The Overreach of Regenerative Agriculture
Carbon sequestration in soil cannot absolve our addiction to fossil fuels.
Recently, Kiss The Ground put out a documentary out on Netflix. In the spirit of honest discussion, I affirm the effort to bring to light how our system of food production is broken and ecologically disastrous, and yet cannot subscribe to the notion that fixing our agricultural issues will remedy our entire global climate crisis. As much as I want to support efforts like Kiss The Ground and appreciate their emphasis on how essential the care for our soil is, they may end up causing more harm by making claims that are too good to be true. Carbon sequestration within properly managed soil is a very real and powerful thing. In fact, rotational grazing (which happens to be my profession) may very well be the most powerful tool to draw down carbon from the atmosphere. However, regenerative agriculture will not return us back to the garden of Eden, and cannot compensate for all the carbon pumped into the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels. And perhaps even more to the point, we have squandered the carbon that was once in our soils by the urbanization of areas with rich soils alongside irresponsible agricultural practices. Even if all farms and ranches used ruminants and soil-friendly agricultural practices to restore the humus of our soils, it would still take centuries to return to the soil depths that had been generated by the ecosystems before we raped the land with “civilized” agricultural practices.
I have written a lengthy essay about the carbon cycles that details the difference of carbon that can be sequestered in soil and the carbon that is being released from fossils.
A longer rhythm of storing carbon involves non-forest soils such as pastures and grasslands. My profession involves a daily practice of sequestering carbon through rotational grazing. Our farm does this on our perennial pastures with minimal dependence on fossil fuels and plays its part in reestablishing the equilibrium of the fast carbon cycle. And yet, as others have pointed out, as essential as rotational grazing is to heal our soils, it cannot save us from the separate problem of carbon flowing in from the slow cycle. As powerful a tool as rotational grazing is for restoring our soils, sequestering water, and sequestering carbon, we have centuries of abuse to the land to compensate for and heal from. Only after such healing could we explore the possibility of such restoration as a further mitigation of other carbon pressures. Even then, it is doubtful that reforestation, rotational grazing, and regenerative agriculture in general, could ever compensate for the sheer quantity and speed of the extra surplus of carbon flowing in from the slow cycle.
The danger of overreaching in our claims for soil carbon sequestration is that we focus on only one aspect of the solution to our climate problems, leaving our devastating addiction to the burning of fossil fuels unchecked. The truth is, we cannot continue to build a civilization based on the extraction of resources without destroying ourselves. This is true whether we are referring to the food we eat or to the energy we use in every sector of our societies — from transportation to the embodied energy in every building, appliance, or amenities that make up our modern lifestyle. I fear the take-away message of the Kiss The Ground documentary will be that we can carry on as we are, as long as we just fix the way we grow and raise food. The problems we face are much more insidious and have deeper roots even than the health of our soil.
