Regenerative and organic farming are natural allies for a greener revolution
Soil degradation is one of humanity’s most urgent, under-appreciated, and yet eminently solvable global crises — if, that is, we change how we farm.
Since the dawn of agriculture, somewhere between a quarter and a third of the world’s agricultural land has been degraded out of production. Yet the problem is not just ancient history. A 2015 U.N. global report on the state of the world’s soils concludes we continue to lose ground to soil erosion and degradation, only now at a pace that equates to tons per person each year. That’s not sustainable.
As a geologist who studies erosional processes, I’ve spent years looking into the history and science behind how farming practices impact soils. And while most debates about agriculture today center around plant versus animal foods, GMOs, and organic versus conventional farming, I’ve come to see that the most basic distinction regarding the impact of farming on the land is whether it is degenerative or regenerative for the soil and its health.
Soil health is a relatively new concept rooted in old ideas, one that captures the impact of farming practices on soil erosion, soil organic matter, and soil life. Unfortunately, the most common farming system labels — conventional, no-till, and organic — do not always convey the impact of agricultural practices on soil health.
To be sure, concepts of soil health were foundational for early organic farming pioneers, but too much tillage can render even organic farms degenerative. That is central to the story I unearthed in Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, which related how farming practices degraded the land enough to undermine past societies long before the rise of conventional agrochemical agriculture. Organic farming today spans a range of practices, from those of no-till vegetable farms that build and sustain healthy soils as a consequence of intensive farming to tillage-intensive farms that accelerate soil erosion and degrade soil organic matter. Now, even produce from soil-less hydroponic farms can adopt the green-and-white organic label.
Soil health provides a new lens through which to see and think about traditional, conventional, and alternative farming practices. This perspective shows how combining practices that underpin traditional soil husbandry with modern science can reshape how we treat the land and restore and sustain fertile soils while continuing to feed a hungry planet well into the future.
In researching Growing a Revolution, I visited farms around the world that restored fertility to degraded land through adopting farming systems based on principles of regenerative agriculture to minimize disturbance and maximize soil cover, living roots, and biodiversity above- and belowground. I was impressed by how rapidly regenerative farming systems could restore fertility, organic matter, and profitability on farms large and small in both temperate and tropical climates. As these farmers had greatly reduced but not necessarily eliminated agrochemical use, I recognized how typical labels for farming systems did not fully capture implications for soil health.
This taxonomic mismatch matters, because although there is a lot of friction between proponents of regenerative and organic farming, these movements and communities should naturally align toward reforming global agriculture to build and support soil health. Most of the controversy and heated commentary I’ve seen thrown around recently between regenerative and organic proponents revolves around either the role of tillage in organic farming or herbicide use in no-till farming. In my view, both sides have a point — and a blind spot.
In navigating these arguments, I find it useful to consider the role of tillage as physical disturbance and synthetic agrochemicals as chemical disturbance agents. This framing allows us to assess different agricultural systems by whether they allow, minimize, or avoid both physical and chemical disturbance. We can then consider regenerative farming as a broad class of systems that minimize or avoid both physical and chemical disturbance.
Whereas conventional farming allows both types of disturbance, organic farms eliminate chemical disturbance and can be considered regenerative if they minimize physical disturbance without necessarily going no-till. Conversely, no-till farming avoids physical disturbance and can be regenerative through minimizing or avoiding chemical disturbance. In this sense, no-till farming systems that routinely rely on herbicides for weed control would not be considered regenerative. Regenerative organic farming minimizes or avoids physical disturbance and avoids chemical disturbance. While regenerative and regenerative organic farming share the goal of supporting soil health, they rely on different ways to get there.
Defining regenerative farming as an umbrella for systems that build and maintain soil health opens the potential for alignment rather than competition with organic farming. It also helps clarify what should not be considered regenerative, such as no-till farming relying on herbicides for weed control or sending crop stubble off to a biofuel plant instead of retaining it on-site as mulch. Likewise, organic farming with either no soil (hydroponics) or that relies on routine tillage without introducing organic matter (such as through cover crops, compost, or mulch) would not be considered regenerative. Indeed, farming practices aligned with regenerative principles can enhance soil health — and build soil organic matter — in conventional, no-till, and many organic farming systems. While cover crops and crop rotations are traditional practices in many regions, the opportunity today lies in combining such practices with minimal physical and chemical disturbance to support diverse soil life through building and sustaining soil organic matter.
