MARCH 2018 NEWSLETTER

Conference Update
In last month’s write ups I forgot to mention Duane Thompson and Michelle Newton. They were a big part of the youth program. Thank you to these people for helping to make our conference the success it was! 

Financially, we had $19920 of registrations and booths, $2,185 from silent auction and $900 raised in memory of John McNeil. On the expense side speakers were $2574, food was $7,134, Convention Centre was $693, Child Care was $714, and Youth Program was $714 and wages and misc of $4346.  We started the convention with $11640 in the bank and add in this year’s profit of $9,376. Our current balance is $21,016. We look forward to using this money to continue to grow the Holistic Management Community and provide events and resources that support our practitioners. 

We are hoping to have the next conference in Manitoba. To date, no one has offered to host. Please contact me (Blain Hjertaas) if you are interested.
 
Regenerative Results
I recently had the opportunity to listen to Dr Jonathan Lundgren at the Prairie Organics Conference in Brandon, MB. He is a entomologist and was named as one of the top scientists in the US. He had 14 research associates, lots of grant money and a great secure job in the USDA. He kept meeting regenerative farmers who asked him questions about why he was doing this. After several years he realized he had it all wrong and gave up his career and began his own research farm in South Dakota. He didn’t have a lot of money so he has crowd sourced the funding. I think we can expect lots of interesting things to come from him in the near future. Check out www.bluedasher.farm. If you ever get a chance to listen to him, I would recommend it would be worth your time. He recently published a paper is “Regenerative Agriculture Merging Farming and Natural Resource Conservation Profitably” which is available in full here. Here is an excerpt:

"Most cropland in the United States is characterized by large monocultures, whose productivity is maintained through a strong reliance on costly tillage, external fertilizers, and pesticides (Schipanski et al., 2016). Despite this, farmers have developed a regenerative model of farm production that promotes soil health and biodiversity, while producing nutrient-dense farm products profitably. Little work has focused on the relative costs and benefits of novel regenerative farming operations, which necessitates studying in situ, farmer-defined best management practices. Here, we evaluate the relative effects of regenerative and conventional corn production systems on pest management services, soil conservation, and farmer profitability and productivity throughout the Northern Plains of the United States. Regenerative farming systems provided greater ecosystem services and profitability for farmers than an input-intensive model of corn production. Pests were 10-fold more abundant in insecticide-treated corn fields than on insecticide-free regenerative farms, indicating that farmers who proactively design pest-resilient food systems outperform farmers that react to pests chemically. Regenerative fields had 29% lower grain production but 78% higher profits over traditional corn production systems. Profit was positively correlated with the particulate organic matter of the soil, not yield. These results provide the basis for dialogue on ecologically based farming systems that could be used to simultaneously produce food while conserving our natural resource base: two factors that are pitted against one another in simplified food production systems. To attain this requires a systems-level shift on the farm; simply applying individual regenerative practices within the current production model will not likely produce the documented results."

LaCanne CE, Lundgren JG. (2018) Regenerative agriculture: merging farming and natural resource conservation profitably. PeerJ 6:e4428 https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.4428

 
More Resources
Another resource I have come across lately is www.sustainabledesignmasterclass.com  This is a free webinar that has an hour with experts from around the world and an opportunity to ask questions. The most recent one was a group from Czechoslovakia called www.rainforclimate.com  It is great for understanding water cycles on a global and local scale and how to fix it. They are now moving into the international arena. If there are opportunities to foster their work here, we should be looking to help.

VIDEO: The End of High-Input, High-Cost, High-Emission Agriculture
by Darrin Qualman and Blain Hjertaas 
 
Winter Team Meetings on Your Farm
If you haven’t got out to a meeting or two yet this winter there is still time. Remember the team making the decisions is the most important part of a farming operation. No one else can do the thinking for you. Education doesn’t happen when you are busy working. It happens when you get yourself out to an event, talk to like minded producers and are challenged by a speaker. As Gabe Brown says “If you don’t fail at something every year, you are not trying hard enough!”
 
Hope the hay holds out and some spring moisture finds us.

Blain Hjertaas, Holistic Management Educator