Totally! Regenerative farming aims to regenerate natural resources and increase the resilience of systems, with a lot of emphasis focused on soil regeneration. With a little bit of planning, you can still have your rows and patches of plants that are easy to harvest, but you can also have diversity, resiliency, and all-around gorgeous landscapes. In silvopasture, the integration of trees and livestock, weeds are kept at bay and farmers can have diversified production streams coming from multiple types of crops and livestock. These soft transition zones can be productive and beneficial to people, too, where cattle can roam through annual cereal crops with rows of trees in between that offer them a source of shade. Take, for example, wild turkeys in savannas, which actually can use the occasional tree as a roosting spot to escape predators, and also can roam through grasses finding the most plentiful food sources. In fact, with land management practices like this, nature favors even more abundance by creating plants, animals, and relationships that occur on these soft edges. That being said, extremely productive plant communities can be designed and put in place if we design with ecotones instead of creating rigid, divided pieces of land. These transition zones between one ecosystem to another are called ecotones, and they can be entirely unique ecosystems by themselves. Imagine a fat strip of land between a prairie and a woodland with trees dotted everywhere, and you've got what we call a savanna. Most often, trees are scattered across these "edges", and between them, prairie grasses and plants that like more sun can grow. Woodlands don't have abrupt edges or a line drawn in the soil that saplings don't cross to grow. One example would be the transition from woodland to prairie. In nature, the edges of ecosystems are soft, and when one biome borders another, there is an entire transition zone that softens things out. When humans fragment ecosystems and pieces of land, the edges are usually very sharp and well-defined. One of the core design principles that Permaculturists promote is to "use the edges", but what exactly does that mean? So then, you may be wondering, how do we manage these "edges" if we want to keep some pieces of land in sections? No one would argue with the fact that it's much easier to bunch up a bale of hay with the swift movement of a blade across the top of a swath of grass. When the edges of ecosystems are disturbed, rare and quality plants suffer while weedy species move in. Pioneer shrubs and trees are removed, and light spills onto what would be forest floor and drowns the shade-loving woodland plants. Unlike the woodland interior of this parcel, the edge is frequently mowed, cut, tilled, and disturbed by human activity. Edges of ecosystems are the most vulnerable to change, and quite often result from humans splitting pieces of land up and designating the different pieces for different functions. In the example above, I was standing on the outside of a high-quality woodland bordering some farmland. The edge effect describes what can happen to an ecological community when you're on the "edge" of an ecosystem, essentially. To understand what's happening here, we're going to look at a concept in ecology referred to as the "edge effect". So what makes these places so different if they're not even that far away from each other? One is full of color and diversity, and the other shows a precious Maianthemum racemosum pressed upon a decrepit agricultural fence hanging on for dear life. These two photos were taken not even 30 yards away from one another, and ecologically speaking, there are some stark differences.
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