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Comment by colechristensen | Hacker News Reader

While I skimmed, I didn’t see anything about “regenerative” besides a casual mention of cover crops which you wouldn’t do anything in particular to already (no pesticides or fertilizer or genetic engineering). The other bit was about being very local about picking where and how to grow nontraditional crops (think farmers market faire) in difficult locations that would otherwise grow nothing.

Transgenic watermelons aren’t a thing and the markets for these like organic.

Basically a bunch of progressive kinds of people are moving to Montana to grow fancy food and like to get pieces written to show off their virtue. They’re not entirely wrong but also… eh it’s all a little overdone.

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You're right, this one was focused largely on the work of one organic farmer, although I would argue that much of what he does is actually regenerative in the sense of regenerating local commerce and economies. And he was one of the first to grow his own soil nutrients by planting dryland alfalfa as a cover crop, and rotating his cover crops.

I would also say that while you're right about progressives moving to Montana, this is not one of them. Bob is a third-generation Big Sandy farmer. In the book Liz Carlisle co-authored with him, she said he was a republican.

My idea was to show how through organic, he'd added value to his own farm, to many others, and to rural communities. And that meant creating infrastructure and new markets. Regenerative, now 40 years later, can learn from that as IT aims to create new markets.

regenerative in the sense of regenerating local commerce and economies.

That is wildly outside the definition of "regenerative farming" given by the article.

It is. I use the definition that most farmers in the state use in the article--working on soil health through a suite of techniques, while also still spraying in a limited capacity when needed.

There are a million ways to define regenerative agriculture. That's one of the main issues right now, and it's something I covered in part 1 of this series. It's covered in incredible depth here: https://thecounter.org/regenerative-agriculture-racial-equit...

That article also leads to the same point I was trying to make in the above comment. If agriculture is going to be truly regenerative, it needs to support communities. I did not get into that explicitly in the story, but it informs the entire framing of it.

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