The Potential of Native Soil Biology

This is Tim Hammerich of the Ag Information Network with your Farm of the Future Report.

Regenerative farming has become increasingly more common, but the reality is regenerative practices are as old as farming itself. While conventional practices are mostly the product of the past 100 years. Heidi Diestel of Diestel Family Ranch says her interest in regenerative farming is really about strengthening the natural soil biology.

Diestel... "Biologically, right, the earth and the soil that we step on and across every single day, the compounds that make it super nutrient dense are in that soil, but with, you know, conventional farming practices, we bound them all up. We've locked everything up, and so it's not accessible nutrients. And, you know, the regenerative mission is really just to start working again with nature in a movement in which we're not trying to put a bunch of inputs into the soil, but we're really just trying to unlock the nutrient density that's already there. And when you kind of think of it in that way, it's pretty incredible. And it's really just getting back to basics like a hundred years ago, right? Yeah, when my Uncle Ernest was doing what my grandfather was doing. And so it's like, it's a little depressing in some senses that we have to like redescribe it and have all these certifications and, you know, really like re-articulate just very natural farming methods. But I'm happy that we're going that direction too, and that, as a small family-owned and operated farm in this country, you know, we can produce a product like this, and there's a market for it.”

Learn more about how the Diestel Family Ranch utilizes regenerative practices at diestelturkey.com.