Farma (Customer Side)

How does nature provide for the natural forests, grasslands, and prairies in such abundance, and why is this not incorporated into our agricultural production systems? Why is this not happening at a large scale? We know that this is the basis for regenerative agriculture, already embraced by many farmers around the world that have started a new industry within modern agriculture gaining traction and growing at a substantial rate. In times where food safety failures are so common, and where consumer distrust of the food system is at an all-time high, and where fake meats are touted as healthy, regenerative agriculture is a refreshing method of raising healthy, delicious animals that also happen to repair the planet.

Willie Pretorius, Soil Health Consultant at Ward Laboratories

Not willing to settle on the quality of your foods? We don’t blame you. “Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are”, said Anthelme Brillat-Savarin in 1826.

We know his saying today as “you are what you eat.” The idea is that the building blocks for your body come from what you eat. Eat the cells and tissues of healthy plants and animals, and your body will produce healthy ones of your own.

Eating healthy animals and plants can heal your body, and we will help you get such foods in just a moment. But what if we told you that raising and growing these foods could also heal the planet, thus solving two problems at once? Actually, it could solve three problems, because many folks also care about the welfare of animals, and when animals are healthy, by necessity they live well.

The solution is called regenerative agriculture.

Robert Rodale coined the term, to distinguish a type of farming that goes beyond sustainable. To understand it, let’s jump into a time machine:

You’re still in America, but it’s the 16th century. Instead of fast food restaurants, you see millions of bison moving across the open plains. Minnesota now looks to be a vast prairie with wetlands full of beavers and otters. Georgia is now a plush green land of more than 300 species of grasses, legumes, and weeds. Antelope, bison, elk, and deer roam the open grasslands of modern day Utah.

Even the Chihuahuan Desert, which goes from Mexico up into Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, is no longer a desert. Instead, it’s a vast grassland and prime hunting ground for Native Americans and for predators such as wolves, mountain lions, and grizzly bears. All in all, you can hardly believe America once looked like this.

Now, what does this have to do with the quality of our foods?

Back then, predators pushed the migratory animals forward, preventing them from overgrazing any specific spot. Therefore, plants always covered the soil and helped retain its humidity by guarding it from wind and sun. Plus, the plants kept feeding the soil with carbon from the atmosphere year-round. As a result, the soil was rich in nutrients, and so were the plants, and the animals eating them.

These natural behaviors are what regenerative agriculture is all about, and it’s what regenerative farmers are replicating on their lands.

Of course, big herds of wild bison no longer exist. To starve the Native Americans, the US military and railroad companies killed most of these majestic creatures, reducing them from millions to just a few dozen by the 1870s.

This execution stopped one of nature’s most fundamental processes. The massive herds would eat anything green in sight but move quickly, with their hooves tilling the soil and their waste fertilizing it. Every bite by a bison stimulated more growth by the plants. This brief stress that they inflicted, and the long recovery time that followed, allowed the land to become stronger with every passing year.

Once we removed these creatures, we quickly turned grassland to desert, bringing forth ecological disasters like the infamous Dust Bowl of the 1930s.

So, if those big herds are gone, what do regenerative farmers do?

They use domesticated animals as a substitute. By strategically placing herbivores to graze large pastures briefly, trample the soil, and then let it recover, they’re mimicking what wild herds did when they migrated across the land many years ago. This practice regenerates ecosystems, leading to rich fruits, vegetables, nuts, grains, seeds, animal products, and eventually to healthy consumers.

Of course, having plants constantly draw CO2 into the soil means leaving less CO2 in the atmosphere. Therefore, making regenerative agriculture the primary way of producing food could reverse a lot of climate damage. This is more crucial than ever, considering droughts, floods, and heat waves have become so common.

So, how do we order regenerative-raised foods to nourish our health and simultaneously reverse climate damage and support animal welfare?

Well, this is why we created Farma :)

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Introducing Farma

Farma is an online platform like Amazon or iHerb, only it connects you to the 30,000 regenerative farms and ranches in America. We are the only distributor that’s 100% dedicated to offering only regenerative foods. To be on Farma, each and every one of the farms and ranches must have the Regenified certificate.

Dr. Allen Williams and Gabe Brown co-founded the Regenified certification in 2021 to promote and verify regenerative agriculture practices. This is in response to the trend of corporations diluting the integrity of certifications like USDA Organic, and businesses liberally misusing buzzwords like “sustainable,” “ethically-sourced,” “cruelty-free,” and “organic” to market low-quality products.

The Regenified cert helps us only list farms that take ecosystem restoration, animal welfare, climate damage reversal, and human health seriously.

To order regenerative foods, all you have to do is hop on our platform, browse through the products, and order. With a platform dedicated to regenerative agriculture, Farma will make it far easier for both you and the farmer.

Farma eliminates the hassle of trying to determine who has the best prices, or who can deliver your food the soonest. It will automatically show you all the relevant farms that you can order from, and the food will show up at your doorstep.

Also, the platform keeps the money in your community, because it only connects you to farms within 200 miles. This also keeps delivery costs and times low. We take a 10% cut to stay operating, but the other 90% goes straight to the farmer.

Actually, we created Farma because we needed something like this ourselves. We wanted an online platform for regenerative products that we could feel safe ordering from. By hiring top-notch developers, and through continuous feedback from Dr. Allen Williams, it took us over a year but we finally made it.

We’re super-excited for you to jump on board and try it :)

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Your Health Starts With The Soil

Most cropland in the US is characterized by large monocultures, whose productivity is maintained through a strong reliance on costly tillage, external fertilizers, and pesticides. Despite this, farmers have developed a regenerative model of farm production that promotes soil health and biodiversity, while producing nutrient-dense farm products profitably.

