Reading in progress
Wednesday 16 September 2026
What is working, where, and who made it work. Read the whole turn of the earth in two minutes, then go as deep as you like.
Rake the first fallen leaves into a heap in the shadiest corner and leave them alone. A hedgehog is still looking for somewhere to spend the winter.
259 of 365Drive through southern Minnesota in summer and the pattern is unrelenting: corn, then soybeans, then corn again, field after field with barely a tree between them. Near Northfield, one farm interrupts it. Salvatierra Farms is small for the neighbourhood at sixty-three acres, but what marks it out is not size. Maple trees stand over the land and native hazelnut bushes grow in thickets, and beneath and between them the place runs as a working farm with no herbicides, no pesticides and no chemical fertiliser in any of its operations.
The farm was once conventional row crops like everything around it. The person who changed it is Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin, an agronomist who grew up in the northern Guatemalan rainforest. His method joins two kinds of education: formal agricultural training, and what he was taught by the Indigenous elders of his home country. Poultry sits at the centre of the system, raised within the tree and bush cover rather than in sheds on bare ground.
Haslett-Marroquin has said plainly that he wants the farm to stand as a model others can work from, and the circle gathering around it is not the usual one. It includes Lakota tribal members, farmers who once operated at large scale, and Catholic sisters, people who have arrived at the same piece of ground from very different directions and stayed. That is as much of the story as the agronomy.
The core of this system is poultry under woody cover, and it starts small: a dozen or so birds in a mobile coop moved through existing hedgerow or scrub gives them shade, shelter and forage while their scratching and manure work the ground. A basic mobile coop can be built from salvaged timber and wire mesh for a few hundred pounds, and the rotation is measured in days, not seasons.
Regeneration International · Associated Press · Read the source
The pumps stopped roughly twenty years ago, and since then the water at Ultima Frontiera has been finding its own way back. Reedbeds have spread across the old fish ponds. Owls and bats have moved into buildings that no one has bothered to demolish. The site sits beside the Chilia branch of the Danube, close to the Black Sea, and its 800 hectares of wetlands, lakes, grassland and dunes already hold white-tailed eagles, Dalmatian pelicans, golden jackals and free-roaming horses.
None of this was untouched wilderness waiting to be saved. In the 1950s the area was cut up with dykes, sluices and pumps to make a fish farm, and the labour that raised embankments and reclaimed land across this part of the delta was forced. The Periprava labour colony nearby was among the harshest in communist Romania; under commander Ion Ficior, more than a hundred prisoners died between 1958 and 1963, working on land reclamation and reed harvesting. When the farm folded, the machinery and earthworks were simply left to rust.
In 2025, with backing from the Rewilding Land Facility, Rewilding Europe took on long-term management rights. Alec Bălășescu, who leads the Danube Delta rewilding team, runs the site. Before touching a single sluice, the team commissioned Dutch consultancy Bureau Stroming to study how water actually moves through the place. That work, finished in 2026, proposes reconnecting the old ponds, stripping out barriers and opening better passage to the river itself. What has happened so far is quieter: roofs patched, rubbish carted away, fences and gates made sound, plans drawn on paper.
The plan is not to recreate some pre-human wetland. The aim is a semi-natural system: water levels that rise and fall more freely, grazing from horses and locally owned cattle already wandering the site, new breeding ground for pelicans and terns. The derelict structures are being kept standing rather than erased, even as vegetation closes over them. Working with Romania's Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes, the team intends the prison remains to stay visible, so that what happened here is remembered alongside what is being restored.
Before breaching any dyke or reconnecting ponds, find out where the water actually wants to go. A consultancy hydrological study takes about a year; on a small site you can do a rough version yourself with one wet season, a notebook and a stick, marking where water sits after each flood.
Rewilding Europe · Read the source
In the spring of 2020 Olivia Boothman was a farm vet in Cornwall who had never heard of regenerative agriculture. The headlines were about empty supermarket shelves, but what she saw in front of her was the opposite: local growers and farmers quietly stepping up to feed their own communities with fresh, seasonal food. Between on-call shifts, waiting for the dreaded pager to sound, she spent her nights reading instead.
The reading pulled one thread after another. She found the 4per1000 initiative and its account of soil organic matter as a buffer against climate extremes, then community-supported agriculture, where eaters share the grower's risk. Books like English Pastoral reframed the job itself - not food production alone but the keeping of a place, its ecology and its culture together. At the Groundswell festival, by then a masters student, she scribbled down the five principles of regenerative agriculture as a speaker flashed them up.
