After many years of hosting legislators on farm tours, Waterkeepers Chesapeake’s Fair Farms project brings farms to legislators through the film, The Dirt on Soil Health. The film illustrates a need for government programs that lower the bar to adoption of regenerative farming both in urban and rural areas. Viewers learn about public policy that can help urban and rural farms to grow soil, increase resilience to flood and drought, and restore water quality.
The farms in the film exemplify how the use of climate-smart regenerative practices grows healthy soil, protects water quality, improves ecosystem health, and reduces farm risk from extreme weather events. Healthy soil is full of pores that absorb water which not only guards against flooding, but underpins the delivery of clean water, making our food and water systems more resilient.
In the summer of 2022, E. coli was found in Baltimore’s water supply and residents were advised to boil their water. During this hot week, were it not for the reservoir of rainwater that Strength to Love Farm held in its healthy soils, its plants would have suffered. Healthy soils were able to save the farm — a bastion of hope in a blighted urban neighborhood.
At Mason’s Heritage Farm potential new economic opportunities abound. The Eastern Shore produces 4.2 billion pounds of chicken per year, but its organic grain feed is imported. Processing infrastructure is needed to enable farmers to process organic grain locally so that organic chicken producers can buy it locally. And more buyers will result in more farmer adoption of regenerative practices.
As Maryland Delegate Andrea Harrison explains in the film, “the closer we get back to the way this Earth was created to function, the better we will be.”
The Dirt on Soil Health film was a project of Waterkeepers Chesapeake’s Fair Farms and the Million Acre Challenge collaborative project.
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