Has Regenerative Agriculture's time arrived?

 In The Social dilemma, a documentary featured on Netflix, a group of young tech-savvy veterans of the social media world lay out their concerns about the undesirable influences exerted by social media giants on individual lives and on society writ large.  It’s a long and complicated story, but it comes down to this: These companies: Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and others, consider your web presence, if you have one, almost entirely in terms of its capacity to draw “eyeballs”. They don’t make it their business to care about content per se. Ultimately, they’re selling ad space based on viewership.

A thought that occurred to me in the midst of my morose ruminations about social media: they might just be useful in telling us indirectly about the salience of a particular topic or person in society.  It goes without saying, of course, that having a high level of visibility on social media is not a figure of merit except in some narrow sense.  With that rather ill-formed thought in mind, I googled “regenerative agriculture”.  It took less than a second for Google to come up with 19,800,000 results.  Wow, I thought, that’s an impressive number!  Then I searched for links to Lady Gaga, whose music I often like, and came up with 210,000,000 results. Actually, the comparative results made me feel pretty good.  As a serious, non-entertainment topic, regenerative ag is doing pretty well. I feel a measure of confidence that regenerative agriculture is becoming a thing in the social universe. So what is it?

In the 1980s the Rodale Institute began using the term ‘regenerative agriculture’ in their publications and formed the Regenerative Agriculture Association. No one can give a definition that will leave everyone happy, but this one, borrowed from Wikipedia, should serve:

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.

The consequences of a century of reliance on industrial methods of farming have been devastating to the soils of America’s great plains. It all began when the U.S. passed the Homestead Acts of 1862 to encourage agricultural development of the Great Plains. A settler could claim ownership of up to 160 acres of land, provided that he lived on it for a period of five years and cultivated it. People had no idea how to farm the virgin plains as they became settled. As tractors and farm machinery became available, they did all the wrong things -- careless of maintaining the soil, deep-plowing the grasslands with abandon.  In the 1930s, droughts in the plains set up the conditions for the Dust Bowl, dust storms that proved to be the greatest single ecological disaster the nation has known. Unfortunately, the lessons of the Dust Bowl were not well learned.  A recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change focusing on land details how the forced conversion of natural landscapes in the interests of increasing crop yields has worked havoc across the globe. 

 We don’t have many years left to halt soil degradation and to restore desertified land, to restore natural landscapes. The way back to restored, productive soil is at the same time a pathway toward lowering the concentrations of atmospheric greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide. Regenerative agricultural practices involve no-till management of the soil, discontinuance of pesticides, herbicides and industrially produced fertilizers. Soils are kept with something planted year-round. Cover crops include legumes such as vetch, clover, radishes and peas, and annual grains such as winter rye. These cover crops are managed so that they protect the soil from erosion and build a soil rich with root systems that soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Regenerative agriculture is in effect, a restoration project, an obeisance to nature. Cash crops, such as corn or soybeans, are sown into soil that maintains its cover crops. You can learn about all this by watching the beautiful and inspiring film, Kiss the Ground. You’ll learn about regenerative agriculture from people like Gabe Brown, in my book a star right up there with Lady Gaga.

You can’t but wonder after watching Kiss the Ground why there hasn’t been a massive shift to regenerative ag practices.  One clue is that Gabe makes a point of not accepting money from the government. That might seem surprising, given that federal subsidies for agriculture are plentiful; on the order of $30 BILLION dollars annually.  A big fraction of that money goes into the pockets of large-scale farming operations and into the coffers of the big ag companies. All of that fertilizer, pesticides, and herbicides, genetically modified seed varieties, and cash price support money, just for starters, has produced an enormous lobby invested in keeping the party going.  In 2019 the government spent $22 BILLION on farm aid related to the trade wars.  Farmers were getting checks that seemed to come out of the blue.

Remember all the fierce debates in Congress and in the public back in 2008 when the government bailed out the auto industry? I’m mystified why we don’t hear loud objections to the much larger recent subsidies to agriculture, much paid out by the USDA without the agency even going through Congress.  Agriculture seems to be built on one subsidy after another.  Many large landowners, already rich off federal money, wondered why they were getting unexpected checks.  Those billions might have been spent on other urgent social programs, instead of mollifying the farm block over potential losses resulting from President Trump’s trade wars. What a wasted opportunity!  What farmers do with their land has a huge impact on water quality, wildlife, and climate change. The USDA could have mounted effective programs that pay farmers to improve the environment, restoration of wetlands, and switching to regenerative methods of farming.

The saying goes that the present is but the child of the past. Let’s take a step back and ask why so much corn is grown across America’s heartland. An article written by Jonathan Foley in 2013 is still relevant today.  Foley points out that only a tiny fraction of the national corn crop is directly used for food for Americans, mainly for high-fructose corn syrup.  A big portion is fed to animals, which we then slaughter and eat.  The fraction of available food calories in feed corn that ends up in the meat and dairy we humans eat is really small. Perhaps the largest single market for corn is a conversion into ethanol. The notion of all the plowing, planting, discing, fertilizing, irrigating, harvesting, storing, and transporting, then converting the corn into alcohol in an energy-intensive, inefficient process, only to burn it in a car engine, never did make sense. It’s now just a way to dispose of the huge excesses of corn produced by farmers who want to get in on free money the government is handing out. It’s no surprise then that in 2019 total corn production in the U.S. increased by 17.5%.   By the way, the folks converting the corn that no one can use into ethanol that can’t rationally be justified as a fuel also receive subsidies for that work since it makes no sense economically. 

What will it take to really change things? Maybe, just maybe, newly elected President Biden will do the right thing and appoint Representative Marcia Fudge as Secretary of Agriculture. She’s shown that she’s ready and able to turn USDA into an effective and socially conscious tool for reform of American agriculture.

Let’s return briefly to Google search. Near the top of the list of the 19.8 million results of the search for “regenerative agriculture” are organizations of all sorts involved in one way or another with agriculture.  Bayer, a corporation at the top of the list, manufactures weedkillers, pesticides and the like. Another, the French company Danone, sells prebiotic yogurts such as Activa, and dairy-free drinks such as soy milk. They must have found their way onto the list via some sort of google algorithm magic.  Neither company has much investment in regenerative ag, though Danone has a few stories to tell. They hardly offset its sorry record as one of the top ten producers globally of packaged water, a global blight in its own right.  I’m left wondering about how profit works its way into decisions about how things pop up in searches. 

The fact that many corporations are feeling their way into regenerative practices, if only by loose association, in an effort to look good could be taken as a sign of progress, I suppose. But those serious about the promise of regenerative agriculture as a suite of disruptive technologies, with the power to improve agriculture’s environmental impact and make a significant contribution to lowering the rate of increase of greenhouse gases, know that the journey is just beginning, and the road ahead will be rough. 

But we needn’t focus only on big ag in our search for promising change. In my next blog, I’ll write about regenerative ag at local levels. That will be more fun and it’s actually quite important.