Scale, applied to ecosystems, does not necessarily mean "bigger is better". **In biological systems, size follows function**. However, there is the paradox that a regenerative approach to agriculture in comparison to the conventional paradigm is about "more from less". Regeneration is about the symbiosis between economy and ecology. This is one of the key insights for me articulated on the level of the external reality of human interaction with the planet.
However, there are some things to say. So, let me start with a paper on my research into the **thinking, ecology and the economics** behind what is wrong in agriculture and how to right it which was published by the UK-based Food, Farming and Countryside Commission last year (please find it attached):
One metric of this scale is the number of staff in agricultural businesses. In the UK, currently, the average 1,000 acre mixed farm employs 5 to 6 full-time equivalent employees. There will be seasonal workers at peak times. The New Foundation Farms model employs over 100 direct full-time equivalent employees and provides work for many tradesmen, office space for self-employed people, learning space for children and adults, retail space for citizen shoppers etc.
Such a conventional farm turns over barely £1m. Our model, after 4 years, produced an annual turnover of £9m with a profit of £2m. How can this be?
The problem in the way we practice agriculture in the conventional paradigm is that we have an extremely low density of activity on a vast area of land. As the only measure of conventional agriculture is yield (and yield = turnover), the belief is that if we focus on growing one crop (one crop = one layer of activity) we will maximise the yield. This follows the mechanical idea of scale. One central problem is that low density of activity on agricultural land also means low levels of biological diversity. Low levels of biological diversity mean systemic fragility, lack of resilience. By applying fertilisers and pesticides we reduce the biological integrity and resilience further and whilst, paradoxically, we do so at significant cost both financially and ecologically. We depreciate the "natural assets" (soil, water, ecosystem), produced hardly any profits, while we have maximised "efficiencies" and the crop yield.
Agricultural scale at the landscape level is a function of biological diversity which is another way of saying "systemic integration of activity". When done right, **layers of biological activity** in an agro-ecoystem are also layers of economic activity, so-called agricultural enterprises. This goes a long to decoupling the land ownership and and business activity connection and seeks to maximise (or better "optimise") the density of ecological layers (= economic enterprises). The scale of this kind of vertical and deep integration produces rich biodiversity, healthy and resilient ecosystems, significant economic activity, employment etc. all at a scale which rural areas are deprived of.
I hope this is at least a helpful start on the subject of scale.
Expanding on this a little, I thought it worthwhile just summarising my work on this subject over the last two years, since July 2019, in which, based on my combined life experience and thinking, I researched **the way we grow, process, buy and consume food, globally**. In my intensive research I discovered a number of things and learned from hundreds of case studies, interviews, academic papers and countless books. Among other things, I found out:
Why and how our global food and farming system is built the way it is.
How we are captured by eight lock-ins that keep us locked-in to the degenerative impact on the wellbeing of people and planet of the global agrifood sector.
That what is called organic farming is still destructive to the natural world and often not as organic and healthy as we think even - if it does leave out the pesticides and fertilisers.
That there are thriving examples around the world - some small, some very large - that show that humans can grow food and fibre in ways which regenerate ecosystems and which are more profitable at the same time. That we now have the science to understand how and why ecosystems thrive.
That we have complexity-aware frameworks that allow us to **design, manage and measure for ecosystem health and quality of life**.
The world of food and farming has left the majority of humankind in different kinds of poverty even where there is, apparently, enough food and enough money to buy the food. These kinds of poverty that the global agrifood system is ultimately based on a poverty mindset, an extractive mode of thinking that looks at farming like a form of mining. We mine nutrients from the soil in ever larger factory farms - its **extractive nutrient harvesting** - only that the nutrient-density of our food has decreased in sync with the health of the ecosystems so that we are eating more and more empty calories, a matter made worse by the way foods are processed and costly healthy ingredients substituted by artificial flavours, sweeteners, sugars and salt.
What has turned the agrifood system into a "wicked problem" of the trickiest kind is that we all suffer from **"baseline reset syndrome"**: A shift over time in the expectation of what a healthy ecosystem baseline looks like. What we think of as pristine nature would be seen by our ancestors as hopelessly degraded; and what we see as degraded our children will view as ‘natural’. This has led to the desertification of two-thirds of the formerly fertile soils on our planet.
For the longest time, in academic circles the blame was pinned on the felling of trees. We now know that it is the routine and mass application of the plough, the tilling of the soil, that is our worst enemy which turns rich and healthy ecosystems into **dead dirt**. The problem is that even well-intended spiritual leaders like Rudolf Steiner whose insights created the global biodynamic movement have not suspected the plough - although he recognised the importance of soil health. The organic movement too is well-intended but we now know that it takes more than removing pesticides and fertilisers to regenerate soils, ecosystems and landscapes. Organic farming is, essentially, industrial farming without the chemicals because the underlying mindset is not focused on outcomes but inputs.
This is the whole dilemma of the world of certification that it is obsessed with process and inputs and audits for these but does not **audit for actual outcomes**. Rather, it is assumed that the outcomes are the consequence of the "one-size fits all" inputs and processes.
The difference is in the way we think about soil, in how we relate to the natural world, in the attention we pay. As Ian McGilchrist says, **our attention literally co-creates the world**. The locus of this attention is not in any machine or framework or policy. It is in every individual human being, potentially one of the finest of instruments in this cosmos but also one of the deadliest when governed by the left-hemisphere of the brain alone. So, the problem is, that we are dealing with a dualism. We are told that it is either cheap food or healthy food, that we either feed the world or save the planet. Apparently, we cannot have both. But this is wrong, so wrong that it couldn't be more wrong. We already produce more than 130% of the food it takes to feed everyone alive today. But we produce it badly, in degenerative ways, and in the wrong places.
As always, humans disagree about the right words to use. Is it agroecological, regenerative or holistic? The way I make sense of it is that regenerative agriculture is the leading edge of agroecological approaches to farming which works with an approach to land management which was called Holistic Management by its founder Allan Savoury.
Regenerative agriculture is an approach to farming that is **soil-focused**, not seed-focused. To understand what this means we have to be ready to accept a radical transformation of both our relationship with nature and with money: we can steward abundant ecosystems which also grow food and fibre. In fact, my definition of **regenerative agriculture is this: Regenerative agriculture is the production of high-quality, nutrient-dense food and fibre, profitably, in regenerating soils**.
This mindset leads to the symbiosis of economy and ecology. Farming regeneratively is at the same time more profitable and ecologically abundant. Instead of wrestling the calorie from the unyielding field, we grow in **partnership with nature**. And in most cases this even leads to less work (in the "sourdough sense" - 10 minutes work over 24 hours - the sourdough culture does the rest), lower costs, much lower use of machinery, technology, chemicals and other inputs.
Once again, my thanks for the conversation and for your patience while I put together an adequate response to your questions.
I would welcome the opportunity to discuss this further from the perspective of how the Holos Project 
and your work overlap and might benefit each other.
Looking forward to hearing from you when you are able to.
Until soon and with my utmost appreciation also, of course, on behalf of Claudius,
Warmly, Marcus
Dear Kerry, dear Marc, Thank you for taking the time to meet with Claudius and me last week while you were in Costa Rica. I hope you are having/ have had a tremendous time. I really appreciated our conversation, and your questions resonated with me. I apologise for the delay in responding to you. It has been a busy time and it is important to me to not rush communication for the sake of it.