Month: October 2021
Airflow
Air is something we take for granted. It’s all around us and available in unlimited quantities but how many of us consciously think about our breath in terms of our health?
How about if I told you that breathing could be one of your most important tools for detoxification managing stress and achieving calm focused energy. And did you know that by helping our soils breathe we could help to reverse climate change?
Now let’s learn how to breathe, shall we?
It sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? But most of us spend all day shallow breathing, taking short rapid breaths using only our upper chest; this leads to many negative physiological consequences.
To breathe optimally we need to take three steps.
- Take a slow deep breath in through your nose.
- Breathe down into your belly.
- Breathe out slowly, taking longer than you take to inhale.
We can live for weeks without food, days without water, and just minutes without oxygen – proper airflow matters.
Oxygen is really important to survival and health – it’s our number one source of energy. We spend a great deal of time and money optimising our diet with organic vegetables and 100% grass-fed meats and often overlook that getting oxygen out of our haemoglobin into our tissues and organs is the most fundamental of health factors.
Having optimal oxygen levels promotes the creation of white blood cells and helps the body to absorb nutrients efficiently. With every deep functional breath, your lungs fill with oxygen that is transported in your blood to other detoxing organs including the lymphatic system, kidneys, colon, and the uterus in women.
As we exhale we eliminate part of the body’s waste in the form of carbon dioxide. By breathing deeply we take in more oxygen that cleanses the body, and by exhaling deeply we eliminate more waste. Both actions have an overall detoxifying effect on the body.
We often take breathing for granted and underestimate the importance of drawing awareness to our breath. However, this can result in shallow breathing with side effects that include fatigue and decreased tissue function. Additionally, the brain uses 20% of the oxygen you breathe in, it simply cannot function to its fullest potential if it is not receiving enough oxygen.
In fact, 70% of our detoxification occurs through the breath and only 30% of detoxification occurs from sweating! If the 25,000 or so daily breaths are not optimal then we will simply not be capable of being truly healthy.
So okay it is clear that we want to improve the quality of oxygen we are taking into our bodies, fresh clean air is going to win every time. But in the case of optimal breathing, it isn’t simply a case of taking in as much oxygen as possible. In fact, most of us are over-breathing!
Patrick McKeown, Author of the Oxygen Advantage says it this way; ‘’the presence of carbon dioxide loosens the bond between oxygen and haemoglobin within red blood cells’’ in a nutshell, we need a build-up of CO2 in the blood to facilitate the transfer of oxygen from the blood to the organs and tissues.
Humans are designed to breathe through their noses. Our ancient ancestors only ever relied upon mouth breathing for periods of extreme exertion and then quickly reverted to breathing through their nose again. Why? Because breathing this way maintains the perfect balance of oxygen and carbon dioxide for effective transfer of oxygen and removal of carbon dioxide in our tissues and organs.
We need to get comfortable with breathing less – increasing our tolerance for higher levels of carbon dioxide in our tissues – not more, ideally taking between 3.5 and 5 breaths per minute taken gently through your nose.
In addition to breathing through your nose rather than our mouth, we need to ensure that when inhaling we are expanding our underappreciated diaphragm by pulling the air down towards our belly rather than inflating only the top of our lungs and expanding the rib cage.
The last step of breathing optimally is to ensure you breathe out slowly, taking longer to exhale than inhale. This ‘flips the switch’ on your stress levels shifting you from ‘fight or flight’ instead triggering a relaxation response.
A great way to train yourself to breathe correctly is to take regular ‘breathing’ breaks where you can take several optimal breaths to help train your diaphragm muscles and take the opportunity to be mindful as you calm your physiology through the long calming exhale.
And it’s not just zen masters and yogi’s who have mastered the art of breathing correctly to take control of their minds, navy seals fully understand the importance of breathing to control their parasympathetic nervous system in order to make clear-headed calm decisions under extreme pressure.
See Ex-Navy Seal Mark Divine use the ‘box breathing’ technique to help calm and control a racing mind to clear the way for good decision making.
Researchers have also shown that using the above breathing technique can help us step in between stimulus and response, effectively boosting our willpower.
