The 4 Ecosystem Processes
This article first appeared in our April 18th, 2023, newsletter, and is adapted in blog form here.
We’ve been covering the 6:3:4™ of regenerative agriculture, courtesy of Understanding Ag LLC, the past few blogs - the 6 principles of soil health (see our new blog post!) and the 3 rules of adaptive stewardship. The 6 and the 3 drive the 4. This time we will discuss the 4 of the 6:3:4™ - 4 ecosystem processes. These processes are freely and readily available to everyone on the planet.
Energy Cycle – Sunlight beaming down on plants drives photosynthesis. If we see growth in our pastures, we may think our pastures are doing well and call it a day. However, we should really examine if we are in fact maximizing photosynthesis, or, to put it in different way, if we are leaking photosynthesis… If we are grazing our pastures too short, we lose leaf surface area, thereby inhibiting the photosynthetic ability of that plant, the plant eventually dies, and our pastures – and by extension our animals – become less and less healthy. If we lack diversity in pastures, we are allowing photosynthetic leakage. The more diverse pastures allow plants of different heights and structures, and allow photosynthesis to take place on a grander scale – leading to healthier pastures and animals.
2. Water Cycle – The underground aquifers and springs in the earth are dependent on how well the soils above infiltrate water via rainfall, snowmelt, and irrigation. In these crazy weather patterns we have, with large amounts of rainfall falling in a short amount of time, are our soils able to capture and hold that water, or does it runoff quickly, creating erosion (think wind erosion as well) and flooding concerns? As an aside, the rampant flooding we have now has much less to do with a changing climate and more about poor farming practices over decades of misuse and abuse of soils leading to poor water infiltration in those soils. Good water retention occurs when we have good soils – which itself begins with good biology.
Rampant flooding (left) is a result of poor water infiltration into our soils, and further results in dryer soils (below) unable to handle current high rainfall events.
3. Mineral Cycle – The mineral, or nutrient, cycle is best served with a good biological component to the soil. The nutrients originate from a wide variety of sources – rocks, rain, animal manure and urine, decaying plant material, and dead and decaying microorganisms.
4. Diversity – If you’ve been paying attention to the 6:3:4™ we have been espousing the last several weeks, you may recall that diversity is the only ecosystem process that is also one of the 6 principles of soil health AND one of the 3 rules of adaptive stewardship. Diversity is that important! We have been preaching from the proverbial pulpit that the greater diversity we have, the greater the entire ecosystem functions – from soil microbes to plants to birds and wildlife. Diversity builds resiliency, life, complexity, and health!
This sums up the 4 ecosystem processes. These processes are critical for regenerative agriculture, which we have an awesome updated definition of as follows - regenerative agriculture is “farming and ranching in synchrony with nature and the 4 ecosystem processes to repair, rebuild, revitalize, and restore ecosystem function starting with the life beneath the soil and expanding to life above the soil” (Understanding Ag, LLC).
Next time, let’s look at a case study of the 6:3:4™ in action - a remarkable story of how one can turn a desert into grassland…
For more information regarding the 6:3:4™, please visit Understanding Ag’s explanation of their model here.