Will regenerative agriculture help save the world? Or help make giant produce companies richer?

Jordan I’m recording this on Earth Day, and I am thinking a lot about how we change or don’t change the way we do things, to protect the environment, our ecosystems, and the entire planet. Mostly, I’m thinking about the difference between changes that we make for show on days like these because they look nice, they feel nice to say, or they help us sell something and the changes that we make because they are necessary and they are sustainable and they make a difference, even if they’re not easy. This brings us to the practice of regenerative agriculture, which, depending on who is doing it and how, could fit into either of those categories. This is a practice almost as old as farming itself. Only the real interest in it from large businesses is very recent. It can preserve the soil, it can help trap carbon. It can even eventually increase crop yields. Or it can do none of those things, but it can let you slap a cool label on a website or on the produce. So what is regenerative agriculture? How does it work? Why is it being touted by everyone from independent farmers who swear by it to gigantic agribusiness companies just getting into it? And how can you tell the difference between real regenerative produce and the stuff that just wants to say it is?

I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. This is The Big Story. Marc Fawcett Atkinson is a reporter and writer covering food, climate, plastics, and the environment for Canada’s National Observer. Hey, Marc.

Marc Fawcett-Atkinson Hello.

Jordan I realize this might be a complicated question to begin with, but just broadly speaking, what is regenerative agriculture?

Marc Fawcett-Atkinson Okay, so essentially it’s an approach to farming that focuses on rebuilding the health of the soil, and it’s really focused on doing that so that you can sequester carbon in the ground. So soil is usually made up from a mix of inorganic matter, like sand and minerals and organic matter. So essentially compost, dead plants, root systems, like living stuff. All that living stuff feeds, in healthy soil, a really vibrant microbial community, which helps sequester carbon. And it also kind of provides nutrients and makes nutrients more accessible for plants.

So in an industrial farming kind of system, the way that the farming approaches it is essentially it takes out a lot of that organic matter and those organic nutrients and replaces it with chemical fertilizers, which kind of has essentially the result of thinning the soil. Kind of like if you tried to eat a diet of just sugar, you wouldn’t die, but you wouldn’t be particularly healthy. And what regenerative agriculture does is it kind of tries to recreate that more natural organic system where you have a lot of microbes, you have a lot of diversity, you have a lot of soil carbon, and that provides food for plants. And also because you have more of this soil carbon, more of this organic matter in the ground, like roots, compost, dead plant stems, it’s also acting as a carbon sink.

Jordan So that sounds pretty straightforward, actually. Can you explain then why there is a disagreement about how it’s defined?

Marc Fawcett-Atkinson So essentially, the disagreement around how it’s defined comes out of what practices count and what don’t and kind of like how they should be applied. So kind of the origins of regenerative agriculture, you could say, come from generations ago. So Indigenous people have been using regenerative practices for forever, and as have many peasant farmers globally. And then it was kind of formalized, I guess, in terms of organic agriculture or permaculture, both of which really focused on, well, organic agriculture explicitly focuses on soil health. And permaculture, they really focus on how do we grow food in relationship with the environment. So there’s kind of one school of thought around regenerative agriculture, which is where the term first appeared, which really is kind of like an extension of these movements, which typically see food production as a more holistic system and have issues with industrial farming and kind of industrial food systems because they’re based on an extractive model. That’s where the term comes from.

But then more recently, in the last ten years or so, there’s been, like, booming interest in regenerative farming by a whole bunch of different actors. There’s kind of the more quote, traditional groups, the civil society groups, the organic farmers that have kind of come up with the term. But then there’s also major food companies that have really kind of jumped on board and said, well, we’re going to start farming regeneratively. But the kinds of practices that they’re using often borrow quite heavily from the industrial approaches that they’re already using.

A good example of that in Canada would be No-till agriculture in a conventional or non organic system. So no-till is essentially the idea where you don’t till your ground, you don’t break up the kind of upper layer of your ground when you seed, which has the advantage of keeping carbon in the ground and keeping the soil healthier because you have less disturbance. But you have a problem with weeds. So in a nonorganic system, the way they deal with that is you’ll go through, you’ll seed kind of with these little knives that pop the seeds into the ground, and then you’ll use herbicides essentially to kill off any weeds, and you have the crop that you want that’s gene modified to be herbicide resistant come up and you harvest your crop. So that approach has been kind of promoted by the larger food industries as, this is one example of how we’re applying regenerative principles to our farming system. People say, well, you’re still relying on chemicals to make it work.

And then there’s also just the issue of there’s no firm definition for regenerative agriculture, which is where this tension stems from. Organic, for instance, there’s federally mandated standards both in Canada and the States that say farmers need to follow XYZ practices to achieve organic certification. And with regenerative, that isn’t there at all. So it’s kind of up to the companies promoting the products or the farmers essentially being good on their word.

