Farm-level transitions to regenerative agriculture
How does transition actually happen on a farm-level? I’m clearly not a farmer, nor do I have intimate knowledge of any transitions. Much of what I know comes from reading books and articles about transitions, as well as from visiting and talking to a variety of farmers. With that caveat, this is my understanding:
In her book Lentil Underground, Liz tells the story of Montana farmers that transition from growing wheat to growing a variety of legumes (like lentils!) and other crops. After decades of growing wheat with chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides, the land is dependent on these inputs. To grow without these chemicals, farmers must begin rotations with nitrogen-fixing crops that generate their own fertilizer, and, in many cases, it requires significantly more labor to manage weeds. On top of that, if they want to be certified organic, it requires three years of chemical-free management to be certified and sell at organic prices. The transition generates significant costs and risk for farmers:
(although organic and regenerative are not the same thing, the same costs and risks apply)
- Equipment costs: In terms of pure costs, farmers may need to invest initially in different equipment than they have been using, or manage the cost of equipment they no longer need but are still financially responsible for.
- Lost revenue: There’s also the cost of lost revenue from fields being less productive and generating no or lower revenue while they are transitioning.
- Loss of crop insurance: They’re also likely to lose the financial security provided by crop insurance since they are transitioning and Whole Farm Revenue Protection requires baseline data of five years (This is something I’m not 100% sure of and need to confirm with an expert).
- Learning curve: In addition to the calculable costs, there’s also the cost associated with learning a new system of farming. Farmers get to know their land and how it will behave as conditions vary from year to year. Introducing a complex set of new variables disrupts this knowledge, and many transitioning farmers need to build up new knowledge over several years.
In addition to all these concerns, there’s also a question of how to sell the product. This is a question that I’ve been really interested in for the past year. If everyone in an area is growing the typical wheat or corn and soy, then all the purchasing infrastructure in the area will be geared towards those crops. If a farmer wants to grow something different, who will they sell it to? In most cases, it will need to be processed locally at some level before it came be sold and shipped. That means there needs to be a local processing facility. But to have a local processing facility, you need to have sufficient volume. To have sufficient volume, you need enough acreage or enough other farmers growing the same thing or something similar in the area. Infrastructure for diversified crops is critical for it to be feasible for farmers to transition. The lentil growers of Montana solved this by self-organizing and building their own processing facility, Timeless Foods. It was a labor of love, and they encountered a lot of difficulty both in obtaining financing and in finding buyers for their products.
To support wide-spread transitions to regenerative farming, we need to grow market demand for these products AND develop better financing mechanisms both for individual farmers transitioning and for the development of local processing infrastructure.
We must also address the learning curve by developing sufficient local research and extension or farmer assistance services. Because ecosystems and growing conditions can vary dramatically across geographic areas, for farmers to receive strong support, there needs to be local research and assistance available. Ideally, existing extension services act in support of regenerative systems. In the absence of this assistance, many farmers have developed their own cooperative systems of informal research and testing. The agroecological Campesino movement in Mexico has done just this, with farmers testing new growing practices on small plots and sharing successful practices with each other.
Both of these imperatives must be locally-adapted and developed, which requires new ways of thinking about our food and farm policies — state, national, and supranational.
Additional Reading:
This is part 5 of a series, written in January 2019
1. Introduction: The Magic of Regenerative Agriculture
3. Defining Regenerative and who’s doing it
5. Farm-level transitions (local learning and infrastructure)
6. Financing Regenerative Agricultural Transitions
