Ronnie Cummins was the cofounder and director of the Organic Consumers Association and a longtime advocate for organic agriculture and food-system reform.
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The agave-powered agroforestry and livestock management system is an example of how native desert plants, cultivated as part of an agroforestry system, can regenerate drylands and provide inexpensive animal feed, taking pressure off overgrazed rangelands.
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Ronnie Cummins was the cofounder and director of the Organic Consumers Association (OCA), a nonprofit, US-based network of more than two million consumers dedicated to safeguarding organic standards and promoting a healthy, just, and regenerative system of food, farming, and commerce. Cummins also served on the steering committee of Regeneration International and OCA’s Mexican affiliate, Vía Orgánica.
An activist, organizer, and writer since the 1960s, Cummins worked on human rights, anti-war, anti-nuclear, labor, consumer, environmental, and sustainable agriculture campaigns. He is the author of Grassroots Rising: A Call to Action on Climate, Farming, Food, and a Green New Deal, and the co-author of The Regenerative Agriculture Solution: A Revolutionary Approach to Building Soil, Creating Climate Resilience, and Supporting Human and Planetary Health. Cummins passed away in Mexico on April 26, 2023.Publications by this author
A Call to Action on Climate, Farming, Food, and a Green New Deal
Chelsea Green Publishing | January | 2020
Grassroots Rising is a passionate call to action for the global body politic, providing practical solutions for how to survive—and thrive—in catastrophic times. Author Ronnie Cummins, founder and director of the Organic Consumers Association, aims to educate and inspire citizens worldwide to organize and become active participants in preventing ecological collapse.
This book offers a blueprint for building and supercharging a grassroots Regeneration Movement based on:
• Consumer activism
• Farmer innovation
• Political change
• Regenerative finance
Cummins asserts that the solution lies right beneath our feet and at the end of our forks through the transformation of our broken food system. Using regenerative agriculture practices that restore our agricultural and grazing lands, we can sequester massive amounts of carbon in the soil. Coupled with an aggressive transition toward renewables, he argues that we have the power to not only mitigate and slow down climate change, but actually reverse global warming by strengthening our infrastructure.
Grassroots Rising shows that a properly organized and executed Regeneration Revolution can indeed offer realistic climate solutions while also meeting our everyday needs.
Is it possible that the solution to the global climate emergency lies in a “waste” agricultural product?
The best-kept secret in today’s world is that solutions to some of our most pressing issues—food insecurity, deforestation, overgrazing, water scarcity, rural poverty, forced migration—lie in adopting, improving, and scaling up organic and regenerative agriculture best practices.
The Regenerative Agriculture Solution starts with the story of how two brothers—Jose and Gilberto Flores—are at the leading edge of this approach, pioneering the use of the previously discarded leaves of the prodigious agave plant to regenerate agricultural soils, reduce erosion, and improve water capture.
When Ronnie Cummins, the cofounder of Organic Consumer Association (OCA) and Regeneration International, met the Flores brothers in 2019 and witnessed their revolutionary agave agroforestry system, he knew they were onto something important.
Cummins had spent decades studying the potential and pitfalls of organic and regenerative agriculture and knew best practices when he saw them. He started to write a book about Flores’s brother and other visionary people, such as Dr Vandana Shiva, Allan Savory, and John Liu, who started landscape-scale regeneration projects. The scientific data was even more convincing, suggesting that these projects—and others like it—could revolutionize how we understand the climate catastrophe.
Sadly, Cummins passed away in April 2023, in the midst of working on the book. Not to leave this work unfinished, Ronnie’s widow and OCA cofounder, Rose, called on their friend, colleague, and collaborator, Regeneration International’s cofounder André Leu, to complete the work and place the Flores brothers’ breakthroughs in the broader context of regenerative agriculture solutions to the world’s many interlocking ecological crises.
The result isThe Regenerative Agriculture Solution, a book that shows how regenerating our forests, rangelands, and farming ecosystems can cool our planet, restore the climate, and enrich our communities.