I’ve been reading about regenerative agriculture and it makes me hurt for home.

For several generations now, farms have become more and more industrial, more and more unsustainable, bigger and bigger. Look at monocultures and the millions of gallons of chemicals that make them possible, and I remember the farm where I grew up. 

The knowledge necessary to farm regeneratively has been disappearing, but I know how to do it. I was there helping my family with a diversified farming operation back when that was still possible. Mostly the genetically-modified seeds and agro-chemicals weren’t even available then, so we used alternatives.

We rotated crops like alfalfa that fix nitrogen with cash crops like wheat that require it. We were a small family on a small farm, but we mostly kept ahead of weeds by chopping them with machetes—early in the mornings when it was cool.  Pests and fungi had less chance of getting a foothold in the before-mentioned rotating fields. In spring, we scooped out the chicken coop, the barn, and corrals so we could spread the animal droppings on the fields with our honey wagon (manure spreader).

We didn’t need much cash because we grew most of our own food—cattle on the rough lands, pigs, chickens, eggs, milk, butter. We had gardens and orchards. We canned and froze a lot of food. We had farm ponds and game preserves where we fished and hunted, and invited the townsfolk to join us.

Sound like a lot of work? Maybe, it was but we did it together—when it rained and we couldn’t get to the fields, we went fishing. It wasn’t always idyllic. Sometimes it was really hard, like when a storm wiped out an entire year’s crop. But when the wheat got hailed, there was still corn and cattle and pigs. Farm economics demanded we get bigger—and bigger—or die and that broke my father’s heart. Literally. I’ll never forget all the farm equipment lined up in the yard for the farm sale.