We need to think of regeneration as more than just soil health
I’ve been at this event — the Acres U.S.A. Eco Ag Conference — every year for the past 18 years. Eighteen years ago there was a very different audience. That was the time when Arden Anderson was a regular presenter. Dr. Dan Scow was still here. I had the privilege of meeting Charlie Walters several years before he passed away. Acres U.S.A. is an institution that existed before “ecological agriculture” or “biological agriculture,” or certainly “regenerative agriculture,” was a thing. The reality is that Acres U.S.A. was very well ahead of its time.
For our conversation this evening, I’m going to be speaking about a topic that I believe is extremely timely and extremely important: regenerating the capacity for stewardship.
Over the past few years I’ve been listening to a number of conversations about developing standards for certifying regenerative agriculture. And as I was just observing and listening, I became very concerned about how the conversation was evolving.
About 15 years ago there was a collaboration between NRCS and a few other organizations that led to the five principles of soil health: minimal disturbance, keeping soil covered, plant diversity, maintaining living roots in the ground, and incorporation of animals. In the past couple of years, several groups have added a sixth principle: context. And then all of a sudden, magically, these six principles of soil health were rebranded as the six principles of regenerative agriculture.
And that’s a problem. That’s a problem because I believe that regenerative agriculture needs to be much broader. We need to think about a much bigger context than just regenerating soil health. I understand that it is seductive to think about regenerating soil health as the foundational underpinning of regenerative agriculture, but regenerative ag needs to be much bigger than that.
And so I started approaching this from a first-principles perspective. At its most fundamental level, “regenerative” is about regenerating relationships at all levels. Regenerating relationships between soil bacteria and fungi; regenerating relationships between the soil microbiome and plants; regenerating relationships between livestock and the landscape; regenerating relationships between people and the landscape that they are stewarding at all levels. Regeneration is about regenerative relationships.
If that’s true, then what defines a relationship that has been regenerated, or that is in the process of regenerating? And what defines a relationship that is degraded, or that is dysfunctional?
Relationships that are not fully functional are relationships that are very transactional. When I say “transactional,” what I’m trying to communicate is an “I scratch your back and you scratch mine” kind of relationship. This type of relationship is looking for reciprocity — it’s ultimately based on how the relationship is going to serve me, rather than serving the greater whole. An inherent function of transactional relationships is that, on some level, they are also inherently extractive. They are always looking for one’s own benefit. It’s not looking at a relationship from a win-win perspective; it’s necessarily win-lose: in order for one crop to win, for us to win, for an enterprise to win, somebody else necessarily has to lose.
These relationships are also inherently competitive. This has been beautifully described by several researchers who have been looking at plant competition in landscapes. In a landscape where resources are abundant — where we have abundant water and abundant nutrients — then it’s true that plants do compete with each other. But the moment we have a resource-constrained environment — where there is limited water and limited nutrients — then, assuming there is a diversity of species that can develop and enter into symbiotic relationships, plants no longer inherently compete with each other. Instead, they begin to collaborate and to support each other.
In summary, these relationships are self-serving. They serve the self rather than serving the whole.
What is the contrast to this? The contrast to self-serving relationships is relationships that are symbiotic — that are collaborative and cooperative. In these relationships, organisms or people or organizations are serving the greater whole, for the greater good, rather than exclusively for their own self-benefit.
When I started thinking about regenerative agriculture and these regenerative certifications from the perspective of regenerative relationships, I quickly realized why I was so inherently uncomfortable with the way these certifications were being framed. I believe that it is a problem to define regenerative agriculture in terms of soil health because regenerative agriculture necessarily needs to be much greater. We need to have a greater vision. We need to have a larger imagination.
It is seductive to think about regenerative agriculture in terms of soil health because it is undeniably true that, to some degree, soil health is the common denominator. First, it’s the foundation that needs to be put in place for regenerating the landscape, the creeks, the rivers. We need to think about regenerating the overall ecosystem and its functionality. Second, we need to think about regenerating hydrological cycles. I’ve been delighted over the past year with the work of Alpha Lo and Walter Jehne and Judith Schwartz — people who have been pioneers in describing how hydrological cycles can be regenerated. This idea has become much more widely recognized and understood — the fact that we can stabilize climates directly by regenerating hydrological cycles, and that when we do that, the carbon cycle inherently takes care of itself. And a third aspect that needs to be regenerated is public health. We need to think about producing food as a public service for public health. We have an epidemic of degenerative illnesses, yet we also have an opportunity to be a tremendous driver for change because when we grow really healthy food, that healthy food can help prevent people from becoming ill.
So those are three ways that soil health can positively contribute to regeneration at a macro scale. But there is a fourth piece that is also a fundamental of regeneration, and that is a prerequisite for any of the others to occur: regenerating the capacity for stewardship. Right now, I would propose that we don’t have enough capacity to steward the landscape in rural communities across North America.
