The relationship between soils and societies has been crucial for humankind for 10,000 years. Montgomery finds that the combination of no-till planting, cover crops, and diverse crop rotations provides the essential recipe to rebuild soil organic matter. Dave & Anne Growing a Revolution reveals that it's possible to bring a farm's soil back to life. Comparison of rates of soil erosion from agricultural fields under conventional agriculture (n = 448) and geologic erosion rates from low-gradient continental cratons (n = 218), soil-mantled landscapes (n = 663), and alpine terrain (n = 44) (sources are listed in SI).Soil erosion rates reported in various units were converted to equivalent lowering rates assuming a soil … Dr. David Montgomery and Anne Bilké correlated their research into changes for soil health with behavioral changes that have taken place with the recent pandemic. Bilké, his wife, is a biologist, gardener and author who worked with Montgomery on their book, “The Hidden Half of Nature.”Montgomery said they focus a lot in their writing on the principle of practice versus product, in terms of the adoption of more regenerative farming practices with less reliance on agricultural products.Montgomery and Bilké’s recently published article can be found at https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10460-020-10102-z.pdf.“If you look at it over a longer time frame, it’s a critically important problem,” Montgomery said. For more than four decades our mission has been to help farmers, ranchers and market gardeners grow food organically, sustainably, without harmful, toxic chemistry.Cutting through standard debates about conventional and organic farming, Montgomery explores why practices based on the principles of conservation agriculture help restore soil health and fertility. https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/388720.David_R_Montgomery “We thought, with this current pandemic, we could recognize these parallels that we were writing about in recent work.”Their recently published article, “Lessons from a pandemic on practices versus products in agriculture,” looks at how society has quickly adopted sweeping changes to address the pandemic, and how those lessons may be applied to changes that could prove beneficial in agriculture.While this situation might not motivate change as quickly as the pandemic, he said, he believes the financial benefits of adopting these practices will motivate more and more farmers as time goes on.Although the time frames differ greatly, Montgomery said, the principles correlate well between the two situations. Gary F Zimmer & Leilani Zimmer-DurandThe problem of agriculture is as old as civilization. “Perhaps seeing how quickly behavioral change can happen when we put our minds to it, it might help motivate us to think about some fairly large-scale behavioral changes, such as looking at conventional agricultural practices and thinking about shifting towards a more regenerative framework.”She said it truly shows the power of behavioral changes on a wide scale.An eye-opening moment was realizing how apparent the lessons were in how quickly results can be seen from changes in practices, Montgomery said. The average person just doesn’t understand the leeway and innovation a farmer has the opportunity to implement, she said.Luckily, Bilké said, there’s a wide range of new products available to farmers and people in the agriculture industry to help them adopt these new practices.Montgomery said they’ve found that putting these new regenerative farming practices into play can benefit farmers economically as well.