After looking into the effects of physical and chemical disturbances on soil health, I’m convinced that the answer to the age-old problem of agricultural land degradation lies in regenerative and regenerative organic farming (and ranching) as parallel paths to soil health. In this system of agricultural nomenclature, other soil-building farming systems, such as Conservation Agriculture and biodynamic farming, can be considered either regenerative or regenerative organic depending on whether they minimize or avoid physical and chemical disturbance. This farming system classification emphasizes that in order to move agriculture to a regenerative footing, we need to shift no-till farming toward minimizing, if not eliminating, herbicide use and organic farming toward minimizing, if not eliminating, tillage.
The key to building soil health is to treat the soil as an ecosystem and manage it to cultivate beneficial soil life through minimizing disturbance, providing for organic matter inputs, and promoting a diversity of soil life through diverse crop rotations. But rebuilding soil health delivers benefits beyond on-farm biodiversity. Farmers can harvest higher profits through sustaining yields using less nitrogen and pesticides. In addition, broader benefits include that they carry a lower carbon footprint, stash more carbon in the soil, lower human exposure to pesticides, and harvest more nutrient-dense food for our plates. Supporting wider adoption of soil-health-building farming practices should be foundational for agricultural policy going forward. We need to reframe farming around building and sustaining soil health.
This vision for a soil-health revolution aligns with those of early pioneers of organic agriculture like Albert Howard, Eve Balfour, and J. I. Rodale. They all took it for granted that soil health was essential for sustaining highly productive farming. We now know why it works through connections between plants and soil life and the importance of biologically (microbially) mediated nutrient cycling, phytochemical production, and fat balances in food that matter to crop, livestock, and human health (see The Hidden Half of Nature and What Your Food Ate for more in-depth discussions).
To be sure, labels and marketing matter, and competition is to be expected among those choosing different paths. But with regenerative farming systems gaining momentum among farmers, consumers, and corporations, even the USDA is getting on board with major new soil health initiatives. Back when I wrote Dirt, I argued for reorienting agriculture toward soil-health-building practices — for reducing tillage in organic systems and reducing agrochemical use in no-till systems. The more I’ve seen and learned, the more I see that this really is the way forward. Still, to build healthy soils, organic farmers need not stop all tillage, and no-till farmers don’t necessarily need to go fully organic. Importantly, the combination of minimizing or avoiding both physical and chemical disturbance can convert today’s conventional and no-till farming to regenerative systems and organic farmers to regenerative organic systems.
It has been gratifying to see how scientific advances over the past several decades have lined up to support the vision of early organic pioneers. Yet, such advances allow us to cast a wider net for soil-health-building farming systems and practices. For we now know how tillage harms soil life and can degrade soil organic matter, the foundation of healthy soils. But we also know how practices that increase soil organic matter — like compost and mulch — can compensate for low or minimal tillage. There is also clear evidence of how synthetic agrochemicals — herbicides, fungicides, and insecticides in particular — can disrupt and alter communities of soil life in ways that degrade soil health and benefit crop pests and pathogens.
Indeed, the perspective of cultivating beneficial soil life to build and sustain soil health provides a new foundation for agriculture, one that can rewrite the future of farming in ways that will benefit us all, both on and off farms. We all need farmers to be both profitable and good stewards of the land. And there is a deceptively simple recipe for how to do it through combining ancient wisdom and modern science: don’t disturb soil life, feed it soil organic matter through cover crops, compost or mulch, and grow a diverse community through diversified crop rotations. While integrated systems need to be adapted to the climate, soils, crops, and technology of individual farms, combining practices rooted in all three principles can build healthy, fertile soils through intensive farming. Furthermore, reintegrating animal husbandry into cropping systems could act to accelerate the process, and there are parallels with regenerative grazing practices in terms of building soil health. All in all, major benefits would accrue to farmers, society, and public health if global agricultural practices shifted to regenerative and regenerative organic systems.
Put bluntly, humanity is out of new land to degrade as we feed ourselves, and our descendants will need as much fertile land as we can leave them. Changing our global farming system to a regenerative footing is perhaps the most important generally under-recognized challenge facing humanity this century. Fortunately, regenerative and regenerative organic farms that rebuild healthy, fertile soils can help address the interlinked problems of adapting to climate change, conserving biodiversity, and providing global food security. While there is more than one path to rebuilding healthy soils, we should encourage farmers of all stripes to make regenerative and regenerative organic farming the future of agriculture — and thereby usher in a greener revolution.