Claire LaCanne & Jonathan Lundgren; Regenerative agriculture: merging farming and natural resource conservation profitably

Food production must start with a solid foundation:

The soil.

“Soils are the basis of life. 95% of our food comes from the soil,” says Maria-Helena Semedo of the Food and Agriculture Organization. And she’s right.

Dr. Eric C. Brevik estimates that around 78% of the average caloric consumption worldwide comes from crops grown directly in soil, and another nearly 20% comes from terrestrial food sources (like animals) that rely indirectly on soil.

Today, American soil is a pile of bare, ploughed-up dirt; pulverized and beaten to death by the heavy use of chemicals and tillage. Most plant foods here are grown on large monocultures, and most animals are raised in horrific feedlots or factories. It results in foods that are deprived of their natural nutrients and flavors.

And it’s not only America. About a third of the world’s soil has been degraded. The global amount of land capable of growing crops per person in 2050 will be 25% of what it was in 1960. According to Thomson Reuters Foundation, if the rates of degradation continue, all of the world’s topsoil could be gone in 60 years.

“We’re losing 30 soccer fields of soil every minute, mostly due to intensive farming,” says Volkert Engelsman, from the IFOAM – Organics International.

For this reason, the #1 priority of regenerative farmers is soil health.

You Can Either Kill or Heal The Soil

Industrial farmers have been focusing for years on yields and profits, using tillage, chemicals, and pesticides to submit nature and force more harvest. In this pursuit of growth rates rather than food quality, they’ve depleted our soils.

This has been terribly wrong thinking all along.

How about collaborating with nature instead? Microbes such as fungi, protozoa, and bacteria mediate 90% of soil function. In healthy soil, every acre should have more than 3 tons of microbes, earthworms, and soil-level insects.

Fungi and bacteria form a partnership with plants. Mycorrhizae fungi, for instance, increases a plant’s reach for minerals and water by 7x on average. Bacteria helps as well, by forming a barrier around the plant’s roots, protecting it from disease and pests. In exchange for these benefits, the plant supplies both with sugars.

Miles upon miles of hair-like roots underneath the plants, they are all feeding sugars into the soil microbiology. If you look through a microscope at these roots, you will see many microorganisms feeding alongside them.

Look at the two systems below. The one on the right contains soil with microbes, as well as fauna such as earthworms, mites, potworms, collembola, and isopods. In contrast, the one on the left was heated in order to kill most life, just like chemical sprays do. See for yourself the differences over a 15-week period:

The left side is the kind of soil you’ll find in industrial monocultures. There’s barely any biotic activity to incorporate plant matter into the system. But, as you can see on the right side, this decomposition is a core process in an ecosystem. It creates habitat for other microfauna and increases gas and water flow through the soil.

In industrial agriculture, farmers don’t see the soil as being alive. They see it as dirt that they have to till and pump chemicals into in order to grow a crop. However, a healthy soil is alive with bacteria, fungi, protozoa, worms, and insects. It is an entire ecosystem, where plants are the organic chemists that mediate relationships.

Therefore, instead of paying for tillage and fertilizers, regenerative farms just let fungi, bacteria, and soil aggregates do the work. And this is just at the microbial level. In fact, the community structure of these microbes depends on plants for support, so regenerative farmers obsess over their crops. They use techniques like adaptive grazing and crop rotation, optimizing the entire ecosystem.

But again, it starts with the soil. Some soils are depleted of nutrients or even toxic, containing heavy metals, chemicals, and pathogens. In contrast, regenerative soils are major sources of nutrients that also act as natural filters for contaminants. By eating regenerative foods, you’ll enjoy foods from the best soils in America.

This means…

Less Pollutants In Your Blood

Agricultural practices like tillage, monocropping, synthetic fertilizers, and pesticides have damaged our soil health. As a result, they have wrecked havoc on our own health as well. What happens when you eat veggies that were sprayed with anti-microbe chemicals? They end up killing healthy microbes in your gut.

Also, persistent organic pollutants (POPs) such as polyhalogenated biphenyls, aromatic hydrocarbons, insecticides, herbicides, nematicides, and byproducts of fossil fuel combustion are often present in the soils of industrial farms. These pollutants can eventually make it into your body via food consumption.

Industrial cultivation also introduces airborne dust into the atmosphere, which can carry these pollutants as well as pathogens, harmful gases, heavy metals, and radioactive materials. These can enter your body through the lungs.

As for heavy metals, cadmium, lead, mercury, and arsenic are particularly toxic, and may disrupt enzymatic activities that affect the brain and kidneys. In farms, they may accumulate in the soil due to fertilizer and pesticide use.

The bottom line is that healthy soil removes toxic compounds from our diet.

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Optimize Your Gut Microbiome

When farmers damage the soil, we’re going to have a whole host of issues with our health. However, when you eat regenerative foods from Farma, you’re ensuring your gut microbiome is as healthy as it can be. There’s a microbiome in soil, in plants, in grazing animals, and also in us. And they’re strikingly similar.

If we want a microbiome that creates welfare for every part of the chain, then we must foster it. A microbiome will either create positive synergies, or negative ones. The latter leads to disease, pest problems, and productivity issues. The former, health and happiness. So, taking care of the microbiome is crucial.

For instance, dealing with crop diseases by spraying does little more than suppress symptoms. A healthy plant, like a healthy human, is able to defend itself against most diseases. However, industrial farmers use fertilizers on their crops, which lead to rapid growth, but also to plant disease. Farmers then use pesticides to save the harvest. Without fertilizers, the need for pesticides would be very limited.

