TO REGENERATE, LOOK TO THE ECOSYSTEMS THAT ORIGINALLY GENERATED Tim Crews Author Tim Crews in a soil pit at The Land Institute's Prairie Festival. Photo by Allison Miller. That agricultural ecosystems need re-generating implies that they have experienced some degree of de-generation. This narrative — especially with respect to soils, the foundation of terrestrial productivity — was central to the establishment of The Land Institute, a non-profit organization that has been striving to make grain agriculture regenerative since Wes and Dana Jackson first filed the papers to incorporate in 1976. It is a mission I share, which is why I moved to Salina, Kansas, over a decade ago, contributing my research to help transform agriculture from being an ecological liability to an asset. The title of Chapter 1 of Wes Jackson’s early ground-breaking healing book “New Roots for Agriculture” was “The Earth in Review: The Rise, Role, and Fall of Soil.” Toward the end of it he wrote:
experiments at survival, many of them through millennia-long roaring successes and even domination before their decline and demise. But it is itself now dying. It is a death that is utterly senseless, and portends our own. In nature the wounded placenta heals through plant succession: enterprising species cover wounds quickly… The human agricultural enterprise and all of civilization has depended upon fighting that succession. When Jackson referred to fighting succession, he was talking about the plow. Left alone, a field of bare ground in central Kansas will gradually, over years, become a diverse prairie or woodland — that is succession. But to grow annual grains, we must knock back succession every year, arresting the ecosystem in a very early stage of development to give the seedlings of our annual crops a chance to grow and set seed. Corn and wheat and beans would never thrive if we were to plant them directly into the dense, alreadyestablished, deep-rooted perennial vegetation of the prairie.
A profound truth has escaped us. Soil is a placenta or matrix, a living organism which is larger than the life it supports, a tough elastic membrane which has given rise to many life forms and has watched the thousands of species from their first 26