How well is the term Regenerative Agriculture understood?

It hardly matters if you’re dealing with food justice activists or tech-startup entrepreneurs. Small, independent farmers or the corporate leadership of agribusiness giants. Policy wonks or research scientists. Everyone is talking about regenerative agriculture. Some even say it’s the future—and not just of farming. The most fervent advocates say so-called “regenerative” practices have the power to restore the balance between human beings and nature, a solution finally big enough to save our beleaguered planet from all of us.  

Buoyed by the optimism of food producers, foundations, and corporate leaders, the term has gained new levels of visibility in the past two years. It’s spawned books by farmers and filmmakers, features in The New York Timesand The Washington Post, and at least one full-length film—Kiss the Ground, a Netflix-distributed documentary. It’s become a marketing buzzword in the corporate world, too, with companies like McDonald’s, Target, Cargill, Danone, General Mills, and others pledging to use funds to support regenerative practices. The term has even been applied as a modifier to individual food products: In 2019, Applegate Farms, a subsidiary of major meatpacker Hormel Foods, debuted a line of “regenerative” sausages.

That private-sector momentum may soon get a public-sector boost. Advisers to President Joe Biden have suggested that the new administration launch a carbon bank for farmers as part of a plan to fight climate change, using the Commodity Credit Corporation—the same government war chest President Trump used to bail out mostly white, mostly wealthy farmers for income lost due to his trade war—to pay agricultural producers to sequester carbon in the soil.

It’s a promising idea. Advocates for regenerative farming argue that agricultural fields can help bury carbon deep under the ground, offsetting the disastrous climate effects of burning fossil fuels—and that potential promise is a central part of its appeal. Even members of the U.S. Senate, not lately known for their consensus-building abilities, have crossed party lines to get on board.

But the growing, still-incipient movement harbors a secret below its hopeful surface: No one really agrees on what “regenerative agriculture” means, or what it should accomplish, let alone how those benefits should be quantified. Significant disagreements remain—not only about practices like cover crops, or the feasibility of widespread carbon capture, but about market power and racial equity and land ownership. Even as “regenerative” gets increasingly hyped as a transformative solution, the fundamentals are still being negotiated. 

That lack of consensus is visible at the most basic level. In a new studypublished in Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, scholars from the University of Colorado, Boulder looked at how regenerative agriculture was defined across 229 academic journal articles and 25 practitioner websites. They found that only 51 percent of research articles that used the term supplied any sort of definition, while 84 percent of practitioner organizations did. Meanwhile, among the sources that did provide a definition, the details varied dramatically. 

Many—but far from all—of the sources surveyed said that “regenerative” was about improving soil health, or sequestering carbon. For some, the term meant using no-till practices or planting cover crops. For others, it was about integrating livestock and crop production, or improving animal welfare practices. For still others, it was about improving human health, or food access, or food safety. Some said it was about supporting small-scale systems. Others said it was about improving the social and economic well-being of communities, regardless of farm size. Some said it was about increasing yields. Some said it was about increasing profit. 

“The study came directly out of my teaching, in large part,” said Peter Newton, a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, and the paper’s lead author. (Disclosure: I audited Newton’s graduate seminar on the environmental impacts of food production at CU Boulder as a 2019 Ted Scripps fellow.) “I noticed that a lot of students were getting very interested in regenerative agriculture—and, at the same time, I was seeing a lot written about regenerative agriculture in the popular media. But I was not finding any standard or common definition of what it was. In any two consecutive conversations, two different people might be making very different assumptions or inferences about what regenerative agriculture is.” 

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In interviews with more than two dozen academics, industry experts, farmers, and ag-world advocates, I encountered an even broader set of concerns. Topics ranged from the federal crop insurance program and genetic modification to the market dominance of multinational processors and land access for Native communities. For every person, the term “regenerative” called to mind an individual set of associations. Priorities often did not overlap, or even outright contradicted one another. Some even resisted the label entirely, preferring other not-quite-synonymous terms, including “regenerative land use,” “agroecology,” or “real organic.” Others resented the sudden use of a splashy new label to describe time-honored farming methods, approaches that some food producers have long embraced due to preference, tradition, or necessity. 

“Black and Indigenous farmers have been practicing this form of agriculture without any specific title or performative acknowledgement for generations,” said Angela Dawson, the Minnesota-based founder of the 40 Acre Cooperative, a national agricultural cooperative owned and operated by Black farmers, in an email. “This is the way I learned to farm from my grandparents.”

Not everyone agrees this lack of consensus is a problem, at least in the short term. 

Let’s say, at heart, everyone agrees on one thing: Regenerative agriculture means farming in a way that makes the whole world better. If that’s the case, maybe the most telling thing isn’t your attitude on cover cropping or rotational grazing. Maybe the most telling thing is how large you think the whole is, and who and what gets to benefit from inclusion in it. 

So, what is regenerative agriculture? 

Well, what do you think is broken? And what would getting better mean? 

For decades, mainstream American farming has been dominated by the monoculture. Most cropland—which takes up nearly 400 million acres in the U.S., more than a fifth of the 48 contiguous states—produces just one commodity at a time, with vast swaths of land devoted to a single species of commodity grain. 

These are nearly abiotic spaces, crowded and yet mostly devoid of life. Fewer organisms survive in the soil, a casualty of the pesticides and herbicides sprayed to kill weeds and foraging bugs. Even beneficial species tend to suffer: Commercial honeybees, which are trucked by the hiveload to make up for the absence of naturally occurring pollinators, get sick from chemical applications and too much of the same plant pollen. The dominant crop pushes out nearly everything else, fed on a diet of synthetic fertilizer. Once harvested, these grains are mostly shipped all over the world to feed to livestock—which also tend to be raised in sterile, dedicated spaces, on fenced-out feedlots and inside windowless barns.  

