What is regenerative Agriculture

Regenerative agriculture is a type of agriculture that includes farming and grazing practices that focus on:

• regenerating topsoil
• allowing farmers to maintain and improve crop yields
• improve retention and plant uptake of water
• increase farm profits for farms
• increases the process of Biosequestration.

It all starts with the soil

Regenerative agriculture’s main focus is on strengthening the health of farm soil. The key is that regenerative agriculture doesn’t harm the soil & land (like conventional farming). Regenerative agriculture improves the land using technologies to build soil health like compost, recycling waste, limiting tilling, not using chemical fertilizers, not using herbicides, not using pesticides, and many other practices.

There are many great videos and speakers online that tout the benefits of regenerative Agriculture and we urge you to check some of them out:

Top 5 Benefits of Regenerative Agriculture

1. Regenerative Agriculture Rebuilds Soil Health

 “Regenerative agriculture describes farming and organic practices that, among other benefits, reverse climate change by rebuilding soil organic matter and restoring degraded soil biodiversity…”

Regeneration International

Regenerative agriculture’s main focus is on improving the soil quality. If you have healthy bio-diverse soil, you get healthy crops. If your crops are healthy and nutrient-dense, they become healthier food products for humans or for the animals we feed them to. Animals eating high quality nutrient-dense food = nutrient dense animal foods for humans.

2. Increasing Crop yields

Switching from conventional farming practices to regenerative, may cause worry for the farmers that crop yields would diminish. This isn’t true.

“Reduce the risk of yield loss due to stressors, and can bring about a material increase in crop yields and quality.”

3. Crop Resilience

The more bio-diverse soil can become, the more that soil can naturally suppress disease for crop species.

 “Under organic systems are likely to be more resilient to extreme weather… in the long-running Farming System Trial, in drought years, yields were consistently higher in the organic system. For instance, organic corn yields were 28-to-34% higher than conventional.” 

Rodale Institute

4. More Profit for farmers

Moving to regenerative agriculture can actually increase your farm’s profitability. Larger product yields = More product to market. But the main saver for regenerative farmers is the cost of chemical inputs like fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides and the likes.

“regenerative agricultural practices can reduce the need for expensive chemical inputs.”

General Mills

5. Regenerative Farms are saving the planet

“we could sequester more than 100% of current annual CO2 emissions with a switch to widely available and inexpensive organic management practices, which we term ‘regenerative organic agriculture.’” 

Rodale Institute

Conclusion

Regenerative agriculture is slowly taking over the farming industry, for the better. As farmers, we should be implementing regenerative agriculture practices to benefit the land, the products produced and to increase yield and profits. As consumers, we should vote with our forks and dollar by purchasing food from regenerative sources. Better Food quality, better for the planet. It’s a win-win.