Project Hero Soil Quest - Explore: Healing the Soil

• In this resource, students can watch several short videos on regenerative farming practices, record their observations in a journal, compare images of regenerative and conventional farms, and complete a survey of home plant care products.
• Students will learn how regenerative agriculture practices like no-till, cover crops, permaculture, managed grazing, enriching the soil with compost, avoiding pesticides, rotating crops, and traditional Indigenous techniques can improve the soil and store more carbon.

Positives

• Students will watch several excellent videos about regenerative farming methods that show how certain practices make the soil healthier while increasing crop yields and productivity.
• Students may be surprised to learn that some traditional Indigenous farming methods eliminate the need for dangerous pesticides and fertilizers.
  

Additional Prerequisites

• This is part of the Explore section of the Project Hero Soil Quest. Make sure to check out the first section of step four, which deals with harming the soil.
• The Virtual Student Guide explains the activities.
• The book button displays additional resources that can be explored.

Differentiation

• Teachers can modify this resource by selecting which videos to use and choosing how much time to devote to each section.
• Cross-curricular connections can be made with social studies and history classes when discussing how sustainable Indigenous farming practices were replaced by soil-damaging industrial farming practices.
• Earth science classes could delve deeper into the no-till section of the resource to discuss why soil that has not been tilled can hold more water than tilled soil. 
• Science classes can integrate some of these videos into lessons about biodiversity, pollution, deforestation, and erosion.
  
• Other resources on this topic include this video on traditional Mayan forest farming methods, this video on Hopi dryland farming, and this Ecosia video on regenerative agriculture.
  

The resource highlights the impacts of regenerative farming methods on soil and climate. When used in conjunction with conventional farming, this technique helps the soil recover its health and biodiversity, boost its capacity to retain carbon and water, and enhance the quality of adjacent water resources. This is suggested for classroom use.