And we’ll mention it again because it’s so important: by eating foods covered with antimicrobials, you’re inhibiting or killing healthy microbes in your gut.

Less Pathogens In Your Food

Bad soil also contains more harmful pathogens.

For instance, there’s more than 100,000 fungi that exist in soil. Most of them are saprophytes that absorb nutrients by decomposing dead organisms. However, about 300 of them are known to cause disease in humans, such as the Exserohilium rostratum species that caused the 2012 fungal meningitis outbreak in the US.

Bad soil is also a fertile ground for parasitic worms that target our intestines, lymph system, or other tissues. They cause around 130,000 deaths each year worldwide.

As for soil protozoa, most just feed on bacteria and algae. However, some cause human parasitic diseases such as diarrhea and amoebic dysentery.

Knowing all this, would you still feel okay eating fruits or vegetables from disease-ridden monocrops, or the animals that were fed these crops?

The soils of conventional farms are more bacteria-dominated, as opposed to the fungi-dominated soils you’ll find in nature or regenerative farms. The latter also cycles nutrients and water better, and has less pathogens and pollutants.

Download Farma, and start enjoying clean, regenerative foods.

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More Nutrients In Your Food

The four atoms hydrogen, oxygen, carbon and nitrogen make up 99% of the atoms in our body. The seven minor elements sodium, potassium, calcium, magnesium, phosphorus, sulfur, and chlorine make up another 0.9%. 18 other trace elements make up the remaining 0.1%, for a total of 29 elements that are essential to us.

When your soils are healthy, they provide a nutrient-rich growth medium for plants. These plants will then grow tissues that contain most of the elements required for mammal life. In other words, regenerative food is not only free of pollutants and pathogens, it is also richer in the basic nutrients of our life.

Make Our Soils Healthy Again

Mother Nature is smarter than us all, so I let her do all the thinking and most of the work.

Tom Lassiter

So, now that we’ve explained why healthy foods have to come from healthy soils, another question remains. Those 30,000 regenerative farms in the US, what exactly are they doing to make their pastures produce superior foods?

Well, when regenerative farmers work to rejuvenate the land, they do it with its historical ecology in mind. To get a real picture of the biological diversity and capacity of their landscape, they must go back hundreds of years.

This gives them a snapshot of what they can restore the land into. What were the plants and animals that existed here at that time? How was the water cycle?

Only then, can the farmer start planting the right crops, and implement the other unifying principles that make a farm regenerative. Here’s what they do:

1. Regenerative Farmers Don’t Till

Tillage is the practice of agitating the soil by digging it up, stirring, and overturning it, usually with mechanical tools like a plow or a disc. Conventional farmers do it to break up compaction, plant seeds, and eliminate weeds.

However, where in nature do you ever see a mechanical disturbance? There’s only disturbances from earthworms, arthropods, burrowing animals, and the hooves of grazing animals. Earthworms, for instance, dig through the soil, creating pockets of air as they feed on organic matter and produce humus, a natural fertilizer.

In contrast, mechanical tillage destroys the soil biology:

The soil is a 3D matrix of exudates (molecules that plant roots release) and sticky threads formed by fungi, bacteria, and other soil life. They act as biotic glues, binding sands, silts, clays, and nutrients into larger aggregates. These clumps encapsulate organic matter, slow its breakdown, and stabilize the soil structure. The gaps between aggregates provide space for water and air to flow.

When you till, you bring oxygen into the soil. It wakes up bacteria, which start eating these biotic glues, causing the clumps to collapse and fill up the pore spaces. Congratulations, you’ve destroyed the soil structure. You’ve also damaged fungal networks and microbial colonies. Organic matter is now decomposing faster, and water has trouble infiltrating. Instead, it runs off or evaporates.

By the way, plant roots can break up around 300 pounds of soil compaction, while fungal strands can handle almost 1,100 pounds. So, to achieve better aggregation and water infiltration, you really don’t want to damage the fungal network.

By tilling, you’ve also removed plant matter from the surface, exposing the soil to the wind. Now, not only can the soil barely retain water, but the wind further dries it out. Before long, your soil begins to crust and restrict plant growth. It also runs out of organic matter, which has been washed or blown away, or decomposed.

This is not just theory. In the paper Aggregation and Soil Organic Matter Accumulation in Cultivated and Native Grassland Soils, you can see how strongly tillage affects the soil. Another review examines the effects of tillage on microbial habitat:

We’ve shown that physically disturbing the soil profile can have profound effects on microbial dynamics of the soil system. A large body of literature supports the view that large-scale disruption of soil by tillage can have highly significant effects on individual microbes and their functions.

Tillage, habitat space and function of soil microbes; I.M. Young & K. Ritz

For these reasons, regenerative farmers don’t disturb soil life with tillage. By going No Till, they build soil aggregates and organic matter, optimize their nutrient and water cycles, improve their crop quality, and reduce disease incidence.

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2. Regenerative Farmers Use Cover Crops

Plants photosynthesize, converting sunlight into compounds that they feed into the soil life. The more you feed the soil, the more aggregates you get, which boost water infiltration, retain nutrients, avoid compaction, and manage salinity.

However, crops are seasonal and have periods of dormancy. To avoid leaving the soil bare and exposed, regenerative farmers plant cover crops. Not only do these crops protect the soil from extreme temperatures or the wind, they also continue to harvest CO2 and sunlight, feeding the soil food web with carbon exudates.

