Episodes
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Sheila Darmos is a third generation farmer and a social entrepreneur in the agri-food sector and civic engagement field in Greece. Her key focuses lie within her lived physical and social environment, namely the farming and rural communities, and thus a systemic approach to enable transitions towards regeneration in a holistic way. Link to Bio
Simon Kraemer works to weave milieus in support of regenerating resilient, equitable and emancipating agrifood ecosystems from the ground up. Ecosystems that are invested in enhancing the socio-ecological and socio-economical aspects of regenerative food and fiber systems that foster horizontal, political and food agency. Link to Bio -
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Allan Savory, a renowned ecologist and founder of the Savory Institute, has dedicated his life to understanding and solving the problem of biodiversity loss, which, among other factors, is fueling climate change by leading to desertification over most of Earth’s land area.
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Dr. André Leu, D.Sc., was named international director of Regeneration International in 2017. Previously, he was president of IFOAM—Organics International, the international umbrella organization for the organic sector. During 50-plus years of visiting and working in more than 100 countries, André acquired an extensive knowledge of farming and environmental systems across Asia, Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Australasia. He and his wife, Julia, run an organic tropical fruit farm in Daintree, Australia.
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From Degenerative Industrial Agriculture to Regenerative Organic Agriculture - The real future of food, farming and communities, Dr Vandana Shiva. Vandana discusses Bill Gates and the Billionaires’ corruption of agriculture and food systems compared to the positive alternative, regenerative organic agriculture of smallholder family farms, which produces more health and wealth per acre.
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Dr. Gilles Eric Seralini of the University of Caen, France. Today he brings us a presentation about his research surrounding the hidden ingredients found in pesticides such as Roundup and the effects of Genetically Modified Organisms on animal health.
This presentation is from Regeneration International's People's Food Summit 2023. The People’s Food Summit is a major 24-hour event in celebration of World Food Day, October 16, featuring exciting speakers from every region of our planet. Find more info here: https://bit.ly/3tr5Wtr -
Precious Phiri, African Coordinator for Regeneration International, has a conversation with Gertrude Pswarayi-Jabson; PELUM Zimbabwe Coordinator, and Caroline Jacqueta from Bio-Innovation Zimbabwe and co-producer of the Seed and Food Festival.
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In the Foreward to the new book by Ridge Shinn and Lynn Pledger, renowned holistic rancher Gabe Brown writes: “It seems that every day we wake up to a new crisis, from the COVID-19 pandemic and high fuel prices to empty store shelves and war in Ukraine. Our world is in a constant state of change. While many cry doomsday, some, like Ridge Shinn and Lynne Pledger, know that the secret to resiliency in a changing world can be found through healthy soil, created with the help of grazing ruminants.
Relying on a lifetime of experience with cattle and resource conservation, Ridge and Lynne take us on a journey through production agriculture in the United States. They explain how farmers and ranchers went from grazing livestock on pasture to confining cattle in grassless pens where grain and by-products are brought to them—grain and by-products that are grown with synthetics (fertilizers, pesticides, and fungicides) and the heavy use of fossil fuels. These practices, in no small part, have led to the degradation of our soils, our waters, and, at least to some degree, our health.
This has led many to vilify animals, cows in particular, and falsely claim that they are largely responsible for climate change. This book helps to set the record straight: This new method of grazing cattle has a net climate benefit. As Ridge and Lynne so truthfully state, “Regenerative grazing will change the way our society thinks about beef, because the grazing itself is as significant as the meat.”
Read more: https://www.chelseagreen.com/2022/why-regenerative-grazing-is-so-important/ -
The Billion Agave Project is a game-changing ecosystem-regeneration strategy recently adopted by several innovative Mexican farms in the high-desert region of Guanajuato.
This strategy combines the growing of agave plants and nitrogen-fixing companion tree species (such as mesquite), with holistic rotational grazing of livestock. The result is a high-biomass, high forage-yielding system that works well even on degraded, semi-arid lands.
The system produces large amounts of agave leaf and root stem—up to one ton of biomass over the 8-10-year life of the plant. When chopped and fermented in closed containers, this plant material produces an excellent, inexpensive (two cents per pound) animal fodder. This agroforestry system reduces the pressure to overgraze brittle rangelands and improves soil health and water retention, while drawing down and storing massive amounts of atmospheric CO2.
Learn more about the Billion Agave Project here: https://regenerationinternational.org/billion-agave-project -
The global best practice model for funding and scaling up regenerative and organic food and farming comes to us from Australia, which has more organically certified farmland and pastureland than any other nation in the world. Veteran organic farmers in Australia have come up with an alternative solution to the global fraud of carbon trading and carbon credits, and corporate greenwashing. They call their new system, which we at OCA and Regeneration International believe is a global game-changer, “Organic Eco-Credits.”
