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Olivia B

Apr 9, 2025

3

min read

Regenerative Agriculture: Healing Soils to Heal the World

Regenerative agriculture offers a new way to restore soil health worldwide.

Regenerative Agriculture: Healing Soils to Heal the World

“Regenerative agriculture” is a concept we often hear, but what does it mean and what does it do? To understand its aims, we must first understand soil and its place in the environment. “Soil” and “dirt” are terms often used interchangeably, but they differ in critical ways: put simply, soil is alive while dirt is dead, and we are turning the former into the latter at a high rate. This is concerning and potentially catastrophic for our environment and economy, so the difference is worth exploring in more detail.  


Soil vs. Dirt

Soil is a structured, complex, thriving biosphere that supports and promotes all manner of life. Its fertility comes from organic matter that hosts a variety of microorganisms, which in turn create stability in this tiny ecosystem by absorbing carbon, recycling nutrients, and supplying vital resources like water and gas. A healthy soil might take thousands of years to form. It’s also the planet’s second-largest carbon sink, topped only by the oceans. 


Dirt, meanwhile, is composed of clay, sand, and silt. The minerals it contains are only accessible to plants once they’ve been processed by microorganisms. Soil might contain dirt, but dirt is not enough to support life on its own. Soil becomes dirt through degradation, which removes its fertile properties and releases its trapped carbon into the atmosphere. In short, soil is a precious and increasingly limited resource. 


Soil Degradation: A Global Problem

Alarming metrics are everywhere: Earth's soil is vanishing. According to the FAO, fully a third globally has already degraded. UNESCO projects that 90% of the planet's terrestrial surface could be degraded by 2050. From 2015 to 2019, 100 million hectares were lost annually, totaling an area twice the size of Greenland over those four years. Impoverished areas disproportionately carry this burden: today, Africa bears 40% of our degraded soil, and the rest mostly occupies communities already afflicted by food insecurity.  


Poor land management and harmful farming practices over the last century are largely responsible for this damage. For instance, monocropping, growing a single crop year after year, degrades soil by continuously diminishing the same nutrients, killing the microorganisms that could replenish them. Synthetic fertilizers and pesticides like fumigants can also be lethal to soil dwellers (and detrimental to human health, as well). Heavy farm machinery and excessive tillage cause soil compaction and erosion, which hinders water absorption and filtration and makes the land more susceptible to flooding and desertification. Unsurprisingly, this leads to dire consequences not just for the environment but for human livelihoods, and the economy: one study estimated that damage from soil erosion alone globally costs $400 billion per year.  


The American Dust Bowl of the 1930s is one potent example of soil degradation’s very real perils. Drought, heat, and corrosive farming methods resulted in severe soil erosion on a massive scale, leading to dust blizzards in the Great Plains that devastated entire states and impoverished millions of people during the Great Depression. The lands affected have still not fully recovered nearly a century later. To avoid repeating history, something must be done to reverse degradation, and here regenerative agriculture enters the picture. 


Restoring Soils with Regenerative Agriculture

Where past sustainable farming has focused on simply avoiding degradation, regenerative agriculture aims to not only prevent further damage, but also actively improve the quality of the earth. It strives to offer a holistic approach, starting with the soil but also accounting for the plants, animals, and workers, essentially building agroecosystems that form a mutually beneficial relationship with nature rather than a purely extractive one.  


In the micro, regenerative agriculture revitalizes soil by reintroducing organic matter, prioritizing the biodiversity of its inhabitants, encouraging water absorption, and restoring ground nutrients. In the macro, regenerative practices lead to carbon recapture, healthier and more robust crops, less food insecurity, and more economically bountiful yields.  


So, what methods does regenerative agriculture use? There are many. Cover cropping maintains soil quality by ensuring the earth is never bare, which decreases erosion during the non-growing season. Intercropping (the practice of growing multiple crops in the same place simultaneously), rotational grazing by livestock, and crop rotation add nutrients to the soil, disrupt pests that thrive on monocrops, and increase yield as well as populations of beneficial bacteria. This allows farmers to use fewer pesticides and synthetic fertilizers, which further keeps soil microbiomes diverse and thriving. Agroforestry protects crops from wind and water damage. Limiting excessive tilling and heavy farm equipment keeps soil absorbent and aerated, potentially garnering greater yields that would eclipse efficiency gains created by those tools. 


Many of these methods have long been used by small farms and Indigenous peoples. Native American tribes, for instance, practiced intercropping with the “Three Sisters”: beans, squash, and corn. Now that regenerative agriculture is gaining wider traction, however, we could revolutionize food systems on a global scale — healing soil, boosting economies, and making the future more fertile for all.