In contrast, after conventional farmers harvest their crops, they let the land sit idle and exposed. They miss out on so much solar energy, so much liquid sun that they could pump into the soil. It reduces their soil’s health and therefore their food quality. Compare these two croplands and guess which one is regenerative:

As a regenerative farmer, you never leave the ground bare and starve the soil. Even when you graze, it’s not down to the ground. You always keep a living root.

Cover crops offer several other benefits to the soil:

• They reduce the impact of rain drops on the soil surface, further minimizing soil compaction, runoff, and the breakdown of soil aggregates.

• By protecting the soil from the wind, they help it retain moisture and avoid crusting. This prevents disease, death of soil life, and carbon leakage.

• They help maintain better soil temperatures: warmer in cold weather, and cooler in hot weather. Soil life functions best in such temperatures.

• They provide food for beneficial pollinators, insects, and of course your animals. Cover crops help feed livestock and use land more efficiently.

• They catch and release mineral nutrients, boosting water quality by reducing nutrient runoff and leaching into rivers, lakes, oceans, and aquifers.

• By adding to crop diversity, cover crops enhance the overall ecosystem resilience, reducing pest and disease pressure.

This short video explores how Charlie Roberts in Halls, TN, is using cover crops to protect soil health and increase water infiltration on his cropland:

By the way, regenerative farmers further extend the benefits of cover crops by leaving all crop residue remaining after a harvest untouched. This plant matter acts as soil armor, further protecting it against wind, rain, and extreme temperatures. And it also enriches the soil. Crops have microorganisms all over their stems and leaves, which enter the soil when you leave their biomass in place.

If you notice, nature is always trying to cover the soil. She wants it protected from wind, rain, excess heat, and from being too cold. She’s placing all these plants to act as solar panels, to suck energy out of the atmosphere and pump it into the soil.

Regenerative farmers are doing the exact same thing. And now your foods will be far more delicious and healthy thanks to it.

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3. Regenerative Farmers Diversify Their Crops

Not only do the fungi provide for the needs of one plant but the fungal/hyphae pipeline connect to multiple plants. This helps satisfy the nutritional and energy needs of microorganisms and the plants.

Dr. Kristine Nichols, soil microbiologisT

Nature always creates diverse ecosystems, never a monoculture. Everywhere nature has control, you’ll see complexity and an abundance of plants, insects, microbes and wildlife. Walk into a forest or out onto a prairie and notice the wide array of plant species, and the shapes and sizes of their leaves. It’s there for a reason.

G. David Tilman from the University of Minnesota showed that as you increase the diversity of grasses, forbs, legumes, trees, and shrubs on a land, you’ll also get more overall plant biomass than if you had less diversity covering the area.

The Journals of Lewis and Clark describe the Northern Plains as having huge plant diversity that was forage for wild herds. When settlement of these plains brought agriculture, this landscape was replaced by a monoculture. Soil life stopped getting carbon exudates from a diverse array of plants capturing sunlight and CO2.

But plants thrive when they grow in proximity of each other. This way, they’re able to share nutrients and phytochemicals through the vast underground network of mycorrhizal fungi, connecting them all to one another. These compounds help each plant to thrive in challenging conditions, and fight off pests and disease.

Plants have different nutritional needs, and are susceptible to different pathogens and pests. If you plant the same crop over and over, you keep drawing the same nutrients out of the soil. Pests and pathogens soon make themselves at home as their food source is guaranteed, and now pesticides become necessary.

For these reasons, regenerative farmers plant different crops sequentially on the same plot of land. This way, they improve soil health by having different root structures, return nutrients to the soil without synthetic inputs, and interrupt pest and disease cycles. They simply do what nature does.

Farmers design these rotations to benefit from different crop types. For instance, after harvesting a field of corn, a farmer might plant beans. Corn consumes a lot of nitrogen, while beans return nitrogen to the soil. This was a simple rotation involving just two crops, but a complex rotation might involve a dozen.

In fact, you’ll most often see a rotation of many crops simultaneously. Even when regenerative farmers let grass grow for grazing purposes, they want as many species as possible, from large grasses like bamboo or corn, to small ones like annual bluegrass. And they want legumes, forbs, shrubs, and trees as well.

Life both beneath and above the soil simply thrives on diversity. Visit a regenerative farm, and you’ll see plenty of butterflies and bees, moving biology from one leaf to another. Take a teaspoon and fill it with the farm’s soil. In that tiny teaspoon, you’ll have around 8 billion organisms, as many as there are humans on earth.

And this is how you create delicious, healthy foods.

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4. No Synthetic Inputs

Pests were 10-fold more abundant in insecticide-treated corn fields than on insecticide-free regenerative farms, indicating that farmers who proactively design pest-resilient food systems outperform farmers that react to pests chemically.

Regenerative agriculture: merging farming and natural resource conservation profitably (Claire LaCanne & Jonathan Lundgren)

Many farmers are convinced they need man-made interventions. They think they need to pump their soils full of synthetic carbon or nitrogen.

However, these elements are abundant and free. Plants absorb carbon from the atmosphere through photosynthesis. They use what they need for growth, and feed the rest to the soil. And although they can’t absorb the 32,000 tons of atmospheric nitrogen above every acre, nitrogen-fixing bacteria in the soil do it for them.

Regenerative farmers work with nature, growing living plants year-round, allowing them to mine and store these nutrients in their cells. And as the plants complete their life cycle and die, soil organisms recycle their nutrients.

Synthetic fertilizers come from a time in which nobody understood the soil. They doubled the harvest, and seemed like a miracle for farmers.