Jordan And I want to get into that in a moment because that’s kind of going to determine, I guess, the future of this practice. But first, maybe just tell me about a regenerative farm that is up and running now that uses these practices in the way that I guess they originated. So you visited a farm run by Céline Caron and Yves Tessier, what’s that like?

Marc Fawcett-Atkinson Yeah. So their farm definitely falls more on the more traditional, more organic end of the spectrum. Essentially, you walk into the farm and it’s kind of this biological haven. A friend of mine who lives there now actually, described it as a jungle almost where they have all sorts of different species of plants and trees.

Jordan How does it look different from what we picture as a traditional farm in Canada?

Marc Fawcett-Atkinson Oh, gosh, there’s was much smaller, you have trees kind of integrated into farming system in a way that you wouldn’t have kind of in a more traditional farm, you have much more diversity is the biggest difference. So instead of having big fields with one crop, you have smaller fields with a whole bunch of different crops put together.

Jordan And is that part of the practice as well, to just sort of mix your crops in the same field?

Marc Fawcett-Atkinson Ideally, yeah. So different crops will feed nutrients essentially to one another or they’ll work symbiotically, essentially. So what you can do is if you plan your crop well, you can essentially have the plants working together to protect each other, to minimize pest disturbances, to feed each other, and you can grow more food per area. The thing is it’s much harder to adapt that to an industrial system because there are different crops you need to harvest at different times, and it’s much trickier in terms of management.

Jordan So tell me this then. Why do farmers like the ones you visited, but more importantly, the ones who are jumping on board now and we can leave off the corporate agriculture for a moment because I want to talk about that separately. But you mentioned this is becoming more and more popular with regular farms across Canada, and I guess what’s in it for those farmers? Is it more work? Is it less work? And what are the returns? Helping the climate crisis is one thing. In my experience, people who are doing something to make a living need a real reason to do that. That will help them do it.

Marc Fawcett-Atkinson Yeah. So obviously there’s helping the climate crisis. I think a lot of people are on board with that. But what is nice with regenerative agriculture, the fact that it isn’t formally in a way structured is it can almost be a bit of a buffet where farmers will pick different practices and see what works well for them, which is one of the reasons why there’s a fairly big range of farmers and kind of like growing interest in it because people can say, oh, well, on my farm, I think cover cropping will work well because of these reasons. So I can adopt that. But I don’t need to kind of adopt a whole suite of practices that will increase costs exponentially.

On the other hand I’ve talked to a few farmers who have done the transition from conventional practices to regenerative practices, and what they find is that after kind of an initial dip in yields and income, after a few years, that starts to come up again and to stabilize and their fertilizer and pesticide costs are way lower. So in the end, it can be profitable. Particularly, and this is just starting to emerge, but there are some regenerative certification systems that are starting to be established, essentially. And what that will do is it allows farmers to kind of get a premium price for what they’re producing.

Jordan I mentioned we’d talk about corporate farms. Why are they attracted to it? My first initial suspicion, and hopefully I’m wrong, is that it’s a great way to advertise that they’re doing something about the climate crisis without doing that much.

Marc Fawcett-Atkinson Yeah, I think the cynical side of me definitely falls in that camp, but I do think there’s a genuine… I’ve talked to a few representatives, like I talked to someone from Cargill a few months ago, and I really do think they see advantages in it, partly in terms of reducing costs because you’re using fewer fertilizers and pesticides and partly to live up to their climate commitments. A lot of these companies have pledged to do something, and they’re trying to figure out how to do it. So their logic is, well, if we move to regenerative or move some of our farms to regenerative, then we can reduce our overall emissions within our supply chain. I think the tension comes out of whether they can actually do that in a way that is really effective or whether there needs to be kind of a deeper overhaul of how we produce and distribute food kind of across the board. Essentially, whether you can produce food regeneratively in an industrial system.

But I do think there’s definitely a lot of interest, and I do think there is some good faith push to do this. I’m curious to see in the next ten years if the promises actually turn out to real changes and if so, what those look like and what they’ll mean for farmers, and then also what they’ll mean ecologically, both in terms of carbon emissions, but also kind of more broadly in terms of fertilizer or pesticide use reductions.

Jordan Well, this is where we do talk about regulations and what those guidelines will look like. So I guess, first of all, who gets to write those and what’s the conversation around what should and shouldn’t qualify as regenerative agriculture at the moment. And second, as you mentioned, this is still really in early days of becoming kind of a mainstream practice. How similar will it be to the debate around what did and didn’t qualify as organic? Because I know that is a huge sore point for many farmers around the country.

