Regenerative Agriculture
Three panelists discussed how regenerative agriculture can drive value for farmers, businesses, and communities.
Our soil is in a critical state. Conventional agricultural practices are decimating the lifegiving properties of soil around the globe, releasing additional carbon into the atmosphere and rendering croplands infertile. Already a third of our planet’s soil is degraded, and UNESCO predicts that the number could be as high as 90% by 2050. Nowhere is immune — agricultural systems from giant operations in the Midwest to subsistence farms in rural Malawi are affected by soil degradation.
Regenerative agriculture offers a way forward, using sustainable land management practices to not only avoid doing more harm, but also to restore already degraded soil. At our fourth community networking event, we welcomed three expert panelists to share their perspectives on this pressing agricultural issue: Melissa Spear, Executive Director at Tilth Alliance; Paul Shoemaker, CEO of Carnation Farms; and Richard Moe, Principal Technical Program Manager at Opportunity International’s Digital Innovation Group.
The Global Impact Collective brought together a diverse group of professionals from farmers to agronomists to professors to discuss this important subject. The topics ranged from the adoption to the economics and future of regenerative agriculture. A few key themes emerged:
Challenges
Establishing Standards of Regenerative Agriculture
Regenerative agriculture is widely defined as farming practices that are minimally disruptive to the soil, exercise crop diversity, utilize cover crops in the off season, and maintain living roots. However, unlike the rigorous criteria built around organic certification, we don’t yet have universally accepted standards and certifications for what it means to claim a company practices regenerative agriculture. If businesses and governments wish to certify and systematize regenerative farming, and if they want consumers to trust the certification, they will need hardier definitions.
Greenwashing: “Because it doesn’t have a definition, because there is no legal standard, regenerative agriculture is subject to greenwashing,” Melissa said. She pointed out that many large corporate food companies implement a no-till policy and label themselves regenerative despite still using pesticides and herbicides. “We have to figure out how to clarify and protect the integrity of what it is that we’re calling regenerative.”
“Organic Plus”: Despite the term generally gaining traction, an average consumer will not have a clear idea of what regenerative agriculture means when the label appears on a food item. Paul suggested pitching the concept to consumers as “organic plus,” signifying that regenerative food has all the same qualifications of organic food plus the benefit of reinvigorating the s
Entrenched Political Systems
A long history of political incentives has led the United States to favor large, corporate, conventional farms, often at the expense of smaller ones. Changing this existing bureaucracy is slow and arduous, but it can be done. Europe, for instance, is 10-15% organic, compared to only 1-2% in the US.
Historical precedent: Paul identified three moments in American farming that led to our current agricultural system:
At the end of World War II, pesticides and herbicides were commercialized on a broad scale.
Earl Butz, the Secretary of Agriculture under Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, promoted a “get big or get out” approach to farming and urged farmers to plant commodity monocrops like corn “from fencerow to fencerow.”
The focus on ethanol created a strong orientation towards conventional agriculture.
Lack of subsidies and financial support: The 2018 Farm Bill allocated $428 billion dollars over five years for agricultural subsidies with the majority of those funds supporting conventional farming. The federal financial support for sustainable farming is extremely low by comparison, and the shift from conventional to regenerative is difficult.
Economic Barriers to Adoption
“It’s expensive to be an organic, regenerative farmer,” Melissa said. “You have higher labor costs, you make different kinds of investments, it’s a more complicated method of farming, and certification costs money.”
Slow transition time: The transition period from conventional to organic certified is three years, and during that time the farmer cannot sell the food with an organic premium despite farming organically.
Lack of information: Rich pointed out that small-scale farmers, especially those living rurally and experiencing extreme poverty, often don’t know how to find markets, negotiate for better prices, and understand the economic outputs of their own farms. Existing resources are hard to access without basic literacy and access to the internet. “Getting information to the end user is critical,” he said.
Opportunities
Farmers Educating Farmers
It’s critical that farmers teach one another. “We know that farmers learn best from farmers,” said Rich. To leverage this insight, Opportunity International is setting up a mentorship program in rural African farming communities and building its educational tools around insights gathered from the local farmers themselves. Rich mentioned OI’s agricultural team in Rwanda has implemented a system of “farmer support agents.” He says, “They get a bicycle, a pair of boots, a smartphone, and training, and in exchange they take the learnings out into their communities and spread it amongst the farmers in that community.”
Melissa also pointed to the Transition to Organic Partnership Program, which helps provide resources to aspiring organic and regenerative farmers. “Paying farmers to talk to farmers: that is really where the information gets transferred, because it’s often not as simple as reading a couple sentences. You need someone there to show you, to explain it to you, to demonstrate.”
Technological Advancements
Recent developments in technology, especially in the AI sector, have exciting implications for agriculture and education.
Precision agriculture: With better instruments, companies and farmers can manage their farms more effectively. Robotic tools that monitor the soil, for instance, can inform users when they need to irrigate, look for pests, know when to apply pesticides, and so forth. “I think this is actually going to reduce the use of some of the more toxic synthetic chemicals on even conventional farms,” Melissa said. “Any stop toward eliminating or reducing the use of those chemicals is good.”
Agricultural education: Using generative AI and other tools, Rich and the Digital Innovation Group at Opportunity International are building a WhatsApp chatbot to help rural farmers in the field get answers to their questions. Given many might be illiterate, the bot can take verbal inputs in the farmers’ native languages, and it can analyze pictures of crops to determine diseases and offer advice.
Climate and Economic Resilience
Farms that practice regenerative agriculture withstand both market pressures and extreme weather. "You're more resilient to drought. You’re more resilient to heat. Your yields will remain higher in the face of a drastic climatic event,” Melissa said.
Community relevance: Paul extrapolated this concept into economic resilience for whole communities by extension, using White Oak Pastures as an example. “They employ nearly a couple hundred people in their local community,” he said. “That’s economic resilience at all levels. The way to try to think about economic resilience is to think locally, think regionally, think within the Puget Sound to try to solve the problem in that domain if you have the chance.”
Interested customers: If consumers remain willing to pay the price premium for organic food, regenerative products will likely also do well on the market provided the certification issues are solved.
Shifting markets: Melissa mentioned market research by the Organic Trade Association that found young people driving demand for organic food. “Younger generations are faced with this existential crisis of climate change, are recognizing that eating is a political act, and that their food choices actually have social, environmental, and economic impacts. And they are willing to make the investment to go organic and regenerative.”