Want to learn more? On May 7, the Global Impact Collective will host our next Community Networking Event at Tactile Studios and bring together a panel of regenerative agriculture experts. Join us for a deep discussion of motivations and challenges to adopting regenerative practices, the use of technology, how impact is being measured, the role of policy/standards, and the importance of partnerships and collaboration between businesses and farmers. We hope to see you there!

Agriculture

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Embracing the Second Era of Sustainable Sourcing

Embracing the Second Era of Sustainable Sourcing

  • Writer: Olivia B
    Olivia B
  • Feb 3
  • 3 min read

Updated: Feb 5

The majority of the environmental and social impacts of our material world occur in the supply chains that support every aspect of our global economy. The vague standards, “impact neutral” frameworks, and external certifications that defined the early days of corporate sustainability are past; the industry is entering a world of higher regulatory expectations, greater environmental literacy, and a renewed commitment to sustainable (or responsible) sourcing. Businesses are now seeking frameworks that emphasize positive impact, a holistic understanding of the risks in their supply chains, and outcome-focused commitments over promises and pilots.


At GreenBiz25, an annual event for Sustainable Business Leaders, companies come together to learn and collaborate around this next generation of sustainable supply chain goals. To facilitate this process, the Global Impact Collective and its partner, DT Global Commercial Advisory, will be hosting a joint workshop on the second era of sustainable sourcing, led by experts who have seen the shift firsthand. The event will showcase best practices across different industries and NGO sectors, then give participants an opportunity to consider ways of using these practices to advance their own sustainable sourcing goals.


“Past approaches to sustainable sourcing didn’t really evaluate, measure, and manage the actual outcomes,” recalls Seth Olson, a senior sustainability manager at DT Global Commercial Advisory. “Now, with the maturity of corporate sustainability as a profession, as well as sustainability science, it’s clear that you have to focus on driving improvements to increase business resilience.”


DT Global's paper Navigating the Future of Sustainable Sourcing: Strategies for Securing Resilient Supply Chains in Our Complex Global Agrifood Systems explores the rationale behind this change and offers advice for companies interested in leading the way. Sustainable sourcing is “when an organization actively and consciously sources products and services in an ethical, environmentally sustainable, and socially conscious way."


“Thinking holistically about social and environmental outcomes and having a good sense of economics helps businesses understand the value of strategies that integrate social and environmental outcomes alongside profits,” Seth says. “It's those improvements in outcomes that will lead not only to environmental and social resilience, but longer-term, to business resilience and business value as well.”


Any company whose supply chain relies on natural resources can understand the sustainability challenges laid out in this paper. Regulations, environmental standards, and even the definition of “sustainable” vary wildly across different countries, making it difficult for global businesses whose resources come from all over the world to create and implement cohesive strategies. Making things even more challenging, long-term impacts of sustainability measures are often difficult to quantify, and granular data is hard to come by, especially in developing countries. In the past, lack of data has led companies to prioritize clean, obvious numbers—such as their volume of sustainably sourced materials—to measure what they are doing rather than the impacts they are having. While such metrics aren’t useless, they risk obscuring larger issues in the supply chain that can’t be so easily measured.


So, what’s a proactive business to do? “A lot of this really boils down to the fact that there are no blanket solutions,” Seth says. “A solution that works in X environment won't necessarily work in Y environment. In fact, oftentimes it won’t.” Overcoming the challenges of collecting and measuring sustainability data is a vital start. “You have to first gain an understanding of your supply chains as granularly as possible. Once you understand this context, you can start to design solutions with the stakeholders and communities in those landscapes.”


The toolkit and skillset that are emerging will help food and beverage companies tackle these challenges and build solutions that address the complexity of truly responsible, sustainable sourcing. “I think that this paper represents one data point in a broader trend toward this recognition of the importance of local context and the need for a holistic approach including environmental, social and economic considerations,” Seth says. At GreenBiz25, companies will collaborate, in a pre-competitive space, to advance these goals, share knowledge, and make progress.


Want to learn more? Join Seth Olson and his co-facilitator, Judith Hochhauser Schneider, VP Partnership Develop at Global Impact Collective, on February 10th at 3:30pm at GreenBiz25 as we share additional insights and are joined by three experts from Google, World Wildlife Fund, and Levi Strauss & Co. This interactive workshop will allow participants to immediately apply new learnings to their own supply chains.

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