Regenerative Agriculture Starts with Growing Soil
When you drive past farmland adjacent to the freeway and see plowed fields waiting to take seed, you may have fondly thought that the land was sitting “fallow.” Resting. Waiting for a chance to reawaken and bring forth new life. In fact what you’re seeing is soil that is dead. It’s fried by the sun, contains no moisture, has no habitat for the microorganisms essential to life, and has lost its precious topsoil to machinery and the wind.
Farming is rarely understood as the radical act that it is. Yet farming can be radically helpful or radically harmful to the planet, depending on how it’s done. Yesterday’s small-scale farming built soil and complex ecosystems, while producing vegetables and other beneficial plants. Today’s large-scale commercial agriculture relies almost solely on artificial inputs that give the radish, the carrot, or the corn stalk exactly what each needs to produce a product for market — and nothing more. The state of the soil itself is of little consequence, serving only the role of holding the plant in place long enough for it to grow to maturity, at which point it is harvested for sale. Top soil, loam, and compost are substituted for fertilizer & nutrients that mimic what nature typically does on its own.
This kind of farming, which weighs heavily upon the planet and disregards soil health, is not sustainable — in the old-fashioned sense of the word. It depletes and takes away, fails to nourish and build, and neglects the cycle of insects, microorganisms, and pollinators that have engaged over the millennia to foster resilient ecosystems.
As leaders at the forefront of a burgeoning new industry, Flow Cannabis Co. strongly believes that cannabis cultivation has the opportunity to improve farming practices throughout the U.S., and to remind other agricultural industries of the power of nurturing healthy soil to create robust plants.
Sensitive plants acclaimed for their ability to draw toxins from the ground, cannabis and hemp are phytoremediative plants that require the soil in which they’re raised to be of the best quality so that their roots don’t suck up harmful additives but rather feast upon the good microbes and great wealth that cover cropping, composting, and undisturbed soil offers to everything it nourishes. Your radish, carrot, and corn stalk deserve that, too. And so do you.
As farmers, we pride ourselves on growing soil, not plants. The fact that healthy cannabis plants - featuring full spectrum effects of terpenes and cannabinoids - results from the soil we grow is a remarkable side effect, but it’s not the main point.
Our farmers focus on growing the very best soil that can be coaxed from the land they work each day. They plant cover crops that trap nitrogen in the soil and allow crop’s stems, flowers and seeds to fall back into the earth to be transformed into food. We nurture microorganisms that naturally eat the predators that love to eat cannabis plants. We disrupt our soil’s heavy clays by planting brassicas and other deep-rooted plants whose roots break up the thick clods, allowing other plants to thrive. We till purposefully and carefully, in discrete and thoughtful places that disturb the soil’s living map of connections as little as possible. We look forward to that moment in the future when we can experiment with true no-till cannabis planting and not disturb the soil and its microbes at all.
What we end up with — after we welcome native insects that gorge on bugs harmful to our plants, add organic compost to nourish, grow and harvest nitrogen-collectors, and work with thoughtfulness and depth upon one small plot — is loamy soil that holds water long into summer’s hottest days, provides nutrition to every root fortunate to be placed in its bed, and naturally encourages the most robust plants possible to flourish.
We call this regenerative agriculture and, while we admittedly don’t take all of our inputs from our parcel of land and must still purchase organic compost, we don’t ever anticipate drawing a line to say: after this we’re regenerative. Rather, it’s about constant effort. We are actively regenerating our farms and expect that we always will be. This is worthy of note only because it’s rare.
We want to grow quality cannabis for everyone — so naturally, we start and end by growing the soil.
