Reaping the Promise of Regenerative Agriculture

by Craig Wichner, founder and managing partner of Farmland LP 

When I started to dig into the data on farmland, what I found shocked me. We may intuitively know that organic is better than conventional agriculture, but the hard-core numbers show that our agriculture system is broken. More than half of U.S. crop acreage grows only two commodity crops—corn and soy. More than 90 percent of that corn and soy is genetically modified and reliant on, even designed for increasing the use of toxic pesticides. Only 0.6 percent of American-grown corn is consumed by humans, while over 130 times that amount (80 percent) goes into ethanol or animal feed. Meanwhile, maxing out farmland on one crop—”monocropping”—is extremely harmful to the environment, contributing to topsoil erosion, water pollution, and other negative outcomes.

That’s how Farmland LP began. We saw how we could combine regenerative agriculture with savvy real estate management practices commonly found in the property sector. And today we’re the largest organic farmland manager in the country, with the highest sustainability rating among all global firms in HIP Investor’s worldwide universe of 10,000 corporations. 

Regenerative farming involves nurturing the land through healthy soil biology, crop rotations, pollinator habitat, and other science-based practices focused on making that land more vital and productive to the roots. For us, this means we look at each 20 to 40 acre field on each farm and identify its ideal crops and develop a 10-year crop rotation plan to increase soil health, plant happiness and the best economics.

Read Craig's full article here - https://greenmoney.com/reaping-the-promise-of-regenerative-agriculture 

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