This approach reflects an agricultural system that’s organized according to a single crude principle: yield. On balance sheets and in economic data, in news articles and U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) reports, yield—how much of a thing is produced per acre—towers above all else. We grow food like nothing matters except the output. So while our agriculture looks like it’s thriving on paper, it’s failing according to nearly every other measure—failing its workers, failing the planet that sustains it, failing the public it is trying to feed. 

At least in some respects, that mindset is starting to change. It’s not a new realization that soil is a living ecosystem, or that food—the plants and animals humans eat—inhabits a broader environmental and social context. But there is new willingness among those in the food and agriculture industry, a trillion-dollar sector in the U.S., to consider farming as something other than commodities to be extracted from the landscape. There’s a new willingness to consider that more holistic strategies may have value after all. 

For farmers, this change of heart may be partly a matter of self-preservation. Fertile topsoil has disappeared from farms across the Midwest. Drought and erosion are epidemic. Badly degraded soil can’t absorb water and nutrients as well, and is more prone to flooding. Meanwhile, climate change continues to make weather more extreme and unpredictable. These cascading crises put agricultural producers in an increasingly tough position. “We’re essentially trying to make up for many years of fairly thoughtless practices,” Anna Cates, Minnesota’s state soil health specialist, recently told NPR.

“I think from both from a practice perspective and a policy perspective, everybody recognizes that if we’re going to keep demanding that farming systems produce the food we need, somehow we have to ensure the health of that system and figure out ways we can protect it,” said Asmeret Asefaw Berhe, who runs the Soil Biogeochemistry Lab at the University of California, Merced. “Clearly, monocultures in intensive production systems don’t seem to be the way forward. They are just not doing it.”

The good news is that the research is clear: The practices associated with the term “regenerative agriculture” can address many of the problems plaguing American food production. 

As plants develop, they suck carbon dioxide from the air, using it to grow new tissues—roots, stems, and leaves. Some of that carbon is contained within the plant itself, as long as it’s alive. Plants also return additional carbon directly to the soil through their roots. When those roots are allowed to grow deeply—think of an old-growth forest, or a native prairie, planted with a thick mix of perennial grasses—it’s more likely those carbon stocks will remain stored beneath the earth’s surface. In the context of farming, though, plants are only a temporary and incomplete carbon storage solution. Crops are planted and torn up each year, so their roots never grow very deep. And whenever ground is tilled for planting, it enhances the rate of carbon loss in soil. 

Yet it’s increasingly clear that traditional farming practices, ones that had been abandoned or ignored by mainstream American agribusiness until fairly recently, can come with significant climate advantages. Not tilling can help keep carbon safely sequestered underground. Cover crops suck more carbon out of the atmosphere, and their root systems—if allowed to grow over the winter, or year-round—add more carbon-rich biomass to soil. Livestock, meanwhile, can harvest cover crops without killing their roots, then return additional carbon from those plant tissues to the soil through their manure. The benefits here are potentially profound, and not just because carbon-rich soils tend to be more healthy and productive. The soil carbon pool is thought to be three times larger than the atmospheric carbon pool—by far a vast enough repository to solve our climate problem, at least in theory. 

This should all be welcome news, and from the recent flurry of news stories about the promise of regenerative agriculture you might think there’s broad consensus about what to do next. Superficially, everyone agrees: We can make food production less harmful and more beneficial. Yet something fundamental is still in doubt. A second, parallel debate rages behind the facade of broad agreement—one about how the benefits of regenerative agriculture are quantified, and how we know what’s really better, and who gets to decide. 

In the CU Boulder study, Newton and his colleagues argue that existing definitions of regenerative agriculture fall into three broad categories. The first type, which they call process-based definitions, focuses solely on things farmers can do: plant cover crops, reduce tillage, integrate livestock and so on. From this perspective, regenerative agriculture is about how you farm. 

The second type, which they called outcomes-based definitions, focuses on measurable environmental achievements like the amount of carbon sequestered, or discernable improvements in water quality. This approach is more or less agnostic about practices: How one farms matters less than what one ultimately achieves. 

Finally, the third type combines elements of both process-based and outcomes-based definitions, suggesting that both the what and the how matter. 

These distinctions might seem minor, but they are far from neutral. Consider, for example, the nonprofit Regenerative Organic Alliance (ROA), a leading certifier of “regenerative” claims. According to ROA’s standard, only organic farmland can be deemed regenerative—the latter is an extension of the former. But for other prominent entities, including the food processing multinationals Cargill and General Mills, “regenerative” can refer to both organic and non-organic farmland. 

Such in-the-weeds differences have profound implications. The organic standard bans the use of tools that are ubiquitous in conventional agriculture, including genetically modified (GM) crops. So can farmers plant GM seeds and still be called “regenerative”? A outcomes-based framework might say yes: If GM crops can facilitate desired benefits—by producing higher yields, conserving more water, or sequestering more carbon than their organic counterparts—they should be encouraged. But a process-based framework might say no—some advocates argue that the ethical issues brought up by genetic modification, including the patenting of life for profit by private corporations, are inherently antithetical to the regenerative ethos. 

Controversy over specific agricultural tools is only one part of the debate. Larger and more fundamental questions still remain unsettled. Namely: When an entity says its approach to agriculture is “regenerative,” how do we know their farming really has the benefits associated with the term? Is adherence to certain practices enough, or do we need more concrete evidence? If practices are enough, which practices? If data are required, what data?

