Colleen Curry

Thanks for posting Colleen! Here's a great resource if you're interested in learning more about regenerative agriculture: https://regenerationinternational.org/why-regenerative-agriculture/

Yes and no Colleen, Organic systems are quite complex. Yes on the soil biodiversity increasing crop yields, 100% there. No in that organic systems are often much harder to facilitate and more fragile than that of their mono-cropping genetically altered peers. For example, it's very hard to farm organic crops in the midwest due to the fact that much of the soil has already been destroyed/depleted and yields are much less than gmo crops designed to be drought, insect, pesticide resilient. Indeed organic systems and soil are more biodiverse and key to long term agriculture. However, they are also much more fragile to the elements in many instances and the farms can often receive much smaller margins and fewer large scale investments which means 1-2 bad years of hurricanes, droughts, etc. can more easily bankrupt small organic farms. Soil farming and biodiversity is key, but developing resilient economic models for organic farming will require an increasing amount of greenhouse gardening and innovation/investment heading forward. Organic is hard, it's continuous spraying of neem, and OMRI certified horticultural and mineral oil. It's labor hours to check to ensure pests are not creeping up due to the fact that you're not spraying as invasive of chemicals which kill a much higher amount of insects/pathogens. It's more expensive seed and often lower yields compared to GMO peers which design high yield products but sacrifice nutrient density. It's really knowing what you're doing and hoping that mother nature plays well in your pursuit of smaller margins (for the majority of organic farms) makes it quite difficult. Also, hurricanes and fires and the like can disrupt the often more traditional means of Organic farms selling their produce at local farmers markets and CSA's and whatnot. These independent systems are more decentralized and more resilient models, but can also be susceptible to weather or pandemic related issues such as having many farmers markets closed for the majority of last year for example, whereas conventional stores were allowed to remain open. This was a very unfortunate reality of the Organic model, and is something I'm keen in learning and investing more in.