Welcome to Regeneration CSA

Towards a Regenerative Economy - Thoughts about Slow Money from a radical farmer.  

Kevin Skvorak
Regeneration CSA
August 31th 2010


I started my comments at the Hudson Valley potluck with the observation that Slow Money is a radical organization, and how grateful I was that a radical 'capitalist' movement that concerns itself with food and farming has come on the scene. As you can imagine this is exciting news for a radical farmer! And in case there is anyone that didn't realize that you were affiliating with a radical organization in Slow Money, I think you all needed to know at some point ....

Being "Radical" of course is nothing to be afraid or ashamed of, far from it!  It is a great word- Radical: from late Latin- radicalis, radix, radic- 'root';  "of or going to the root or origin"; fundamental, essential.   I think this describes the analysis and principles of Slow Money pretty well.

It is natural that farmers are radical, thinking about the roots of things as much as they do. I made a comment at the potluck about all of the radical farmers I have been inspired by, and been lucky enough to learn from in the organic movement.  I alluded to the origin of the organic food movement, created by radical farmers who saw clearly the roots of things, (the roots of the converging problems of climate change, peak oil, and ecological carrying capacity for instance) and devised a radical solution - farming organically.  I also made a comment about how frustrating it is to watch as this potentially transformative movement slips dangerously close to being dominated by the paradigm of commodification, speculation, centralized power and wealth, and corporate control etc. as it becomes just another purely "profit" driven industry, with all of the attending unsustainable and de-generative outcomes.

I said this as a warning i think, to remind us to keep our "eyes on the prize" as we untangle this conundrum of centralized, monetized wealth and power- with all it's own inherently destructive "principles' - and matters of true wealth; the wealth held in our local relationships, local ecologies, and our local communities. 

This is the honest and radical understanding clearly embodied in the principles of Slow Money.  The radical understanding that business-as-usual is taking us all: wealthy, poor, and in between, down the same doomed path.  The radical understanding that strategies and actions that actually achieve regenerative and transformative results are the only ones that matter now.

As a permaculture designer, as well as a farmer, I (like many others in these fields) use the word "regenerative" a lot. Our farm is called Regeneration CSA.  We use the term regenerative because it best clarifies our goals; regenerating our natural and ecological systems while getting a yield for ourselves (humans).  A simple, radical idea, and the foundation of Permaculture Principles, and Permaculture Ethics.  An idea that I hope also helps us keep our eyes on the prize of creating a truly "regenerative economy", an economy that is the logical outcome of following the principles of Slow Money.

Regenerative-design, regenerative-agriculture, regenerative-economies... "regenerative" because it is already too late for "sustainable".

Too late to "sustain" a vibrant, living gulf of mexico already suffering an enormous hypoxic dead zone  long before the latest oil spill.  Too late to sustain a viable arctic ecology, that is already, it seems, beyond it's tipping point.  Too late to sustain fertile agricultural soils worldwide, already depleted of natural fertility and utterly dependent on fossil sunlight and fertility (aka oil) to produce any food. Too late to sustain the crippling social inequality that is, in and of itself, a major driver of environmental destruction. It is just too, damn, late.

So, a regenerative society, and a regenerative economy must be our goals.  Anything less is just too little, and too late.

At the event I made a quip about being careful not to drive our Prius off the same precipice of catastrophe as all the Hummer drivers are hell bent on pushing us over, about being careful not to fall for false solutions to our "predicament" , not to believe (or most critically, continue to emulate) false "green capitalist" hype and recognize that such efficiencies are useful only insofar as they buy us some time to make the transformative changes necessary, and to also understand that all these wonderful gadgets of efficiency, filled with rare earth minerals like lithium, silicon, coltan and the like, have enormous ecological costs of their own, and are driving deadly wars and conflicts at this very moment.  

