![]() In February, it released a report called “Farm Forward,” outlining how farms in the watershed can participate in improving water quality and mitigating climate change while also building economic resilience. The Chesapeake Bay Foundation (CBF) has been at the center of those efforts for years. Pennsylvania has implemented it on 30,000 acres with a goal of 169,000. As a part of its Watershed Implementation Plan under the Chesapeake Clean Water Blueprint, the state of Maryland is about half way to a 2025 goal of implementing rotational grazing on 19,500 acres. Most significantly, the Chesapeake Bay has long faced pollution from farm and urban runoff throughout its vast watershed, and many advocates and scientists see converting conventional dairies and commodity cropland to regenerative pasture-based farms as an important solution. “Getting our farmers to help clean up the Bay actually has all these benefits for climate change and for the farmer’s bottom line.” And now, various forces are converging to create opportunities for more farmers to follow in his footsteps, to scale up the practice in this region in a big way. Twenty-five years later, some might see him as the godfather of regenerative grazing in the Mid-Atlantic. But, in 1995, he took a class on rotational grazing, prayed about it, and decided to take his stewardship to the next level. ![]() “It’s just a thrill!”īefore he took over the farm, Holter’s father and grandfather grew corn and other crops in contour strips to feed a barnful of dairy cows there. ![]() “By having roots that deep, we are pumping carbon down deep in the soil,” he says. Wearing a literal feather in his farm cap, he directs attention to the idyllic landscape and talks about how it contributes to the health of waterways and stores soil carbon using sweeping, energetic hand gestures. Over the decades he’s spent fine-tuning his grazing system, he has watched as diversity increased on the ground and in the surrounding environment and soil and water stopped running off the fields. At this point, Holter says, it’s been about 20 years since the soil in his pastures has been bare.
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