Those three pieces that I described — regenerating ecosystem health, restoring hydrological cycles, and growing medicinal-quality food — none of those are issues that can be systemically solved at the farm level. You have to have a very large ranch or farm operation to expect to have a significant effect on restoring hydrological cycles. There are a handful of farms that have the capacity to do that, but most do not. This is going to be an effort that is going to require the cooperation of communities and working together in restoring landscapes. And so this is not a function of us as individual farmers. This is something that is going to take a greater community to rally around.
So, what does it mean to regenerate the capacity for stewardship? There are two fundamentally contrasting views about the role of humans in the landscape. The first view — the view of many environmentalists and many of those who subscribe to the narrative that carbon dioxide alone is causing a climate catastrophe — believe that humans are parasites and that the best way to regenerate ecosystems is to remove humans from the landscape. The second view, in direct contrast to the first, believes that humans are a hyper-keystone species, and that when we engage with the land and its ecosystems in caring, loving, stewardship relationships, we have the capacity to transform landscapes and to transform ecosystem function more rapidly, more efficiently and more effectively than by any other means. I clearly subscribe to the second of these two hypotheses.
One of my mentors, a very gifted agronomist, several decades ago, used to describe what he called the eyes-to-acres ratio: that in order to care for crops really well, you need to have a certain level of human involvement, and that operations could become too large and could therefore become completely ineffective. He was working out in the Dakotas with many operations that were tens of thousands of acres in scale, and he described the story of a farmer who completely forgot to harvest a quarter section of beans one fall — 160 acres. It just got missed in the course of everything else going on. That was an example of having gone to an extreme in the eyes-to-acres ratio.
But I would suggest that we think about this in terms of a heart-to-acres ratio. If we want to engage with the landscape as caring stewards, that means we need to have a heart connection to the landscape. You can call that caring, you can call that love for the landscape, you can call it whatever you like. But the point is that we need people who care about the land to be involved — many people — many more than we have today. This is the crux of the issue as I see it — that we don’t have enough stewards today. We don’t have an emerging generation of caring stewards for the land of the future.
The foundational reason for this is that there is not enough economic energy flowing into rural communities and into rural landscapes. If we want to have a truly regenerative agriculture, the first link in the chain is that we need to regenerate the capacity for stewardship. This means we need more young people in rural communities — more young people caring for the land — and they need to be compensated well. This means that we need regenerative supply chains that include, for lack of a better term, a fair-trade component, because we need to have strong economic energy flowing back into rural communities.
From this macro perspective, we do not need regenerative-certified farms. What we really need is regenerative-certified supply chains. If we go down the pathway of having regenerative-certified farms, once again — as happened with certified organic — retailers and CPG companies will be successful in assigning 100 percent of the responsibility to farmers. They assume no responsibility for themselves. They assign 100 percent of the responsibility to the farmer — 100 percent of the risk — and they will happily collect the majority of the upside. In other words, they will continue to farm the farmers. And that, to me, sounds like an extractive relationship. That sounds like a transactional relationship. That does not sound like a regenerative relationship.
I’ve been thinking for a long time about what regenerative supply chains actually look like, and there are a few beautiful examples that I’ve come across. They’re in the minority, but these stories are incredibly powerful. One is a partnership in the Netherlands between farmers; a fresh-produce packing, processing and distribution group called Bakker, which is a cooperative owned by farmers; and a fresh-produce retail chain called Albert Heijn. The Netherlands is obviously very geographically compressed compared to the United States, but the model this group has developed is incredible. There is complete, open-book financial transparency between the farmers and Bakker and Albert Heijn. They all see each other’s books. They know exactly what the costs are, and they know exactly what the margins are for each of the other two players in the chain. Between these various organizations there are no salespeople and no buyers. The farmers determine which produce products are going to be on sale in which week in the Albert Heijn grocery stores, and they determine what the price point is going to be. This arrangement accounts for the distribution of 80 percent of the fresh fruits and vegetables sold throughout all of the Netherlands. Their goal is to have fresh produce harvested and in a customer’s refrigerator within 24 hours, and they achieve this goal 95 percent of the time. This is partially facilitated by the European shopping habits of only getting enough food to last a day or two and then buying more when you’re on the way home from work.
The beauty that I have come to appreciate from this cooperation is that it is the ultimate expression of a symbiotic, collaborative, cooperative relationship where everyone is working together closely for the greater good and is not seeking to serve just themselves. It is not an extractive relationship. Also, from a market competition perspective, this relationship has served them well from a market domination perspective. They account for 80 percent of the total supply chain. That’s a big deal. And they were able to achieve that by cooperating and not constantly trying to compete with each other.
There are other examples. There’s Bleu-Blanc-Coeur in France. There are smaller farm cooperatives here in the States. We have Marty Travis, who published his book My Farmer, My Customer with Acres U.S.A. and has spoken at this conference in the past and has contributed to the magazine. We have many great examples in our world of what it means to really collaborate and cooperate together effectively.