However, nothing comes without a cost. Their widespread use has led to soils that no longer have the minerals, nutrients, and organisms that plants need in order to thrive. For instance, they kill the mycorrhizae fungi that absorb water and nutrients for the plant, forcing you to water your crops and fertilize them frequently. Since less fungi also leads to fewer aggregates and higher compaction, you’ll need to plow deeper, further destroying the soil, and encouraging disease.

Using synthetic fertilizers also stimulates bacteria to rapidly decompose organic matter, releasing CO2 back into the atmosphere. In contrast, regenerative farmers rely on humus, a natural fertilizer that soil organisms create by breaking down dead roots, leaves, and animals. Humus helps keep CO2 locked in the soil.

Regenerative farmers realize that the soil is alive. It’s always been alive. It’s not a matrix of rocks and dirt, but a living ecosystem. Understanding that the soil’s alive changes everything. Suddenly farmers understand that they can feed the soil using living plants, rather than relying on fertilizers. Once they stop using fertilizers, suddenly they realize they can rely on root exudates to kill pathogens, rather than spraying their crops with insecticides, fungicides, herbicides, and pesticides.

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5. Regenerative Farmers Integrate Animals

The results suggest that management-intensive rotational grazing offers farmers increased forage quality and quantity when compared to continuous grazing or haying. In addition, these systems have greater potential for carbon sequestration compared to the other systems.

CENTER FOR INTEGRATED AGRICULTURAL SYSTEMS

You can drive hundreds of miles through farms in the central US without seeing a fence, without seeing an animal or even an insect on the landscape. This is a very bad thing to have if you’re trying to foster a healthy ecosystem.

Simply put, ecosystems do not function well without animals and insects.

When an animal grazes, the physical action of biting and tugging stimulates the plant to produce root exudates to feed microorganisms, which break down organic matter into nutrients. This nutrient cycling helps the plant regrow, and plants in proximity grow stronger and more nutritious as well. Also, the trampling effect of the grazing helps organic matter have better contact with the soil, protecting it against oxidization and nutrient loss, and helping in seed germination.

Now, as the animal is grazing, it eats the microorganisms that are on the plant leaves and stem, but it also leaves its own microorganisms on the plant before it moves on. This is a positive interaction that diversifies the landscape’s biota.

However, you don’t want animals to graze a pasture all the time. You want them to take a bite and move on. This is what happens in nature, when migrating herds of herbivores graze a grassland and continue, not returning until next year.

To mimic that, regenerative farmers use rotational grazing. A cow’s tugging and biting and heavy movement may challenge the pasture, but nature is resilient and recovers well from such insults as long as they’re brief. By rotating pastures, you can allow each area to rest, boosting the health beneath and above the soil.

In regenerative farming, you’re moving your cattle daily. And you’ll use fences, trained dogs, even cowboys or cowgirls on horseback, to herd the animals and give the pasture a long rest period before returning them back to graze again.

To illustrate, if you have a single cow grazing 10 acres for an entire season, that one cow may overgraze the field and kill thousands of plants. But if you put a thousand cows on those same 10 acres for just a few hours, they will not kill a single plant. They will actually enhance the long-term health of the plants and soil.

As the French biochemist and grazer André Voisin described, overgrazing has little to do with the number of grazing animals, but more to do with the amount of time you exposed plants to these animals. Overgrazing damages the ability of plants to regrow. By having less plant biomass, you reduce productivity, expose the soil to erosion, and decrease the amount of carbon and sunlight that you pull down.

When you graze more than 50% of a plant, it redirects its resources to regrow leaves and stems, causing some root mass to die off. With fewer roots, nutrients can leach below the root zone and be lost into groundwater. The plant also stops sending carbon into the soil, as it needs all the carbon it can capture to repair itself.

When animals overgraze a pasture, soil compaction increases due to their hooves and the lack of plant biomass. Not to mention the collateral damage of manure gases, reduced water infiltration, and damaged soil structure. However, when you graze properly, you only take half the plant, move to another pasture, and leave the previous one healthy, sucking up carbon throughout the rest of the season.

If you want to see how planned, rotational grazing improves a pasture in real life, check out the Ranney Ranch in Corona, New Mexico. Seeing the difference on either side of their border fence should be all the evidence you need:

Rotational grazing is also adaptive. Every organism has a memory, including plants and soil microbes, who respond to prior grazing. If you use the same rotation year after year, they become stagnant and stop improving. Similar to an athlete who must alter his workout routine to keep improving, you must alter your rotations if you want your soil microbes, plants, and livestock to become more resilient.

For example, you could change the livestock density on a pasture, or the times of year when you graze it. You could change the species – grazing a paddock with both cattle and sheep simultaneously has a different effect than doing it separately. You could alter the rest periods of pastures. You could alter orientation as well – for a heavier trample impact, make paddocks long and narrow in shape.

Another beautiful example is Don Jackson’s first 6 months into rotational grazing, with huge changes in cattle health, insects, and in the amount of forage:

It’s not only about grazing animals, but about insects too. We want insects. For every pest species, there are about 1,700 insect species that are neutral or beneficial. As we discussed, farms often have pests because of a lack of diversity.

Seen another way, the move from conventional to regenerative farming is a move from an agriculture based on killing to one based on life. Instead of waking up every morning to kill weeds or pests, you wake up every morning trying to decide how to get more living organisms on your operation. It’s refreshing.

