ASA is pleased to announce that we have been selected as a recipient of a 2023 Common Roots Foundation Grant. The award will be used to provide a soil health workshop focused on regenerative farming practices. The workshop will be held in the spring of 2024. Stay tuned for details.
The Common Roots Foundation aims to sustain and improve the quality of life throughout northeastern NY. Local organizations can apply for a grant to help fund wellness, inclusivity, environmental stewardship, or sustainability projects.
Quality soil is the foundation of farming, but over the years, some farming practices have depleted these irreplaceable resources and resulted in the need for more and more soil amendments to achieve the same amount of output. This not only adds to the famer’s cost of production, but also is decreasing the biological richness in the soil, lowering the amount of carbon storage, increasing water runoff, and making crops more prone to disease and erosion given climate change.
However, through farming practices such as intentional rotational grazing, interseeding cover crops, no till, etc. farmers can rebuild the soil, retain more water and carbon, and improve their economic bottom line. A primary focus of regenerative farming is to decrease a farmer’s reliance on synthetic inputs (herbicides, pesticides and chemical fertilizers) and move away from monocultures which in turn helps to reverse some of the biodiversity loss through conventional farming practices. Once you have improved the biodiversity in the soil, the biodiversity of flora and fauna above the soil is also improved leading to richer plant, bird and insect populations. This type of regenerative farming is gaining momentum, but farmers need opportunities to see its effectiveness first-hand and to learn from their peers.
