In 2023, we started our Regen Reads series – a reading list to help our followers learn more about regenerative organic agriculture 📖 After many, many great recommendations we’re wrapping up the series with a look back at all of the great reads we have featured:
A Soil Owner’s Manual: How to Restore and Maintain Soil Health by Jon Stika
Interested in regenerative agriculture and soil health? A Soil Owner’s Manual by Jon Stika is a great place to get started thinking about your soil, how it affects you and how you affect it. This book will “open your eyes to the truth about how soil is supposed to function and will empower you to restore it—allowing you to produce high-quality crops while reducing your dependency on expensive inputs.”
Teaming with Microbes: The Organic Gardener’s Guide to the Soil Food Web by Jeff Lowenfels and Wayne Lewis
If you’ve heard about regenerative agriculture then you’ve probably heard about soil health, soil life and the microbes that bring it all together. Teaming With Microbes is written with the average gardener/grower in mind but has all the information you can ever hope to get out of a textbook. A great foundation for anyone digging into soil microbes!
Teaming with Fungi: The Organic Grower’s Guide to Mycorrhizae by Jeff Lowenfels
Teaming with Fungi is an excellent primer for anyone interested in the world of micorrhizae, beneficial fungi and regen ag. Although this is one of a few books by Jeff Lowenfels in his “Teaming with” series, it’s a great stand alone text that makes the concepts explored in many other fungi focused books a lot more accessible.
Teaming with Nutrients: The Organic Gardener’s Guide to Optimizing Plant Nutrition by Jeff Lowenfels
Interested in understanding how plant nutrition works? Teaming with Nutrients is an accessible guide that will take you through the biology, chemistry and physics of how plants get food. A great read for anyone interested in all things plant related – from gardening to understanding the plant side of the regen ag equation.
Teaming with Bacteria: The Organic Gardener’s Guide to Endophytic Bacteria and the Rhizophagy Cycle by Jeff Lowenfels
Another installment in Jeff Lowenfels “Teaming with” series, Teaming with Bacteria explores the important role of bacteria in the underground soil food web and how this affects your regenerative efforts. Understanding the roles that bacteria play in our soil has huge implications for anyone trying to grow plants – from the backyard gardener to the large scale crop farmer.
Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest by Suzanne Simard
Finding the Mother Tree is the powerful story of a Canadian forester turned scientist and how she went against the grain to shed new light on the interconnectedness of trees, the forest and the world around us. A great read for anyone interested in fungi, the intricate web they weave between trees and how trees use this web to communicate and share resources.
Cover Cropping in Western Canada by Kevin R. Elmy
Getting started with cover crops often leads to more questions than answers. How to get started? Which plants to choose? What is a ‘functional group’? Luckily, Saskatchewan’s own cover cropping guru has pulled together his vast knowledge in this easy to reference book, Cover Cropping in Western Canada, walking you through many of the most common cover crop species for the Canadian prairies (and beyond) – their uses, strengths, concerns and much more!
Quality Agriculture by John Kempf
Filled with information on a wide variety of regenerative topics, this book is a compilation of interviews between Kempf and a variety of regenerative subject matter experts. It contains insights from folks like Michael McNeill, Don Huber, Jerry Hatfield, Robert Kremer, Gabe Brown, Dr. Kris Nichols, Dr. Jonathan Lundgren, Klaas Martens, Gary Zimmer, Tom Dykstra, Ed Curry, Dr. Gerald Pollack and Matt Kleinhenz. If you are interested in regenerative agriculture and want to get a crash course from those who know it best, Quality Agriculture is a great place to start!
Digging into Canadian Soils – An Introduction to Soil Science edited by Maja Krzic, Frances L Walley, Amanda Diochon, Maxime C. Paré, and Richard E. Farrell
Written entirely by members of the Canadian Society of Soil Science, Digging into Canadian Soils is an open access textbook that is available to anyone and everyone who’s interested in learning about soils and soil health in Canada! This is a true hidden gem of a book designed to make Canadian soils accessible to everyone.
Holistic Management by Allan Savory with Jody Butterfield
Holistic Management is by no stretch of the imagination a new book on the scene – in fact, it was touting regenerative practices and a regenerative mindset before they were mainstream ideas! So chalk full of ideas, this book might best be approached as almost a textbook rather than a work of non-fiction. A must read for anyone interested in understanding their (agricultural) system and the world around them.
Not Just Dirt by Kevin Elmy
Not Just Dirt is a very accessible read that can be picked up by anyone from the regen ag novice to the well weathered producer. There’s something in it for everyone. In this book, Elmy starts strong by laying a clear foundation for regenerative ag including applications from both conventional and organic modes of production. He delves into the “how” behind common management techniques and their often unintended consequences on the soil.
Hydrate the Earth by Ananda Fitzsimmons
We often talk about how climate change is affecting the water cycle and weather around the world. But what about how changes to the water cycle are affecting climate change. In her paradigm shifting book Hydrate the Earth, Fitzsimmons delves into the water cycles (both large and small), how we’re affecting them and how they may be the quickest and most impactful way we have to address climate change. A quick read, the depth of this book will have you wanting to reread it before you’ve put it down for the first time!
