Regeneration as a Monolith to Money-Making PART II with Jeremy Dumphy
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Industrial agriculture linearizes to control. Regenerative agriculture diversifies to control. We get mad at the linearity but never the control. The anthro and its scientists measure the millennia with microscopes. It’s time to look up. It’s time to let go. What do you think?
Episode Summary
In this episode, I talk with Jeremy Dumphy and discuss the misrepresentation of conventional agriculture and the reductionist and binary perspective of regenerative agriculture.
We explore the impact of modern accessibility on agriculture and the lack of nuance in the regenerative movement, emphasizing the importance of context, community, and balance and calling us homeward and not into globalism.
Our conversation explores the tension between balance and capitalism anddelves into the practicality of growing grains for sale locally and the importance of limits, an idea and necessary reality often lacking in both conventional and regenerative mindsets.
The discussion also highlights the “heroic narrative” often associated with regenerative agriculture and the disconnect between stated reasons and actual motivations. The conversation concludes with a discussion on mandatory agricultural systems and the subversive nature of self-sufficiency in place of community ownership or participation.
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Jeremy's Website: www.pasturesongfarm.com
Episode Takeaways
The regenerative movement often misrepresents conventional agriculture and fails to acknowledge the importance of grains in the food system.
The binary perspective of regenerative agriculture as good and conventional agriculture as bad oversimplifies the complexities of farming practices.
The modern accessibility of buying grains from anywhere has led to a lack of local accountability and reciprocity in the regenerative movement.
The regenerative movement needs to embrace nuance and consider the regional context and diverse farming practices.
Community and balance are crucial in regenerative agriculture, and the focus should be on building relationships and finding sustainable solutions. Regenerative agriculture exists in tension with the capitalist drive for growth and profit.
The practicality of growing grains for sale depends on regionalized understandings of regeneration and the balance between production and ecological resilience.
The heroic narrative surrounding regenerative agriculture often overlooks the complexity and limits of natural systems.
The marketing of regenerative agriculture can sometimes prioritize marketability over true ecological regeneration.
Achieving regional balance in agriculture requires considering the interconnectedness of landscapes and the limitations of individual farms.
Nuance is essential in understanding and practicing regenerative agriculture, as it involves balancing multiple factors and recognizing the unique context of each farm. Balancing decisions and resources is crucial in agriculture.
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I loved both parts of this episode.
Seems like our food chain has gotten so screwed up that consumers aren’t able to get “perfect” food and they’re forced to choose between different versions of “better”. If you can’t get both, how does one know if organic is better than local? Biased agribusiness advertisers inform our understanding better than independent science, so it’s very hard to know what meat is better for the environment… regenerative that comes with a lot of transportation, or local that involved tillage, grain, etc.? And then we have our health to consider… is grass fed from the other side of the world gonna treat our bodies better than grain fed from just down the street?
To me, the obvious answer is to escape the whole system and raise your own food, but again, there’s so much embodied energy in small-scale homesteading thanks to poor efficiency of scale. So maybe the answer isn’t obvious at all.
How do we sort through so many complex factors?