Marc Fawcett-Atkinson Yeah. So in terms of regulations for regenerative specifically, I haven’t seen anything on the regulatory side yet. What I have seen is, for instance, the federal government really likes the idea, and they want to encourage farmers to adopt regenerative practices. So they started implementing a suite of different programs that will essentially help farmers afford and know how to kind of use these practices. So, for instance, they have created a program for what they call natural climate solutions, which help farmers use cover crops. Or they’re also starting to create a program that will make it easier for people to access hydrological services or soil testing services so they can better assess which kinds of regenerative practices make sense for them and how to do it in a way that financially makes sense.

In terms of the kind of broader debate around regulation, there’s tension within the organic community around regenerative, essentially wondering whether a movement towards it is kind of going to subsume the gains and kind of the structure that’s been established for organic, which was, as you said, quite controversial and remains controversial. I think from what I’ve seen, there isn’t any imminent push from either the US or the Canadian government to kind of push for regulating regenerative ag per se.

And also, if we look to Europe into the EU, Europe is further ahead in terms of adopting regenerative practices under a slightly different lingo and kind of enshrining them in law. So they have their ‘Farm to Fork’ plan is the EU’s kind of overarching agricultural plan. And there they’ve really embraced this idea of agro ecology, which is similar to regenerative agriculture, but also kind of contains the social justice aspect to it. And they’ve really been quite aggressive in saying we want to really reduce our pesticide load and we really want to encourage farmers to adopt more organic practices. They’ve really pushed in that direction. The US has been quite opposed to Europe’s approach, and it’s kind of been more focused on, well, let’s stay with regenerative and not really have kind of any regulatory oversight. And so far, Canada seems to be sticking more on the US side of things. As always, we’re a bit in between the two.

Jordan This is the last thing I want to ask you about, and I know you can’t see the future, but I’m just wondering where it goes from here. And in particular, what’s the upside? Like, we’ve talked about carbon capturing on this podcast before. Obviously, it’s a positive idea. How much carbon sink are we talking about here? If this could become a mainstream practice. And what happens next to keep that going?

Marc Fawcett-Atkinson I think one thing to be cautious with with regenerative agriculture is a lot of the discourse, a lot of the narrative around it in the last ten years or so since it started to boom, has been, well, this is a climate solution that’s going to save the world and kind of drastically reduce our emissions. Or not reduce our emissions, but sequester our emissions. Partly this is coming out of data produced by a US research Institute that was claiming, I think, something like we could sequester 80% of our emissions or something in the ground. There have been since some pretty strong critiques of that study. And actually I read one study out of Germany that was peer reviewed that kind of assessed how big of a gain can we actually get in terms of carbon sequestration, and what they found is in the next 20-30 years, we can probably gain a fair bit if we do transition over to largely regenerative practices, but then it’ll start to Plateau. And that makes sense because soil carbon kind of exists in a cycle, so different types of ecosystems will typically cycle carbon at a fairly static level. So kind of as you increase the soil carbon, at some point, you’ll hit kind of a natural balance again.

Usually, the way I think about it is it’s a really good approach to essentially neutralize our emissions from food and agriculture in combination with reducing meat intake and dairy intake, and also just kind of cutting emissions in other parts of the agricultural sector. So like fuel, for instance. But it’s not kind of a be all, end all solution to the climate crisis. We can’t keep burning fossil fuels and just kind of count on soil to endlessly sequester carbon. The way someone at COP 26, the climate conference in Glasgow, explained it to me, they were saying we can’t put the burden of sequestering millions of years worth of plant matter, which is fossil fuels, into the top, like 2 meters of soil on the Earth. The balance is skewed. So we need to stop emitting, and then we need to look at regenerative agriculture as one way of reducing the emissions and growing food more sustainably and kind of making our food production more sustainable, but also have this other suite of practices.

And the one thing I’d add, final thing I guess I’d add to that, is on top of the carbon aspect for regenerative ag, you also have some pretty significant benefits just in terms of health and biodiversity. Typically, you have fewer pesticides, fewer fertilizers. That’s better for pollinators. It’s better kind of for the environment generally to have fewer chemicals floating around. It’s easier on workers as well. You have less exposure to harmful chemicals. It’s a significant benefit.

Jordan Marc, thanks so much for walking us through this world today. It’s fascinating.

Marc Fawcett-Atkinson Yeah. Thank you.

Jordan Marc Fawcett-Atkinson of Canada’s National Observer. That was the big story. For more head to thebigstorypodcast.ca. Find us on Twitter at @TheBigStoryFPN. You can email us anytime, hello@thebigstorypodcast.ca [click here!].

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Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan heath-Rawlings, we’ll talk tomorrow.

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