#darren doherty

[johnzillaaaa]

Permaculture, Regrarians, Australians, & Lunatic Farmers

So I went to listen to an Aussie dude speak on carbon sequestering in agriculture tonight. That was pretty cool.

His name is Darren Doherty and he’s started something of a movement along side permaculture called Regrarians (a mashup of Regenerative Agrarians).

Pretty cool stuff. It’s more of an A-Z process than permaculture, which is really more of a philosophy and set of general guidelines. His Regranian system is geared more toward actual steps to follow to sustainability in agriculture. He definitely knows his stuff and gives hard numbers to support his ideas, which is really valuable in convincing actual farmers.

I gotta say though it was also really refreshing to listen to somebody with an Aussie accent talk for a couple of hours straight, and bring up Australian politics and boast about the metric system and all that. I miss Australia and I miss Australians. You guys are awesome. I gotta go back one of these days.

Anyway yeah really fascinating talk and I’m going to also go to a movie screening of a film called Polyfaces, which details the methods of American “Lunatic Farmer” Joel Salatin. He’s a shining example of how you can treat animals well, treat the environment well, and still be a very successful farmer.

Should be pretty awesome Documentary from the trailer I saw. Here’s the link to that in case you feel like checking it out. https://vimeo.com/138177205

[cbqcc]

The Wooden Leg - Darren Doherty, Nick Smith (1994)

[fedrikx]

[willszal]

Carbon Farming Course '12

For the past three weeks, more or less, I've been in the Carbon Farming Course at the Threefold Center in Chestnut Ridge, NY.

First I'll start with the name.  I like it as it puts an emphasis on soil carbon, which is at the core of fertility and climate-change mitigation.  Also, such a breadth of progressive agricultural practices were covered that there wasn't yet a term broad enough for all of them.

Check out my photos from the event here.

The course was organized more or less with three day workshops.  We had a whole slew of world-class folks, both as presenters and as participants.  Please check out the links above to read more about specifics.  Topics included:

Perennial staple crops

Polyculture enterprise model development

Soil biology

Keyline

Holistic Management

I'd prefer to talk about big-picture take aways.

I could be frustrated that this knowledge isn't more widespread [we went over some truly phenomenal stuff] and that there isn't more cohesion between the presenters [everyone put an emphasis on a different facet of regenerative agriculture, and there was even a fair amount of disagreement on the "facts"].  I guess I can just be happy that I'm riding right out front on a tsunami of integration and my surfboard's so gnarly I won't run into any issues.  It's going to be really interesting to watch how this new wave of culture/agriculture washes over the parched landscape of the worldview of separation.

[ptpermaculture-blog]

Regenerative Agriculture: Three Days with Darren Doherty

Recently, I had the privilege of attending a course in regenerative agriculture strategies with Darren Doherty. The course was structured by an interpretation of the Keyline Scale of Permanance with a couple of additional items:

Climate

Geography

Water

Access

Forestry

Buildings

Fencing

Soils

PolyMarketing

Energy

The Keyline framework was used to introduce a suite of regenerative strategies, including:

Holistic Management;

Pasture Cropping;

Biofertilisers and Chromatography;

Mycorestoration;

Regenerative Forestry;

WET Systems;

Effective Micro-organisms;

Induced Meandering for Riparian Restoration;

No-kill Cropping;

Agroforestry; and

Natural Sequence Farming

As well as all this, we saw a Keyline plough in action in a West Sussex pasture.

Why is all this so exciting? To my mind, an approach to agriculture that creates systems which build biological capacity in the form of soil, biomass, biodiversity and balanced natural and human managed ecosystems (agroecosystems) is the foundation of the possibility of our flourishing in the earth. And it is interesting and fun. What more exciting thing is there to do in the world than to join with those natural forces which would produce abundance with ecological health; to foster productive systems which teem with life and invite others to join in this creative work.

Darren presented people throughout the world who have been involved in this work with beautiful and profitable results. Profit, in these cases, is gained while ecological health is improved. There is still the issue of to whom those profits might rightfully accumulate or with whom they are most properly shared, but that will be a subject for another day. While I am working the most part of every day to build a barn to store some cereals, I have to hold back on exploring all that I am learning and thinking about. I have written a little bit about some of these people and strategies here before (holistic management, pasture cropping, keyline design, agroforestry). Some of the others strategies in the above list will be the subject of future posts. Some of Darren's own ideas were also very provocative and will doubtless find their way here in the near future. For now, I have to get off to bed so that many years of work in gathering and multipying diverse cereals are not exposed to rain and sun and lost before we get a barn built.

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