These lines of inquiry are especially urgent as the Biden administration considers policy that would pay farmers for sequestering carbon on their fields. If we’re going to use taxpayer dollars to promote certain approaches to agriculture, or if we’re going to assign a dollar value to specific environmental benefits, we need to know we’re getting our money’s worth. 

Yet on this front, things get murky quickly. In my reporting for this piece, I noticed that agribusiness companies often define their progress in terms of desired outcomes—a certain amount of carbon sequestered, say. But, upon closer inspection, I’d discover that those measurements were in fact rough estimates based on the adoption of practices. They aren’t necessarily borne out by on-the-ground data. 

That approach might make sense when it comes to benefits like erosion, drought resistance, and water quality. In those cases, scientists agree that practices translate roughly into outcomes. But it’s potentially problematic when it comes to climate mitigation claims: As of now, there’s really no easy way to say that X practice always yields Y carbon benefit. 

There is still widespread scientific debate about how much carbon agricultural lands can actually sequester in the soil. The potential carbon benefit can vary from region to region, farm to farm, even from parcel to parcel within a single farm. It can change based on soil composition. It can change based on the level of nitrogen available. Some studies suggest that agricultural lands max out their carbon sequestration potential over time. And even minimal tillage has the potential to undo all a farmer’s short-term carbon. 

Given this uncertainty, the scientists I spoke to generally weren’t as comfortable modeling carbon sequestration as they were other benefits. 

“It’s not that we don’t know how much carbon sequestration is going to occur because of different practices,” said Berhe, the UC Merced soil scientist. “It’s just that we can’t pin it down unless we measure every spot. If I measure every soil profile, I’ll tell you exactly how much carbon is in there. But whether I can use that information to project over a large area, that’s a slightly more complex issue—because of how inherently variable soils are.” 

Modeling based on practices isn’t necessarily a crude tool. Dan Ryan is CEO of CIBO, a software platform that hopes to make it possible to verify regenerative practices at scale without on-the-ground testing. He told me that his platform has already determined what he calls “the regenerative potential” for every parcel of land in the U.S.—how much carbon could be stored under ideal circumstances, given the variety of factors present. From there, the platform uses satellite imaging to verify which practices are being used, while adding a layer of computer modeling that helps to calculate the overall benefit of these practices using data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and other sources. Though the models are validated against generic on-the-ground data over the years, direct measurements are not taken on a field-by-field basis—and Ryan thinks that’s just fine. 

“It’s not 100 percent accurate, and no one’s going to say that,” he said. “But on average, over time and space, it’s going to be correct.” 

Still, standards based on broad, well-meaning estimates can sometimes prove to be destructive. A recent article in MIT Technology Review shows how California’s “forest offset program,” which seeks to reduce carbon emissions by preserving trees, significantly overestimated the amount of carbon stored—allowing polluters to claim emissions reductions based their purchase of credits that had no real environmental benefit.

Berhe said a lot of the discussion boils down to how much uncertainty we can tolerate. 

“Are we comfortable with, say, I don’t know, a 10 percent error? Or 20 percent? 30?” she said. “We have to be able to accept some error and variability—it’s inherent to this system. That’s okay from a scientific standpoint, maybe even okay from a farmer-trying-to-manage-their-land standpoint. But it’s quite problematic when you start to put dollar values with these measurements. That’s where the complexity gets into this discussion.” 

If we’re going to develop functioning markets based on carbon sequestration, in other words, modeling based on practices may not be enough. 

For Debbie Reed, executive director of the Ecosystem Services Market Consortium (ESMC), a nonprofit that’s developing protocols to measure the benefits of regenerative agriculture and is working toward the launch of a national marketplace for farmer-generated credits in 2022, on-the-ground carbon sampling is indispensable, if still impractical. 

“We’re trying to build the system that can actually monitor what’s happening at large scale,” she said. “No one has that ability to do that right now.”  

She said that collecting farmer- and rancher-specific data at field scale is “very rigorous” and “very expensive,” but ultimately worth the cost due to reduced uncertainty. I asked her to say more about why she’s so committed to on-the-ground carbon measurement, when some of the modeling approaches rely on such sophisticated tech. 

“I think you have to,” she said. “If you look at USDA data, they have soil carbon databases like SSURGO. A lot of that data is 50 to 75 years old. We don’t really know what’s going on down there. We have so many instances where we actually test soil type and we see it’s not what’s in the database. It was created for a totally different purpose, and we’re now using it for a market context. If we really want to track what’s happening, we need better data.” 

In a company blog post, CIBO lead data scientist Jason Route describes how the company uses USDA’s SSURGO database to help calculate its estimates of soil carbon impact—yet Reed says that data is decades old and potentially unreliable. It’s just one example of how competing entities still don’t agree on even basic fundamentals, even as farmers are already starting to generate income based on purported climate benefits. 

Yet these disagreements obscure a larger point.  While entities like CIBO and the ESMC fixate on the best way to measure farm-level impact, others reject their premise entirely. These critics argue that analyzing farm-level benefits has limited usefulness when the broader landscape is still so fraught. The focus on the efforts of individual producers is a reluctance to think bigger, they say—a failure of imagination that limits the environmental potential of regenerative agriculture, while deflecting from deeper, more systemic problems.  

Last year, the Netflix-distributed documentary Kiss the Ground started to bring the term “regenerative agriculture” to new audiences. With a swelling orchestral score, sweeping aerial footage, an A-list Hollywood narrator, and the backing of a company that’s arguably the biggest player in the movie business, the film makes no bones about its world-changing ambitions. 

“This is the story of a simple solution, a way to heal our planet,” actor Woody Harrelson intones in the movie’s trailer, which has been viewed nearly 10 million times. “The solution is right under our feet—and it’s as old as dirt.” 