The principles, she came to think, are where the trouble starts. Two farms can follow every one and get entirely different results, because a farm is not a blank canvas. It carries centuries of previous land use, the way its neighbour farms, the policies pressing in from outside. On a drought-prone mixed farm, permanent ground cover may cost more water than it saves; elsewhere, cutting livestock numbers may be what lets a damaged habitat recover. What matters is whether the land, and the people on it, are getting healthier.
That argument now has an institutional home. Boothman works with the Global Farm Metric, on which Regen10's Outcomes Framework - the first globally co-developed attempt to say what regeneration should actually deliver - is built, through farm trials and extensive consultation. The agreed list runs wider than the early framing of carbon, biodiversity and water, taking in social and human health too. The model is the Sustainable Development Goals: prescribe no method, but give farmers, funders and policymakers a shared picture of success.
Before adopting any practice with a good name, choose three outcomes you can check yourself and measure them the same way twice a year: earthworms in one spadeful of soil, the time a litre of water takes to drain through a bottomless tin, one bird species counted each June. A spade, a tin and a notebook - under £10.
Sustainable Food Trust · Read the source
One of today's readings argues that a farm should be judged by what it delivers, not by the label it wears or the methods it advertises. Outcomes over intentions. It is a fair standard, and it applies uncomfortably well to this page, because the three readings above it were drafted by a machine, and this column is the place where we say so when it matters.
Here is what the machine did today. It read a pile of harvested articles, picked out a hazelnut-and-poultry farm in Minnesota corn country, a piece on Dutch water research, and an argument about measuring regenerative farming by results. It summarised them. No person at this publication walked Salvatierra Farms, interviewed a hydrologist, or sat through the Sustainable Food Trust's reasoning. The machine produced text; an editor checked it; you read it. That is the whole supply chain, and pretending otherwise would be exactly the kind of method-labelling the third reading warns against.
Judged by delivery, then: the summaries are accurate as far as we can verify, they cost some electricity and water at a data centre none of us will see, and they exist because no small publication can pay a person to read a hundred feeds a morning. The honest question is not whether a machine wrote them but whether they sent you somewhere worth going. Today, we think they did. On the days they do not — when a summary flattens a nuance or picks the wrong story — that failure belongs to us, not to the tool. A spanner does not take responsibility for the bolt it rounds off.
This column will keep using the tool and keep accounting for it, in that order. If you ever catch a reading that misrepresents its source, write in. That correction is worth more than any disclaimer.
Sustainable Food Trust — Beyond Principles: Why regenerative agriculture must be defined by what it delivers · source
What to do when the tomatoes are going soft faster than you can eat them, and the loaf has gone stale.
Warm the oil in a wide pan and soften the onion and garlic until they give no resistance to a spoon, keeping the heat low enough that nothing catches. Chop the tomatoes roughly, cores and skins staying in, and add them with a good pinch of salt; let them collapse for fifteen minutes, crushing them against the side of the pan as they go, and add the sugar only after tasting. Tip in the bread with about 300ml of hot water and stir it through - it will look wrong for a minute, then the bread drinks the tomatoes and the whole thing turns thick and ragged. Take it off the heat and leave it to sit for ten minutes, which is when it becomes itself. Serve warm rather than hot, with more oil over the top and the leaves torn in. It should hold a spoon upright; if it runs, give it five more minutes.
Nothing drops off. Today's readings move here tomorrow morning and stay, filed under the entrypoint they came in on. Below is the back-spool already gathered from the network.
The institutions whose public output feeds this reading. Each is watched every morning for what it publishes openly. Individuals are not listed here.
Permaculture Association · Permaculture Magazine · Regeneration International · Seed Savers Exchange · Garden Organic · Navdanya · Biodynamic Association UK · Biodynamic Demeter Alliance · Rodale Institute · Kiss the Ground · Savory Institute · Landworkers Alliance · Sustainable Food Trust · Real Farming Trust · Agroforestry Research Trust · Soil Association · A Growing Culture · Pasture for Life · Farmerama Radio
Ecosystem Restoration Communities · Rewilding Britain · Rewilding Europe · Trees for Life · Knepp Estate · Beaver Trust
The Restart Project · Low-tech Magazine · Makery · Repair Cafe International · Precious Plastic · Library of Things · Wuyong (Ma Ke)
Centre for Alternative Technology · AECB · Passivhaus Trust · Community Energy England
Julie's Bicycle · Dark Mountain Project · Emergence Magazine · Orion Magazine · Resurgence & Ecologist
Shareable · Transition Network · Global Ecovillage Network · Capital Institute
Bioneers · Gaia Education · Schumacher College · Center for Humans and Nature · Findhorn Foundation