About Us

Regenerative Soil Amendments has been born out of an intense desire for the past 20 years to use the land, time, talents, and passions we’ve been entrusted with to provide for our family and community, and teach others about the amazing biological system that supports the life all around us.

The basis for this support and the legacy we can provide to the next generation is our soil. Over the last 20 years we’ve learned much about the soil on our 74 acre property here in Western New York State, through successes and failures along the way.

My name is CP Knerr and I own and manage Regenerative Soil Amendments along with my wife and our two children.

Although I’ve been at our current place for 20 years, the story of my life with the soil started when I was very young, growing up in Pennsylvania on my parent’s farm, where we raised vegetables.

Our History

I’d like to share a brief glimpse into our journey so you can see where we’re coming from, so you can better understand where we’re headed to and why!

Our Land

We are situated in Western New York State on 74 acres of rolling land that has been used over the years for a variety of purposes, when we took over the property in 2003 it was used as conventionally farmed row crop land in a corn-soybean-wheat rotation.

Prior to that, in the 1970’s it had been used as a dairy farm with remnants of the dairy equipment still in place in the barn and tree lines.

The soil is mostly a sandy loam.

The Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) Years

Going back 20 years while I was single, I started and managed a small 15 member CSA with a TroyBilt Horse rototiller and a 1958 Ford Tractor. That first year we established a 1/2 acre garden plot for all sorts of annual vegetables: Greens, Broccoli and Cauliflower, Beans, Sweet Corn, Squash, pretty much everything you’d expect in the typical CSA box.

Over the next 5 or 6 years, this small veggie patch grew into a 2-3 acre garden managed in a couple plots, as well as a fledgling orchard and perennials such as berries and asparagus.

The vegetables were all managed in a way that I’ve read described as “organic by neglect”… we weren’t engaged very heavily in soil building activities, and our soil was cultivated bare. We did do some cover cropping and composting, but it was not a big part of our system.

After 6 years, I decided to call the CSA quits. Throughout these years, I was also selling vegetables at a local farmer’s market while also working full time, and I was spent.

The Animal Husbandry and Farming Years

Ever since I moved to the farm we are at now, we’ve had animals. On Day 1 there were horses, goats, and chickens at our farm. The horses and goats lived in the barn and the chickens lived on the front porch (Note to future self: Separate farm animals from the family home!)

The horses were not mine, but over the next few years, I learned to care for and milk the goats and care for the chickens.

Soon we were also in the meat business with pigs and meat chickens. These were big steps up for me. They were, along with all of our other animals, managed on pasture.

The final nail in the vegetable farming coffin came when I got cattle and started mob stocking them, Joel Salatin and Greg Judy style. The pasture health transformation was amazing, and the amount of time it took daily fit my lifestyle a lot better. The cattle were also more resilient to any weather issues and didn’t require nearly the infrastructure and equipment that the vegetable farming needed.

Reflections

These first 10 or so years I had spent farming were incredibly formative to my understanding of what exactly it takes to raise food to feed a community of people.

Vegetable farming, at least the way I was doing it, is HARD and is not at all forgiving. Taking soil that had been farmed conventionally for years, decades even, and transforming that land into crops to feed 15 families only a portion of their sustenance, is not an easy feat. Weeds are a constant battle. Systems must be created for irrigation and delivering nutrients to crops. Deer and other critters provide constant pressure. If you are late for any step in the process, the whole system and end product suffers.

I remember dry years where I’d rototill the soil and be tilling what seemed like dust. What kind of nutrition could come from that soil for the 15 families? Even if the food was “better than the grocery store”, these methods would not last.

Now consider the mob stocked animal systems I had “discovered”. Beef cattle, goats, and chickens are a much more resilient system to depend on when some problem arises. Dry conditions? Move the herd faster. Too wet in a portion of the field? Skip that part of the rotation and come back when things dry out.

The one thing our land does do is grow grass, well. Instead of fighting it, the best thing to do is to embrace what the land does well and enhance that aspect.

I am thankful though: the years of vegetables had provided me plenty of valuable knowledge on what not to do with our land. For this location and our community, vegetables are best left raised at home for those who want to do so, while the land here is best utilized by animals.

Digging Deep and Farm Reboot

While I’m trained in Software Engineering, I did a deep dive into Soil Science and Permaculture and soon found myself devouring every bit of information I could on the subject.

in 2021, I had the opportunity to take Matt Powers’ course: Regenerative Soil Science. This 20 week course went through all of the latest soil science. My biggest takeaway knowledge from this course is the microbiology present both in the soil and the plants, and the realization that through proper microbiology we can provide much of the nutrient needs of the plants that are applied in conventional farming through chemicals. These same principles mimic themselves in human health: This gives me so much hope for the future.

Matt Powers is really a permaculturist by heart, so his perspective on the course material lends itself to systems thinking and permaculture principles. I began to apply his actions and recommendations to our farm on a small scale and realized that this really is the hope we can have in the future of our environmental management.

This site was built as an extension of the soil building activities I’m already doing on my own farm as I learn: Making biochar, raising worms for worm castings, and making bokashi bran for handling our household waste.

The Future

As we move forward, we are raising perennial edibles on the farm, as well as getting back into raising ruminants (cattle and sheep), pigs, ducks, and laying hens to build the farm soil (and systems) back up.

Community is also important to me. I want to spread the knowledge and experiences I have to others not as just information, but in a more personal way. We’ve begun to re-form relationships with those in our community we lost touch with over the years so we can all benefit from our combined experience.

One of our close neighbors is Gal-A-Tin Acres, who sell pasture raised beef, pork, chicken, and eggs.

My vision for our future is to continue to gather information and experience in soil building and nutrient retention at our farm, and give others practical advice for their situation through our experiences.

I built this site as a framework on which to hang that information as I learn. Getting the information out of my head will both organize that information for me as well as provide a place I can refer back to as we continue our journey. Along the way, I want to provide resources for our readers in the form of products, information, and affiliate links for products we use, so that others can duplicate our results at their sites.

The Nursery Years (in more ways than one!)

Shortly after I got into cattle, I got married and with that to additional needs: The need for new cabinets and appliances in the kitchen, and the need for time to take care of our daughter.

My wife and I decided to sell the beef cattle and took a few years working on the house and the family.

When our daughter was a few years old, I wanted to satisfy my love for plants and growing for our community without going all in with vegetables again. I found that with little infrastructure, I could easily propagate and raise perennial ornamentals and berries. I was suddenly hooked raising lots of baby plants again, but this time more towards putting those plants in other’s backyards instead of my own.

The start of the plant nursery and edibles propagation also got me into more of a food forest/permaculture mindset so I decided to do more “digging” so to speak