The film’s entreaty is compelling because it’s so straightforward and direct: If the problems we face are complex and vast, the solution is the very opposite. That may be wishful thinking, but scientific oversimplification was not the main issue with Kiss the Ground. The film’s harshest critics say it failed to consider its own social context, reflecting aspects of the systemically racist culture that produced it.  

The film has “frustrated and alienated a number of Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) in the food and agriculture world who say it all but excludes their voices and completely ignores their ancestors’ contributions to the regenerative movement,” wrote Gosia Wozniacka in Civil Eats. “What’s worse, they say, is that the film fails to step beyond its soil health focus and upbeat message about reversing climate change to address the social inequities and structural racism at the heart of American agriculture, including Black and Indigenous land dispossession, discrimination, and a lack of access to farmland.” 

Ultimately, the nonprofit behind Kiss the Ground issued an apology for its presentation of the issues, and for the film’s overall lack of inclusivity. But the problem isn’t specific to Kiss the Ground. Sources for this story also expressed frustration that a large segment of the regenerative movement has focused so much on carbon credits—omitting the importance of addressing social and political issues as part of the regenerative ethos, while erasing the contributions of Native farmers and farmers of color. 

When I asked A-dae Romero-Briones, director of Native agriculture and food systems programs at the First Nations Development Institute (FNDI), a nonprofit working to improve economic conditions within Native American communities, she expressed disappointment in the disparate groups of people rushing to fix the planet under the banner of “regenerative.” 

“The Native scientists that I know, the Native agricultural professionals that I know, who have all the same certifications and qualifications as those with a seat at the table, see the people who are part of the system that created the problem now grasping for solutions,” he said. “While those who have always practiced the solutions, and who continue to practice the solutions, and who have really been at the spear tip of the exploitative institutions that damaged their society, now see those same institutions forming around these ‘modern’ principles.”

“It’s a little bit breathtaking to see that sort of arrogance at play,” he went on. “We who are non-Native came to North America and displaced a functioning system of agriculture and food production that had been here for 10,000 years. And within a matter of 250 years to 300 years, we’ve destroyed the value of the land. But those Indigenous practices are based on thousands of years of science. There’s plenty of genetic studies that show the incredible knowledge that it took to breed corn—when folks begin to study Native principles, they realize that they’re grounded in modern science. Yet these studies are done with very little participation from Native scientists.” 

Reed, the executive director of ESMC—one of the few ecosystems services entities that publicly acknowledges the importance of outreach to Black and Indigenous farmers—agreed that experts within underserved communities often go unheeded or ignored, with self-defeating results for the entities now scrambling to find ways to regenerate farmland.  

“There’s a lot we don’t know,” she said. “And rather trying to figure out what it is, let’s go back to individuals and cultures that are, in fact, continuing to practice the way they have for a long time. We can learn a lot rather than reinventing the wheel there.”

“Indigenous people aren’t smarter or more spiritual than anybody else,” Romero-Briones said. “We’ve just had a lot more trial and error across a lot more generations. Now we’re at the point where we have all this experience and knowledge that has been passed on from generation to generation—when we talk about processes and outcomes, our timelines are hundreds of years. When people in regenerative agriculture talk about timelines, they’re talking about seasons.” 

Opening doors and fostering dialogue always sounds great in theory. But if those racing to adopt—and profit from—“regenerative” practices stop to listen, they may not be prepared to embrace what they hear. That’s not only when it comes to issues that directly affect a farmer’s bottom line, like the minimum wage exemption. A more inclusive conversation may mean reconsidering aspects of the food system that many take for granted. It may mean entering uncomfortable, even unthinkable, terrain.

Consider, for instance, the regenerative movement’s sacred cow: cattle. The appealingly counterintuitive idea that “cows can save the planet” has taken on new currency of late, thanks in part to high-profile coverage in major media outlets and films like Kiss the Ground. Yes, when allowed to graze cover crops and perennial grasses in an actively managed way, cattle can help return carbon from digested plant matter to soil, which in turn helps increase biodiversity, water quality, and soil health across a variety of metrics. Great—now that that’s settled, we can all agree cattle are good. Right? 

Well, no. Romero-Briones sees it differently: She points out that these benefits aren’t specific to cattle. Other species of ruminants can confer them, too. 

“Elk are ruminants. Deer are ruminants. Buffalo are ruminants. These are all important protein sources for Indigenous people and always have been,” she said. “Cattle are in the same category, but the American diet and the American food system puts such an emphasis on cattle—to the detriment of all these other populations.”

As a 2019 article in the journal Agriculture, Ecosystems & Environment put it, “In most of the world’s semi-arid and arid grasslands, the replacement of free-ranging wild herbivores with fenced-in livestock has caused degradation of vegetation and soils, resulting in declines in productivity and biodiversity, a reduction in ecosystem resilience, and overall decline in historic ecosystem services generated through the grazer/grassland relationships.”

If we know free-ranging ruminants are helpful, why not support systems that let them proliferate more freely? Wouldn’t that be consonant with the overarching ethos of regenerative agriculture, which is supposed to promote increased biodiversity and the integration of ruminants into cropland? You might argue that it’s easier to control domesticated species, or that infrastructure for processing elk and deer at scale does not presently exist, or that current regulations would make it difficult to sell their meat for human consumption. But the hangups aren’t just logistical. A closer look at the way federal lands are managed suggests a much more active hostility to these non-cattle species. 

