What is Regenerative Agriculture?

Building Soil Health

Healthy agroecosystems start from the ground up: soil is one of the most important resources on Earth, and preserving and building it up is one of the core goals of any regenerative agricultural system. It’s easy to think of soil as just dirt, but in reality, it’s a complex living system. In healthy soils, plants, animals, fungi and microorganisms all interact.² All of these organisms are important for making sure that nutrients can flow freely through the environment.

One of the most important components of soil is organic matter, which is made of carbon and comes from living things. Plants and bacteria deposit organic matter into the soil as they grow, and animals add it through their manure. Bacteria and fungi help break down plant parts and other materials into small pieces of organic matter. This cycle adds enormous amounts of carbon from the atmosphere to the soil, holding three times more carbon dioxide than the atmosphere itself.³ In addition to being imperative for soil fertility — organic matter acts as a sponge that holds water and nutrients — maintaining this soil carbon is critical for slowing climate change.⁴ Preventing the loss of organic matter and adding it back to soil whenever possible is one of the most important facets of regenerative agriculture.

This starts by never allowing the surface of the soil to be bare. Farmers can do this by reducing tillage, or the plowing of the soil. While plowing seems like a foundational farming practice, recent research has shown that it’s often unnecessary. Plowing can help warm up soil quickly and help control some weeds, but it also breaks soil up and leaves it vulnerable to erosion. Leaving old plant roots and other material in the ground anchors the soil and prevents compaction while adding organic matter. Not tilling the soil also keeps communities of beneficial soil organisms intact that are important for recycling nutrients so plants can take them up.⁵

Another common practice to build up soils on regenerative farms is planting cover crops: plants that are grown to improve soil quality and prevent erosion in between seasons. Depending on the farm and what the soil needs, these crops can vary. Grasses add organic matter and prevent nutrients like nitrogen from washing away as soil erodes, while legumes can add nitrogen to the soil, an important nutrient that is often added through synthetic fertilizer. Some cover crops, like forage radishes, break up compacted soil with thick, deep taproots.⁶ When it’s time to plant the main crop, farmers need to kill the cover crop. Sometimes they can harvest some of the material as hay or allow animals to graze on it, but in other cases farmers rely on cold temperatures or specialized crushing tools to kill the cover crops without chemicals.⁷

All of these practices can generate big returns for soil and for farmers. Combining no-till with cover cropping can minimize erosion and make soil more resilient to drought.⁸⁹ While it can take several years for farmers to adjust to no-till and cover cropping, they are typically able to match their earlier crop yields within a few years while also enjoying the added benefits of resilient soil.¹⁰

Minimizing Chemical Use

In keeping with the first principle to focus on soil, regenerative systems minimize the use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. While these can be useful tools for farmers in the short term, they harm soil organisms, insects and other wildlife in ways that throw natural nutrient cycles out of balance and disrupt on and off farm ecosystems.

On a conventional farm, synthetic fertilizers are applied at several points in the growing season. They’re rich in nutrients that accelerate plant growth, especially nitrogen, which helps farmers harvest more crops per acre. However, overreliance on them has several downsides. Chemical fertilizers disrupt the activity of bacteria in the soil that naturally cycle nitrogen, throwing the bacterial communities out of balance and accelerating the rate at which bacteria digest other organic matter in the soil.¹¹ They also leach into groundwater and pollute rivers and streams, contributing to algae blooms and dead zones in water bodies far from the farm, such as the Gulf of Mexico, where runoff from industrial agriculture causes an oxygen-free dead zone that covers thousands of square miles.¹²

Maximizing Diversity

Regenerative systems rely on vibrant, healthy soils and thriving populations of beneficial organisms, but these in turn rely on having a varied habitat to thrive in. Industrial agriculture relies on monocultures — large areas where a single crop is grown — because they are simpler to maintain with chemicals and easy to harvest and market. But these monocultures don’t foster a productive agroecosystem.

Growing a diverse array of plants together can benefit their growth. Growing different crops together this way is called intercropping. In a classic example used by the Indigenous people of North America, corn, beans and squash are grown together in a system called the Three Sisters. Corn stalks provide structure for climbing beans, which fertilize the soil. Meanwhile, squash leaves shade out weeds and help keep water from evaporating in the heat.¹⁷ Intercropping like this can dramatically boost crop yields and help farms produce more food. A diverse agroecosystem can also incorporate non-food crops, like pasture for animals or wood for fuel and timber.

Diversity over time is also critical: rotating between multiple crops can give farmers a chance to build up soil’s organic matter with plants that leave lots of residue or add vital nutrients like nitrogen to the soil by planting beans or other legumes. Researchers have also observed that adopting more diverse crop rotations directly increases the amount of beneficial bacteria in soil.¹⁸

Rotation also has benefits for disrupting cycles of harmful organisms like pests who destroy crops. Insects that prefer a single food source can’t establish large populations when farmers grow diverse, multi-year rotations and avoid repeatedly growing large swaths of a single crop.¹⁹ Similarly, incorporating more species of crops can help reduce weed populations. Farmers in the Midwest have found that vigorously growing species like rye can outcompete even the most tenacious, herbicide-resistant weeds when planted in rotation with other crops that are more vulnerable.²⁴ Chickens can also be moved around on pasture, where they feed on insects and plants, particularly weeds that can otherwise overtake pasture environments.²⁵

The benefits from appropriately managed rotational grazing can be immense: the carbon deposited in manure and sequestered by strong plant roots helps support more organisms in soil and draw down carbon from the atmosphere. These benefits are most obvious when former cropland is turned into pasture. In one study of a regeneratively managed farm, researchers found that cattle helped to sequester more carbon in the soil than they emitted themselves, helping the farm have far lower emissions per pound of meat than its conventional competitors.²⁶ Researchers modeling the whole food system suggest that if rotational grazing replaced much of the industrially produced grains that feed livestock today, the increases in soil carbon could offset the greenhouse gas emissions that come from erosion on poorly managed cropland.²⁷

While these would be significant gains, this involves more than a simple dietary change for livestock. In a truly regenerative system, animals shouldn’t overwhelm the land they graze on, and this means that they can’t be kept in dense quarters like they are on CAFOs. Grassfed animals are also lighter and slower growing, so producing the same amount of meat and dairy on pasture would require far more land than currently used for conventional agriculture.²⁸ While there would be enormous benefits to trading some crop land for pasture — well managed pastures are healthier agroecosystems than industrial monocultures — it’s important to address the possibility that this might also cut further into wildland that’s best left undisturbed. Poorly managed grazing on vulnerable land is a major driver of extinction for endangered species worldwide, especially for carnivores like wolves that ranchers see as threatening their herds.²⁹³⁰ The conversion of healthy ecosystems like forests into pasture for livestock would release more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than even a well-managed system could sequester.³¹

Ultimately, regenerative systems do need animals to really thrive, but a genuinely regenerative food system that preserves wild lands and wild biodiversity may not produce the amount of meat and dairy that we’ve grown accustomed to in our industrialized food system.