This article first appeared in our March 7th, 2023, newsletter, and is adapted in blog form here.

One of the exciting events taking place for our farm this year is the Soil Health Academy (SHA) workshop I’m (Skip) attending next week, sponsored by Understanding Ag, LLC, and hosted by White Oak Pastures in Bluffton, GA.  See the brochure below the preorder buttons to learn more about this workshop.  I registered for the event a few months ago, and was graciously awarded a partial scholarship, for which we are eternally grateful.  If you are a gardener, rancher, farmer, or just a nature-lover, this event may be for you.  We include this information for our readers if for no other reason than so you will understand our mindset with respect to how we farm.

If you have been a subscriber/reader of our's for any length of time, you have no doubt heard of regenerative agriculture.  We have given you our definitions of what regenerative ag is.  But the best definition we’ve heard/read is the one recently given by Understanding Ag co-founder, SHA co-instructor, and North Dakota rancher Gabe Brown.  Regenerative ag is “farming and ranching in synchrony with nature to repair, rebuild, revitalize, and restore ecosystem function starting with all life in the soil, moving to all life above the soil” (Working Cows podcast interview, Ep. 283).

With that succinct but powerful definition in mind as to why we do what we do, we want to build on that fundamental concept.  We will be throwing a lot of info at you in future blogs.  Our hope is that you find this information invaluable with how you look at the natural world around you.

As a prerequisite for this workshop, I had to take the Regen AG 101 class virtually, with the cost included in my tuition to SHA.  What follows in this and the next couple of blogs are some of the core concepts taught in that class.

At the SHA, the instructors teach the 6:3:4™.  The 6:3:4™ is explained as follows:

6 Principles of Soil Health – we’ll expound on these soon

3 Rules of Adaptive Stewardship – will be explained in the coming weeks

4 Ecosystem Processes – will also be covered in the coming weeks

NOTE: The thrust of the 6:3:4™ methodology is the emphasis on a high level of adaptive management, and is in no way a prescriptive approach.  Dr. Allen Williams, another instructor for Understanding Ag, says that the moment one seeks to make the 6:3:4™ prescriptive “is the moment they are no longer adaptive and regenerative.”