Romero-Briones brings up the example of the Point Reyes elk, or Tule elk, that have been reduced to a population of only 6,000 in California—and may be limited further under a controversial plan that would allow park service officials to cull them. Why? Because elk compete with cattle for grass, they’re seen as a nuisance by the ranchers who graze their livestock on the same federal lands the elk inhabit. It’s the same story in Yellowstone, where the remaining buffalo herds are contained and systematically culled when they grow in number—a plan that’s nominally about the threat of disease transmission but, as I’ve reported, is more likely about protecting ranchers’ monopoly on federal grazing rights. 

Once you start to ask the question of why these ruminants, why cows above all, there are no easy answers. You can’t really argue that cattle have magical properties other multi-stomached herbivores lack. You can’t really argue that there’s an ecological logic to their dominance of the landscape. Sit with the question long enough, and the likeliest explanation becomes hard to ignore: The single-minded attention to cattle is mostly about preserving the power, profits, and land access of those who benefit from the system as it currently exists. 

It’s just one example, but it demonstrates why the environmental and social and political conversations can’t be parallel conversations. They’re the sameconversation, even if they’re not always being had at the same time. That’s not just because it’s inconsistent, even hypocritical, to advocate for a holistic approach to farming, and yet not embrace the widest possible spectrum of human concerns. In measurable, concrete ways, the environmental aspect of regenerative agriculture likely cannot be decoupled from its social and political context—even if some of the movement’s most high-profile adherents don’t seem to realize it yet. 

“I don’t want to sound like I hate regenerative ag,” Silvia Secchi, a natural resources economist in the department of Geography and Sustainability Sciences at the University of Iowa, told me. “But it’s honestly a last-minute front.” 

For Secchi, whose research focuses on land-based energy production, water quality, and adaptation to climate change in the Mississippi River Basin, there is no climate solution—there can be no regenerative agriculture, more broadly—until the U.S. addresses its policy of systemic agricultural overproduction. 

Yes, some of the practices associated with “regenerative” can help build up soil carbon. But when those practices are layered on top of a resource-intensive approach to farming, their value becomes dubious. Cover crops won’t change the fact that agriculture, especially in Grain Belt states like Iowa, relies heavily on fossil fuels, which are used to produce synthetic fertilizers, power irrigation pumps, and keep diesel combines running. 

It’s strange, when you start to think about it: All the talk about paying farmers to sequester carbon largely avoids discussion of how much they’re already emitting. The carbon benefits of “regenerative” practices, after all, are meaningful only if they substantially outweigh the emissions cost of production. But do they? 

I posed this question to Mark Lambert, vice president of agriculture at the venture capital firm Quantified Ventures, who helped to design the Soil and Water Outcomes Fund, a vehicle for paying farmers to adopt sustainable practices that has sold credits to customers like Cargill and others. His response surprised me.

“We are not quantifying whether each farm operation is achieving net neutral or net negative carbon emissions overall,” he wrote in an email. “We are concerned only with the below-ground carbon pool. The broader emissions associated with production don’t negate this sequestration. Taken on the whole, we recognize that each farm will likely be a net emitter of GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions. What our program is helping farmers do is reduce that overall GHG profile by increasing sequestration in soils.” 

That makes sense: All improvements are welcome, and it’s better than if those farmers had done nothing. Still, this stance becomes problematic if, as Lambert said, his farmers are still net emitters of GHG emissions. As long as their farming processes pollute more than they conserve, they’re still making the problem worse, not better. It’s a way of talking about benefits without accounting for the costs of production. 

“Since we are paying for the overproduction of corn, we are therefore as taxpayers indirectly responsible for the greenhouse gas emissions that that generates,” Secchi said. “We are then also responsible for all the greenhouse gas emissions downstream, from the livestock industry, which these subsidies support—because it’s cheaper to grow the hogs and chickens and whatever. And then we want to pay farmers to fix the problem? It’s mind-bogglingly stupid.” 

In this context, she called regenerative agriculture “a massive deflection.” 

Zach Ducheneaux, a member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe who is executive director of the Intertribal Agriculture Council, an organization that promotes economic development and conservation in tribal communities, agreed that it’s illogical to try to fix state-sponsored overproduction with piecemeal on-the-ground farming changes. As a cattle rancher, he’s seen the way that the existing system absorbs individual decision-making power, making it harder for farmers to produce food the way they otherwise might. For him, there is no point in talking about “regenerative” until we address the forces that compel farmers to focus on yield at the expense of everything else. 

“To me, regenerative agriculture is what every producer would do if they were freed from the confines of this commodified system,” he said. “I don’t believe there is a single cattle producer in the country that is excited about sending the calves they worked so hard to raise on a double-decker truck 800 miles away to a feedlot to be poisoned by grain. I fundamentally don’t agree that that’s what every cattleman wants to do. But that’s what dad did, and that’s what grandpa did, and that’s what the system dictates that they have to do.” 

“By the same token,” he continued, “I don’t think there’s a single row crop or grain farmer out there that is looking forward to the prospect of putting Roundup on their field in the spring. But they have to, because the system that they’re in dictates that they grow at least X number of bushels on X number of acres to make their note payments so that they can continue to keep the farm operating. To me, ‘regenerative’ is what these guys would all do if we could free them from that yoke of financial determination that predates them.”

Despite this, Secchi said, she’s seen a notable reluctance to question long-held assumptions. That’s true even in the academic world, including among those who study agriculture’s potential for transformative change. Part of the resistance is cultural: The emphasis seems to be on finding ways to incrementally improve the existing system, even if that system is fundamentally at odds with broadly agreed-upon goals. But the spaces she inhabits are also largely dominated by white men with close industry connections, people who have a lot to lose if they alienate more powerful interests. She’s based in Iowa, after all, where the influential Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture was recently defunded—a move that critics saywas political retaliation for scientific findings that were unfriendly to big agribusiness. 

