Food Chain Radio Show #1204

Michael Olson, Author & Urban Farming Agriculturalist

Regenerative Agriculture and the Myths of Modern Agriculture

Guest: David Montgomery, University of Washington Professor of Geology & Author, Growing a Revolution

We begin with Michael Olson’s First law of the Food Chain: Agriculture is the foundation upon which we build all our sand castles.

Michael Olson Food Chain Radio – Brown Revolution and Regenerative Agriculture

Simple enough: No surplus of food, no sand castles!

When living so far removed from the source of our food, as we do, it’s easy to forget that elemental fact. We start thinking food comes from grocery stores, and it will always come from grocery stores.

Then somewhere along the line we wake up to the fact that we forgot about the importance of agriculture, and we become frightened by the fact that we have no control over our food or our environment.

Perhaps that is one of the reasons why so many are now calling for a Green Revolution to change the way we go about living our lives. “Stop eating beef,” they say, “and stop using plastic straws.”

But there are some who say we should have a Brown Revolution before we have a Green Revolution.

Recently I ran across an article in The Conversation titled “Healthy Soil Is the Real Key to Feeding the World,” by David Montgomery, the author of Growing a Revolution. In this article Montgomery presents four of the big myths of agriculture:

Myth 1: Large-Scale agriculture feeds the world today.

Myth 2: Large farms are more efficient than small farms.

Myth 3: Conventional farming is necessary to feed the world.

Myth 4: Organic farming is inherently sustainable.

In believing these myths, and allowing them to be used to develop an industrial agriculture independent of soil biology, Montgomery claims that we run the risk of depleting our soil, as have the great civilizations of the past that collapsed.

Montgomery says it is time to look past these myths of agriculture to find truths, and to use those truths to build a regenerative agriculture based on living soil that can sustain us for millenniums to come.

And so we ask:

Leave a comment below: Which revolution should we have first: a brown one or a green one?

Tune in here, for the syndicated the Michael Olson Food Chain Radio Show #1204 October 5, 2019 Saturday 9AM Pacific

Nationally syndicated Food Chain Radio airs live Saturday mornings 9-10AM Pacific.