Regenerative Agriculture and
Holistic Management
Regenerative Agriculture is a wide spectrum that covers all kinds of techniques, methods, practices and research that healing ecosystems, soil and water assets, and all kinds of living diversity, while producing food for humans.
Regenerative Agriculture is also a "paradigm change": an approach that reviews the relationship of human beings with non-human nature and other people, brings radical innovations to all stages of the process from seed to fork, and focuses innovation, transformation and information sharing in line with the thousands of years old heritage of agriculture.
Agriculture has been the heaviest burden and the greatest damage humanity has ever put on the shoulders of the planet. It was a "harm" that started when humanity invented the first plow, long before the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides called the Green Revolution in the 1950s. The Green Revolution expanded the extent and scope of this damage. For example, the "Fertile Crescent", which is also the beginning of agriculture and civilization, had become a region with limited water resources, low productivity, and rapidly becoming desert by the millenium BC, after several thousand years of "natural" agriculture. Many of the world's "man-made" deserts can also join these examples; It is now known how effective the agricultural activities of human beings played in the transformation of what we call the Sahara Desert from a fertile basin to a desert.
But the same “human” has found, developed and applied different regenerative farming methods for thousands of years: It is now clear that many areas with great fertility, which are defined as “natural areas” today, became this way with the “regenerative” methods of the people and civilizations of the period, that is, they were transformed by human influence. Terra preta practices in the Amazons, huge food forests in North America, forests transformed and recreated by fire in the Australian continent are examples of that.
In today's changing conditions from country to country, from basin to basin, from village to village, and even from household to household, Regenerative Agriculture marks the last point of humanity's journey of food production, sharing and access: Enabling a resistant, nutritious, safe, healing, fair, low-cost food production – while regenerating nature beyond preserving it!
Regenerative Agriculture is very similar to “open source” computer programming in terms of its methods, paradigm and ways of propagation/development. Just like this movement, which started with the philosophy of access to information and whose most well-known examples are Linux operating systems, Regenerative Agriculture is essentially a strong social movement that acts with the motto of documenting, keeping records, and improving the methods they learn from each other through experimentation and sharing the results.
There is a "tool kit" analogy used by Regenerative Agriculture practitioners: Methods and techniques that emerged especially in the last 30 years and have become widespread especially in the last 10 years with the help of the internet are used in a "modular" structure and for different purposes. Holistic Management is also one of the key tools in the Regenerative Agriculture toolbox: decision making, short and long term strategy formulation and planning, financial planning and implementation, and grazing planning (if there exists livestock) is mostly done using the Holistic Management framework. Holistic Management is also used for ecological monitoring and land planning purposes.
Holistic Management is one of the most sought after Regenerative Agriculture tools among “ex-farmers”. This is because it draws a “practicable” framework with very concrete output, results-based, combining practice and theory, and offers answers to the questions that farmers really ask. Since Holistic Management can be applied at all scales, it is also in demand on large lands, therefore it is one of the most common Regenerative Agriculture methods in terms of the amount of land in the world: The inventory study of the Savory Institute has not been completed yet, but it is estimated that Holistic Management is applied in more than 10 million hectares of land worldwide. The aim is to increase this to 1 billion hectares by 2020.