This 12 minutes film, “Soil Carbon Cowboys”, really captures the essence of rotational grazing together with the other principles:

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By Eating Regenerative…

You’re Getting Healthy, Delicious Foods

The result of all these combined strategies are delicious, nourishing meat, fruits, vegetables, nuts, and seeds. No food on Farma will ever bring any growth hormone, GMO, antibiotic, pesticide, herbicide, or preservative close to your plate.

We’ve handpicked each of the regenerative farms on Farma, ensuring they have the Regenified certificate. In each of them, the animals live on healthy, diverse, thriving pastures, eating what nature has intended for them to eat. No form of mechanical tillage, chemical inputs, or overgrazing is taking place.

The beef you buy on Farma, for instance, was all grazing on thick rangeland grass and a mixture of plants. And you’ll taste the difference.

It’ll be healthy too. Most conventional meat in America grows in feedlots or factories, eating an unsuitable diet of cheap grains. Compare this to regenerative cattle, who are free to choose what they eat. In fact, you can’t select by hand a diet as nutritious as what an animal will eat if it has options. Dr. Fred Provenza showed that if your pastures are diverse enough, herbivores will eat 30-60 species of plants a day. They can detect nutrient deficiencies within a few hours, and adjust.

Monoculture crops don’t allow this selectivity of diet.

For animals, a landscape with plant diversity is a nutrition hub. It’s also a pharmacy full of phytochemicals. Even random weeds offer benefits to the cows: they’re rich in nutrition, and they’re medicinal, allowing cows to self-medicate and deworm.

Such diets create healthy animal proteins for us. The phytochemicals pass on to the meat, eggs, and milk, protecting from lipid peroxidation and protein oxidation, known factors in the inflammation that leads to heart disease and cancer.

Our health really is tied to phytochemical diversity. When you bite into a fleshy strawberry or a delicious steak, you consume more than calories. You consume phytochemicals. Carotenoids, flavonoids, ellegic acid, and allium compounds; tens of thousands of such phytonutrients are in our plant and animal foods. They’re antioxidant and anti-inflammatory, protecting all of our body systems.

The conventional focus on yields has led to an insane decline in the nutritional value of our foods, and an equally insane increase in obesity rates. Chemical inputs and tillage have reduced phytochemical activity so much, that fruits and vegetables today are 25-80% less nutritionally dense than they were 50 years ago.

Hidden hunger is real:

Calories are more accessible than ever, yet people are getting sicker. The shift to highly processed, industrial foods has enabled more than 2 billion people to become overweight or obese, with higher rates of diet-related diseases like diabetes, heart disease, autoimmune disorders, and various cancers.

Change starts at the farm. Regenerative farmers restore soils to their historical ecology, nourishing plants and animals with a boatload of nutrients. And by eating them, you’re adding the same nutrient density to your own diet.

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You’re Supporting Farmers Who CARE

Rural America has been in crisis for a long time. Did you know that farmers suffer the highest suicide rate of any profession in the US? Farmers often complain how retail giants are squeezing every last cent out of their pockets, forcing them to sell at commodity prices, making them dependent on government subsidies.

For a proud American farmer, this is no way to live a life.

By ordering your food from Farma, you’ll order directly from regenerative farmers around you. You’ll order directly from those who care deeply about the soil, the planet, and the health of the plants, animals, and the people who eat them.

These good Americans make an effort to do things right. They take a degraded land and introduce diversity through crop rotation. They restore microbial health. They observe how their cattle graze, and adjust accordingly. They eliminate the use of tillage and synthetic inputs. They take a shovel, see what’s beneath the soil, and test for aggregates. They try to attract beneficial insects like bees and ladybugs.

These farmers are selling you 100% US-produced, top quality foods. And while they’re doing so, they’re making the land healthy for the next generation, not degraded or pulverized to death like the fields of conventional farms.

Buy from Farma and provide farmers with a fair return for their labor.

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You’re Keeping Dollars In Your Community

Wherever you live, naturally you’ll want the area to develop and offer a better quality of life for your family and neighbors. One way to encourage it, as we all know, is to keep the dollars circulating within your local economy. Since Farma only ships food from farmers around you, this is exactly what happens.

You’re taking your money and putting it in the pockets of regenerative farmers around you. And by them having direct access to the customers, we give them back the leverage from big corporations, and the lion’s share of the revenue.

You’re Rebuilding Your Local Ecosystem

When you buy from regenerative farms, you’re helping revive rural America, not just financially but also ecologically. You’re fixing your ecosystem’s cycle:

The cycle starts with plants sucking sunlight and CO2 from the air. They also break down water into hydrogen and oxygen. They combine the hydrogen and CO2 into sugar, which they use or give to soil microbes. These microbes, in exchange, give them nutrients that they created from the nitrogen they pulled through air gaps. As animals then graze the land and naturally fertilize it, they stimulate the plants to grow more biomass, absorbing even more carbon and sun into the soil.

It’s a beautiful cycle.

Remember when we talked about the importance of soil aggregates, those clumps of soil particles and nutrients? Each one of them lasts about 27 days, and without them, the soil can’t breathe. No oxygen or water enters, and excess CO2 can’t escape. This creates a crust, and your soil soon becomes home for disease.

The heat of the sun causes plants and soils to transpire. Their lost moisture later comes back in the form of rain. But to be able to reabsorb it, you need good soil aggregates. Rainwater isn’t meant to run off and evaporate, it’s meant to sink into the earth, help plant and soil life, and eventually saturate aquifers and springs.

When water has a hard time sinking into the soil, you’ll always be praying for the next rain. This is why regenerative ranches are more resilient in drought. They ensure the continuous formation of aggregates by avoiding tillage and synthetics, and by attracting microbes, fungi, and soil life through a diversity of crops.