There are many types of breathwork and ‘how to breathe’ can be as controversial as ‘what to eat.’ The point is to take notice of how you are breathing and do some research.
There are several breathwork approaches. You may want to try out a few different techniques over time to see which type most resonates with you and brings about the best results.
Types of breathwork include:
The importance of breath is important for human health but in regenerative agriculture, we also focus on ensuring our soils can breathe optimally too. Why? Because if our soils can’t breathe, plants cannot properly access nutrients and water so productivity is significantly reduced.
In functional soil, plants achieve nutrients through a symbiosis with the soil food web of microscopic organisms. These tiny bacteria, fungi, and microscopic predators exchange minerals that are normally unavailable with sugary exudates produced by the plant during photosynthesis. If these soil organisms cannot access adequate air and get rid of the waste gasses then they are unable to perform these nutrient exchange services to the plants.
Plants need nitrogen and other nutrients to grow. Nitrogen is one of the most significant limiting factors in production.
The mismanagement of nitrogen, however, is the single largest agriculturally destructive practice. It burns out humus, leaches calcium, acidifies the soil, contaminates ground and surface water and produces nitrous oxide, the most potent greenhouses. Nitrous oxide then returns as nitric acid and destroys forests and symbiotic fungi in the soil through acidifying rainfall!
In compacted soils with poor structure, the airflow is restricted so the microbes responsible for cycling nutrients and fixing nitrogen cannot do their job. 78% of air is made up of nitrogen and there are millions of free-living nitrogen-fixing bacteria in the soil and root nodules of legumes that can turn this nitrogen in the air into important food for plants. If these pathways are not available then farmers become more and more reliant on artificial forms of nitrogen and other artificial nutrients.
Upwards of 40% of all nitrogen applied to farmland is either lost through groundwater into the rivers and sea or volatilises into the atmosphere – either way it’s an environmental disaster.
Globally we have increased grain production 4 fold by increasing nitrogen input 23 fold. This is not a sustainable way to produce food.
Improving soil health, soil structure and therefore the ability of microbes to breathe in the nitrogen-rich air we could take great steps to reduce or eliminate the use of artificial nitrogen in our food production systems – often with minimal or no loss of yield.
Healthy functional soils can continue to feed plants indefinitely – as long as there is sunshine, rainfall, bedrock and air then this miraculous symbiosis between plant and soil life can offer a truly sustainable way of growing nutrient-dense food.
Ancient cultures referred to and revered the classical elements of water, earth, fire, air, and (later) aether, which were proposed to explain the nature and complexity of all matter in terms of simpler substances. Ancient cultures in Greece, Tiber, and India had similar lists, sometimes referring in local languages to “air” as “wind” and the fifth element as “void”.
So it seems that throughout history the importance of air as a fundamental force of nature has been recognised.
Optimising our inner airflow and that of the soils and landscapes we rely upon to produce our food could indeed be a big piece of the puzzle for attaining truly sustainable whole system health.
Farm Profile: Meet Rhiwlas Farm
About the Rhiwlas
We are partnering with Flora and Richard the owners of this stunning farm near Bala in Wales.
Flora and Richard have been working with Caroline and the Wilderculture team to transition the farm to regenerative agriculture/Wilderculture and explore how to achieve ecological restoration through the use of hardy native livestock on their upland areas. The farm’s mountain ground of the farm includes a wide range of internationally important habitats including blanket bog, dry heath and wet heath.
The farming system.
The farm rears Welsh Black cattle and Welsh mountain sheep which are managed in an extensive and low input system. The farm is in the process of taking the next big step to becoming a truly sustainable production system that uses the livestock as a tool to sequester carbon, improve watersheds and restore biodiversity by transitioning to a combination of regenerative grazing and carefully planned conservation grazing on the mountain.
At Rhiwlas the mountain is run as an open grazing area with only a perimeter fence and no fences between several other farms. Currently, the sheep and a few cattle are managed in line with the prescriptions created to try to protect the feature habitats of the special area of conservation (SAC). The optimal stocking rate for each habitat is added together to dictate the number of livestock across the whole area.
In Wilderculture we cover the importance of relative palatability and when designing grazing plans we group habitats in terms of palatability and forage production to help work out where grazers will spend most of the time and tend to overgraze if they are given the choice.