All the economists and financial folks seem to understand that it is all smoke and mirrors at this point; debt as money, a demand for exponential growth from a system (the planet) at its limits, collateralized debt obligations, the Federal Reserve, peak oil, all pointing to an impending collapse on many levels.  ("The Tapeworm economy" as Catherine Austin Fitts says,  aka "The Suicide economy", David Korten's term for our current  insane path)

 As Slow money radicals we know that the current globalized financial system is inherently de-generative. We see that it virtually demands, for the sake of economic "growth", the extraction, depletion, and destruction of real wealth, (living rivers, mountains, forests, oceans, soils, and human cultures) piling these all up like so many dead pelts, scalps even, into symbolic fungible "assets".    

What do we feel after we recognize that under the current economic system for virtually every new dollar of debt, every speculative financial transaction, every hard-earned (or easily earned) dollar in our portfolio, the living systems of the planet are diminished?  That there is not "more" to go around, but less?      Vertigo and dread about sums it up I would say....  

So, what are the real solutions? What does a "regenerative economy" look like?  How do we measure it? How do we actually create it? For every dollar created, how much carbon ought to be sequestered instead of burned? How much ecosystem resilience enhanced instead of diminished?  How much soil fertility must be built instead of depleted?  How much social and economic equality restored instead of further degraded?

These are the questions that I am most interested in talking about with others, as I think  we already have answers and directions for most of them. (as a regenerative farmer and permaculturalist in fact i know we have answers)

 Perhaps we can start with a few of the Slow Money Principles:    "What if there were 50% more organic matter in our soil 50 years from now?"       Ok, imho this is what one might call a "step in the right direction"   50% more organic material in our existing depleted soils (running at 1 to1-1/2%)%) is a good start, but probably isn't enough to have a real mitigating effect on climate warming if that is the goal. It is a start though.  In any case, how do we do it? How do we measure it?   And how do we market it?
 
Well, we do it by actually farming in a regenerative manner. Rodale has some perfectly useful methodology that can be adopted immediately. Wes Jackson at the Land Institute has been doing some promising work for yrs, and of course we have our own methodology at Regeneration CSA that we believe is imminently practical, fully scalable, and that is particularly well suited to regenerating and bringing back into production some of the compacted and depleted heavy clay soils that are typical of much of the Hudson Valley. (We are looking for a new home btw.)  And there are a lot of other folks doing this work as well.  
And we measure it by using real measures of soil carbon and soil fertility, like Elaine Inghams work on the soil food web, and the Real Food folks work on brix testing and soil mineralization.   And we market it, well....I am not completely sure of this, but this is not something that farmers can do alone. We need the shapers of the marketplace, stakeholders with influence like those in Slow Money to get involved.  One way might be a new certification. Here is a letter I wrote to Ari and others at SM offering a proposal for just that.

Another Slow Money principle: "The 20th Century was the era of Buy Low/Sell High and Wealth Now/Philanthropy Later—what one venture capitalist called “the largest legal accumulation of wealth in history.” The 21st Century will be the era of nurture capital, built around principles of carrying capacity, care of the commons, sense of place and non-violence."

Ok, what Woody might have said, but didn't was not just the largest legal accumulation of "wealth", but most importantly the largest centralization of wealth. This is key as well. The logic of dog-eat-dog, row-your-own-boat capitalism ( that too many even in Slow Money seem to accept as an inviolable law of nature instead of a cultural construct) would seem to be that personal accumulation is the key to freedom, happiness, security, and the like.  But as Slow Money radicals, who have read the work of authors like Bill Mckibben, ("Deep Economy" )  we know that personal accumulation is a "dead end" in a diminishing world.  We may all make some more dollars betting on the end of the world, (speculating on diminishing resources etc) but if that is what we continue to do with our dollars, we are absolutely guaranteeing that disastrous outcome.   So what is the point?  Are we really "enjoying the ride" as we slide faster and faster towards an ecological tipping point?  Really?

So, to get to the heart of this principle, some type of "redistribution" is central to the realization of Slow Money goals.  Horror upon horrors you might say!  If being a radical means "giving" my money away then forget about it!  Ok, but I don't believe "giving" money away is going to help either. 

