Introduction: The Magic of Regenerative Agriculture
I came to business school at Berkeley Haas to transition to a career in which my daily work was helping the world become more environmentally and socially sustainable. In my first year, I learned about the potential of regenerative agriculture and got incredibly excited about what it could do for the world.
Regenerative means returning more to the system than taking out of the system. Regenerative agriculture actually restores nutrients to the soil, sequesters carbon, and improves the resilience of the land.
Most agriculture in the US today is heavily chemical dependent, with almost half of production dedicated to corn and wheat, which suck nitrogen out of the soil and rely on water. To provide the requisite nitrogen, farmers must apply chemical nitrogen fertilizers to their fields in increasing quantities. These fertilizers release large quantities of the greenhouse gas N2O into the environment, contributing to climate change, and toxins into waterways, destroying marine life and affecting human livelihoods further down the watershed. Water-dependent crops are highly susceptible to drought exacerbated by the increasingly erratic rainfall patterns we’re seeing as a result of climate change. Farmers must now depend on federal crop-insurance dollars to guarantee some income in the face of crops that fail as a result of drought several times each decade. At the same time, their income is subject to the vicissitudes of the global commodity market, in which they are selling the same two or three things as everyone else, and thus get lower prices when they are able to produce more. Since they are just growing one or two crops, they don’t get the benefit of ecosystem services that help keep away pests, so they must purchase chemical pesticides to get rid of the pests, and then purchase seeds that are not affected by these pesticides from the same companies. So they are squeezed by the price of their products on one side, and the high cost of inputs like fertilizer, pesticides, and seeds on the other side. This drives them into a cycle of debt and dependence that is difficult to exit.
The regenerative agricultural movement advocates a version of the world in which farmers cultivate a diverse variety of crops and surrounding vegetation and animal life to create an ecosystem that self-generates all the inputs needed and as a bonus actually creates a richer environment that feeds even more life. Nitrogen-fixing crops, mostly legumes like lentils and chickpeas, act as natural fertilizers for nitrogen-feeding crops that follow them in rotation or are grown concurrently with them. These legumes are high in proteins and other nutrients that are more nourishing for humans and animals than grains like corn and wheat. Other crops are rotated in or interplanted to ward away pests, provide shade or weed-resistance, and build the soil. Building healthy soil with the right mix of nutrients, roots, and microbes allows it to retain more water, making the land more drought-resistant, flood-resistant, and fire-resistant. As a bonus, the soil also sequesters more carbon, and the mix of nutrients and microbes produces more nutrient-dense, flavorful crops. With regenerative agriculture, our food is not just more economically and environmentally sustainable, it’s more nutritious and more delicious.
It almost sounds too good to be true. In fact, these types of agricultural systems have been practiced by humans for millennia, and they work. However, regenerative agriculture is not without its challenges. First, it requires an immense amount of knowledge that must be built up over time and adapted to local ecological conditions. Beyond that, transitioning back to regenerative agriculture from a chemically-dependent system often requires significant investment and a dip in productivity before reaping the benefits of a regenerative system. Cash-strapped farmers may be hard-pressed to accept this risk and dive into the unknown. Furthermore, our current food system is solidly entrenched in an industrial agricultural regime, so a transition to wide-scale implementation of regenerative agriculture requires reimagining and rebuilding our food system and other economic and political mechanisms that support it. This series of blog posts attempts to outline how we, as a society, can regenerate our food system into one that supports environmental and, thus, human well-being.
I am not an expert by any means. My goal in writing this is to articulate my current understanding and learn what others agree and disagree with. I welcome any and all feedback about the validity of my assertions.
Additional Reading:
- Regeneration International — Why Regenerative Agriculture?
- iPES Food — From Uniformity to Diversity: A paradigm shift from industrial agriculture to diversified agroecological systems
- Politico The Great Nutrient Collapse
- Fast Company — Why “regenerative agriculture” is the new thing in sustainable farming
This is part 1 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
