About Laurel Hill Farm and Regenerative Agriculture

Laurel Hill Farm is a small scale regenerative farm producing seasonal vegetables, microgreens, mushrooms + eggs in Tabernacle, NJ. 

Regenerative agriculture in general focuses on soil health + building soil. At Laurel Hill Farm we employ a variety of permaculture techniques and systems such as composting, composting with animals, vermicomposting, interplanting, cover cropping, no-till bed preparation and mulching. The general principles are:

1. Disturb the soil as little as possible.

2. Keep the soil covered as much as possible.

3. Keep the soil planted as much as possible.

Overall, our goal is to feed the soil food web and build healthy soil.  This creates the proper habitat to grow healthy plants that are more resilient and thus pesticides, herbicides, fungicides and chemical fertilizers become unnecessary. 

Many farmers and gardeners think of soil as simply a planting medium to which you add seeds and fertilizer, but the reality is far more fascinating.  Soil is actually an entire ecosystem, known as the soil food web or living soil.  The soil food web is made up of a diverse ecosystem of microbes such as bacteria, fungi, nematodes, protozoa, and various anthropods.  In short, plants create their own energy via photosynthesis, then exchange nutrients with different soil microbes in a variety of interesting ways to survive + thrive.  Plants aren't capable of "eating" nutrients the way we are, rather they collect them through various interactions with soil microbes. When a plant photosynthesizes, the carbohydrates produced are mixed with organic acids, hormones, amino acids and other compounds known as root exudates; which the plant excretes through it's roots. These exudates nourish the microbial life in the soil and in exchange the plant gets bio-available forms of nutrients it needs to survive.  Our main goal is focusing on building soil, farming soil microbes, which in turn allows the plants to thrive without any chemical intervention.