What we need to do with this surplus symbolic "wealth" is to put it back into real wealth while we still have time.  Real wealth for our entire communities, because that is the only way we have real security and quality of life in the long run.  This real wealth is what some might call "soft returns", but it the only return on investment that has any real value in the long run.

Personally,  I am afraid that Slow Money may be a dead end if people don't prioritize the so-called "soft" returns, instead of the hard ones. As a SM investor you will not get back 5% 10% or 15% off of the top of local food production profits.   In fact, even if you get 0% return in dollars, you get all of the other returns that far outweigh the dollars in long term benefit.  This I think needs to be paramount in the discussions, not tertiary.  Otherwise Slow Money runs the risk of not only not being effective, but in fact being a problem as it provides the "feel good" avenue for further speculation and centralization of wealth in the local food economy, just at the time we need diversity the most.

Be careful what you wish for my Slow Money friends.

In any case, this is where we need to prioritize "philanthropy"  (which we should really call investing in true wealth).  As far as I am concerned the key strategic need right now in the Hudson Valley, and much of the NE United States, is true farmland (not just "open space") protection and affordable farm access to new farmers.  To accomplish this we have been working for a while on a non-profit with a mission to specifically protect farmland and provide it to new farmers.  The Hudson Valley Community and Agricultural Land Trust.

There is not a better investment one can make than creating opportunities for new farmers.  And there are a lot of other needed areas of "investment" like this as well.  Educating ourselves about the strategic areas of (so-called) philanthropy, and where they are intersecting with regenerative food/farming goals could also be important work of Slow Money thinkers.

A lot of people pass the following Gaylord Nelson quote around:    "The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment. All economic activity is dependent upon that environment with it's underlying resource base. When the environment is finally forced to file under Chapter 11 because it's resource base has been polluted, degraded, dissipated, irretrievably compromised, then, the economy goes down into bankruptcy with it because the economy is just a subset within the ecological system."

Not much more to say on that.


Best regards,
Kevin Skvorak

Regeneration CSA
www.RegenerationCSA.org

Hudson Valley Community and Agricultural Land Trust
www.HVCALT.org

Letter to Slow Money:

I am the farmer who crashed the SM event, bothering everyone
i could find to talk to about soil carbon
sequestration.

First of all, much respect to you both, and everyone involved so far.  Much good work being done.

Second of all, here are some thoughts from a farmers perspective,  one
who is also thinking as deeply as he can about all of the
relationships that converge in our food system.


A couple of premises first to help frame things:

On the most fundamental level, soil carbon and soil fertility (which
are inherently linked) are going to be one of the primary limiting
factors in sustaining human populations and civilization as we know
it. We are already in a deep global crisis regarding our soil that is
masked by fossil fuel inputs. It is almost impossible, imho, to
overstate the gravity of this crisis and its implications.

The coming generation of farmers, eaters and food sysem investors are
the ones that may well be determining the very future of human
civilization, via how they manage (and restore)together the carrying capacity of our soils.

  I feel there are some limitations to the effectiveness of SM
at least as currently concieved. It is natural that a hammer sees each
problem as a nail. Investors and those coming from capital markets see
their hammer as the solution.  But it has its limits, and we need to
consider those limits, and how to synergize with other tools to be
most effective in reaching our shared goals.

For instance, we have a small CSA, and are comitted to growing with
regenerative farming methods that sequester carbon and build soil. We
could certainly benefit from some capital, but that is not what we
need most.   What we need most (besides secure access to affordable land) is a market.  Ideally an informed and
motivated market that pays a premium for carbon-negative food.  That
market doesn't exist yet, and until it does very few other farmers are
going to adopt these methods.

If the eaters and shapers of the marketplace do not pay a premium for
soil regenerating/carbon sequestering food, it is not going to happen.
If doesn't happen we all lose.   So the bottom line is- can we create
a market-based incentive for carbon sequestering food?

There may be various ways to create this incentive, and I would love
to talk further with anyone interested from SM in this.  I certainly
don't have all of the ideas on this, but I do have one - a Carbon
Negative food label.

