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:

1. Climate
2. Geography
3. Water
4. Access
5. Forestry
6. Buildings
7. Fencing
8. Soils
9. PolyMarketing
10. 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.