Regenerative Agriculture Heals Both the Soil and the People
Ask anyone on the streets of Hinsdale, Montana, about Patti Armbrister and they’ll be quick to tell you that, “she is probably working in a garden, somewhere.” Patti grew up in Michigan working on her family's market garden patch. She recalls the summers helping her parents in the strawberry fields, her fingers tinted red from the harvest. The aroma of the berries was so strong that she could taste them before they even touched her tongue. “Most food doesn't taste, nor smell, anything like it did when I was young,” explained Patti. Her desire to have people experience the richness in the flavor and smell that produce can have, is what led her to a life of teaching and sharing agriculture practices.
Patti has lived in Hinsdale since 1992 and is the agriculture educator at the local school. The school has 63 students total, K-12. She started their farm-to-school program in 2009 with a few pots of cherry tomatoes and has since created a very involved and educational garden for her students to take part in. The program hosts an onsite school garden and greenhouse as well as a root cellar for storing produce. The students are involved in the gardening process but also help prepare meals with the school chefs using food that they help grow. Patti gets innovative and has the students make hypotheses about which type of potato will be the best for certain meals and will even plant mysterious new crops in the garden for the students to identify.
“I was determined to be teaching kids how to grow food and to get healthier foods in school,” said Patti, “I did self education and research constantly and one of my first research projects was the greenhouse through the school.” The school’s greenhouse is run with passive solar and it’s where Patti works most mornings throughout the summer to ensure there is enough supply for the upcoming school year. It’s the project that got her tuned into regenerative agriculture.
Regenerative agriculture, in short, is a system of farming principles and practices that seek to rehabilitate and enhance the entire ecosystem of a farm by placing a heavy emphasis on soil health. Conventional agriculture has exhausted both the soil and the farmer. “At this point, you've got input costs that are out of this world and the farmers are struggling to make a living. They're not healthy, both physically or mentally. We can't keep putting fossil fuels into the fertilizers. There’s nothing sustainable about it,” explained Patti. “Regenerative means that we’re going to regenerate from generation to generation, once we can regenerate, then we can sustain.” As Patti describes it, regenerative agriculture goes beyond organic farming. Regenerative Agriculture operates with a few main principles; limiting tillage, soil covered with plant litter, maintaining living roots in the soil, increasing biodiversity, and integrating livestock.
Patti sees a future of regenerative agriculture but knows it will take a lot of work and education to get there. The biggest obstacle, Patti says, is the mindset. Regenerative agriculture is a psychological shift that views farming as a process that should occur in collaboration with the natural system rather than the two being at odds with one another. “Farmers have to ask questions and start getting curious as to why they are still spraying the same type of weed for the last 30 years,” said Patti.
Industrial or conventional agriculture causes decarbonization, erosion, desertification, and chemical pollution of the soil among other issues that impact public health by diminishing nutrition. In the last half a century, produce has seen a reduction in protein, calcium, phosphorus, iron, riboflavin, and vitamin C. By using cover crops on the soil, the soil biodiversity increases and soil minerals are revitalized. Increasing the organic matter in the soil means more plants performing photosynthesis, taking carbon out of the air and putting it into the ground, improving the soil’s ability to hold water. The soil’s ability to absorb and hold water offers a huge benefit during the unpredictable weather farmers have been experiencing in the current climate crisis.
“You’re never going to out-farm the weed bank because Mother Nature has put them there for millions of years with a purpose to heal the soil, nature does not want any exposed soil. That's why the annual weeds come into the system to heal and drop their leaves on the soil surface,” said Patti. There are successions of plants that should grow and remain in the soil to replenish the soil’s minerals for the next succession of plants. Succession starts with an empty area, either pure rock, or a forest destroyed by a fire or clear cutting. Small plants take hold and a specific sequence of growth occurs, eventually resulting in a mature ecosystem again. “Our vegetable farmers all should be growing in the third succession but they never get there because they stay in disturbance by tilling, applying pesticides and using synthetic fertilizers,” said Patti.
COVID-19 has shown many people the faults in the current agriculture system. Many of the shifts that people like Patti have been trying to implement and encourage in the farming community for years have begun happening at hyperspeed. With major meatpacking plants closing during the pandemic and people avoiding supermarkets, Americans have begun thinking about food differently. Farmers markets and local producers across the United States have seen increasing sales because they have been better able to adapt to the crisis. Farmers markets have been difficult for low income communities to access and afford in the past. This has been changing in recent years, according to USDA FNS data, 7,377 farmers and farmers markets across the country were authorized to accept Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits in 2017. Patti believes that everyone can have access to good food, it’s these small changes that have been happening over time that can get us closer to that goal. “Many people who have never gardened before have started growing in their backyards.” she said. “The seed producers that sell vegetable seeds were all sold out after a month of COVID, they had to shut their shops down to restock. A friend of mine who sells seeds had to restock three times, when usually she doesn’t restock at all during a season.”
The virus has also caused a shift with Patti’s farm to school program. With the kids out of school, the faculty has had to donate the food they were growing for the end of the school year. Thankfully, they were able to still provide meals to the students while they were learning from home which helped put the produce to good use. Looking ahead to the fall, there is a lot of uncertainty whether or not the students will be returning in person. Currently the produce is being donated to the local senior citizen meals program and the area food bank which will continue if the students don’t return in person.
“My hope is that the general person will have a better respect for food, respect for how it was grown, and hopefully grow some of their own and teach their kids about food because it's what's hurting our health dramatically,” explained Patti, “As far as society, we have a broken system out there. We have a lot of soils that need a lot of work. We need to put the soil at the top of the priority list.”
Patti sees that there is hope in changing the system. “The big upside is that we can fix it, maybe not everything but we can fix a lot of things by just deciding to farm differently and be open minded. And every time I go somewhere I can think of three or four jobs that a younger person could be doing to get into agriculture without having to own the land and a huge sprayer and all that stuff,” said Patti. “Regenerative agriculture is going to be what will heal the people.”
Patti is a member of the Soil Task Force with the Northern Plains Resource Council. She was attracted to the grassroots nature of the organization and has been a member for the last four years. The Soil Task Force believes that many of the environmental and food issues we are facing can be addressed by fixing the soil. The committee started in the last few years with the mission to educate farmers and the public on how to combat the current issues through changing things like grazing practices and adding plant diversity. The committee puts on “soil crawls” and various other soil health workshops with hands-on exercises and educational speakers.