 I think a new certifcation regime would be one good way to make this
all happen. I like the brand "Regeneratively Grown" but maybe cleverer
marketing minds can come up with another name.

It will require some work, some money, and multiple influential
stakeholders to make a new certification system work of course-

1)  We need a marketplace for the "brand".  Can WholeFoods or other
big distributers make the commitment to carry such certified food? It
would require a lot of effort, esp to start, that would no doubt add
costs to their current procurement. Are they willing to accept this?
If they are not, who else might be?

2) We need the non-profit certfying bodies that will do the research,
testing, and farmer support that will be needed to train new farmers,
and help farmers transition   This is an important strategic area to
direct philanthropic dollars to right now and SM could be a voice for
this.  There are a lot of places doing this research, often with very
little funding, and they could all use help. Of course unless we
simultaneously create a market, those research dollars are just
funding more studies that farmers probably won't read, much less
adopt.

 We are personally trying to raise funds to move our CSA to a secure
and much larger piece of land  (conserved by a Land Trust) and
simultaneously create a regional non-profit that can begin to lay the
groundwork for this in our region. We are calling it the "Hudson
Valley Regenerative Agriculture Center."   Seems catchy enough.  I did
not come to the SM conference hat-in-hand for this effort, mostly
because i wanted to get a sense of the seriousness and perspective of
the crowd there.  We do need support though, and see a regional
research and education center(s), based around a working farm, to be
an essential incubator to all of this.

3)  Yields and returns: By creating a new niche in the market like
this, we are opening up all sorts of opportunities for the types of
investment that SM is talking about.  We will need some philanthropic
dollars to "prime the pump" in all of this, but assuming we get a
market for truly regenerative food up and running, the sky is the
limit for investment dollars to yield the truly transformative
dividends that SM articulates so well.

look fwd to any thoughts!

Best regards,
Kevin Skvorak

Regeneration CSA
www.RegenerationCSA.org

Hudson Valley Community and Agricultural Land Trust
www.HVCALT.org










 

Regeneratively grown seedlings on the way! Seedling sales May 16th and May 23rd!

chicks love mulch!

Here is a little note in which we will try to share some things about the direction we want to go as a CSA, as farmers, and as people.

We are really grateful for the experience we have gained over the last three years and the connections we have made with the local community. We are especially grateful to the owner of the land we are farming on, Toby Stover, whose has been a great friend to us, and a great supporter of the CSA community. She is a wonderful person, and we couldn’t want a more friendly environment to farm and live on.  

We are though, working towards a future for the CSA that goes beyond this piece of land. Though it is a beautiful spot, it is not ideally suited to the kind of farming we need to do to become sustainable as a CSA.

WHAT IS OUR PERSPECTIVE ON FARMING?

   Choosing to grow food within a CSA is more than just a “business” model for us. We see being part of the growing sustainable community-based food movement as a central part of our work, and part of our core values that keeps us motivated.
   We strive to embody, as best we can, a holistic approach to our farming practices, our community relationships, our ecological relationships, as well as our own personal desire for happiness, security, and meaning in our lives.

  So,  “what is the community-based food movement?” you might ask.  Well, it really goes to the heart of what we are as a community, the choices we make as individuals, and is arguably central to questions as deep as whether we even survive as a species on this planet.   It is about the interconnectedness of the big important stuff that comes together in how and what we choose to eat.

OK, in case you are a bit skeptical we’ll start with the scary stuff which we hope you all are already aware of anyway, though the terrible mess we have ourselves in with our current food system can hardly be adequately described, esp in a short blog post.:  

Climate Change: 

   Industrial agriculture (including much “Organic” production) is the largest contributor of greenhouse gas emissions of any industry. This occurs thru the direct use of fossil fuels for transportation, energy, fertilizer, and pesticide, and well as methane and nitrous oxide production from feedlot animal production and other farm activities.  It is estimated that there are on average ten calories of fossil fuel energy used to create one calorie of food energy that we consume here in the US.

