Regenerative Agriculture: What Are Cover Crops?
Cover crops protect the soil from erosion and feed the microbial life in the soil when there’s no cash crop growing; or they can be interseeded with cash crops in a supportive role.
I was born in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains between Clay City and the rolling fields of central Kentucky. I grew up on the farm, went to small town schools, learned to drive on winding country roads with lots of blind spots. I went away, like a lot of people, and came back.
“Away” took me to Dartmouth College, to Philadelphia, and then six or so years in Houston. I studied the way that economies and social agreements and hard physical realities interplay in real actual places (not models). I worked at a delivery business and at a refugee resettlement agency. I ran a handyman business and for a short while a grain elevator.
I thought for a while that 'the climate movement' might generate political will for a massive transformation in the way that humans relate to the natural world, and I worked on that. Now, I think it's time to focus on regenerative agriculture in our Ohio River Valley to ride through whatever comes our way.
State of Ecological Agriculture Winter ’23
Part 1: The Roots of Real Organic and why we must return to them Over the last several months I’ve been blessed to attend a fantastic trio of ecological farmer conferences– Acres, USA; The Organic Association of Kentucky; and the Ohio Ecological Food and Farming Association; and more recently also The Real Organic Project’s symposium…
USDA ‘Climate Smart Commodities’ Grant Recipient
Last summer, we applied for funding under the USDA and Natural Resource Conservation Service’s ‘Climate Smart Commodities’ grant program. We proposed “Building whole-farm designs and market infrastructure to provide premiums for Climate Smart Farming among mid-sized agricultural enterprises in the Ohio River valley” (a mouthful I know). In December, USDA gave us a great Christmas…