*Global CA-CoP* *CONSERVATION AGRICULTURE COMMUNITY OF PRACTICE*
*for sustainable agriculture and land management*
Dear Subscribers,
Please see herebelow a note from Didi Pershouse on *Seventeen questions you
might never know the answer to!*
Her online course begins tomorrow "Regenerating the Soil Carbon Sponge for
Flood, Drought, and Wildfire Resilience
<https://didipershouse.us6.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6075151f49894b2c63289a22a&id=a0f931a15e&e=7906f4d8e3>"
*Amir Kassam *
*Moderator*
*Global CA-CoP*
e-mail: [log in to unmask]
URL: www.fao.org/ag/ca
*Conservation Agriculture is an ecosystem approach to regenerative
sustainable agriculture and land management based on the practical
application of context-specific and locally adapted three interlinked
principles of: (i) Continuous no or minimum mechanical soil disturbance
(no-till seeding/planting and weeding, and minimum soil disturbance with
all other farm operations including harvesting); (ii) permanent
maintenance of soil mulch cover (crop biomass, stubble and cover crops);
and (iii) diversification of cropping system (economically, environmentally
and socially adapted rotations and/or sequences and/or associations
involving annuals and perennials, including legumes and cover crops), along
with other complementary good agricultural production and land management
practices. Conservation Agriculture systems are present in all continents,
involving rainfed and irrigated systems including annual cropland systems,
perennial systems, orchards and plantation systems, agroforestry systems,
crop-livestock systems, pasture and rangeland systems, organic production
systems and rice-based systems. Conservation Tillage, Reduced Tillage and
Minimum Tillage are not Conservation Agriculture, and nor is No-Till on its
own* (more at: www.fao.org/ag/ca).
---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Didi Pershouse <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Sun, 24 Feb 2019 at 01:38
Subject: Seventeen questions you might never know the answer to.
To: Amir <[log in to unmask]>
*
<https://didipershouse.us6.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6075151f49894b2c63289a22a&id=77348d9066&e=7906f4d8e3>
Didi Pershouse*
*Author • Soil Sponge Strategist • Educator*
*Founder of the Land & Leadership Initiative*
Author of *The Ecology of Care* and
*Understanding Soil Health and Watershed Function*
Dear friends,
Here's what's ahead:
1. Doing nothing, and something, in Europe.
2. Seventeen questions you might never know the answer to (or perhaps
you'll choose to sign up for the course
<https://didipershouse.us6.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6075151f49894b2c63289a22a&id=de58fee3dd&e=7906f4d8e3>
that answers these questions, which starts this Tuesday, February 26th).
This afternoon, I took off my shoes and socks to put my feet on the moist,
cool, early spring grass in Luxembourg Gardens in Paris. I felt myself
relax from the noise of the city and leaned up against a tree to draft this
letter to you all. Within minutes, a policeman kindly but firmly told me I
had to leave my little patch of earth and get back on the pavement.
I'm on the third leg of my European journey, which culminated today in my
presentation at the five day Meeting for a Living Agriculture, a gathering
of several hundred French farmers who are working on bringing soils back to
life, bringing flavor and nutritional integrity back to food, and bringing
hope back to the world. The French farmers are joined by people from
Tunisia, Ethiopia, England, and South Africa, plus our "equipe de les
Etas-Unis," our little gang of speakers from the US: Jill Clapperton,
me, Dan Kittredge, Trey Hill, and Gerald Pollack (who kind of blew our
minds).
I arrived here in France a few days ago after three days in Prague, in the
Czech Republic, where my stepfather Olda is from, and where he now lives
again, in a tiny fifth-floor walk-up (with a view of the castle), teaching
Economics at the Czech University of Life Sciences. I had never been to
Prague, and although I had to hang some scarves over the
disturbingly pornographic art in my hotel room in order to sleep the first
night, I eventually realized it is truly a magnificent city--gorgeous,
friendly, safe, with incredibly efficient trams that make cars totally
pointless, better hairdressers than in London; and *really* good pastries.
I also had some delicious pig's knees boiled in dark beer and a great
discussion with three soil scientists at the University about ways to
reverse soil degradation in Europe.
