LIBERTY TOWNSHIP, Ohio – Taking a course in permaculture design was an eye-opening experience for Nancy Duker, who operates a regenerative farm in Liberty Township.

All her life, Duker had heard about agriculture’s destructive impact on the environment.

After acquiring property in 2013 where she today operates Bending Oak Educational Farm, she looked for someone who could “help heal the land,” which had been clear cut, and the topsoil removed from it.

She subsequently took a class to obtain permaculture design certification.

Permaculture is an approach to land management and settlement design that adopts arrangements observed in flourishing natural ecosystems.

Regenerative farming is an offshoot of permaculture.

“It’s essentially about working with nature to tip the scales in our favor,” says Duker, whose background includes asset management, social work and property management.

She is not alone in the regenerative farming industry in the Mahoning Valley.

“Regenerative simply means restoring the land back to its natural or healthier state,” Sophia Buggs, owner of Lady Buggs Pharm, a 1.3-acre regenerative farm in Youngstown, says.

Born and raised in Youngstown, Buggs says her mother took her to central Florida when she was 10 years old, but she would return during summers, where she helped tend her grandmother’s garden. A self-described outdoors person, she moved back to the area about 15 years ago.

“That was my dream, to just grow [my grandmother’s] garden, but I wasn’t expecting to do urban farming,” she says. “I didn’t think I would make space for 1.3 acres of space to grow here.”

Her focus shifted when she recognized the degree of food insecurity around her. “I did not realize when I came back home how Youngstown was really challenged with healthy food access,” she says. Despite that, no one appeared to be talking about using vacant lots in the city for gardening or farming.

“Urban agriculture is not just about food sovereignty. It’s also about land conservancy. It’s also about wellness. It’s also a way for you to be in tune with the natural resources, like the air, the wind, the sun, the soil,” she remarks.

Bronson Family Farm is in its first growing season. Operator Constance Burgess recently hosted a soft launch of the agritourism center, located on property at Youngstown’s Lansdowne Airport that she is developing under a land use agreement.

Burgess laid cardboard boxes, which are made primarily of wood, on the ground and soaked them. She then put in mulch, leaves, tree limbs and similar materials, and added compost on top of that. Other food waste is then added to decompose and thereby feed the plants. Worms add additional nutrients.

“You’ve got all kinds of life living in this area,” Burgess says “We want to live with the life that exists here. We don’t want to replace it.” Crops will be rotated so the soil benefits from what is being grown.

Burgess, who came to Youngstown from California to be closer to her son and grandchildren, was interested in expanding her food options to help manage her Type 2 diabetes and to address high food prices. Like Buggs, a farming course she took through Cleveland State University opened her eyes to doing something beyond a garden to address food insecurity, “which I hadn’t been exposed to before, until I moved here,” she says.

The class required her to develop a plan, she continues. Hers was to create a farm for agritourism, one that would embrace the Mahoning Valley’s history.

Nature Based

Doing regenerative farming requires using systems that are nature based, Buggs says. That means low-till or no-till farming so as not to scrape away the nutrients of the soil for the sake of planting; employing natural pest management and fertilization methods; and planting plant species that are native to northeastern Ohio, Buggs says.

“Those practices regenerate the soil and make it healthier and better, so I am literally returning the soil to a healthier state than how I found it,” she says.

Features of Bending Oak include an onsite cob oven, cabins and campsites, Duker says. Electricity for the property is generated by solar panels and stored in a salt water battery installed earlier this year. The fenced-in fruit tree orchard contain apple, pear, peach, cherry, plumb, quince and medlar trees, with grapes growing along the fencing as well as supporting plants to fill in the ecosystem.

“In an ecosystem in nature, you’ll never find a monocrop,” or a single crop grown on the same land year after year, Duker says “You’d never find a field of wheat or a field of corn. You’re going to find wheat and corn in amongst a variety of other plants. That’s because in an ecosystem, each plant has a job.”

Some plants fix nitrogen in the soil, while others sequester carbon.

Mixing crops also has another purpose, she says – preventing pests from wiping out the entire orchard.

“The pest of an apple is not the same pest of a pear or a plum,” she explains.

Understanding how plants grow, what they need and how to sustain them until they produce fruit is “an entire topic of discussion,” Burgess says.

Visitors have learned that a single seed can produce a bush that tuns out 60 pieces of fruit, when they’re spending $5 for a single piece of fruit at the grocery store.

Pictured at top: Nancy Duker stands next to a cob oven at Bending Oak Operational Farm.