BFA 12th Annual Soil & Nutrition Conference - reNaturing ourSelves : Week 7 - Abe Collins

BEHAVIOR – In Week Seven, the conversation turns inward — not toward techniques alone, but toward the patterns of decision-making that quietly determine whether land, communities, and systems truly flourish. With grounded intensity and lived experience, Abe Collins makes the case that regeneration is ultimately a behavioral challenge before it is a technical one. Abe’s work spans deserts, dairies, watersheds, and cooperative landscapes, yet the thread running through it all is feedback. No living system functions without it. Soil, water, plants, animals, and people respond to the signals they receive — and our behaviors either restore those signals or drown them out. When land is compacted, stripped, or simplified, it is not a failure of nature, but of human decision-making disconnected from consequence. What emerges is a reframing of stewardship. Instead of chasing isolated practices or one-size-fits-all solutions, Abe invites us to think in wholes — watersheds rather than fields, communities rather than individual operations, long-term function rather than short-term yield. Behavior, in this sense, is collective. It shows up in how we cooperate, how we share data, how we learn from the land instead of imposing assumptions onto it. When feedback loops are restored, landscapes begin to organize themselves toward resilience. There is also a quiet optimism here. Abe insists that we already know how to heal land — how to rebuild deep topsoil, hold water, increase biodiversity, and restore nutrient density. What has been missing is alignment: behaviors that honor biology, physics, and relationship at the same time. When decisions are guided by care for future generations, by love of place, and by attentiveness to feedback, regeneration stops being abstract and becomes inevitable. Flourishing, then, is not a distant goal — it is the natural outcome of behavior brought back into relationship with life itself . #SoilAndNutrition #ReNaturingOurSelves #BionutrientFood #RegenerativeAgriculture #FoodAsMedicine #HealthySoilHealthyPeople #NutrientDensity #EcoWisdom #LandStewardship #FutureOfFood #HealingTheLand #HealingOurselves #Regeneration #RealFoodMovement #NatureKnowsBest #HolisticHealth #FoodSovereignty