© Ayana Elizabeth Johnson
Regenerative farmer Louise Maher-Johnson at her Skyhill Farm, with free-range heritage chickens and microbiomes.
Regenerative farmer Louise Maher-Johnson at her Skyhill Farm, with free-range heritage chickens and microbiomes.
As food writer Mark Bittman recently remarked, since food is defined as "a substance that provides nutrition and promotes growth" and poison is "a substance that promotes illness," then "much of what is produced by industrial agriculture is, quite literally, not food but poison." Of course, it doesn't have to be this way. Eliminating pesticides and transitioning to organic regenerative farming can get us back on track to nutritious food, restore microbiomes and protect our health. Let's break all this down, and then talk solutions.
"You would have to eat twice as much broccoli today to get the same nutrients as a generation ago." That is according to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, from 1975 to 2010, as reported by Planetary Health/Amberwaves. So much chewing! And in fact, the situation may be even more dire. Data going back to 1940, as reported by Eco Farming Daily, shows: "The level of every nutrient in almost every kind of food has fallen between 10 and 100 percent. An individual today would need to consume twice as much meat, three times as much fruit, and four to five times as many vegetables to obtain the same amount of minerals and trace elements available in those same foods in 1940." Thank goodness for multivitamins, but we've also got to fix this.
Comment: It's encouraging to see a mainstream publication like Scientific American actually getting it. Despite the acceptance of the 'carbon effects climate' propaganda, the authors illustrate the dire need for us to move away from the dead paradigm of chemical agriculture to regenerative agriculture. Whether it be for our own microbiomes or the microbiomes of the soil, we need to embrace this new (or very old) system - our future depends on it.
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