How We Farm

At Rocklands Farm, we seek to foster reverence, intimacy, and stewardship in our community through holistic land management and practicing regenerative agriculture, focusing on growing grass and building healthy soil while imitating nature’s patterns and processes in order to provide you with delicious, nutrient-dense wine, meat, and eggs.

What is Regenerative Agriculture?

Regenerative agriculture is a step beyond sustainability - while traditional western agriculture depletes natural resources, and sustainable agriculture seeks to conserve current resource levels, regenerative practices increase those resources in both quantity and quality for utilization by future generations.

Regenerative agriculture practices use holistic land management, a system which considers the diverse social, economic, and ecological factors that come into play on the farm. A farmer managing their land holistically uses biomimicry (the imitation of nature) to create a system in which each organism is recognized as part of the greater ecosystem - just like a symphony, where individual notes come together to form whole movements, the farm becomes a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts, from microscopic organisms in the soil to large grazing animals on the pasture.

Creation is the model for our management philosophy and farming systems: from ecosystem function, to livestock husbandry, to vine vigor, nature provides an incredible model for healthy land, healthy plants and animals, and healthy people. It turns out that imitating nature’s patterns and functions also serves to build soil carbon, which drastically increases soil health, as well as removing carbon from the atmosphere.

So how does it work?

Think about the natural spaces that you see every day. Even in a city, plants and animals manage to spring up and thrive, and though we may not think of a vacant suburban lot as a natural oasis, the spaces in our communities that don’t get our attention often become lush and green seemingly overnight, boasting an incredible diversity of species and creatures contributing to the same system. That’s because the earth was created to produce fruit! When we use this as an example for agricultural production, we end up with systems that work together and increase overall food yield instead of stripping the land of its resources.

A regenerative system focuses on biodiversity and soil health - crops grow together like they would in the wild, and livestock are rotated frequently through pastures in dense groups, as they would in migrating herds. Raising animals on pasture with rotational grazing mimics the natural cycles of grasslands and large grazing herbivores, improving water retention capacity of soil, decreasing nutrient runoff and erosion, increasing soil carbon through plant and soil growth, and encouraging healthy functioning of soil biology, including methanotrophic bacteria. This rotation ensures the freshest grass for the herd, but most importantly causes pasture plants to photosynthesize more rapidly, pushing the carbon they absorb from the sun into their roots, revitalizing the soil and increasing the overall health of the land.