Now, without a proper water cycle, you don’t have a nutrients cycle. Soil microbes are sub-aquatic organisms. To keep breaking down organic matter into nutrients, they need water. When they function well, you don’t need any fertilizer.

So, you see the importance of soil aggregates. To help create more aggregates and restore the ecosystem, regenerative farmers make sure the soil is covered with a living plant 365 days a year, no exceptions. Those plants feed the soil with carbon year-round, and the microbes underneath keep creating more aggregates.

This, in short, is the cycle of regeneration. Imagine how much healthier America would be if all our farms took care of the soil.

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You’re Giving Animals a Great Life

Livestock producers are finding morbidity and mortality decrease when stocker cattle forage on diverse mixtures of plants rather than monoculture pastures.

Dr. Fred Provenza

Animals nourish us with their flesh. We should be respectful and raise them in an ethical, compassionate, grateful way, until their final day.

Unfortunately, the conventional meat in America comes from animals whose every day in life is a nightmare. They live in tiny spaces, eating a diet unsuitable for their genetics in order to make them as fat as possible as quickly as possible.

In contrast, the animals on regenerative farms lead an amazing existence, roaming on native prairie grasses, free of worries, getting everything they need. They live on farm systems that work in harmony with nature, and improve the quality of life for every creature within that system. From microbes all the way to the people.

As Dr. Fred Provenza showed, animals eating a diversity of plants are healthier than those restricted to a smaller selection. Regenerative cows are not just healthier than feedlot cows, but also healthier than cows raised on non-regenerative pastures.

For instance, those forbs that others often refer to as “weeds”? They’re left alone in regenerative systems, because they’re part of a full ecosystem. First, they produce a distinct array of soil root exudates that attract beneficial soil microbes. And second, the cows feeding on them enjoy an incredible array of chemical compounds that are medicinal in nature and have natural anti-parasitic properties.

The result is happy, healthy animals, and healthy, delicious meat. By treating the animals well through rotational grazing with a diversity of plants, you’re bringing an unmatched flavor and nutrient profile to the meat on your plate.

And it’s poultry as well. All the chickens, ducks, turkey, and geese on Farma come from Farms that raise them outside, protected from predators, and with plenty of room and sunshine every day. On the pastures, the birds peck and scratch up insects, worms, grasses, seeds, anything they can find.

As for pork, these smart animals are perhaps those who suffer the most as a result of factory farming. Industrial farmers keep them in tiny cages, barely able to move. In contrast, regenerative pork comes from pigs that forage in the open air.

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You’re Taking Care of CO2 Levels

Using livestock to reverse desertification is totally scalable to about two-thirds of the world’s land. And that can be done extremely low cost. This takes the only thing that we need out of the air, and holds it.

Allan Savory

Heatwaves, hurricanes, wildfires, air pollution, floods, droughts, dust storms, and land erosion. The urgency to address climate change has never been higher. Two-thirds of the world’s grasslands have turned into desert.

Beyond the obvious dangers, these climate effects have also reduced crop yields, destroyed livestock, and interfered with the transport of food. They are putting at risk the food supplies not just in the US, but around the entire world. We have to feed billions of hungry people today in a rapidly degrading climate.

To solve these issues, vegans have been advocating for removing cattle from the landscape, which they target as a major cause of the rising CO2 levels.

However, the problem isn’t the cattle. It’s how you use them. When animals graze the land, they actually help plants suck up as much atmospheric CO2 as they can. This is the way it works when nature is left undisturbed.

Regenerative farmers farm like nature does. They keep a diversity of living crops at all times, which constantly trap CO2 from the atmosphere into the soil. When their cattle graze the crops, their hooves aerate compacted soils and incorporate dead plants, animals, and manure into it. And their biting stimulates vigorous plant growth, which sucks enormous amounts of CO2 down from above.

To mitigate climate change, we need more animals on the landscape, not less.

Of course, there’s also that methane issue that people associate with cattle. But in healthy soils, plant phytochemicals stimulate microbes like methanotrophs, which digest methane. This is how nature took care of methane from the hundreds of millions of wild ruminants that once roamed the face of the earth.

So, while vegans may want all the credit, regenerative farmers are the ones who address both soil restoration and the reduction of atmospheric CO2 levels. Our planet needs that now more than ever. Dr. Allen Williams explains it well:

When we degrade our soils, we capture and store less carbon, the world gets hotter, and the land further degrades. It’s a cycle. So really, our first resource concern should be to capture as much carbon as we can, and feed it to soil life.

Also, rising levels of CO2 in the atmosphere affects our foods:

Dr. Sam Myers exposed grain crops to the CO2 levels predicted for 2050, and found that they lost 10% of their zinc, 5% of their iron, and 8% of their protein. In countries where zinc, iron, and protein deficiencies are major causes of impaired brain development in kids and other illnesses, this could be a real problem.

Right now, more than 2 billion people worldwide are undernourished. If our crops keep losing nutrients due to climbing CO2 levels, billions more will be at risk. Not to mention the climate-related disasters that destroy entire food crops.

By ordering food from Farma, you’ll help break this cycle. You’ll help regenerative farmers continue to improve soil health and provide nature with an unmatched level of security against floods, heat waves, droughts, and other disasters.

The numbers are there:

The Croatan Institute’s report shows how $700 billion of investments in regenerative agriculture in the next 30 years could not only return $10 trillion, but also mitigate 170 gigatons of CO2 emissions. To put that into context, to fulfill the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s recommendation to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees centigrade, we need to remove at least 100 gigatons.

