Intro and Chapter 1

 Liz Carlisle starts the introduction by highlighting the environmental issues that are going on today. Things like climate change, soil degradation and the extreme loss of biodiversity. She gets into the fact that it is not just an ecological issue but a social and political issue. She believes that our modern industrial and agricultural practices have negatively impacted our crops and soil fertility. She proposed regenerative farming as an alternative moving forward, such as cover cropping, and rotational grazing. In my opinion I think that introducing new agricultural practices is one thing but actually implementing them would be a huge step forward for our food systems and will help promote a sense of justice for certain communities that are faced with food insecurity.  

Moving into chapter 1, she discusses the history of our agricultural practices and how they came to be. It is important to understand our practices and policies if we are to positively move forward towards regenerative farming. Carlisle talks about how older more traditional practices have had some respect for the land including crop diversification and grazing. Regenerative farming can play a huge role in mitigating climate change by eliminating the amount of carbon dioxide that gets released into the atmosphere. Her emphasis in this chapter was how to work with and not against the land when dealing with climate change and it gave me a whole new perspective on the issue. I agree with her, I believe that humans have dealt with issues by industrial practices and developing new ideas when we need to use the land and natural resources we were given.  

With new practices comes challenges and she addresses them at the end of Chapter 1. Obviously, the financial aspect plays a role in how much the farmers can change their agricultural practices, especially with an already challenging budget. Carlisle emphasizes on an opportunity for transforming policy changes and a community based agricultural network. In my opinion, there won’t be enough change until more people become informed and involved and Carlisle does a great job addressing the major issues in this book to hopefully get the ball rolling.