Press Conference Today on Capitol Hill: Official Launch of U.S. Farmers & Ranchers for a Green New Deal!

This is fantastic, utterly fantastic. Seriously. While eliminating fossil fuels absolutely must be done for us to prevent our own extinction, that alone cannot possibly save the planet or even our lives at this point. Regenerative Agriculture, however, WILL.

Farmers and ranchers will be our climate saviors, with a “transition away from industrial agriculture toward family farm-based organic and regenerative farming and land-use practices that improve soil health and draw down and sequester carbon.” This is stated clearly and unequivocally in today’s Letter from U.S. Farmers & Ranchers to Congress: We Need a Green New Deal.

The massively important keywords/phrases here are:

• REGENERATIVE FARMING & LAND-USE PRACTICES
• IMPROVE SOIL HEALTH
• DRAW DOWN & SEQUESTER CARBON

Assuming that you, like myself until about six months ago, have no idea what Regenerative Agriculture actually means, let me very briefly explain the basic ideas (and proven facts).

1. Regenerative Farming means using a technique called no-till agriculture to plant crops without destroying the topsoil, planting off-season cover crops to protect the soil year-round, and eliminating all chemical applications because they kill everything that makes soil healthy.
2. Healthy soil not only produces healthy food and can continue to do so indefinitely, it also sequesters carbon from the atmosphere and converts that carbon into sugars/fuels for premium plant/crop health without the need for any pesticides whatsoever.
3. Regenerative Land-Use practices, particularly regarding ranching, means using a technique called intensive grazing to manage cattle/animal consolidation and pasture rotation to not only maintain pastureland indefinitely, but to use the animals to actually increase the productivity of that land by using the animals to fertilize the pastures simultaneously with using the pastures to feed all the grazing animals.
4. No one needs to stop eating beef (if rotational intensive grazing is used), because cattle are actually key to healthy pastureland soils that sequester enormous amounts of carbon out of the atmosphere (making cattle as valuable as trees in regard to saving the planet).

Given that I’ve just consolidated six months worth of research into four bullet sentences, please forgive me for oversimplifying. I was so excited about the Letter from U.S. Farmers & Ranchers to Congress: We Need a Green New Deal that I just had to give you at least the bare bones of what I have learned so that you can go read up the solutions yourself.

I’ve been meaning to do a series of detailed blog posts on all of this, but I’ve been working hard on improving my own land to sequester carbon, eliminate erosion, improve water retention, and reduce fire hazard (I also considered raising goats/sheep to regenerate my soil, but that seems to be beyond my abilities given the kind of mountainous land I live on and my own limitations). I still have many, many months of work ahead of me in that regard, but I am insanely thrilled that the people in a position to actually save our species, our planet, and our way of life (those people being farmers and ranchers) are now taking a stand together and notifying all of Congress that they HAVE the solutions we need.

Now Congress must act to support Regenerative Agriculture and eliminate industrial ag and fossil fuels. If our elected officials chose to act in OUR best interests instead of those of industrial agriculture, oil & gas, and big industry, we could all live long healthy lives. I don’t trust the vast majority of our current officials because most of them are owned by the corporations causing our extinction, but I’m thrilled that they are being forced into the open so we can replace them with elected officials who WILL act in the best interest of the PEOPLE.

P.S. One thing that can be done immediately, without requiring any new legislation, is to simply eliminate subsidies to the corporations that are destroying the planet. It is ridiculous that taxpayers are still forced, generation after generation, to subsidize massively profitable corporations in industrial agriculture and extractive fossil fuel industries.

P.P.S. I’m still researching the countless applications of this, but it is clear that one particular crop, hemp, has ridiculous potential for our economy. I’m not talking about marijuana, just the non-psychoactive plant of hemp, which is idiotically banned. Hemp uses 1/3 the amount of water of other crops, produces vastly more durable fibers for textile manufacturing, and is stronger than steel (besides being lightweight) for building materials. Hemp farming and materials production could boost our economy by countless billions of dollars.