19 February 2025

What I did:

This week I read about the history of regenerative agriculture and how it is situated in relation to other alternative agriculture movements. I also read a scoping review of regenerative agriculture practices. These two articles involved much less commentary on the social dynamics of regenerative agriculture; there was less of a critical tone and more observations. I sent a follow-up email to Ryan Snyder.

 

What I learned

“A Genealogy of Sustainable Agriculture Narratives: Implications for the Transformative Potential of Regenerative Agriculture”:

In industrial agriculture, the farm is analogous to a factory in which food is commodified at mass scale. Large corporations have been promoting RA which indicates the direction of regenerative agriculture. Corporations have co-opted many alternative agricultural movements in the past including Organic Agriculture (OA), Conservation Agriculture (CA), and Sustainable Intensification (SI). Once the corporate actors adopt alternative agriculture narratives, it diminishes their ability to make necessary transformations. The only prominent alternative agricultural movement that has not been co-opted by large corporations is agro-ecology. When corporations begin to endorse a mode of agriculture, by nature it extinguishes that movement’s ability to make systemic and structural changes. 

The organic movement, at its inception, was inspired by scientific research that proved soil was alive. Indigenous people have held this belief since time immemorial, however, it stemmed from creation stories and long histories of being in relation with land rather than Western science. Organic agriculture discouraged the use of external inputs and rejected the view of land as an inanimate resource. Demand for organic food quickly surpassed the supply and large-scale organic farms took over the movement. Over the years, the organic movement has largely been reduced to an industrialized system which approves the use of organic chemical inputs. 

Conservation agriculture promoted the use of technologies to encourage soil conservation. This movement was centered around no-till or low-till machinery such as the broadleaf weed killer and seed drill to replace conventional tillage practices. It is important to note that this alternative agriculture still relied on fossil fuels to power the new machines and heavily relied on chemical inputs, GM crops, and pesticides.

Sustainable intensification was inspired by issues of food insecurity. This movement advocated for increasing yields without cultivating more land; essentially, farming the same amount of land with more intensity. This movement quickly fell out of favor, coinciding with the rise of Regenerative agriculture.

Agroecology has a principles-based focus, rather than a set of standards (like OA), integrating ecology with agriculture. It aims to transform uneven power distributions that industrial agriculture perpetuates. The main concern with agroecology is its ability to keep up adequate food production and consumption patterns based on its low-external input model. The case with agroecology is a tricky one, as its radical agri-food system transformation inherently deters corporate co-option, however, this also diminishes its popularity and level of engagement from the global community.

When governing powers and corporations institutionalize alternative agriculture movements, they prevent them from transforming the uneven power distribution, hence why new terms keep being invented.

Both the issues and solutions for sustainable agriculture are place based and should be locally grounded, necessitating a plurality of sustainable agriculture narratives. The term regenerative agriculture is still contested and subject to co-option. Regenerative agriculture may not have a definition but it may not need one. Definitions can be limited. A set of principles for regenerative agriculture that can be adapted to different social, ecological, and cultural contexts is more beneficial than a single definition. Organic is not the way forward, conservation agriculture is not the way forward, sustainable intensification is not the way forward. There is no one way forward.

 

“What goes in and what comes out: a scoping review of regenerative agricultural practices. (+ideas from Healing Grounds)”:

The scoping review of agricultural practices discusses RA through a soil-centric lens and does not address social justice elements. 

RA has been characterized by low input agriculture, focusing on stimulating biology that is pre existing in soils to help cycle nutrients, replacing some of the need for nutritional amendments like fertilizer, compost, and manure. Regenerative farms have been found to be more profitable than their conventional counterparts in the long term, but in the short term, specifically 2-3 years, making the transition from conventional agriculture to regenerative agriculture is a period of lower yields and financial deficit; gradual change can soften this. 

RA cannot be a completely closed system based on the nature of food production as nutrients leave the farm when food leaves the farm; therefore, some external inputs are needed to replace them.There are no specific descriptions or explanations regarding the types of inputs that are used in RA which is appropriate, as the nature of RA requires a placed-based nuance.

Farmers are not the only ones who need to make changes for regenerative agriculture to transform food systems; a shift in mindset of consumers will be critical. This entails shifting from a focus on high yield to high diversity; diverting from market-driven production to production suited for localities.

Conventional agriculture has high reliance on off-farm, extractive inputs and follows a  “linear take-make-dump” framework. On the other hand, regenerative agriculture follows a non-linear framework. However, to suggest that regenerative agriculture can be defined as a cyclical framework is a gross oversimplification. There are many cycles within regenerative agriculture that operate in complex interconnected ways that are beyond human comprehension. Through repeated exposure to and interactions with the living beings and nonliving elements in nature, one can begin to guess at the complexities of these systems and try to make sense of them. It cannot be learned in a season or a few years. Knowing the land takes time. Sometimes there may be misunderstandings, maybe our first impressions are wrong. But regenerative agriculture calls for a shift from telling the land how we want it to serve us to listening to what a unique area has to offer. An example of this can be found in Healing Grounds in which rural farmers in Mexico rely on ancestral knowledge and experience rather than modern chemicals. They have distinct knowledge of a multitude of corn varieties that they can draw from to select hyper specific crops based on the precipitation that year or the elevation they intend to plant. These varieties were bred not in a lab, but over generations of experience working with family and friends, the crop, and the land, including everything that comprises that land (fungi, bacteria, non-crop plants, insects, etc).

 

What I am doing next:

Next week I will be reading two more articles that go beyond an objective point of view that reviews alternative agriculture movements and practices common in regenerative agriculture. One of the articles comments on “farming by the numbers” and calls for a move beyond this calculative approach. The second article will discuss regenerative agriculture from an anti-colonial point of view. I hope these articles will give me some insight on how to make sense of what a “rock-the-boat” regenerative agriculture movement would look like. I should hear back from Ryan Snyder by next week.