Webinars are back at the F4S Academy. The first cycle of webinars on Regenerative Agriculture will start on March 24.
In 1983 Robert Rodale, one of the pioneers of this practice, defined Regenerative Agriculture as "that which, at increasing levels of productivity, increases our biological production base of land and soil. It has a high level of built-in economic and biological stability. Has minimal or no impact on the environment beyond the farm or field boundaries. Produces pesticide-free food. Provides for the productive contribution of an increasing number of people during a transition to minimal dependence on non-renewable resources."
We are all responsible for and intimately linked to the food we eat and so it is a growing need to achieve better quality food. However, we cannot have quality food if the soil is not in good condition and able to serve as a home for plants and microorganisms.
In the past, the intensification of agriculture and the consequent massive and unsustainable use of soils and the high use of fertilisers, herbicides and insecticides led to the loss of soil biodiversity, resulting in low quality crops and food products.
It is now essential to reverse these effects. We need to ensure more sustainable ways of preserving natural assets, especially those as crucial as soil fertility and soil life and work together to promote an innovative and entrepreneurial food sector.
According to EIT Food, the leading European food innovation initiative which F4S have been working with, "Regenerative agriculture gives us the opportunity to improve food quality, protect farmers' livelihoods, and safeguard the land we depend on. It's a profitable and sustainable system that makes sense for farmers and food lovers alike." Additionally, they state that "by working together with nature, we can produce more nutritious food, more resilient crops, while having less wasted water. Furthermore, we can stop or even reverse climate change if the world's soils stored just 0.4% more carbon every year, this could offset all the CO2 emissions made to date."
In this first webinar series we will talk about the importance of regenerative agriculture and how this practice can influence soil health, while highlighting the latest technological advances and the challenges still to be overcome in this research area.
The webinars take place on Thursdays, 4.00 pm until 5.30 pm (Lisbon time). Save the dates in your calendars:
March 24th “Theoretical discussion - definition, can it replace conventional farming?”
March 31st “Regenerative agriculture in practice - the EU & Portugal realities”
April 7th “Empowering farmers to regenerative farming”
"Spend, then, the fleeting moments you have left in a spirit consonant with Nature and depart satisfied. As the olive falls when it is ripe, blessing the ground from which it sprang, and grateful to the tree that generated it." Marco Aurelio, Meditations. Let's try to allow nature to take its time to regenerate, something it already does naturally, but which, due to severely instituted agricultural practices, it has stopped doing.