WHY WE DON’T SUFFER FROM CARBON TUNNEL VISION: THE NEXT ITERATION OF A NATURE-BASED SOLUTION

New Foundation Farms, at its core, is a disruptive farm-to-fork food business, addressing the problems of the current food system including the parallel challenges of farm profitability and GHG emissions as well as addressing both ecosystem health issues and human health. We do this through a focus on providing people with affordable nutritionally dense (and delicious!) food grown in healthy ecosystems. This is a systemic solution to the climate crisis. It is also a nature-based solution, with for example over 100,000 trees typically planted on each 1,000 acre farm. The trees are not an “add-on” but are part of a variety of integrated habitats for farmed and wild animals. We can sequester CO2 back into the soil, increase biodiversity and address water issues like flooding, water stress and clean water downstream.

From Soil to System: The Impacts We Plan to Have and How – click to view separate article.

Restoring natural capital is vital to humans and the planet. These added benefits can make a huge impact on carbon drawdown and solve three major aspects of the current interconnected crises: climate, food production, and farm profitability. By contrast, reforestation, which is offered as another nature-based solution, has large set-up costs and relies on someone paying for the carbon to deliver investment returns. Reforestation also increasingly takes land out of food production on a false narrative that it is degraded and therefore not suitable for growing food.

Modern science means we now know how to build ecosystem health and grow food on degraded land and in so doing, increase it’s ecological health.

New Foundation Farms approach to stacking agricultural enterprises is sensitive to the local context and delivers food, ecologically positive outcomes and social regeneration in rural economies. It’s a systemic WIN-WIN-WIN rather than a one-trick pony focused on carbon.