In this video, Ben Dobson of the Hudson Carbon Project and Ronnie Cummins, international director of the Organic Consumers Association and Regeneration International steering committee member, discuss the need for Organic Eco-Credits in North America.
Then Regeneration International Director, Andre Leu, interviews two leaders, Carolyn Suggate and Greg Paynter, of Australia’s new organization, the Organic and Regenerative Investment Coop (ORIC). ORIC website: https://organicinvestmentcooperative.com.au/eco-credit/
Listen as they explain how Australian farmers and investors are creating a new paradigm of Organic Eco-Credits and Bonds. -
What’s going on with our kids?
As of 2011, 43% of US children (32 million) had chronic health conditions, increasing to 54.1% when overweight, obesity, or being at risk for developmental delays was included. This data is 13 years old and newer studies suggest that these numbers continue to escalate to shocking levels.
As any parent knows, trying to get to the root cause of common problems like extra weight, allergies, asthma, gastrointestinal upset, eczema, learning challenges or behavioral issues can be maddening.
Thankfully, there are some moms, doctors and scientists out there who don’t give up.
In this conversation, Organic Consumers Association’s Political Director Alexis Baden-Mayer talks to three such women: pediatrician Michelle Perro, scientist Stephanie Seneff, and Moms Across America founder Zen Honeycutt.
These three super sleuths investigated common toxic exposures, widespread health disorders and the medical literature until they identified a central factor in what’s making our children sick: Foods that have been genetically engineered to soak up Monsanto (now Bayer)’s glyphosate-based Roundup weed killer.
They didn’t stop there. Listen to this information-packed interview to learn more. -
Midwest Healthy Ag is a research project dedicated to listening to farmers and farming communities in the midwest of the USA about agriculture, the environment, community, and health. Learn more here: https://midwesthealthyag.org/
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Based in Kotagiri in the heart of the Nilgiri mountains, Last Forest Enterprise has been a market intermediary for wild forest produce that is harvested by indigenous communities since 2010. These communities are working on forest and agriculture produce, which are natural, wild and local.
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Nate was born in Philadelphia. He graduated from Abington Friends School in 2000 and from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service in 2004. Following college, he worked as a landscaper, camp counselor, office manager, and theatrical spotlight operator, before committing himself to a life of activism. He has worked in a variety of jobs in politics and organizing, including Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign and Joe Sestak's 2010 U.S. Senate campaign, though he quit his last “real job” in 2012 (as an organizer with the Service Employees International Union). He is grateful to consider himself equal parts farmer and organizer today.
As a volunteer, Nate has been involved in efforts ranging from the Sudan Freedom Walk to Occupy Sandy. He has participated in foreign delegations to Mexico, Honduras, and Cuba. He helped found InterOccupy, an open communication platform for activists, and used it to help coordinate Occupy Sandy New Jersey. He ran for U.S. Congress in 2012 (and was called “the first Occupy candidate” by Politico magazine). He has served on the Executive Board of the Project for Nuclear Awareness, the Cumberland County (NJ) Long Term Recovery Group, and the Jewish Social Policy Action Network. He is a member of the Seed Advisory Committee of the Non-GMO Project, the Education Committee of the Northeast Organic Farming Association of New Jersey (NOFA-NJ), and Vice President of GMO Free Pennsylvania. As a plant breeder and researcher, Nate has a broad range of interests, but he is most engaged at the moment in the pursuit of climate stabilizing perennial staple crops, especially sorghum.
Nate now works with the Experimental Farm Network: https://www.experimentalfarmnetwork.org/ -
Helena Norberg-Hodge is a pioneer of the new economy movement and recipient of the Alternative Nobel prize, the Arthur Morgan Award and the Goi Peace Prize for contributing to “the revitalization of cultural and biological diversity, and the strengthening of local communities and economies worldwide.” She is author of the inspirational classic Ancient Futures, and Local is Our Future (2019). She is co-author of Bringing the Food Economy Home and From the Ground Up, and producer of the award-winning documentary The Economics of Happiness. Helena is the founder and director of Local Futures and The International Alliance for Localisation, and a founding member of the International Commission on the Future of Food and Agriculture, the International Forum on Globalization and the Global Ecovillage Network.
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Sundeep Kamath is a Biodynamic Advisor having professional expertise in the wide spectrum of the Organic/Biodynamic food landscape, from Biodynamic Agriculture production to market linkages based on Associative Economics. He has been the Secretary of the Biodynamic Association of India & is currently on the Board of IFOAM Asia & is the General Secretary of AIONA.
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After decades of longstanding racism in the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) loan programs, Black farmers stand to lose their farms, land and livelihoods after a temporary injunction halted an estimated $4 billion in emergency relief passed by Congress as part of the American Rescue Act.