“These are all ecologists. They should be able to think in terms of systems,” Secchi said. “But what they’re doing is not thinking in terms of systems. What they’re doing is fiddling at the margins, so they can keep their big labs open. Keep all the federal funding and funding at the state level flowing. Not upset anyone, not rock the boat. But regenerative ag—if it’s true—should rock the fricking boat.” 

The links between subsidies, overproduction, and environmental damage aren’t the only touchy subjects in the conversation surrounding regenerative agriculture. In some quarters, there’s also a reluctance to talk about land ownership. There’s a desire to invest in new science and embrace new tools without confronting the way scaled up, ever-more-mechanized farming directly and indirectly served to consolidate—and homogenize—ownership of U.S. farmland, paving the way to our current crises of equity and environment. 

In an illuminating analysis, Portland State University scholars Megan Horst and Amy Marion synthesize years of academic research, showing how federal programs focused on the overproduction of commodities mostly benefited wealthy landowners—who were, and still are, mostly white men. These landowners had the resources to compete in the race for larger and larger farms, while less-well-off farmers, tenants, and laborers—disproportionately people of color—were, as one Farm Security Administration official put it in 1938, “shoved aside in the rush toward bigger units, more tractors, and less men per acre.” 

According to Romero-Briones, many of those who use the term “regenerative agriculture” have avoided reckoning with this uncomfortable history. 

“We need to talk about land access and land acquisition for Indigenous people. We can’t get into conversations about regenerative agriculture without that,” Romero-Briones said. “But a lot of the conversations that are happening kind of go up to the fence—you’ll talk about soil and carbon, but we don’t want to talk about land ownership. We’ll talk about grazing cattle on more or less acreage. But we don’t want to talk about who owns those acreages.” 

We know who owns those acreages. In the U.S., according to the most recent available USDA data, a full 97 percent of U.S. farmland is owned by white people. 

That’s not an accident. The story of American agriculture is in many ways a story of dispossession and exclusion, an extensively documented saga of broken treaties, forcible removal, slavery and incarceration, racist violence and intimidation, grinding systemic discrimination. That history continues to this day. While white co-founders shill their food startup ideas in the pages of glossy magazines, Native producers and entrepreneurs struggle to attractbasic press interest and investment—just the way other people of color, and also women, struggle to secure the capital needed to run viable food businesses. In 2019, an investigation by The Counter showed that USDA’s stated record of recent civil rights accomplishments was based on highly misleading data—data that helped to obscure decades of discrimination, while spurring the continued pattern of land loss that has been epidemic among Black farmers and other farmers of color. 

This history is not a backdrop. It’s fundamental to the social, political, and environmental challenges that we face today. The lack of representation in American farm ownership can’t really be separated from Iowa’s unbroken landscape of corn. They’re two sides of the same problem.  

“What is regenerative ag without considering the consequences of Jim Crow and what it meant for Black farmers? Without considering the fact that the whole state of Iowa was essentially just given to white farmers who started tilling the heck out of it and overproducing—and now we’ve had to have policies in place for a century to take care of that overproduction?” Secchi said. “That’s what regenerative ag has to face if it wants to be real, in my opinion. Otherwise, it’s just greenwashing.” 

Others agreed that, without a strong social and political foundation, regenerative agriculture was doomed to be a facile intervention. As Chappell put it, quoting the food sovereignty advocate Maria Whittaker: “Sustainability without justice is merely sustained injustice.” 

In theory, you would think that proponents of regenerative agriculture—farming that makes the world better—would want to address these issues head-on. But just as there’s a curious silence on the topic of farm subsidies and overproduction, I found entities in the regenerative ag space to be curiously silent on the topic of racial injustice, specifically when it comes to land access. 

In his analysis of the many definitions of “regenerative,” Newton, the CU professor, found that about 17 percent of academic studies and 40 percent of practitioner websites included language related to social issues and community well-being. But when I asked him to look for mentions of racial parity specifically, he found none in a scan back through the data. 

That omission is indicative of the overall tone. The Regenerative Organic Alliance, for instance, has incredibly detailed metrics for what farms must do to use the term “regenerative” on consumer-facing products, from agreeing to regular sampling of soil carbon to passing metrics about increased biodiversity. There are even metrics related to equity: The program helps to certify that farmer-supplier contracts are fair, that workers are being paid honest wages, and that fields are free from child labor and sexual harassment. This is rigorous, well-thought-out stuff. And yet nowhere is racial justice, specifically, mentioned. Nowhere does the program seek to address the fact that white people own 97 percent of the land. 

I asked Jeff Moyer, CEO of the Rodale Institute, who sits on ROA’s board as executive chairman about why issues related to racial justice were omitted. 

“I would say that we probably haven’t done a thorough enough job of trying to incorporate that thought process or those principles in that language into our standard,” he said. He cited that ROA’s standards are nimble and able to evolve through a process involving the company’s board of directors—the still-young certification, he said, only debuted in the summer of 2020. 

“We can’t expect everything to happen all at once. The team that we’ve assembled has done an amazing job to create a dynamic standard that is being well received in the marketplace. Companies and food packagers are saying this is exactly what we’ve been asking for, exactly what we need. And we’re rolling it out as rapidly as we can with a fairly small budget and a very small staff. Is it all-encompassing and perfect? No. But give us time. We’ll incorporate these things, and that’s one of the pieces of language that we need to think about as we progress on this path.” 

In a statement, a General Mills spokesperson told The Counter: “In terms of specific goals and metrics around racial equity in our regenerative ag pilot programs, we’re actively exploring how we might do that moving forward.” It also mentioned its sponsorship of events run by other organizations that have been more proactive in their support of advancing equity in agriculture. 

