Regenerative Minimum Standards for Retail Food Claims

Compost, Manure and Cover Crops

• Alan • Season 1 • Episode 3

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Please join us for our next stakeholder session on Minimum Regenerative Standards for retail food claims. This session will focus on Compost, Manure and Cover Crops. Panelists with bios are below.

As our work groups sessions unfold, we now turn to sources of fertility such as compost, manure, cover crops and green manure. It’s imperative to know where these materials come from, how they are grown, and how they are incorporated into the cropping system. Just because it’s organic matter does not mean it qualifies as a regenerative input.

This session on Compost, Manure and Cover Crops builds on previous conversations by asking, what are best practices for using off-farm manure, challenges with composts, and the important role of cover crops and inter-cropping. Our panelists are practitioners of best practices with skills honed from decades of experimentation and learning. They also bring cautionary tales. Topics for this session:

  • Manure from conventional livestock operations vs hoofs on the ground.
  • Cattle, hog and poultry manure – challenges and opportunities
  • Municipal sources of organic matter – the good and bad
  • Using cover crops as soil armor
  • Herbicide use with cover crops
  • Using green manure as a nutrient source
  • Challenges of scaling compost operations using off-farm sources
  • Small scale agriculture approaches to organic matter
  • Windrows and tilling organic matter into soil – best practices
  • Pharma, metals, and pesticide residues in manure and compost
  • Is there a role for synthetic biology in managing soil nutrition

In drafting a guide for retailer buyers to use when reviewing retail food product packaging that displays regenerative claims, it is important to provide a clear decision tree based on what inputs and practices are reported by the brand. 

Our expert panelists will try to answer these questions based on their hard-won experience — and pose new questions as well. We invite you to attend this session on Compost, Manure, and Cover Crops. The session begins with about 45 minutes of wide ranging prompts discussed by the panelists and moderator.

You will then be able to ask your own questions through a moderated Q&A function. Finally, we will open up the call for public comments on the topic. 

You can also submit written comments or questions any time via the Reply section on the main regenerative minimum standard program page.

All session info at https://ifoamnorthamerica.org/regenerative-minimum-standards/  New podcasts released every three weeks.