regenerative farming Archives

regenerative farming

September 26, 2023

Q&A: Taking a stand — new legal group focuses on farm country

By Shannon Kelleher

The US agriculture industry puts food on Americans’ tables, but many of the farming practices used to produce that food are controversial. Critics say large corporate interests dominate agriculture and push policies and practices that endanger human and environmental health and harm the interests of small farmers and rural communities.

A group of community advocates announced on September 20 that they were joining forces with legal and food system experts to form an organization they’re dubbing “FarmSTAND,” with the specific goal of challenging the companies that dominate US industrial animal agriculture through court actions. The group said it is working to dismantle a “corporate-controlled, industrial food system” and support regenerative farming to help “change the system from the ground up.”

The New Lede spoke with FarmSTAND Executive Director Jessica Culpepper about the group’s goals.

Q: What is your mission? How do you envision FarmSTAND’s role?

A: We really believe that independent farmers and ranchers, food chain workers, and consumers of agricultural products deserve a legal advocacy group that’s focused only on them. That doesn’t exist yet. We are really excited to be that for them.

September 7, 2023

Amid steep global bird declines, farmers create refuges

New research finds that certain farming practices are benefiting some types of birds, underscoring the influence agriculture can have on important species at a time when bird populations around the world are in decline.

Farms that make use of smaller plots, varied crops, and tracts of forest, are helping boost bird populations in Costa Rica, scientists wrote in a paper published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The findings add to previous evidence that diversified farming is an important conservation tool, said co-author and Stanford University researcher Nicholas Hendershot.

“There is a really huge benefit for biodiversity from these diversified farming practices,” he said.

Hendershot and his colleagues determined that over 18 years, bird species living on diversified Costa Rica farms were more likely than those in forests to have increasing, rather than decreasing populations. The varied crops and natural features on diversified farms provide a home for the birds and for insects and other animals that birds eat, said Hendershot.

On intensified farms, which generally plant only one crop and make use of high amounts of pesticides, the only species of birds thriving long-term were those that were adapted to highly-degraded landscapes, indicating the importance of diversified farms to provide habitat for other bird species, he said.