And in case we forget, we can always look at natural ecosystems as a reminder. It strikes me that at the most fundamental level, if we engaged with other organizations and individuals from the foundational and correct understanding of the Golden Rule, we would live in a very different world. The past half-dozen years I’ve gone through this exercise of occasionally asking people I meet, “What does the Golden Rule mean?” Most people say, “If you don’t want someone to hit you, then you don’t hit them.” But that’s not actually what the Golden Rule means. The Golden Rule says, “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.”
There are two very important distinctions between what the Golden Rule actually says and the way that it’s commonly understood. If you go with the most widely held definition — if you don’t want other people to do things to you, then you don’t do it to them — that is a negative framing rather than a positive framing. That means you could do nothing and be following the Golden Rule. You could sit in a room, isolated from all of society, and have no interaction with anyone else, and follow that version of the Golden Rule. But the actual Golden Rule is framed in a positive manner. “Do those things to other people that you would like for them to do to you.” You cannot obey that version of the Golden Rule by isolating yourself from everyone else. It requires active participation. It requires active contribution to a community.
There are a few beautiful expressions of community that I have had the privilege of observing and participating in within the Amish community. I’ll give you two examples. The first is the concept of a barnraising. I actually got to participate in one of these when I was in my late teens. It was early January and bitter cold, and a dairy barn had burned down, and the community came out to build a new one. There were between 300 and 400 men working at that site all daylight hours and beyond for 96 hours — at the end of which, there was a new dairy barn standing. The old barn was still smoldering. That’s an amazing expression of community.
Another example is when there is a death in the community. The family needs to do nothing except make decisions about how they want arrangements to be handled. Then the community pitches in, particularly the local church districts, and they take care of everything. Everything is taken care of. There is this tradition that funerals are usually held three nights after the death occurred, and in that three-day window, hundreds of people show up every day in the afternoon and evening. There is an outpouring of community support.
These are expressions of community that our society at large seems to have largely lost. There are some groups and communities who have not forgotten these practices, but many have. To be part of these expressions of community requires a frame of thinking. This is not something that you receive. This is something that you give. This is something that you contribute. If you want to be a part of a community, you have to contribute to the community. We’re constantly contributing, and then we receive very richly in return.
How do we actually make this thought process useful and apply to everyday life? Greg Pennyroyal recently shared something that fits perfectly into what I’ve been trying to describe. It’s a quote from Rumi. He said, “Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.”
I’ve been fascinated for a number of years by the Harvard Study of Adult Development. It’s a study that has been ongoing for about 80 years. Different teams of researchers have led this project over the decades as it has evolved. The original study started with a class of graduates from Harvard, and the intent was to try to determine the factors that contribute to longevity and to health, and to a sense of fulfillment and well-being. Every year they sit down with the participants and complete a very thorough interview about what is happening in their life, their choices, and how satisfied they are with their life. As time went on, they started including different cohorts — not just Harvard grads.
The central finding of the study — the one that I find most intriguing and powerful — is that there is one factor that supersedes all others in correlating to longevity and to a sense of well-being and fulfillment: the depth and quality of our personal relationships, particularly the relationships with our family and our immediate peers. Many experts on developing a mindset to be successful in life describe the phenomena that we tend to be an aggregate of the five people that we spend the most time with. Your personal income and personal wealth is likely to be almost exactly in the middle of the five people that you spend the most time with. Same thing with your IQ. Those people become a reflection of you, and you become a reflection of them, to some degree.
So, in the spirit of Rumi, I’ve become wise and am now changing myself. The question that I would ask you is, do you allow yourself to be surrounded with relationships that are less than healthy? Do you have relationships in your life where the people are being self-serving, where it’s an extractive relationship? Or do you have healthy relationships that are operating in a truly symbiotic, collaborative, cooperative manner that are serving the greater whole? And not just on a personal level — do you have extractive relationships with vendors or with buyers? Do you permit relationships to exist that are less than healthy for your own personal well-being? And the last question is, how do you show up in these relationships? Because the reality is that your relationships are to some degree going to be a reflection of you. As you grow as an individual, without question, the dynamics of those relationships are going to change. If they are unhealthy, it will soon become apparent that they are not the right fit — and either they will self-select out or you will cut them off.
I would suggest we need to begin evaluating our relationships and make that an immediate priority. Another of my favorite quotes, which meshes well with what Rumi describes, is from Bill O’Brien, as popularized by Otto Scharmer in his work in Theory U and leadership for the emerging future. O’Brien says that the outcome of an intervention is dependent on the internal condition of the intervener. In other words, if we look at the world around us — if we look at the relationships around us — and we see that there are relationships there that do not serve the greater good, and we seek to develop a shift in those relationships to improve them, or in some cases to move on beyond them, the outcome of our interactions and our ability to shift those relationships is going to be dependent on where we are coming from within ourselves. In other words, the responsibility is completely yours. You have the ability to completely control the outcomes.
The golden rule requires action; you cannot be passive. And if you want to change the world, then change yourself. John Kempf is the founder of Advancing Eco Agriculture and is the executive editor of Acres U.S.A. magazine.
