Regenerative Agriculture

Regenerative Agriculture        Winter Term 2023          Course Schedule for 2023

Professor David Harbor – harbord@wlu.edu; 458-8871 (office). My cell phone number is posted at my office; A223 Earth & Environmental Geoscience Department; Science Center

Course Description: Interested in the environment? Want to learn about food and farming? Changing agriculture will help us out of the global carbon crisis, undo the damage to soil health and improve the food supply. Learn how soils form and function, why two centuries of agriculture has eroded and depleted so many of them, and why you should care about who grows your food. Then explore how regenerative agriculture can restore soil health, fix water quality problems, increase drought and pest resilience, and increase farm profits. Explore the scientific research that shows how soils can store carbon and how much might be sequestered by using new practices. Talk with farmers and soil professionals from your home area. Explore local soils and agriculture practices. Field trips to local farms will be scheduled. Students, voices and sources from geology, biology, history, anthropology, economics, and more are necessary and welcomed in this query. (SC)

Learning Objectives:

  • learning the geologic and human history of soils, their characteristics, processes, and agricultural context
  • acquiring knowledge of soil carbon storage and applying it to regionally appropriate agricultural practices
  • engaging and summarizing scientific literature
  • gaining first-hand appreciation for the work of individuals and organizations involved in current regenerative agricultural practices.

Our overarching objective for this course (well, mine for you) is to develop a body of knowledge and a broad understanding through your activities that informs and activates the ongoing regenerative agricultural “revolution” and which will lead to the development of better farming practices and carbon sequestration in W&L’s local farmland, and hopefully near your home as well.  The drawdown must begin now and your work in this “activist” class can help the United States lower its carbon footprint with ancillary benefits to farmers, our local economy, and the watershed.

Course elements: The course is divided into several broad realms

  • Soil development, morphology, and processes
  • How agricultural practices affect soil carbon and soil health
  • Regenerative agriculture and effects
  • Case studies from Rockbridge and your home region

The schedule is a bit of a work in progress, in part because I would like to follow your interests, styles of learning, and goals for your investigations. I am happy to veer off in the direction of student interests. However, here are the bones of some of your work . They are these:

  • In-class interrogations – when you have something to read, review or research for a given class, you’ll be asked in just the first 5 minutes of class to write out brief responses to my queries. I will use these to make sure that you’re sharing your best thoughts with the class,. If you are a quiet person, I will do my best to make ours a safe classroom to receive ideas and comments from every person and this is your chance to learn to speak up. Outspoken students, you will be encouraged to elicit and listen for the ideas of others. The best science (and policy) is generated from a forum that makes room for every voice, especially under-represented groups overshadowed by the white-male opinion. And discovery must take in every possibility, from the mundane to the outlandish; be tolerant and respectful. The interrogations may also be used to see if you’re chewing on the topic; did you going beyond just reading  or watching something assigned to explore an idea further? The bibliography assignments ask you to do that as well. Participation is speaking up in class, which is often where you’ll bring up what you wrote in your interrogation.
  • Assignments – these assignments will be distributed through the first two thirds of the course, and I reserve the right to add, delete or alter them where our mutual interests and time take us. I will make a schedule due dates and delivery mechanisms that hopefully extends two weeks out (coming soon).
    • Regenerative Ag in the news – What is regenerative agriculture? What is the fuss…?
      Week two. See canvas assignment.
    • Annotated bibliographies – (three) Part of the process that moves science forward is reviewing what is already known, or at least previously studied, and using that information to contest it or move one or more hypotheses forward. It involves the skill of finding and ingesting (sometimes without completely understanding) what scientists have considered, concluded and/or dismissed. These will be very short descriptions of the best of what you can find in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. A “how to” and rubric will be distributed that explain the assignment goals. Here are the kind of the statements and questions that will guide our investigations into the literature.
      • How much carbon drawdown from the atmosphere can agriculture (crops, grazing, both?) accomplish (locally, nationally, or globally)?
      • Hypothesis: David Montgomery states “The connection between healthy soil biota and healthy plants is pretty well known” (or something like that). What is it that we have recently learned about the connection between plant health and soil critters? We may divide up the kinds of biology before you start.
      • What is the best (cheapest? most accurate? fastest?) way to measure soil carbon so we can pay farmers to offset it? What are the promises? And the pitfalls?
      • Could “mob-grazing” (also known as “adaptive pasture management” or “management intensive grazing”) be effective for carbon sequestration given Rockbridge County’s soils, geology and land use history?
    • Visual evidence of soil health and soil erosion over break – Study google earth for where agriculture is happening near you and then take a tour by bike or by car to photgraph (supplemented as needed by drawings, paintings, and prose) that document differing conditions around the county (in different types of landscapes or on different soils/slopes?). Where is soil being enhanced by what farmers are doing and where is it being degraded? What agricultural practices do you see that control these differences? How does this affect water quality through the erosion of soil into streams?
    • Soils and farms in your home region
      • What does the USDA know about the soils in the agricultural region near your home?
      • Who can you talk to in order to learn the challenges and possibilities (and progress?) of regenerative agriculture there? And what do they think?

