How regenerative farming can help heal the planet and human health | Charles Massy | TEDxCanberra

[Music] [Music] now what would you think if I told you that regenerative agriculture can both save the planet and renew human health at the same time preposterous this guy's off his rocker last time I checked no and so I'd like to take you on the journey that led to that conclusion that journey began here on my farm in snow mountains region beautiful native grasslands lots of biodiversity including these guys who only arrived yellow Robins after the big fires and the mountains in 2003 now they're in abundance so they clearly liked the biodiversity there as do these guys black cockatoos who also arrived after the fires and are now there and painted here by my friend Richard Weatherly and Richard has captured their lazy flies in that painting so it might surprise you to know that early in my farming career I did great damage to this beautiful landscape and therefore some of its creatures but that in turn became a catalyst for change but first what is regenerative agriculture what's an ecological approach of farming that enables landscapes to renew themselves radical idea that enabling and not dominating there's a range of practices in regenerative agriculture ecological or holistic grazing cropping with biological inputs cropping into native grasslands agroforestry food forestry and a range of others like bio dynamics and permaculture as now tens of millions of hectares worldwide under this approach and generally run by family and not corporate fans in contrast industrial agriculture tends to simplify dominate control and usually ends up destroying natural systems and their cycles and it's driven by some of the world's biggest multinationals chemical pharmaceutical companies operating under an economic rationalist philosophy of growth and greed now some of its key practices are monocultural cropping the application of synthetic fertilizers we decides pesticides pharmaceuticals the manipulation of plants and animal genomes and the factory farming of animals now all of these are unnatural some unconscionable so how come a nature lover ended up adopting some of these practices well I grew up as an only child on our farm and spent a lot of time up in the bush nearby national parks so I was a nature lover ended up over here at Anu doing serology but the age of 22 my father's illness meant I went home to take over management problem was I knew nothing about management so I sourced the best advice best local farmers Department of Agriculture csro read lots of books and papers and the result of that was that I was inducted into the industrial paradigm or world view of Agriculture and consequently early in my farming career I ended up doing damage I remember over grazing and plowing beautiful native grasslands and I particularly remember the big drought of the early 1980s well arrogantly said I'm going to fight this so I kept my animals boarding lots of food and the result you can see we damaged the landscape ended up with a big debt but that began to rattle the cage and change came from a number of incidents I remember a few years ago one Saturday morning driving to our local town half an hour away with my son-in-law Andrew and grandson Hamish to watch Hamish play soccer on the way we passed a farmer spraying his paddock with herbicide and suddenly seven year old Hamish said to me grandpa why do we have to kill things to grow things it was a profound question and it really got me thinking and then on my subsequent travels across Australia I encountered more and more regenerative farmers and I discovered they weren't just regenerating their landscapes but also their finances and family and mental health so the upshot was in my late 50s I ended up back at Anu doing a PhD asking the question why had they shifted and what were they doing and then the breakthrough came because I was forced to reflect on my own early journey and I realised I'd actually been landscape illiterate I couldn't read the landscape I didn't know how it was functioning I didn't realize that landscape should have been in hospital in intensive care it needed healing so consequently as a in my teaching students and then writing a book about this subject I came up with a model to teach ecological literacy now there are lots of cycles in nature chemical and otherwise but you could simplify them down to those five key functions obviously the solar drives at all is the water cycle Psalm biodiversity and the one we all forget about this one the world views and paradigms we bring to our landscape if you look at the diagram all those inter connecting arrows if you damage one of those systems you damage them all because of that connection but if you regenerate them you regenerate them all and it's that process that drives our healthy planet and healthy humans so let me just give you a couple of examples we all know the solar energy is key the solar cycle is key so plants have many solar panels they photosynthesize grab carbon dioxide turn it into sugars which feeds all that soil biology if it's healthy soil and then that biology brings in nutrients for the plants and we create the plants but that biology and plants also lays down through that process long live carbon in our entire industrial civilization is based on fossil fuels through that process now this guy I visited Norman croon in tough country in South Africa the left side of that fence line is his farm today on the right is a neighbor still farming desert and when Norman started a few decades ago it was all desert 400 years of European mismanagement he then said about ecological grazing putting on his solar panels and diverse plants and that kick-started the carbon and the soil cycle and the water cycle and then biodiversity you can see the result today and today compared to when he started a few decades ago he's now with his animals and production producing more than three times what he started with biodiversity another example a few years ago I visited some friends just out of Canberra who told me they're regenerating their creeks with various methods and as we drove to have a look we passed the neighbor who was traditional industrial farming so it was over grazed it was bare the signs of dry land salt the creek was dry and there's recent erosion from a rain event but then downstream through the fence I came across David and Jones Creek and there's hundreds of meters of green lush grass coming out from their Creek wash vegetation and because of the ward are stored in ground that Creek now was running all year round and what were they're talking about this I noticed a patch of tall Phragmites reeds and suddenly out of those reeds came this beautiful call of a reed Warbler that guy no bigger than a wineglass and it suddenly hit me that was probably the first time in a hundred and fifty years of European mismanagement that a reed Warbler had returned to that valley and all because that family had begun to love and care for their land so so what how does this relate to our planet well it relates