ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on over 20 years of collaborative soil management research and experimentation in highland, mountainous agriculture. Awareness of this situation has led to a growing number of calls for more productive, sustainable, and regenerative development strategies and major policy redirections in agriculture and food. Colleagues working in diverse contexts – at the Rodale Institute in Pennsylvania, with Healthy Soils Australia, and the Center for Regenerative Agriculture and Resilient Systems in California – have converged on a series of agronomic principles and practices to guide a global transition to regenerative agriculture. Situated both north and south of the equator, the northern Andes of Ecuador receives intensive sunlight throughout the year. Cangahua soils are essentially rock that is still undergoing continual weathering. The history of land restoration at Granja Urkuwayku has progressed across three general strategies: physical, chemical, and biological. By 2015, Paredes and Sherwood saw that soil improvement at their farm had reached a limit.
