The Road to Regenerative Agriculture - What is it? Who’s on it? Why?
Regenerative agriculture is everywhere. It was the topic of a solution session at the Chesapeake Food Summit in DC last week. Everyday my Google Alert turns up about a dozen new articles related to regenerative agriculture. Even Al Gore hosted a conference dedicated to regenerative agriculture on his farm in Tennessee last week. So, what’s all the hype about?
Regenerative agriculture is not a new concept, but it is certainly getting some attention from new, well-funded corners of the world. I first heard the term more than a decade ago when I was working at the Rodale Institute. There, a 330-acre organic research and education farm and home of the longest running comparison of organic and conventional grain farming in the U.S., regenerative agriculture was our clear objective. Their work revolved around not just sustaining the level of soil health, crop health and other ecosystem services, but rather increasing key indicators of soil health like soil organic matter levels, water holding capacity, soil aggregate stability and nitrogen mineralization potential. In essence, that is what regenerative agriculture is: a system of crop and livestock production that builds soil, crop, and animal health through biological processes.
Tools we were looking at then and that Rodale continues to research and advocate for revolved around biological intensification of agriculture. Bringing the life and carbon back into our soils by filling voids left in our most prominent cropping systems with cover crops and diverse crop rotations. Doing things like adding a winter wheat or winter barley crop to a corn-soy rotation can go a long way toward tilting the balance between carbon capture (hello, winter and early spring photosynthesis!) and carbon emissions (farewell bare fallows and tillage) in a cropping system.
Even more impactful, from a greenhouse gas standpoint, is how that wheat crop creates space for a winter legume cover crop to fix most or even all of the nitrogen needed for the subsequent corn crop. Synthetic nitrogen fertilizer is the single largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in our modern cropping systems. Manufacturing nitrogen fertilizer is an extremely energy intensive process that requires burning lots of natural gas. Unfortunately, emissions don’t stop there. Once applied to soil, just a fraction of the nitrogen fertilizer makes it into the crop, while the rest washes out into ground and surface water and another solid chunk denitrifies to N2O, heading back to the atmosphere as a greenhouse gas more than 300 times as potent as CO2.
These problems propagate through our food system, multiplied by our current dominant systems for animal agriculture in the US, which largely rely on just conventional corn and soybean as feed. Recent LCAs that have examined how all this shakes out, find that a solid 70% of poultry and swine greenhouse gas emissions come from growing the corn and soybean feed they eat. Methane emissions from enteric fermentation (cow burps) complicate the picture a bit for cattle, but, surprisingly, this same simple strategy of growing a winter or spring grain to replace some of the corn and soy in their rations has an astoundingly similar potential to reduce beef and dairy footprints by double digit percentages.
In a meeting of the Feed Chains and Small Grains team at Target yesterday, these findings were consistent across multiple modeling approaches presented by UMN’s Dr.Jennifer Schmitt and the Sustainable Food Lab’s Elizabeth Reeves. So we know what we need to do, and at the farm level it’s pretty clear how to do it. What remains is how businesses across the supply chain can support and incentivize these changes - growing winter grains to fill a predominantly empty niche and legume cover crops to reduce the need for synthetic nitrogen fertilizer. These practices are not exclusively organic practices, nor do they have anything to do with non-GMO variety usage, so they are not particularly well-aligned with consumer-facing labels that could incentivize change.
Figuring out how to support these changes will require radical collaboration across sectors to ensure there are solid markets for all phases of these rotations. This may mean bringing together some odd bedfellows, like oat milk manufacturers and traditional dairy producers. The oat milk folks can buy the feed grade grains and the dairies can utilize the grains with higher levels of mycotoxins than humans, chickens, or pigs can tolerate.
Together we can drive this change, but we must collaborate to de-risk this big transformation for all partners in the supply chain. Many companies are talking about regenerative agriculture, a few are doing it, but focusing on delivering these outcomes together is something any company that touches food or ag should engage with. We must all work together to leverage these straight-forward biological tools to address climate change.
