Regen Road Trip Reading

This week I’m on an extended road trip from the ranch to Fayetteville AR, including attending the NCAT/ATTRA annual Sustainable Ag conference. It’s a great time to stack up some learning and thinking! Here’s what’s playing:

'Holistic Management, by Alan Savory (audiobook). We’re using the holistic management framework as a foundation for the next phase of Wild Type Ranch. This is definitely NOT light reading! Alan was a pioneer in adaptive grazing and really brought to light the understanding that livestock, at high density for short periods of time, are an integral part of reversing and preventing grassland decline. But this book goes so much beyond that. Holistic planning takes into account the entire context of all the people affected, the land, air, water, government, and implications for all the natural processes in creating plans.

Crazy Town (podcast). I’m catching up on back episodes of this podcast, since I only started listening to them this spring. Amusingly cynical view of our predicament and the usually impotent responses to it, backed by some thorough research. I learn and laugh and usually feel a bit more prepared for facing the future. This season’s series on escaping all the “isms” that got us into our current predicament is great. I also really enjoyed listening to one of last year’s on overhyped technofixes to our climate predicament.

The Great Simplification (podcast). Nate Hagen’s podcast is my one must-listen every week, and I’ve gone back and caught up on nearly all past episodes. Nate brings in guest experts from a wide range of topics that touch on where we’re headed (and possible appropriate responses) with regard to climatic, geopolitical, ecological and economic changes that are likely on our horizon in the coming decades. His topics range from energy to agriculture to philosophy to money. This is one I have to listen to when I can pay full attention, but always worth my time and attention.

And then, there’s always listening to archived webinars from Understanding Ag, my favorite source for practical advice on implementing Regenerative Agriculture. I’ll be summarizing a number of these individual webinars in future posts.

With 16 hours of driving on my week’s schedule, I’m sure I’ll have lots of learning!