In an email, a spokesperson for Cargill said they were “pretty sure we have never been asked this question. I’m not aware of any such definition that includes an equity measure, so will have to check.” 

After a 10 days, Cargill wrote back to inform me of a new initiative it had just announced, which will explore ways “to increase the participation and profitability of Black farmers.”  

After asking for more time to formulate a response, Danone had not provided further clarification by press time. 

From the organizations I spoke to, it seems clear that issues of racial justice and land access are second-tier issues—considerations that aren’t included in initial pilots and programs, but worked out gradually over time. To be fair to them, these issues are complex—and there’s meaningful debate about who, ultimately, is responsible for taking them on.

“We have to grapple with these uncomfortable conversations and discussions around racial justice. We have to do that,” Berhe, the UC Merced soil scientist, who has also advocated for including an equity dimension in definitions of regenerative agriculture, told me. “Where it gets complicated, though, is when you start thinking about how this factors into this specific farms working in a specific way. Should this be a larger societal burden that we all bear together to acknowledge the history that got us to this point? Or do we put all that burden on specific farms and individuals?” 

Berhe said she is still grappling with that question. And, ultimately, we may decide that the burden of addressing racial equity in agriculture and land ownership does not fall on the shoulders of specific farmers, corporations, or certifiers, but to the government—which has powerful tools at its disposal to uplift those who have been shut out of food production. 

The Growing Climate Solutions Act, a bill currently under consideration by the Senate and co-sponsored by a bipartisan group of more than 30 senators—seems to recognize this. The bill, which would start the process of allowing USDA to certify entities that pay farmers for carbon sequestration, includes language that would require lawmakers to find ways to increase the access of “historically underserved, socially disadvantaged, or limited resource farmers” to land (and, through it, valuable carbon credits)—though it currently offers no specific proposal for how to do so.  

It remains to be seen how the government will act. But proponents of regenerative agriculture can’t just ignore this debate. As the writer Sarah Mock recently argued, carbon credits are already making farmland more valuable—further raising barriers to access for those who find themselves excluded from agriculture, while rewarding those who are already wealthy (if not in dollars, then in land). Without a strong equity component, then, climate-farming schemes are likely to worsen social inequality and consolidate land ownership—factors that are correlated, in turn, with environmental degradation. 

There is another way, one that could improve both the ethical validity and environmental efficacy of “regenerative,” while addressing the ongoing crisis of equity in our midst. But it will require drawing a bigger circle, and entertaining a broader spectrum of concerns, while facing up to the realities of our shared and shattering past. 

A great transition is afoot. Nearly one-third of America’s farmers are over 65 years old, and nearly two-thirds are over 55, according to USDA data. The average age of farmers in the U.S. is just shy of 60 years old. It’s an indicator of a generational change that’s already underway: According to some estimates, as 25 percent of farmers retire between 2011 and 2031, 70 percent of farmland will change hands.  

The conventional wisdom, in some circles, is that no one will want to replace these farmers when they age out of the business—and no one will need to. 

“The fundamental fact is that we no longer need many farmers,” tweeted the Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, in a 2019 thread on the decline of rural communities in the U.S. He shared a chart suggesting that farm productivity had doubled more than five times—an overall increase of 2,400 percent—in the past 70 years. “We just can’t find work for many farmers these days,” he wrote. 

In a broad sense, it’s true that farming—especially conventional farming—has become a lonelier, more automated profession that requires fewer and fewer people. In a recent Foreign Policy essay titled “Big Agriculture is best,” two leaders of the Breakthrough Institute—a think tank that advocates for intensive technological solutions to environmental problems—argued that this exodus is a good thing, claiming that “vanishingly few [Americans] live anywhere near a farm or want to work in agriculture.”

But that narrative doesn’t tell the whole story.

I’m finally able to be who I was meant to be by doing this. As Little Elk’s example shows, there are those who burn to work the land, who feel their humanity will never be fully complete without it. There is no lack of desire. There are only barriers to access. Tahz Walker is senior program manager of the Farmers of Color Network, a fund that provides infrastructure capital to farmers in the southeastern U.S. as part of RAFI-USA, a nonprofit that advocates for corporate accountability, environmental sustainability, and racial equity in agriculture. In his experience, land access is a defining issue for many of the region’s young, aspiring farmers—and the supply of would-be farmers far outpaces the availability of land. 

“A lot of beginning farmers are in the same place,” he said. “They may be leasing land in urban or peri-urban areas, and the land prices have just obviously gone up. So they’re looking at more rural land, and just not having the capital. At the same time, they want to be close to their markets—often, they were already working with a specific market closer to an urban area, and they don’t want to be too far away. They’re having to really figure out, ‘OK, well, these land prices are crazy, how do we afford this?’” 

In short, many who want to farm find themselves priced out of the market. Farmland prices have soared in the past decade, thanks in part to unprecedented interest on the part of wealthy investors. In Iowa, farmland costs six times what it did in 1990; nationwide, farm real estate value has jumped nearly 60 percent since 2006, according to USDA data—and the emergence of mature carbon markets is only likely to accelerate this trend.

The resulting land access dilemma is common among new farmers, but it’s especially keen for farmers of color. Walker says that the surge in interest he sees is from people who don’t have an immediate history of agriculture or land ownership in their families, or whose connection to the land was severed generations ago. The ones who are able to purchase farmland tend to have something in common: They’re white. 

“This is not a knock on a lot of the younger white farmers, but what I’ve seen is that a significant amount of them—not all—come with generational wealth that they can lean on. I know farmers who are like, ‘How did you get this farm so fast, and all this infrastructure?’ And it’s like, ‘Well, we got a loan from our parents,’ or ‘We got a loan from family,’ or ‘We were able to pull trust fund money and cash out on it.’”

