I support Everyday Farm’s CSA because their regenerative farming practices mimic natural systems that move carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere into the soil. Livestock raised on factory farms is an environmental and health disaster, but livestock raised using regenerative managed grazing is a boon to the environment.
Managed grazing involves moving livestock across land using a sequence of movable fencing enclosures (paddocks), confining livestock to one paddock at a time. The animals remain in one paddock for as little as a day — depositing dung and urine and trampling the soil. After the allotted time in each paddock, the animals are moved to fresh grass in the next paddock, and the left-behind paddock is allowed to rest and absorb the nutrients deposited by the animals. The left-behind paddock is not grazed again until it has had sufficient time to recover.
This practice has been shown to accelerate carbon storage in the soil. Managed grazing mimics the way predator pressure keeps animal herds moving across grasslands in the wild. The interaction of wild grazing animals and their predators creates grasslands with deep soils and significant carbon storage. As seasons of managed grazing accumulate, forage quality improves, the health of the animals improves, and the farmer’s job becomes more efficient and more profitable.
The meat produced by managed grazing contains more health-giving nutrients than meat produced on factory farms. Managed grazing is a way we can mimic nature to benefit the environment and ourselves — a way to serve both. I believe that regenerative managed grazing is contributing to solving our climate crisis and to healing the notion that we are separate from nature, and that it has an important role in building a healthy, sustainable local food system. To learn more online, visit www.drawdown.org/solutions/managed-grazing and holisticmanagement.org/featured-blog-posts/book-review-dirt-to-soil/.
Dorothea Sotiros
Greenfield