The Regenerative Agriculture Solution
A Revolutionary Approach to Building Soil, Creating Climate Resilience, and Supporting Human and Planetary Health
| Pages: | 208 pages |
| Size: | 5.5 x 8.5 inch |
| Publisher: | Chelsea Green Publishing |
| Pub. Date: | September 26, 2024 |
| ISBN: | 9781645022695 |
The Regenerative Agriculture Solution
A Revolutionary Approach to Building Soil, Creating Climate Resilience, and Supporting Human and Planetary Health
Paperback
$24.95
“Read this book to understand why you should care about regenerative agriculture. Until the public is better-informed and insists on sweeping changes to current agricultural policy . . . we will continue to degrade our planet and destabilize our climate. Leu and Cummins, through inspiring stories and solid science, show just how quickly we could turn that around.”—Allan Savory, president, Savory Institute; chairman, Africa Centre for Holistic Management
Is it possible that the solution to the global climate emergency lies in a “waste” agricultural product?
The best-kept secret in today’s world is that solutions to some of our most pressing issues—food insecurity, deforestation, overgrazing, water scarcity, rural poverty, forced migration—lie in adopting, improving, and scaling up organic and regenerative agriculture best practices.
The Regenerative Agriculture Solution starts with the story of how two brothers—Jose and Gilberto Flores—are at the leading edge of this approach, pioneering the use of the previously discarded leaves of the prodigious agave plant to regenerate agricultural soils, reduce erosion, and improve water capture.
When Ronnie Cummins, the cofounder of Organic Consumer Association (OCA) and Regeneration International, met the Flores brothers in 2019 and witnessed their revolutionary agave agroforestry system, he knew they were onto something important.
Cummins had spent decades studying the potential and pitfalls of organic and regenerative agriculture and knew best practices when he saw them. He started to write a book about Flores’s brother and other visionary people, such as Dr Vandana Shiva, Allan Savory, and John Liu, who started landscape-scale regeneration projects. The scientific data was even more convincing, suggesting that these projects—and others like it—could revolutionize how we understand the climate catastrophe.
Sadly, Cummins passed away in April 2023, in the midst of working on the book. Not to leave this work unfinished, Ronnie’s widow and OCA cofounder, Rose, called on their friend, colleague, and collaborator, Regeneration International’s cofounder André Leu, to complete the work and place the Flores brothers’ breakthroughs in the broader context of regenerative agriculture solutions to the world’s many interlocking ecological crises.
The result isThe Regenerative Agriculture Solution, a book that shows how regenerating our forests, rangelands, and farming ecosystems can cool our planet, restore the climate, and enrich our communities.
Reviews and Praise
“Ronnie Cummins’s work late in life at Vía Orgánica Ranch demonstrated that even in the driest of valleys in Mexico, farmers and herders can develop climate-resilient food production strategies that need not tax the soil, the aquifer, or the rural community, but enhance them. In my mind and heart, he is up there with Bill Mollison and Masanobu Fukuoka for shining a bright, warm light into our future on Planet Desert.”
—Gary Paul Nabhan, James Beard Award–winning writer; desert agroecologist
More Reviews and Praise
“This book is a testament to the vision of the late Ronnie Cummins. His friend André Leu memorializes Cummins’s lifelong work with this overview of the demonstrable benefits of regenerative agriculture for everything in the book’s subtitle and more. Cummins’s case study on agave illustrates these benefits perfectly, making this book a useful as well as touching tribute.”
—Marion Nestle, professor emerita at NYU; author of Slow Cooked: An Unexpected Life in Food Politics
“In the posthumously published The Regenerative Agriculture Solution, Ronnie Cummins offers a final gift: a dynamic model for using CAM (Crassulacean acid metabolism) plants to regenerate land, feed livestock, pull down carbon, and revive communities in hot, water-stressed areas. Why we hardly hear of CAM plants is a mystery; their alternate photosynthetic pathway is tailor-made to cope with the heat and aridity so many now face. Cummins tells the story of the Billion Agave Project, beginning with the enterprising brothers who devised a way to ferment the thick, spiky agave leaves for animal fodder, saving their farm in the process. Regeneration International’s André Leu situates the project within a growing wave of regional eco-restoration efforts—and shares how embracing and applying these efforts can bring us a long way toward ameliorating climate change. This is the book that Ronnie, an ‘incorrigible optimist’ and champion of farmers, would have wanted.”