On World Food Day, as part of the global People’s Food Summit, OCA Political Director Alexis Baden-Mayer interviewed lawyer Tracy McCurty of the Black Belt Justice Center to learn about the Black Farmers’ Appeal: Cancel Pigford Debt Campaign.
How would agriculture be different today if the 3.9 million Black farmers emancipated from slavery by 1865 had been given land as reparations for their stolen labor and had been able to pass that land to their descendants?
We’ve heard of the promise of “40 acres and a mule,” but in reality Black farmers coming out of slavery got nothing. Even the 400,000 acres that were negotiated by Black leaders in an agreement with General Sherman were taken back after Lincoln was shot.
It was with grit and determination, and without any help, that Black farmers managed to earn 16 million acres of land by 1910. As farmer Eddie Slaughter explains in a video on the Acres of Ancestry YouTube channel, Black farmers had no education, no political clout, and no help, but they had one thing going for them. They were the ones who knew how to farm!
The 16 million acres of land in 1910 was the peak of Black land ownership in America. Whites’ violence against Black landowners, including 3,445 lynchings between 1882 and 1964, coupled with severe economic oppression, forced Black farmers off their land.
The USDA played a large role in this, one that has continued to this day.
Farmers cite multiple instances of discrimination, including:
-Misplaced loan paperwork and approval delays of more than two years;
-Inability to sell equipment to repay loans due to vandalism at the auction house in the form of racist graffiti on the tractors up for bid;
-Loan paperwork being filed on time but funds chronically arriving too late for planting season;
-Inaccurate advice about whether FSA loans could be restructured; and
-Receiving loan funds weeks later in the season than white farmers in the same area, providing them with an unfair advantage in planting and harvesting a profitable crop.
In 1997, Black farmers sued the USDA and won one of the largest ever civil rights settlements against the U.S. government, Pigford v. Glickman. Almost $1 billion dollars has been paid or credited to more than 13,300 Black farmers under the settlement's consent decree. There was a second lawsuit, known as Pigford II, that allowed an additional 70,000 farmers to file claims. In December 2010, Congress appropriated $1.2 billion for the second part of the case.
These settlements were significant, but they did not compensate Black farmers for the full impact of the USDA’s racist discrimination. As a result, over 17,000 Black farmers have been left with crushing debt, threat of foreclosure, and no way to save their family farms. Most of this debt originated from the racist misdeeds of USDA and was supposed to be canceled under the Pigford settlement, but due to a range of factors including attorney malpractice and incompetence, only 4.8 percent of the $1 billion Pigford settlement went to debt cancellation.
Shockingly, the USDA continues to garnish Black farmers’ tax refunds, social security, disability, and subsidy payments to cover outstanding debts. Farmer Eddie Slaughter, a double amputee, had his social security, peanut subsidy, and disability payments garnished for over nine years amounting to over $41,000.
They turned to Congress with the Black Farmers’ Appeal: Cancel Pigford Debt Campaign and finally, in 2021, $4 billion in debt relief was passed by Congress as part of the American Rescue Act. Section 1005 of the American Rescue Plan, signed into law on March 11, 2021, was designed to provide debt cancellation to Black farmers, and other farmers of color, who have long suffered at the hands of the USDA’s harmful discrimination.
Not a penny of that appropriation has reached Black farmers because the courts have sided with white farmers who claim that such payments would discriminate against them!
Congress could fix this by amending the American Rescue Plan Act to forgive USDA loans for “economically distressed borrowers.” This would end up helping white farmers who didn’t experience racism, but it would still provide Black farmers the relief they need without having to defend it in the courts against reverse-discrimination claims.
WATCH: Justice for Black Farmers: A Conversation to Uproot Racist Policy and Plant Seeds of Redress: https://youtu.be/FbhaJ1pwgkE
READ MORE: The Nation: How Thousands of Black Farmers Were Forced Off Their Land: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/black-farmers-pigford-debt/
LINKS:
Black Belt Justice Center: https://acresofancestry.networkforgood.com
Black Farmers’ Appeal: Cancel Pigford Debt Campaign: https://acresofancestry.org/black-farmers-appeal-cancel-pigford-debt-campaign/ -
Nelson Mudzingwa (Zimbabwe Smallholder Organic Farmers' Forum (ZIMSOFF), National Coordinator) is one of the founding leaders of the Shashe Agroecology School that has become one of the most successful examples that practices local diverse food production that is based on the fundamentals of their spirituality and cosmovision.
His presentation is generous and thought-provoking, sharing on food production, and connection to the whole human (including spirituality). He takes us on a journey of issues surrounding nurturing soil health, local diets, seed and food sovereignty whilst celebrating their culture and way of life.
Learn more at https://regenerationinternational.org
Sign the regeneration pledge: https://regenerationinternational.org/pledge - Show more
