Today our advocate Falko Schilling testified in favor of S. 159, a first-of-its-kind piece of legislation that would establish a state-level certification program for products produced using regenerative agricultural processes.
We support this bill for a few important reasons:
- It will help to legitimize and support regenerative agriculture, which has huge environmental benefits, including:
- Carbon sequestration and decreased greenhouse gas emissions
- Improved water infiltration and retention, resulting in flood and crop resiliency.
- Regenerative agriculture has been shown to increase farm profitability, and encourages traditional farming practices and communities.
- A certification will provide consumers with more information about the food they buy and the ability to make choices based on how it was grown, in addition to what’s not in it (like pesticides).
Regenerative organic agricultural, also known as carbon farming, focuses on soil and natural ecosystems as the base off which to sustainably raise healthy crops and livestock.
And even better? Regenerative agriculture aims to increase levels of carbon within the soil, meaning it’s sequestering more CO2 from the atmosphere – that’s right, it reverses the climate-change causing trend of our current industrial agricultural practices. Here’s a great explanatory graphic from the Rodale Institute, a global leader of regenerative agriculture practices and research (click to enlarge):
