Regenerative agriculture is a conservation and rehabilitation approach to food and farming systems. It focuses on topsoil regeneration, increasing biodiversity, enhancing ecosystem services, supporting biosequestration, increasing resilience to climate change, and strengthening the health and vitality of farm soil.
Regenerative agriculture is not a specific practice. It combines a variety of sustainable agriculture techniques. Practices include maximal recycling of farm waste and adding composted material from non-farm sources.
Regenerative agriculture claims to mitigate climate change through carbon dioxide removal from the atmosphere and sequestration. Carbon sequestration is gaining popularity in agriculture from individuals as well as groups. However, such claims have also been subject to criticism by scientists.
Definition A 2020 review of 229 journal articles and 25 practitioner websites found that regenerative agriculture lacked both a legal or regulatory definition and a broadly accepted definition in common usage. Definitions varied considerably: some focused on particular practices, such as cover cropping, livestock integration, and reduced tillage, while others emphasized outcomes such as improved soil health, carbon sequestration, and increased biodiversity. The authors noted that process-based and outcome-based definitions may conflict and can have different implications for policy, certification, and carbon-payment schemes. They did not endorse any single definition and cautioned that the frequency with which particular processes or outcomes appeared in the literature did not make them more valid or preferable. Because the term is used in many different ways, they recommended defining it carefully and comprehensively for each specific purpose and context.
History
Origins Regenerative agriculture is based on various agricultural and ecological practices, with a particular emphasis on minimal soil disturbance and the practice of composting. Republished by Acres USA, Austin, Texas, 1991 Similar ideas focus on "sea minerals" (originally published 1976). and innovations in no-till practices, such as slash and mulch in tropical regions. and Whatley, Booker T. How to Make $100,000 Farming 25 Acres. Emmaus, Pennsylvania, Regenerative Agriculture Association, 1987. 180 pages. Sheet mulching is a regenerative agriculture practice that smothers weeds and adds nutrients to the soil below.
In the early 1980s, the Rodale Institute began using the term 'regenerative agriculture'. Rodale Publishing formed the Regenerative Agriculture Association, which began publishing regenerative agriculture books in 1987 and 1988.
However, the institute stopped using the term in the late 1980s, and it only appeared sporadically (in 2005 and 2008), until they released a white paper in 2014, titled "Regenerative Organic Agriculture and Climate Change". The paper's summary states, "we could sequester more than 100% of current annual CO2 emissions with a switch to common and inexpensive organic management practices, which we term 'regenerative organic agriculture.'" The paper described agricultural practices, like crop rotation, compost application, and reduced tillage, that are similar to organic agriculture methods.
In 2002, Storm Cunningham documented the beginning of what he called "restorative agriculture" in his first book, The Restoration Economy. Cunningham defined restorative agriculture as a technique that rebuilds the quantity and quality of topsoil, while also restoring local biodiversity (especially native pollinators) and watershed function. Restorative agriculture was one of the eight sectors of restorative development industries/disciplines in The Restoration Economy.Cunningham, Storm. The Restoration Economy. Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2002. 340p.
Developments (since 2010) Regenerative agriculture has appeared in academic research since the early to mid 2010s in the fields of environmental science, plant science, and ecology. As the term expands in use, many books have been published on the topic and several organizations started to promote regenerative agriculture techniques. Allan Savory gave a TED talk on fighting and reversing climate change in 2013. He also launched The Savory Institute, which educates ranchers on methods of holistic land management. Abe Collins created LandStream to monitor ecosystem performance in regenerative agriculture farms.Collins, Abe. "Growing Deep Soil Watersheds" (PDF). Harvard Forest. Retrieved 19 August 2019. Eric Toensmeier had a book published on the subject in 2016. However, researchers at Wageningen University in the Netherlands found there to be no consistent definition of what people referencing "regenerative agriculture" meant. They also found that most works on this topic were instead authors' attempts to shape what regenerative agriculture meant.
