A powerful component of the circular economy is the transition to sustainable, regenerative agricultural practices worldwide. Regenerative agriculture is a term for an agricultural practice that’s becoming more main-stream, particularly as a climate, soil and water quality, equity, and animal welfare solution. Because of its recent conceptualization (at least in the western world), there isn’t a specific definition and set of practices yet, but there’s a growing consensus around what regenerative agriculture means that allows us to get a sense for the practice and its benefits.

What is Regenerative Agriculture

As a growing movement, people still disagree on what regenerative agriculture really means. Whether it’s more practice-based or solution-based, these disagreements can have ramifications for the climate, racial equity, land ownership, and our agricultural system as a whole. A recent study by researchers from the University of Colorado, Boulder, looked at how regenerative agriculture was defined across academic articles and practitioner websites. They found that a broad consensus was considerably lacking, but the research highlighted common themes that can help us to orient our understanding of regenerative agriculture and to define the practices that reap the most benefits.

They found five areas with the most agreement, which state that regenerative agricultural practices improve soil health, increase biodiversity, sequester carbon, integrate livestock, and increase community well-being. It’s common for new practices to undergo a long thought out process of consensus building, which means that over time we’ll see more agreement about what regenerative agriculture is. For now, it’s important to continue to have these discussions since different definitions can have different implications for all sectors of society. Something we’ll take a deeper look into later.

Let’s take a look at the definitions and practices that most commonly come to mind when people think of regenerative agriculture. According to the Climate Reality Project, “regenerative agriculture is a system of farming principles and practices that seeks to rehabilitate and enhance the entire ecosystem of the farm by placing a heavy premium on soil health with attention also paid to water management, fertilizer use, and more.” Regenerative agriculture is a closed-loop, self-nourishing system that seeks to restore and sustain, our agricultural landscapes to pre-industrial levels. This is why regenerative agriculture is an important component of the circular economy - instead of feeding the earth with chemical fertilizers, regenerative agriculture would take biological waste (thus diverting it from the landfill) and use it to restore nutrients back to the soil.

To achieve these benefits, a range of agricultural practices generally need to be put into place. These include:

Integrating livestock

Integrating livestock means rotating livestock around your pasture in a systematic way so that they help to rebuild soil health, instead of destroying it. Animals will often over-graze the pasture, so rotational grazing ensures that key nutrients from plant matter are left for the soil when the animals are moved. Livestock help soil in a couple of ways - as they move, their hooves break up the soil and compact inedible plants, expose new plants to sunlight, and creates a natural mulch, all of which helps to return key nutrients to the soil. Furthermore, as animals graze and drop waste, their excrement acts as a natural fertilizer for the soil. All of these components not only help to return nutrients to the soil but also improves the soil's water retention.

Crop rotation and cover crops

Many modern-day farmers traditionally leave their soil bare for the winter, which exposes soil to the elements. Wind and rain can negatively impact soil by depleting the nutrients in the soil, either through drying them out or washing them away. Additionally, planting the same plants in the same locations can lead to a build-up of some nutrients and a lack of others. When you rotate crops and plant cover crops strategically, however, farms can systematically build up diverse nutrients in the soil and ensure the soil has the right nutrient balance. These particular practices have the added benefit of being natural disease and pest deterrents.

No-till and minimal soil disturbance

Mechanical, physical, and chemical (fertilizers, pesticides, etc.) disturbances all harm soil health. Plowing and tillage erode soil and release carbon into the atmosphere, and they lead to nutrient loss by creating hostile environments to the soil microbiome. Chemicals can also disturb soil health, negatively impacting the delicate balance of these ecosystems. By adopting no-till practices and regenerative approaches to pest management and fertilizer (e.g. compost), you can avoid these consequences and over time increase soil organic matter, creating healthier, more resilient environments for plants to thrive. These practices are often touted as being a carbon sequestration solution, as well, but the extent of carbon sequestration and its use as a climate solution is still up for debate.

Crop diversity

The benefits of crop diversity are similar to the idea behind crop rotation. Different plants encourage different nutrient uptake in the soil, which leads to healthier soils overall, and also healthier plants and more productive yields. Not only that, but the science behind companion planting is getting more robust, and it can encourage more biologically diverse ecosystems, in addition to being a powerful pest deterrent. While companion planting isn’t necessary to have crop diversity, it’s a powerful tool in and of itself and can help with crop diversity.

The Problem with Current Agricultural Practices

The United Nations released a special report in 2019 detailing how the world's land and water resources are being exploited at an unprecedented rate, which combined with climate change is negatively impacting the ability of humanity to feed itself. Soil is being lost between 10 and 100 times faster than it is forming, and half a billion people already live in places turning into desert. This is on top of the 10% of people who are already undernourished.

The report warns that climate change is going to make these problems worse. Extreme weather threatens to disrupt and shrink the global food supply by speeding up the rate of soil loss and land degradation. This can lead to severe food shortages which will have far-reaching consequences.

Modern-day agricultural practices also contribute to climate change and other environmental degradation. As discussed above, agriculture often leads to soil degradation as the practices are often destructive to soil and require the use of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides. The use of these chemicals and the soil degradation also lead to water quality issues as soil and pollution wash off of agricultural fields and into local waterways, which has ramifications for aquatic ecosystems and human health.

Our current agricultural system further contributes to climate change because it often requires clearing forests and wetlands for production. For example, in Indonesia and Malaysia wetlands were drained to allow for the creation of palm oil plantations. This is particularly damaging as peat and wetlands hold a significant amount of carbon dioxide, which when drained and cleared is released into the atmosphere further contributing to warming.

Additionally, cattle are increasingly in demand globally, and they release significant amounts of methane, on their own, but unfortunately also contribute to the destruction of ecosystems as forests around the world are cleared to host cattle or cropland for cattle feed. More and more of the Amazon is being cleared for cattle production, specifically. Clearing forests, just like wetlands, also releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

The contribution of agriculture to climate change is just one area, albeit fairly encompassing and significant, that highlights the issues with the current agricultural system. There are also animal welfare and human welfare issues that operate hand in hand with the current system. Factory farms notoriously treat their animals inhumanely, and there has long been a movement against the practice. But also humans are often exposed to toxic chemicals when working on farms that use chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and they often suffer mental health ramifications from working in inhumane slaughterhouses. This is all in addition to the fact that many are paid very low wages and often are migrant workers that are housed in unsafe conditions for the season.

Next Steps

Taking a closer look at modern-day agricultural practices shows us why we need to rethink our agricultural system and switch to regenerative approaches. Regenerative agriculture has far-reaching implications for human and animal welfare, climate change, and soil and water quality that are vital to healthy communities. The debate about exactly what regenerative agriculture is leading to uncertainty in how we can scale the practice and verify regenerative claims, in addition to the uncertainty in which benefits we will see from it as a society. This is why it’s important that we take a step back and consider what regenerative agriculture is and how we’re going to approach it so that we can ensure a just and equitable transition. In our next blog post, we will dive deeper into the debate on regenerative agriculture and look at specific solutions that benefit all people.

The Circular Economy: Regenerative Agriculture vs Our Current System