It’s almost unbelievable, but for every 1% increase in organic matter, an acre of soil keeps down 10 times more carbon. For perspective, most conventional farm soils contain less than 0.5% organic matter, whereas long-established regenerative farms can have 5% or more. This means a lot more CO2 is being pulled down.

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Download Farma

We invite you to try out Farma and see how much better regenerative food tastes. Not only will your mouth experience the full flavor profile that phytochemical-rich foods offer, but you’ll also contribute to the welfare of animals, plants, soil, and the climate in many different ways. Plus, you’ll do wonders for your health.

There really is no need to sacrifice nutrition or flavor anymore. Farma gives you the entire package, the most sustainable, environmentally net-positive foods in existence, that also happen to be delicious. And straight to your door.

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Every Farm Is Regenified

The Regenified certification program was started by Dr. Allen Williams and his partners to ensure the proper use of regenerative practices on a piece of land, and to defend this type of agriculture against corporate sabotage.

Every farm on Farma is certified Regenified.

What Foods Can You Order?

We offer a variety of products on Farma, from tens of thousands of regenerative farms across America. Let’s start with the meat. Regenerative meat is truly grass-fed, on multiple species of grass. Fire up your grill and try something out:

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Regenerative Food Is Diet Friendly:

Yes, vegans are welcome too.

If you’re vegan, you can enjoy all of our regenerative fruits, veggies, grains, nuts, and seeds. In contrast to the “organic” stuff sold at various stores across America, regenerative food is the real deal. It is net-positive environmentally, solving both the animal cruelty and climate health issues simultaneously.

What Do We NOT Have?

You Can Visit Our Farms And See :)

By buying from Farma, you’re better to your planet, better to your animals, better to your body, and better to your taste buds. If you want to develop a personal relationship with the farmers who raise your foods, or if you simply want to take a day off and go see what a cruelty-free farm is, you totally can.

Farma connects you to the farmers. Every farm on the app has their address fully exposed, and is available for the customer to visit. In contrast, try taking a tour of a factory farm. Spoiler alert: they don’t put tour guides on payroll.

By joining Farma, you’ll stop buying food from distant corporations that see you as just another number. Instead, you’ll return to the old-fashioned way of connecting with local farmers, who you can visit, support, and make friends with.

If you choose to go visit one of our farms, you’ll quickly fall in love with the regenerative community, develop relationships with the families, and feel much safer knowing who raises your food and where it comes from.

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Keep Your Farmers Accountable

In Farma, you are the one who keeps the farmers accountable. If you like a farm, you keep buying from it. If not, you’ll try another one. This keeps a healthy competition among farms, which drives quality up and prices down. Thanks to you, our farmers will keep producing delicious foods that heal the world.

No Bullshit

Our app is designed to prevent you from drowning in a sea of options. In other words, we avoid the paradox of choice at all costs. For instance, we’ll only show you farms around your location that have the greatest customer rankings.

Why bother with the rest? You’ll have a simple shopping experience:

Choose food; choose farm; done.

Next-Day Delivery & Cost Competitive

Farma matches your order with the highest-ranked farms that can ship the soonest or for the best price. You decide between time and price. Each farm sets a price threshold for free shipping. If you don’t reach it, you cover the shipping cost. Of course, there’s also the option to browse and buy from specific farms.

In other words, when using Farma you can shop in two ways:

1. Product-Specific Shopping: Search and browse through specific products. When you order, you’ll select the farm it will ship from based on shipping speed or best price, your choice. If the order is large enough, you can split it between farms. You can also add extras like honey, soaps, leather wares, hot sauces, marinades, jams, jellies, or fresh produce from the same farm.
   
   
2. Farm-Specific Shopping: Browse through farms in your area. Some only sell regular things like beef or eggs, while others specialize in unique products like goat meat or exotic cheeses. This is perfect for exploring different farms, or for buying from a specific farm you previously ordered from and liked.

* Specialty items like bison (usually grown out west) can take a few days to ship.

Farma Prime-Rib Subscription

We offer an optional subscription at $5 monthly or $50 annually, which includes free insurance on every order to protect it from mishandling or theft. Plus, you’ll earn 2.5% back on each order as credit for future purchases on Farma.

Order Regenerative Food From Farma

Your chance to repair, restore, and revitalize America is here:

Industrial farming has polluted our country, producing low-nutrient foods that are full of toxins and chemical inputs. They’ve led us to an epidemic of obesity and disease, and have lowered animal living standards to a despicable level.

In contrast, regenerative agriculture is about the renewal of the ecosystem and our food quality. It aims to regenerate the soil, increase biodiversity, and improve the mineral, carbon, and water cycles. All the while, it ensures a healthy, ethical life to farm animals, and keeps the nutrients where they belong – in our food.

This cycle of regeneration starts with a living plant that captures sun and CO2, converts them, and feeds the organisms beneath the soil. These organisms, in turn, enrich the plant with nutrients and water. The animals above eat these healthy plants, and produce healthy meat for us. They then encourage the plants to regrow in even more mass, absorbing increasingly more carbon into the soil.

Regenerative farming can solve many of our most critical issues, from human health, animal ethics, environmental restoration, and climate damage.

So, clean up your diet and the ecosystem. Try Farma’s regenerative food and see what true sustainability tastes like. Nourish your family, nourish the planet, and ensure the proper respect to the animals who feed us. You won’t find any processed junk on Farma. What you’ll find instead is the most nutritious food in existence.

Sign up, and start enjoying regenerative foods right away.

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