenerative agriculture. Thanks for being on the podcast, Daniel.

[00:00:10] Daniel Rath: Thanks a lot, Craig. I'm excited to be here.

[00:00:13] Craig Macmillan: We've been trying to find folks to talk about regenerative agriculture because it's a real buzzword right now.

[00:00:18] And it's a buzzword in the vineyard industry, but it's not vineyard specific. This is applying to all sectors of agriculture and globally. This is a big concept now. So that's inspiring and drawing a lot of people, uh, in different directions. But I get different definitions of it. What rege