THE DUSTY ROAD at the outskirts of Zahlé, Lebanon, is lined by spring flowers, peaking out among piles of plastic waste. The town sits against the backdrop of the snow-capped Lebanon Mountains, near the border of Syria, in the Beqaa Valley, which is home to nearly a million Lebanese and more than 300,000 refugees. Here, poverty is prevalent, and gun ownership is widespread. The road leads through concrete buildings, crowned with barbed wire and scattered across plains green with young wheat and maize crops, to one of the valley’s many makeshift refugee camps.

This may not seem like the place for an innovative agricultural collective, but behind an uninviting cement wall, spread across 9,000 square meters, is Turba, an ecological farm working to promote food security. Turba, whose name means “soil” in Arabic, is a regenerative farm. Its regenerative methods yield three times the crops of conventional practices, while restoring soil, capturing carbon, and promoting food sovereignty. In a country coping with heavy pollution and an economic crisis, the impact of Turba’s practices are notable.

“The crisis is helping to spread regenerative farming here in Lebanon,” Erica Accari, who is in charge of operations at Turba, told me. “There’s always a silver lining for negative things.”

Three years ago, Turba’s land was covered in monocropped wheat. Today, it hosts an abundance of plants, including chickpeas, radishes, spinach, and oats. The farm also includes two greenhouses and one vermicompost toilet. In 2021, the farm produced more than 8,000 pounds of organic produce, creating 20 job opportunities, and impacting over 700 people. This includes a refugee family of six, who live on and help care for the land.

These results are significant in a country that has been devastated by an economic crisis and whose currency has lost more than 98 percent of its value since 2019. In addition, the Lebanese government is experiencing a political deadlock, causing community tension and the collapse of public services.

On top of that, Lebanon is currently hosting the highest number of refugees per capita in the world, according to the European Commission, and more than 70 percent of the population is in need of humanitarian aid. Due to these interlocking crises, many other issues are overlooked, such as the hazardous levels of pesticides found in Lebanese produce. In 2021, Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ) carried out an investigation on pesticide use in Lebanon. The reporters found that 52 percent of their samples contained banned pesticides with associated health risks of infertility, Parkinson’s disease, and cancer. (These same chemicals also harm soil health and ecosystems).

Air pollution levels in the country exceed environmental standards by three times, according to the World Health Organization. The open-air burning of solid waste and a lack of public transportation are major factors. In addition, some pollution remains as a result of a massive explosion of stored ammonia nitrate in Beirut in 2020.

Residues of highly toxic pollutants from the waste-burning also seep into water and land. That makes cultivating healthy soil here even more important, as it sequesters and cycles carbon, prevents land from degrading, and helps clean the water. Good soil also produces nutritious foods, which many Lebanese lack. According to the United Nations, about one in three people in Lebanon currently suffer from some form of food insecurity.

ACCARI, WHO IS 28 years old and originally from Tripoli, works the farm daily. She shares the space with a Syrian family who fled their home country six years ago in search of a safer life for their children.

“I was studying mechanical engineering at university, but I was not happy,” Accari said. “I was just doing it because that’s what you’re ‘supposed’ to do. I ended up dropping out because I was suicidal.” After months of soul-searching, Accari decided to apply for an organic farming program in Canada, despite having no previous experience. “When I was there, I was so happy,” she said. “I don’t think I’d ever been truly happy before in my life. From that moment on, I knew I made the right decision.”

Although she still experiences depressive episodes, the freedom that comes with having nature as her office helps pull Accari out of negative thought-loops, as does the knowledge of the positive impact of her work, on both planet and people. “It’s nice to know that even if the day comes where we leave this land, we leave it in a much healthier state than we found it,” she said.

Turba began its operations in 2021, using a farm model created the year before by Farms Not Arms, a design collective co-founded by a Lebanese entrepreneur named Jehane Akiki. The farm design won the Rockefeller Foundation Food System Vision Prize, worth $25,000, enabling a kick-off. Accari joined soon after as the project’s “on-the-grounds-operator,” and Akiki keeps track of the administrative side of things.

“The idea was to create a model for an agro-ecological farm with the main objectives of restoring soil health, rebuilding biodiversity, and saving native seeds that would also help combat food insecurity,” Akiki told me. “We planned to achieve this through combining regenerative agriculture with an adaptive, low-tech hydroponic system.” If the model were spread across just 3 percent of Lebanon’s land, it could provide enough food to sustain the country’s 4.6 million citizens and 1.8 million refugees, according to Farms Not Arms.

