One of the world’s foremost authorities on restoration agriculture, Mark Shepard is happy that its popularity is growing but worries that its systemic nature is being misunderstood or “much degraded.” Restoration agriculture calls for the re-imagination of agriculture in which perennial systems replace annual plantings and harvests that expire in one season and leave nothing behind except scorched earth, toxic runoff and carbon emissions. What is necessary is a “systematic redesign of how we get our staple food crops,” Shepard says. “Agriculture absolutely must be ecological agriculture or else it will not persist.”
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