I started the journey in England with the Bullmores, who were a second
family to me starting at age 9, when I was sent to spend part of the summer
with them (the first of many summers, but the only one in which Amelia and
I got to sit on top of megaliths at Stonehenge). Our family's friendship
spans three or four generations. Their house in Wiltshire--a blacksmith's
place in the 1500s-- has a river running right next to it, and was one of
three places where I learned to love the land.
Last week I got to re-experience, once again, the incredible darkness and
quietness of nights there, and the freshness of morning: being awoken
by all sorts of ducks, pheasants, grouse, and other birds wandering around
the garden right outside the window. The town is so tiny that there are no
addresses, just houses with names, and you have to write on the envelope
that it is "near Fovant."
The Bullmores are a family that knows how to sit around a crackling fire
together, doing some incredibly productive version of *nothing*. Thinking,
reading, dozing, writing, drawing--the kind of nothing that is absolutely
essential if you want to actually do *something*.
As I listened to them doing nothing, at first I just closed my eyes and
soaked in the sound of it. It is something one rarely hears in the United
States. I listened for a long long time. And then *my *something started to
emerge: this list of *questions* that are behind so much of my work these
days.
I love questions. *Questions are like doorways that keep opening into other
worlds. *Our skill at asking questions peaks around age four or five and
then is quickly hammered out of us by tired adults. *We have to relearn the
art of asking good questions, and that's one of the aims of my teaching.*
The list of questions below is the list that the course I've been teaching
works to answer, through my own understanding, through the mentors I have
studied with, and from the experiences of the incredible people who join
the course.
1. What are the large and small flows that make a landscape work? How do
flows of carbon, water, nutrients, biological work, and human decisions
interact with each other?
2. How can I tell whether a landscape is generally healthy and
functional? What are the signs of poor function and soil degradation?
3. How can we cool and rehydrate the landscape around us while
providing abundant clean water through simple changes in land management?
4. How can we pay for land regeneration without carbon markets or
fundraising? How can we pay farmers a living wage for building a soil
sponge?
5. Why is the soil carbon sponge the basic infrastructure that makes
life on land possible? How does it protect against extreme weather events?
6. How are farms, towns, roads, and regions affected by the presence or
absence of healthy soil or "the soil carbon sponge"?
7. What is the biological workforce, and what essential jobs do other
species do to create a functional landscape and climate?
8. What are the principles at work in a healthy landscape?
9. How does nature grow food without degrading soil?
10. Why does soil fail and what can we do to prevent that from happening?
11. What should we be monitoring, noticing, tracking, observing, and
watching? How do we know whether change is going in the right or wrong
direction? What are the warning signs that things are deteriorating?
12. What kind of citizen science data mapping can we do to track change
over time? Why are maps useful for driving change?
13. What are some of the ways I can get involved? What is needed most?
What groups/projects already exist? What is missing that I might provide?
14. What are simple ways of communicating these ideas?
15. What stories can I collect around me and share? What photos do we
have, or could I take that would help? What information and data can my
community collect?
16. How do we facilitate groups to make sure people are
engaged, learning and listening to each other?
17. How do we get actual projects off the ground, and shift from
information to implementation?
I hope you will join us. No matter if the group is small or large, we
always enjoy deep questions, great debates, and an uplifting sense of
community-building.
*For more information about the course, or to sign up, click here.
<https://didipershouse.us6.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6075151f49894b2c63289a22a&id=68dfea40e5&e=7906f4d8e3>*
For financial assistance, especially if you are a farmer, and/or from the
Global South, please reply to this email.
I want there to be so much fertile earth on this planet that the police
can't find me.
Love,
*Didi*
Join the class.
<https://didipershouse.us6.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6075151f49894b2c63289a22a&id=cf993a1e5f&e=7906f4d8e3>
*“If you want to learn how to make your farm more resilient to droughts and
floods, then here is your chance! Didi is fantastic at explaining how to
fix our broken water cycle.” — Gail Fuller, Farmer*
*Upcoming events:*
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*“Didi Pershouse is an awesome teacher and I highly recommend studying with
her if you're interested in regeneration and what this means for building
resilience to drought, fire, floods.” — Rebecca Burgess, Founder, Fibershed
<https://didipershouse.us6.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6075151f49894b2c63289a22a&id=e08aed53c3&e=7906f4d8e3>*
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