Every grazing animal has a preference for certain species of plants which is commonly referred to as palatability. Palatability is however a complex concept and is not fixed, it can be influenced by learned behaviours, the current nutrient requirements of the animal and may change with the seasons or be influenced by complimentary nutritional offerings.
In reality, what appears to be happening at Rhiwlas is that the sheep spend too much time on the acid grassland and dry heath leading to overgrazing and a contraction of the area and species diversity of those habitats, and too little time on the blanket bog areas leading to under impact and an unfavourable condition.
Overall this blanket management approach is leading to a loss of production for the farm and the decline of some very important and rare habitats.
Working with Wilderculture, Flora and Richard are keen to understand more about the drivers behind the preferences of the livestock.
In an exciting new project, Rhiwlas is one of the partners in the Partneriaeth Rhostir Gogledd Cymru/North Wales Moorland Partnership which has received EU funding under the RDP sustainable management scheme.
For over a year using a range of methods including satellite collars, camera traps and visual survey work we will be monitoring where the sheep and cattle – as well as wild grazers – spend most of their time grazing throughout the seasons. We hope to be able to start to build a picture of which habitats are being grazed preferentially and the percentage of time grazing livestock and wildlife spend on each habitat type.
Creating this baseline is important and will help inform the development of grazing plans that can be more regenerative for upland habitat mosaics.
We hope further research and trials will come of this initial piece of work and lead to the development of projects to teach active herding/shepherding skills along with the use of proactive complimentary nutrition as a tool for the regeneration of our uplands.
Primal Meats are working with Rhiwlas to offer some of their 100% grass-fed meats to you as a way of supporting their transition to fully regenerative principles and practices.
Report; ‘Soil health: a national security profile’
Report identifies poor soil health as national security threat.
A report, Soil health: a national security profile, launched today by the Food & Global Security Network, calls on ministers to formally recognise healthy soil as a strategic asset, critical for maintaining food and societal security.
It says that defence departments globally should work with departments for agriculture and the environment to jointly oversee delivery of increased food sovereignty within nations and the regeneration of soil function. In the UK, the Ministry of Defence should work with Defra.
Ffinlo Costain, chief executive of Farmwel and founder of the Food & Global Security Network, said;
‘The right to affordable nutrition underpins peace and civil stability, but the impacts of climate disruption and biodiversity loss are already affecting food production. If we see a 2C rise in global temperatures, which now seems increasingly likely, we could experience extreme disruption in global food supplies. When food is scarce, prices rise, inequality increases and simmering resentments can turn rapidly into conflict and even war. Healthy soil and a balanced ecosystem are critical for food sovereignty and a peaceful society.’
Soil health: a national security profile was published by the Food & Global Security Network, a project of Farmwel, supported by FAI Farms.
The report profiles the critical importance of soil health through the independent writings of 22 experts – military minds, NGO leaders, scientists and practical farmers. Writers include Rear Admiral Neil Morisetti (the UK’s former Climate and Energy Security Envoy), Patrick Holden, Øistein Thorsen, Sue Pritchard, Martin Lines, Walter Jehne, Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin and George Young.
Global security is maintained by taking steps to mitigate future threats. Now, in addition to traditional state-on-state or intra-state threats, we face non-traditional threats, the most important of which can be characterised as ‘ecological breakdown’.
The extreme weather events associated with global warming, coupled with the loss of biodiversity and soil structure, could have devastating impacts on harvests around the world. While food scarcity is a recognised accelerant of instability, it is soil biodiversity in particular that is critical in minimising and mitigating this risk.
Ffinlo Costain said;
‘We urge governments and food businesses to take the security risks associated with soil degradation and ecological breakdown extremely seriously. We see agroecology as a low risk and low cost solution that can mitigate the security threats connected with poor soil health. With COP26 in sight, agroecology and regenerative farming can produce great food locally and at scale, while greatly accelerating carbon drawdown, regenerating biodiversity, and managing precipitation to provide greater drought resilience and better flood protection.’
Useful links
- Website Food and Security: foodandsecurity.net
- Watch the recording of the webinar here.