In 2011, the (not for profit) Mulloon Institute was founded in New South Wales, Australia, to develop and promote regenerative practices to reclaim land as water-retentive areas by slowing the loss of water from land. The members of the Institute created a 22-weir in-stream project with neighbours over 2 kilometers of Mulloon Creek. A study indicates that the outcomes were positive but relatively unpredictable, and that suitability of ground conditions on site was a key for success.Hickson, Oliver. (2017)"Surface water and alluvial groundwater connectivity at Mulloon Creek and the implications for Natural Sequence Farming" (University of Woollongong Research Online) Retrieved 13 January 2024 Bottom-up change in the context of Australian regenerative agriculture is a complex set of narratives and barriers to change affecting farmers. A West Australian government-funded survey of land hydration was conducted by the Mulloon Institute in June 2022, which concluded that water retention projects supported the regeneration of native plant species.Landscape Rehydration in Western Australia, A Review (June 2022), Retrieved 13 January 2024
Several large corporations have also announced regenerative agriculture initiatives in the last few years. In 2019, General Mills announced an effort to promote regenerative agriculture practices in their supply chain. The farming practices have received criticism from academic and government experiments on sustainability in farming. In particular, Gunsmoke Farm partnered with General Mills to transition to regenerative agriculture practices and become a teaching hub for others. Experts from the area have expressed concerns about the farm now doing more harm than good, with agronomist Ruth Beck stating that "Environmental marketing got ahead of what farmers can actually do". More recent debates highlight concerns that corporate actors may be co-opting regenerative agriculture, invoking the term for marketing purposes while neglecting its substantive practices.
In February 2021, the regenerative agriculture market gained traction after Joe Biden's Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack made reference to it during his Senate Confirmation hearing. The Biden administration wants to utilize $30 billion from the USDA's Commodity Credit Corporations to incentivise farmers to adopt sustainable practices. Vilsack stated in the hearing, "It is a great tool for us to create the kind of structure that will inform future farm bills about what will encourage carbon sequestration, what will encourage precision agriculture, what will encourage soil health and regenerative agricultural practices." During the House of Representatives Committee on Agriculture's first hearing on climate change, Gabe Brown, a proponent of regenerative agriculture, testified about the role of regenerative agriculture in both the economics and sustainability of farming.
Several days before the opening of the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference, a report was published, sponsored by some of the biggest agricultural companies. The report was produced by Sustainable Markets Initiative, an organisation of companies trying to become climate friendly, established by King Charles III. According to the report, regenerative agriculture is already implemented on 15% of all cropland. Despite this, the rate of transition is "far too slow" and must be tripled by the year 2030 to prevent the global temperature passing the threshold of 1.5 degrees above preindustrial levels. Agricultural practices must immediately change in order to avoid the damage that would result. One of the authors emphasised that "The interconnection between human health and planetary health is more evident than ever before." The authors proposed a set of measures for accelerating the transition, like creating metrics for measuring how much farming is sustainable, and paying farmers who will change their farming practices to more sustainable ones.
Principles Several individuals, groups, and organizations have attempted to define the principles of regenerative agriculture. In their review of the existing literature on regenerative agriculture, researchers at Wageningen University created a database of 279 research articles on regenerative agriculture. Their analysis of this database found that people using the term regenerative agriculture were using different principles to guide regenerative agriculture efforts. The 4 most consistent principles were found to be, 1) enhancing and improving soil health, 2) optimization of resource management, 3) alleviation of climate change, and 4) improvement of water quality and availability.
Notable definitions of principles
Terra Genesis International Terra Genesis International, an environmental regenerative design firm working to mesh economics with ecology, promotes a holistic definition of regenerative agriculture practices built on four principles. First, regenerative agriculture practices must continually work to better entire agroecosystems, specifically in their biodiversity and soil and water quality. Second, each farm should make intentional designs and decisions that reflect its core values and circumstances. The third principle involves the development of fair and equal roles and interactions of all stakeholders of the farm. Lastly, regenerative agriculture practices must constantly progress on the individual, farm, and community levels in order to maximize all potential benefits.Soloviev, E. and Landua, G. Levels of Regenerative Agriculture. Terra Genesis International, High Falls, NY, 2016.
Philip Loring Instead of focusing on the specifics of food production technologies, human ecologist Philip Loring suggests a food system-level focus on regeneration, arguing that it is the combination of flexibility and diversity in our food systems that supports regenerative ecological practices. Loring argues that, depending on the relative flexibility of people in the food system with respect to the foods they eat and the overall diversity of foods being produced and harvested, food systems can fall into one of four general patterns:
Firstly, food systems can be regenerative, with high diversity and high flexibility. Ecosystems are able to recycle and replenish used energy into new usable forms, such as those found in many Indigenous food systems.
Food systems can also be degenerative, with high diversity and low flexibility. This occurs when people fixate on specific resources and only switch to alternatives once the preferred commodity is exhausted, such as fishing down the food web.
A coerced food system involves low diversity and low flexibility. People subsidize prized resources at the expense of the surrounding ecosystem, such as in the Maine Lobster fishery.
Impoverished food systems have low diversity but high flexibility. People are willing to choose sustainable options, but because they are living in degraded ecosystems and possibly a poverty trap, cannot realistically allow ecosystems and resources to regenerate.