   Greenhouse gas in the atmosphere also comes from tillage of the soil. The relationship of soil carbon to greenhouse gas emissions is left out of most calculations, and this is why you won’t always see agriculture as the top of the list in greenhouse gasses. However you count it up though, if we don’t change the way we feed ourselves, little else will matter in terms greenhouse gas reduction. 
 
   And the damage being done by industrial farming methods goes beyond climate change, and includes: topsoil loss and depletion (this is huge), waterway and ocean habitat destruction, (hypoxic zones across the globe from agricultural runoff) the loss of fossil aquifers (will future wars be about water?) and much more.  

Food Security and Food Justice:  

  For most of us on the planet; rich, poor, and in between- our access to good food is neither just, nor secure.

  We have a "globalized" food system, and yet  one billion people are lacking adequate nutrition, and tens of millions starve to death each year.  There are also a billion people who are overweight, including 60% of us in the US, the highest percentage of any nation.  And yet still we have millions of people in this country without access to healthy, affordable, nutrient rich food in their local community. 

   Billions of dollars go into a health care system to treat chronic disease that are preventable with a good diet.

  There are 75 million people in the NE United States, and if we are all going to eat more locally, we need ten times the farmers on the ground that we have now. (The good news they are out there; young people with a passion to farm, and want to be in the local food business for all the right reasons!)

  Healthy, local food cannot just be something the most privileged in our society can afford to eat if we are to create a sustainable future for ourselves.  

Food Sovereignty: 

  This is a complicated way of saying that for people to address all of the above problems, they need to have some measure of control over the food resources in their local  community. 

  This could mean access to land for community gardens and new farmers, this could mean a say over the food that is served to their children in school, it could mean some type of control over the food that is brought into their communities by corporations and global treaties,…it can mean a lot of things, but is again a central part of any secure, sustainable food system.

LOCAL SOLUTIONS:

  OK, so where does our humble little CSA, our extended community, and we as farmers fit into all this?

  Well, we want to be part of addressing all of the above, and more if we can, in a local way.
 
  We want to do more than just grow food as a commodity to sell to “consumers” for top dollar, and we want to be part of a system that is providing food for all of our neighbors and community that wants it- not just the most privileged among us.  Up to now we have done this through an open sliding scale approach, and we are committed to this in the future.

  We want to grow food in a way that is healthiest for us as growers, healthiest for the people who eat the food we grow, healthiest for the soils we grow on, and that (we hope) are effective in remediating and regenerating the damage we have done to our ecology with our societies past (and current) damaging practices. Regenerative, Permaculture based farming practices are key to this.

  We want to help develop a CSA model (there are many good ones out there already to look at) that can be replicable, and that other young growers and other communities can take the best from as they seek to create and expand their own sustainable food systems.  Land tenure is a key aspect of this. We can’t create a healthy, affordable local food system without a healthy relationship to our communities farmland.

OUR GOALS:

  We are looking for another piece of land to grow and live on.   We are open to, and looking at various options and land tenure models, but we feel that in the long run what we all need are community supported land tenure models to grow the community sustainable nourishing, affordable food.

  The current speculative market on land is arguably the largest barrier to rebuilding a safe, sustainable local food system. The “market value” of land in the Hudson Valley is far beyond its agricultural carrying capacity. This means that no matter how talented, how creative, how hard working, and how market savvy our regions new farmers are (and they are all of the above) they cannot grow enough food on a given piece of land to service their debt if they were to purchase it at market value.  This is self evident all around us; new farmers without access to land while estate buyers, and second (or third or fifth) homes all around.  This is not just a problem for new farmers, this is a danger to all of our long term food security.  


  We will never be able to have an affordable, sustainable, healthy local food supply unless we have affordable access to land for new farmers. 

  So, while we are remaining open to various opportunities for Regeneration CSA, our ideal future would be as a pilot project for a new non-profit: The Hudson Valley Community and Agricultural Land Trust.  www.HVCALT.org
  

Rocket stoves are very efficient ways of burning biomass. You can heat anything with a rocket stove principle: your house, your hot water, and of course your pizza.  


Check out this video from Approvecho's work in Malawi.

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