because what we do in our landscapes extrapolates right across to the planet and there she is it's a one-off there's only one Bluegreen planet where life itself created conditions for life and that maintenance of those conditions means that today we have nine integrated self-organizing systems maintaining those conditions climate being one of them problem is our industrial society has now started as we heard earlier today grossly destabilize all those systems due to our own fossil fuels and all the rest of it and that's why there's an increasing consensus of scientists saying Earth has now moved into a new epoch which they're calling the Anthropocene anthropo human-made and if you look at those systems up there the red and the yellow shows that some of those systems are getting into highly dangerous state possible runaway events and the key point I want to make if you look at all the research is that the practices of industrial agriculture are key player in destabilizing and dangerously most of those systems but there's a flipside to that because we turn that around regenerative agriculture can play a huge role so you going back to normal and kroons farm on the right ongoing degradation carbon dioxide up continuing degradation of the other cycles on the left the opposite and that extrapolates across huge landscapes and we're starting to get some numbers on this recently one of the world's leading environmental and social change agents over the last few decades Paul Hawken has initiated a study 70 or more scientists and analysts crunching the numbers on the hundred best methods of drawing carbon dioxide bearing it away or avoiding it going up now looked at at all this there's a few regenerative agriculture approaches in they're all doing the same thing so I a grenade and called it regenerative agriculture and by nearly two and a half times the next best method regenerative agriculture is the best way of pulling carbon down and burying it in the soil and so that's why I say with great confidence regenerative agriculture can heal and save the planet but this in turn is connected through our modern health crisis mental and biophysical because with the rise of the Anthropocene has come a parallel rise of human ill health through various reasons the way industrial society processes its food adds fats sugars salts and generally destroys all the micro a lot of the micronutrients and main nutrients that we've co-evolved for for our health and immune systems over millions of years but a key the stabilizer of those nutrients and health is industrial agriculture the way we play our etcetera and here's a cross-section of the crucial element of soil biology it just shows one of the key players which the root fungus micro hug micro house'll fungi so they feed off the plant sugars go and source of nutrients which feeds the whole process but if we plow fertilize spray poisons pesticides we decides we kill off most of that soil biology so all that huge range of micronutrients aren't coming back in and we're left with drug-addict plants waiting for their industrial fix of just a few restricted nutrients and the evidence is showing there's a high correlation between that process and and the rise of industrial diseases post Second World War but there's even another dangerous element in this and it's coming at us like an express train and that is the widespread use of the world's most used herbicide known as glyphosate and a brand name you'd be familiar with roundup and because it's water-soluble we now know it's widely pervasive in our environment there's nearly a million tons going out every year of this stuff mean so it's in our groundwater our surface water it's in our industrial foods the tests are showing now it's in most of our bodies it's even in breast milk when it gets into our body research is confirming it is now having a devastating impact gets into this critical microbiome of our gut it's destabilizing a crucial amino acid pathway essential for our immune function being water soluble it's crossing some of the critical barriers in our body stop toxins getting in it's crossing the gut lining the blood brain barrier etc and again the research is showing a huge escalation particularly from the 1990s of the use of glyphosate is highly correlated with a lot of the modern mental and biophysical diseases okay let's sweep the negative aside because we now have regenerative biological replacements and methods for farming and biological replacements for the inputs not farming and we can turn it around and I can now go back to my grandson who asked a profound question grandpa why do we have to kill things to grow things and I could say to him Hamish we don't have to kill things we just have to nourish them and so that's seven year old boy a tree Warbler and indeed the planet they're calling us all they're calling us to nurture and care for this earth because I can tell you the solutions aren't going to come from the big end of town they're not going to come from government it's up to us and so they're calling us to do three things one for we farmers to shift to regenerative agriculture two for all of us to grow and consume healthy food and nourish our communities and three for all of us to begin really loving and nurturing that one-off Bluegreen planet and so that's why I can say to you with the utmost conviction that regenerative agriculture can save both the planets and renew human health at the same time [Applause] [Music] [Music]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 91,277

Rating: 4.9382715 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Global Issues, Agriculture, Farming, Health

Id: Et8YKBivhaE

Length: 17min 28sec (1048 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 13 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/CrashCourseHEMA]

I'd love a short list of all these Australian Regenerative Agriculture and Aquaculture sources.

I feel my state of Tasmania could be a world leader in this stuff :)

Though I will note, I am still pro-GMO (within certain applications that I like to call Plant Enhancement).

[u/slipperyfish3469]

I love the regenerative agriculture movement and I hope videos like this will bring more awareness to those stuck in industrial agriculture. Although I'm not sure if mentioning glyphosphate was a good idea.

I've seen a lot of polarisation on the issue of glyphosphate safety, to humans directly or environmental microbiomes, and the metaphorical water is very muddy. Therefore I feel that even if glyphosphate is as harmful as this talk suggested just its mention will trigger mental defensive responses in many of the minds that this video is trying to reach out to.

I could be wrong though. Maybe after being given regenerative agriculture as an alternative there will be a safe mental space for farmers to ditch glyphosphate really quickly?

[u/FXOjafar]

Larger herds. Rotational grazing that renews the land and sequesters carbon. We could run 3x the amount of cattle currently grazed on fields and they'll all be fat and happy full of grass. How good is that?