Regenerative agriculture meets a hip DC lounge

One of the hip places in DC is Bus Boys & Poets, an urban restaurant, lounge and bookstore. Was a bit surprised to find they were having an event featuring regenerative agriculture about which they said:

 

Regenerative agriculture goes beyond "sustainable" to restore the natural resources we need for food production, starting with the soil. In the United States, soil disappears 10 times faster than it is naturally replenished, causing $37 billion in lost productivity. Globally, the United Nations warns that, at current rates of loss, the soil will disappear in the next 60 years.

The difference between rich soil and unproductive dirt is the amount of carbon in the soil. When we lose soil, carbon is lost to the atmosphere and becomes the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. We can reverse this process by building carbon in the soil and cleansing the atmosphere of carbon dioxide.

According to the National Research Council, the maximum potential for total CO2 removal from the atmosphere is on the order of the total amount that has been removed from terrestrial ecosystems by human activities—roughly 660 GtCO2, equivalent to a reduction of 40-70 ppm in atmospheric CO2 concentration by 2100. This means that regenerative agriculture has the potential to reverse climate change!

Some of the most important forms of regenerative agriculture are the traditional agriculture practices that indigenous nations have preserved and adapted to make it possible to live on and produce food from the same land for thousands of years.

Indigenous nations and communities have legal rights to about one-eighth of the world’s forests although they actually hold and use much more under customary arrangements. When governments protect community forest rights, the results are healthy forests with high carbon storage and avoided CO2 emissions from deforestation.

While addressing agriculture may seem like an afterthought when it is so important to stop fossil fuel use, food and farming can't be ignored. Food and farming is responsible for a huge chunk of global greenhouse gas emissions - up to 57 percent according to the UN Conference on Trade and Development. Agriculture is also more vulnerable to climate change than any other sector of the global economy. Since 2008, one person has been displaced every second by climate and weather disasters - an average of 26 million a year - and the trend is likely to intensify in the immediate future as food producing areas struggle to cope with warmer weather and more erratic rainfall.