Farmers are the backbone of self-reliant communities; they are treasures.

Our Rockbridge neighbors carry an intimate understanding of their land’s flora, fauna, soils, streams, slopes, and seasons. Their stewardship generates abundance: food to nourish our bodies and minds, habitat for nature’s creatures, soils which keep carbon where it belongs.

Those who farm understand life’s rhythms. Today the cycles and systems that have long sustained us are out of balance — not just ecologically, but economically too. Despite best intentions, these days it often doesn’t pay to do the right thing. How can doing the right thing also become profitable again?  After all, farmers have to eat too.

COREworks tackles this problem by rewarding farmers who tend their land in ways that actively restore its health. How does this incentive system work? Simple.

• • Demonstrate that a year of implementing your regenerative farming practices has increased the amount of nutrient-rich carbon in your soil, and receive a COREworks “bonus.”
  • Use that bonus toward another year of “carbon farming,” and so on, in a positive feedback loop.

Flipping ag-as-usual on its head, COREworks helps farmers generate income from the value of what is returned to the land, rather than simply from what is extracted.

These practices not only prevent soil loss, but reverse it. That means they leave the land more fertile as a result. How do we know? Field-based scientific research.

COREworks regenerative farming projects adopt professionally-vetted research methods for determining the value of conservation credits generated by each farmer’s annual endeavors. The greater the demonstration of carbon return, the greater the bonus — and the data gives us proof.

What kind of evidence-based practices restore soil? For Rockbridge County, these practices focus on specific ways to manage crops, meadows, and livestock grazing. Carefully applied, the practices set in motion a cascade of benefits:

• • The soils regain nutrients and micro-fauna, which in turn creates more soil — immediately starting to reverse a century’s long process of depletion and erosion.
  • The process of regeneration draws down huge amounts of carbon from the atmosphere (where we don’t want it) into the ground (where we do).
  • Once restored, the soils support flourishing plant growth whose blooms feed pollinators and whose roots retain water. Happier bees, cleaner streams, healthier communities: what’s not to love?

Investing in regenerative agriculture is good for farmers, good for consumers, and good for the earth that sustains us all.