A recent report from the nonprofit National Young Farmers Coalition spells out the problem in more detail. It’s not just that white people already own 97 percent of farmland, much of which will be handed down to a family member—or if it doesn’t, may be snapped up by an investor before ever appearing on the open market. In addition to this gap in inherited wealth, farmers of color face any number of additional obstacles, including higher levels of student loan debt, language barriers, discrimination from lending agencies and public farm programs, discrimination by the people and entities selling land.

In this light, Krugman’s tossed-off analysis—“we just can’t find work for many farmers these days”—appears deeply misguided. Plenty of new farmers, many of them people of color, want the opportunity to work the land. They’re simply hitting up against a system that rejects them. 

What can “regenerative agriculture” really be if issues related to land access, economic equity, and racial parity fall outside its purview? Ultimately, it can only be a limited, selective, and self-serving framework, one that seeks to strengthen what is already powerful while declining to fix what is broken. As National Young Farmers Coalition’s executive director Martin Lemos put it in a recent op-ed for The Counter: “Without concerted and multiple land policy interventions, we forestall the more just food system that is struggling to be born,” he wrote. “Too little investment would expose how much of our agricultural policy is [in fact] a land-wealth preservation strategy.” 

This is where the conversations about environment and equity start to converge even more clearly. A vision of “regenerative” that ignores access and equity would likely be not only incoherent but ineffective, undermining its conservation goals from the outset. After all, pivoting away from a heavily mechanized agriculture obsessed with yield toward a more dynamic agriculture based on ecology would be an unprecedented transformation. That transformation can only be powered by a precious natural resource: people. 

The case for a more thoroughly populated agriculture becomes clear in two recent studies co-authored by a range of contributors from across academic disciplines and professional industries.

“A critical and underappreciated feature of agroecological systems is that they replace fossil fuel- and chemical-intensive management with knowledge-intensive management,” write the authors of a study titled “Transitioning to Sustainable Agriculture Requires Growing and Sustaining an Ecologically Skilled Workforce.” 

In this formulation, the key ingredient isn’t high-tech machinery and expensive inputs. It’s a recipe that requires the expertise, creativity, and watchful eye of human beings. 

“For decades, US policies, technologies, and economic pressures have tended to ‘deskill’ rural labor. … Production has shifted to larger farms that specialize in two to three crops or in livestock,” they write. “Such ecologically simplified operations rely on repetitive tasks, heavy chemical and fertilizer applications, and large-scale ‘labor saving’ machines. [But] under a model that pursues productivity as the primary goal, neither food security nor sustainability has been achieved, and a critical resource—farmer knowledge—has been eroded. As a result, the single greatest sustainability challenge for agriculture may well be that of replacing non-renewable resources with agroecologically skilled people.”

These are scholars, scientists, and activists with a keen sense of our dire environmental predicament. And yet they’re saying the greatest sustainability challenge we face may not be climate change, or population growth, or depleted soil. It might be something much more immediate: finding a way to get more knowledgeable people on the ground. 

“With such a small percentage of people trying to do all the farming in the country, we have a huge rupture between people and ecosystems—there’s not enough human care involved,” said Liz Carlisle, a professor of environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and co-first author of the study. “In an agro-ecosystem that’s being managed regeneratively, there would be a lot of monitoring and observation and adjusting and care of plants and soil. We have people farming tens of thousands of acres, but they can’t possibly observe at that level what’s happening.” 

As University of Michigan ecologist John Vandermeer has argued, the technologies that drive conventional agriculture—from powerful pesticides to genetically modified crops—tend to be, at heart, labor-saving techniques. Those approaches make it easier for fewer people to operate larger and larger farms, but they also tend to be more resource-hungry and emissions-intensive. The mere presence of more human workers can diminish those impacts. Multiple studies have shown that increased human capital tends to mitigate carbon dioxide emissions—in short, because people take back the work from polluting machines. 

A truly regenerative agriculture, then, may require an approach to farming that’s less isolated and automated, more creative and collaborative—embracing solutions that Chappell called “low-carbon, high-human.” That doesn’t mean that people must resign themselves to lives of drudgery to make sustainable farming work. Monocultures might be monotonous, but Carlisle argues that ecologically-minded farming can be engaging, fulfilling work that is creative, non-repetitive, and rooted in community. 

Though news outlets and academic papers continue to focus single-mindedly on carbon, there’s some sense among the people I talked to that that could change. There’s an inherent power to the holistic thinking that informs regenerative agriculture, one people still seem to believe in. It makes it harder to put up walls. It makes it harder to sequester interconnected problems into claustrophobic silos. It makes it harder to maintain monocultures of culture and thought. 

“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe,” the 19th-century naturalist John Muir wrote. 

Muir himself fell far short of that all-seeing ideal. In a recent public statement, the Sierra Club acknowledged Muir’s highly problematic example, noting his cherished status among current-day members, and inestimable influence on the Sierra Club’s early years.

“It is time to take down some of our own monuments,” the Sierra Club’s executive director Michael Brune wrote, explaining how Muir palled around with prominent Eugenicists, and readily embraced notions of white supremacy. His writings about the Native and Black people he encountered reinforce the hateful rhetoric of his time, leaning heavily on derogatory stereotypes. Ultimately, it amounts to a profound failure of empathy and imagination: To the end, Muir refused to see that the planet he loved, and the people who inhabit it, are sacred in the same way, that they deserve the same respect, that a crime against one tends to be a crime against the other. 

It may be time for American agriculture to take down some of its own monuments. Our decaying idols cast a long shadow, but beyond the darkness a new conversation is waiting to begin.