Due to decades of mismanagement from Lebanese authorities, Lebanon is, on top of everything else, experiencing an electricity crisis, so the hydroponics have had to take a backseat for now, Akiki said. The farm’s full focus is now aimed at regenerative practices, such as multi-cultured poly-cropping, crop-rotation, and the incorporation of trees according to agroforestry principles.

Their ultimate goal is to create a food forest that is resilient to outside shocks and to maintain an organic seed bank (including an heirloom seed collection), funneling excess rainwater into irrigation storage, and rotating herds of animals who fertilize with manure.

Notable successes for the farm include its three vermicompost toilets, built through grant money. “We built one here, for the family who lives on the land, and two in the refugee camp next door,” Accari said. “Prior to that, they used a hole in the ground, polluting the surrounding groundwater. This is a true improvement.”

Turba is also living out a motto of working smarter, not harder. They are now collaborating with a local community of seed-collectors, who gather, save, and share heirloom seeds. The work to protect ancient peasant seeds is a vital form of activism against the monopolization of food supplies, Accari said, in the name of food sovereignty, biodiversity, and health. That’s especially important today, where just four companies own 50 percent of the world’s seeds.

“Conventional farming uses hybrid seeds that actually require the use of chemical pesticides to survive,” she said. “And farmers cannot save the seeds from these crops, since that would yield a completely different crop the next year, so they remain dependent on an outside source for their seeds, must use chemicals, and cannot operate regeneratively.”

However, there are huge challenges operating regenerative agriculture within a capitalistic system, John Ikerd, an author with a PhD in agricultural economics, told me. “A big advantage of the industrial system of agriculture is the fact that you simplify the production process, so that an individual farmer can control much more land and produce a much larger output.”

An operation like Turba also involves a lot more work, he said, pointing to the intensive management needed to run an agroecological small-scale project, as well as the physically heavy labor involved. Still, there are success stories, he said, such as the US-based intentional community, called Bruderhof, which found a niche in the global market by producing wooden furniture for schools. This in turn provided an income stream to fund all other projects the community wanted to pursue. “As a farm that has alternative motives of training, equity, justice, and quality of life, you have to find some place where you can create economic value, without compromising your values,” he said. “Then let that be the means by which you carry out the mission.”

For such an approach, Turba’s mission is clear. “Wherever there is soil, I feel like there is a responsibility to care for it,” said Akiki, who sees the land in Lebanon as a vital asset to be cherished and cultivated. For the project to survive, however, it must evolve into a self-sustainable social enterprise. In a nation where the currency has lost nearly all its value since 2019, that presents a challenge. With the fluctuating price of the dollar, if a vegetable basket from Turba were priced in Lebanese lira at the start of the year, by the end of the year, currency devaluation would mean the veggies were sold for basically free.

This is a pivotal “make it or break it” year for Turba, said Akiki — the farm must become economically self-sustainable to survive. “We now have stalls at farmers’ markets, and we are creating more pantry products, which we hire women from the area to make, so it creates both job opportunities and income streams.”

Akiki believes that adaptation is key to the success of any project, especially the pursuit of setting up a permaculture farm in a country that only saw its first organic farm in 2018.

However, for lasting change within the sector to take hold, Akiki believes government action is essential. “Lebanon is the perfect example of bottom-up, grassroots coalitions. And it is possible to come together and create change at large,” she said. “In a way, it’s the more realistic approach in Lebanon, given the state of the government. But in other countries that have been able to create change at a systemic scale, an enabling political environment is crucial.”

Politicians in Lebanon are far from enacting such a change. Lebanon is ranked 154 out of 180 countries in Transparency International’s 2022 Corruption Perceptions Index, with a cross-sectarian political system that “has looted the state and weakened its institutions.” This includes tax fraud and the misuse of natural resources, with numerous Lebanese politicians distributing unearned wealth amongst themselves and their followers. Yet there is a high level of entrepreneurial spirit in the country, with half of the population under 25 and many people creating impactful projects.

That includes the niche of regenerative farming. “When I left Lebanon for Canada in 2017, there were no locally run organic farms in the country,” Accari said. “When I came back two years later, there were already four or five. Now I believe there’s 10 of us. It’s becoming a community, which is beautiful to see.”

Accari and Akiki point to another important factor for future success: the consumer. If demand for a more diverse set of crops rises, poly-crop farming will increase; if requests for organic produce shoot up, so can the production of such crops; and if heirloom seed products are favored, food sovereignty can prevail.

“If we find a way to consume more consciously, and get rid of the massive amounts of food waste we see today, we could definitely sustain ourselves on regenerative farming methods on a global scale, Accari said. “It’s just about finding that harmony between demand and supply.”