When Weeds Talk by Jay L. McCaman
Many of us see weeds as a problem – voraciously growing plants that steal space and resources from our crops and garden beds. Unfortunately, what we don’t always realize is that weeds aren’t actually the problem – they’re there to solve our soil problems for us, we just need to recognize what they’re telling us. Our absolute favourite part of When Weeds Talk is the extensive ‘Sheet 1’ table that lists many of our most common weeds and their ecological associations, providing instant insight into why they’re in our fields and what they’re trying to tell us.
Dirt to Soil: One Family’s Journey into Regenerative Agriculture by Gabe Brown
Dirt to Soil is a journey from conventional to regenerative farming, full of practical insights and inspiring stories. Brown’s experience shows how regenerative agriculture can revive ecosystems, improve soil health, and make farms more profitable.
The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan
This insightful book delves into how our food choices impact our health, the environment, and society. At the heart of Pollan’s exploration lies the fundamental question, ‘What should we have for dinner?’ Through this lens, The Omnivore’s Dilemma challenges us to reconsider the significance of our dietary decisions and the broader compounding impact they have on our world.
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Braiding Sweetgrass shares Indigenous wisdom and ecological insights that remind us of our connection to the land and the importance of stewardship. Kimmerer captures the essence of organic regenerative with this quote: “The job is never over; it simply changes from one task to the next. What I’m looking for, I suppose, is balance, and that is a moving target. Balance is not a passive resting place—it takes work, balancing the giving and the taking, the raking out and the putting in.”
Practical Regeneration: Realistic Strategies for Climate Smart Agriculture by Scott Gillespie
Practical Regeneration follows a simple path that keeps the reader engaged throughout. It begins with Gillespie’s research and observational assessments throughout his years as an agronomist, and continues into the basics of regenerative principles and how farmers can start implementing them on their fields. It finishes off with some expert tips to refine these practices as well as examples of how farmers can expect amazing changes in profit and soil health in the future.
Leveraging the Beneficial Connections Between Plants and Soil Organisms
This Regen Reads Recommendation is an article written about Jo Tobias called “Leveraging the beneficial connections between plants and soil organisms”. Jo Tobias is the Founder of RootShoot Soils, and she aims to restore soil health through the use of robust composting techniques. Tobias is a library of knowledge and a living compost expert. She is an advocate for jumpstarting dying soils with nutrient-rich compost that provides nourishment to soil biology and brings life back to the soil.
Build Your Own Bioreactor
This Regen Reads Recommendation is an article written about Franck Groeneweg titled “Build your own bioreactor” from Grainews! Groeneweg is an experienced farmer whose expertise crosses over multiple borders and continents, and his vast knowledge of regenerative agriculture is part of the reason that his farm, Living Sky Grains, is an inspiration for all ecological farmers.
Managing Cover Crops Profitably from SARE Outreach
Cover crops are superstars in regenerative organic agriculture, and it’s no surprise that producers all over the world have incorporated cover crops in their operations to boost overall soil health. They are amazing tools for reducing pest pressure, maintaining nutrient cycling, providing alternate means of income, and so much more. But how do you know which cover crop species or blends to include in your operation, based on your own individual context? Managing Cover Crops Profitably can help answer this big crop question!
Call of the Reed Warbler by Charles Massy
Massy is a 5th-generation Australian farmer who advocates for ecological and regenerative farming as the solution to climate change and soil degradation. His book, Call of the Reed Warbler, delves into his life as a conventional farmer struggling to keep up with an intense drought in the late 1980s. His decision to transition to regenerative practices led him on a path of healing the soil through natural processes and returning soil health to what it used to be before chemical inputs and heavy tillage.
The Serviceberry: An Economy of Abundance by Robin Wall Kimmerer
In The Serviceberry, as Indigenous scientist and author of Braiding Sweetgrass Robin Wall Kimmerer harvests serviceberries alongside the birds, she considers the ethic of reciprocity that lies at the heart of the gift economy. How, she asks, can we learn from Indigenous wisdom and the plant world to reimagine what we value most? As Kimmerer explains, “Serviceberries show us another model, one based upon reciprocity, where wealth comes from the quality of your relationships, not from the illusion of self-sufficiency.”
What Your Food Ate by David Montgomery and Anne Biklé
What Your Food Ate integrates old and new science to present studies that reveal shocking and sometimes unsettling facts about our food systems and their means of production. Join these authors as they discuss how farm management directly impacts the crops grown, which in turn affects the humans that consume them.
Managing Pasture by Dale Strickler
In Managing Pasture, Strickler shares in-depth but approachable insights on how to care for the land in a way that supports healthy and profitable livestock while also providing plenty of environmental benefits. With the capacity to do all this, it’s easy to see why the detailed ideas shared in this book can help farmers feel like they’re able to unlock pasture’s superpowers!
Practical No-Till Farming by Andrew Mefferd
In Practical No-Till Farming Mefferd provides a “quick and dirty” guide to growing organic vegetables and flowers with common no-till methods. He discusses their pros (and cons), how to make them work for your context, and helpful strategies for dealing with specific weeds and pests.
Looking for even more content to continue on your regenerative organic learning journey? Check out our Regenerative Organic Hub for a wealth of related content!
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