Integrative Project – you will conduct a final project that involves investigation and reporting on a topic of interest to you and that can make a difference to the practice of agriculture in this region or your home.  Each project should take up (digest? metabolize? bioturbate?) the scientific and other information that we’ve processed to reach new understanding or localize what others have observed or studied elsewhere. This project can take many forms and should be tailored to your strength and experiences.  For the scientists, that may be an investigation of soil character comparing one place to another, or documenting some aspect of soil property and process.  For the historians, your research could support the changes of stewardship in the history of our or your local agriculture. For the humanist, your project might seek to engage new audiences through prose or poetry in the science of soils food nutrition, and carbon sequestration. For the artist, your project may seek to connect scientifically held hypotheses or findings to each other visually as a way to evoke better vision of the scope of work before us. You must propose what you want to do by week 8 of the class; it can metamorphose in the following weeks, but you must initiate the process then.

Evaluation                               

  • Assignments (100 pts)               40%
  • Interrogation/Participation          20%
  • Integrative Project                      40%
    • Proposal                  20%
    • Project                     50%
    • Presentation            30%

Books

Nuts and Bolts

My Office Hours  may be held in the CGL atrium or outside places nearby. If you can’t find me, text me. I won’t be in my office any more than necessary because the moldy air handling in the science building makes me sick (an inflamed post-Lyme disease immune response, well.., hopefully, post-Lyme).

Course Schedule All assignments will noted on this schedule and will only be accepted until the due date without written permission in advance for late work. Attendance in class is expected. If know you’re going to miss class for any reason, please let me know as far in advance as possible. The best practice would be to talk to me (in person class, or call me) and then follow up with an email.

 Accommodations – “I am committed to ensuring access to course content for all students. Reasonable accommodations are available for students with disabilities. Contact Lauren Kozak, Title IX Coordinator and Director of Disability Resources, to confidentially discuss your individual needs and the accommodation process. More information can be found at https://www.wlu.edu/disability-accommodations/undergraduate-accommodations.

If you have already been approved for accommodations, please meet with me within the first two weeks of the term so we can develop an implementation plan together. It is important to meet as early in the term as possible; this will ensure that your accommodations are implemented early on. If you have accommodations for test-taking, please remember that arrangements must be made at least a week before the date of the test or exam.”

Religious Holidays –  “Any student who is unable, because of his or her religious holiday(s), to attend classes or to participate in any examination, study, athletic, or work requirement on a particular day shall be provided an opportunity to satisfy the requirement in a timely manner or shall be excused from the requirement. Specifically, [u]ndergraduate students should reach out to their faculty member, adviser, supervisor, or coach, within the first two weeks of class in fall or winter term, two days in spring term, and again prior to the religious holiday to discuss how best to make up the missed requirement.” link to the policy