Farmers in Africa are important to the economy, but also very exposed to climate change.
Regenerative agriculture is a farming practice that brings back destroyed soil
in a way that makes soil healthy and productive,
restores biodiversity and improves nutrition.
That’s the future.
There are two innovative farms in Kenya
practicing regenerative agriculture.
We have Tamalu using agroforestry and Farmer Max using livestock to regenerate soils.
The story about this farm is not just about chickens,
it’s about using chickens as a tool to regenerate soil.
It was typical to any small farm,
it was heavily grazed, it was tilled.
We got in 100 chicks and it kind of evolved from that.
Over many many years the ground was being used in a conventional way of farming,
which means that over time you have a loss in the microorganisms by tilling it.
You’re releasing carbon which is food for the microorganisms.
What we’re trying to do is stop any disturbance in the soil
and try and revitalise it by using livestock
to fertilise the soil in a natural way.
Conventional poultry farming is usually in confined houses
where there’s a batch of 3,000 to 4,000 chickens.
What we do is we take away that pressure by shifting the coops.
On the broiler pasture, we have a small dairy herd
that we move about 10 days in front of the chickens.
And they graze the grass down to about six inches.
The patties are full of natural protein by the time the chickens graze over them.
So, it further substitutes their feed in terms of natural protein
that they are able to forage and peck at on the ground.
What they poop out is our resource for the soil.
Their poop is high in nitrogen, they are fertilising the soil.
We are trying to rebuild ecosystem health,
and it’s effective.
And then behind the chickens are the sheep that come in
who also maintain a sort of level of pasture
where we want it for the broilers.
In other poultry operations the poop is a burden,
whereas for us it’s a tool to regenerate soil.
Our system of farming is nature-enhancing.
If you had a bird’s eye view of our farm,
you would see exactly where the chicken coops have been.
And the idea is that if your soils are healthy,
your pasture is healthy, your animals are healthy,
we are healthy and the planet’s healthy.
Agroforestry is a practice of either agriculture in forestry systems
or forestry in agricultural systems.
So that trees and crops are on the same piece of land
for long periods of time.
Farmers are able to produce diverse portfolios of food
allowing them to make more income,
rather than when they were relying just on one crop or one enterprise.
What we’re standing in here are actually tunnels that used to grow flowers
and only two years ago it was just bush,
lots of weeds, very overgrown and not much life.
It’s just amazing that you can bring that all back within less than two years.
We decided to set up agroforestry
because we wanted a food production system
that produces superior quality,
enhances soil and sequesters as much carbon as possible.
And enhances, of course, biodiversity.
It was really when we first went to Brazil
and discovered the advantages of syntropic agroforestry
over any other agroforestry.
We realised a lot of the crops that they were using in Brazil
are also in Africa,
and so, we knew we could do it here
and just slightly change it, ever so slightly,
just to fit into the local context.
So, if you can imagine in a natural forest,
you’ve got lots of different levels.
You’ve got your canopy crops, you’ve got your emergent above that,
you’ve got your sub-canopy,
and then you’ve got your ground level stuff.
In some circumstances,
you’ve even got food growing under the ground.
And that’s what we’re strongly mimicking in a system like this.
In syntropic agroforestry, everything is planted at the same time,
be it from seed or from seedling.
You start planting trees and other crops
that begin to grow slowly and help each other.
Fast growers begin to diversify the system
and produce food at the onset of the systems.
So, you’ve got a continuously self-propagating family of plants
that build the soil for you.
The difference between Tamalu and the neighbours is very evident.
Where our neighbours are the lands are bare or just one monocrop all the way.
If it’s dry season, it’s just dry.
But in our system, it’s always green, always bushy.
In Tamalu, we’re living in a food forest.
Even if it’s just a normal tomato, if you taste it,
it’s not just juicy but it has some flavour.
It doesn’t really matter what it is,
if you taste it,
it’s really yummy.
We’ve been harvesting very superior quality produce from the farm.
We started with families, but now we’re at the online shops.
We’ve been selling to restaurants also locally in Nanyuki and Nairobi.
And we are also selling our farm produce to shops in Mombasa too.
The end goal is to be able to consistently
supply those big urban markets,
because that’s part of the circular vision of this farm.
As chefs, it’s our duty to source our food from producers
who are really looking after the environment.
And I can tell you from a chef’s point of view, this is where it starts;
this is where you start building flavour.
And more and more you see customers push back
and actually demand their food comes from responsible sources.
The future has got food and feed for everyone,
we should not just think about ourselves.
We are part of nature.
We need to have a stable agricultural system
in which we’re able to store a lot of carbon in the soil
to produce healthy food for human beings,
and other parts of the ecosystem.
And therefore, get on a path of growth
that is based on the wider concept of circular economy.