—Judith Schwartz, author of The Reindeer Chronicles and Cows Save the Planet
“Read this book to understand why you should care about regenerative agriculture. Until the public is better-informed and insists on sweeping changes to current agricultural policy, which supports practices based on chemistry and technology rather than nature and biology, we will continue to degrade our planet and destabilize our climate. Leu and Cummins, through inspiring stories and solid science, show just how quickly we could turn that around.”
—Allan Savory, president, Savory Institute; chairman, Africa Centre for Holistic Management
Reviews and Praise
“Ronnie Cummins’s work late in life at Vía Orgánica Ranch demonstrated that even in the driest of valleys in Mexico, farmers and herders can develop climate-resilient food production strategies that need not tax the soil, the aquifer, or the rural community, but enhance them. In my mind and heart, he is up there with Bill Mollison and Masanobu Fukuoka for shining a bright, warm light into our future on Planet Desert.”
—Gary Paul Nabhan, James Beard Award–winning writer; desert agroecologist
“This book is a testament to the vision of the late Ronnie Cummins. His friend André Leu memorializes Cummins’s lifelong work with this overview of the demonstrable benefits of regenerative agriculture for everything in the book’s subtitle and more. Cummins’s case study on agave illustrates these benefits perfectly, making this book a useful as well as touching tribute.”
—Marion Nestle, professor emerita at NYU; author of Slow Cooked: An Unexpected Life in Food Politics
“In the posthumously published The Regenerative Agriculture Solution, Ronnie Cummins offers a final gift: a dynamic model for using CAM (Crassulacean acid metabolism) plants to regenerate land, feed livestock, pull down carbon, and revive communities in hot, water-stressed areas. Why we hardly hear of CAM plants is a mystery; their alternate photosynthetic pathway is tailor-made to cope with the heat and aridity so many now face. Cummins tells the story of the Billion Agave Project, beginning with the enterprising brothers who devised a way to ferment the thick, spiky agave leaves for animal fodder, saving their farm in the process. Regeneration International’s André Leu situates the project within a growing wave of regional eco-restoration efforts—and shares how embracing and applying these efforts can bring us a long way toward ameliorating climate change. This is the book that Ronnie, an ‘incorrigible optimist’ and champion of farmers, would have wanted.”
—Judith Schwartz, author of The Reindeer Chronicles and Cows Save the Planet
“Read this book to understand why you should care about regenerative agriculture. Until the public is better-informed and insists on sweeping changes to current agricultural policy, which supports practices based on chemistry and technology rather than nature and biology, we will continue to degrade our planet and destabilize our climate. Leu and Cummins, through inspiring stories and solid science, show just how quickly we could turn that around.”
—Allan Savory, president, Savory Institute; chairman, Africa Centre for Holistic Management
About Ronnie Cummins
Ronnie Cummins was the cofounder and director of the Organic Consumers Association (OCA), a nonprofit, US-based network of more than two million consumers dedicated to safeguarding organic standards and promoting a healthy, just, and regenerative system of food, farming, and commerce. Cummins also served on the steering committee of Regeneration International and OCA’s Mexican affiliate, Vía Orgánica. He was the coauthor of The Truth About COVID-19 and author of Grassroots Rising and Genetically Engineered Food.
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Books by Ronnie Cummins
About André Leu
André Leu is the International Director of Regeneration International, an organization he cofounded in 2015 with Dr. Vandana Shiva, Ronnie Cummins, Dr. Hans Herren, and Steve Rye, and which has now grown to 540 partners in 75 countries, advancing projects in agroecology, permaculture, AMP grazing, agroforestry, and biological, organic, and ecological agriculture. Dr. Leu holds a Doctor of Science in Environmental and Agricultural Systems and is an Adjunct Professor of regenerative agriculture at South Seas University. His books include Growing Life, Poisoning Our Children, and The Myths of Safe Pesticides. Dr. Leu and his wife, Julia, live on their organic tropical fruit farm in Daintree, Australia.
Books by André Leu
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