Who Bears the Burden of Regeneration?

We need regenerative verification programs for supply chains — not just for farms

What do we want the regenerative agriculture landscape to look like over the course of the next five to 10 years?

Whatever it is that we want it to look like, we have to define it in the next six to 12 months.

As we are all aware, the narrative in the regenerative space is quickly evolving. The players who are entering it are rapidly growing and changing. I believe this is valuable and beneficial. It’s the future that we want to create — but we are responsible for guiding it.

Should “Regenerative” Be Verified?

Roughly six or seven years ago, Walmart announced that they were going to begin distributing organic fruits and vegetables, and other organic foods, in significant amounts. This produced a lot of outrage in certain sectors of the organic agricultural community. On one level, I understand that the inherent ethos of organic agriculture — caring for the landscape as good stewards — is not particularly the ethos that is associated with Walmart. But on the other hand, if we truly desire to change landscapes on a significant scale, then we should enthusiastically embrace the idea of Walmart distributing organic food products on scale, because we want to see significant market penetration.

We are in a similar moment with regenerative agriculture. As of right now, there is no universally accepted definition of regenerative agriculture. I used to be of the opinion that this was a good thing. I thought that regenerative agriculture verification or certification was a problem because organic certification automatically created an us-versus-them — an “in” group and an “out” group — and the effect of that polarization bears part of the responsibility for organic certification not gaining more rapid acceptance.

I’m concerned that the discussion about regenerative verification might accomplish something similar. I also have a concern about regenerative verification being process oriented rather than outcome oriented. And I have a concern about it not being inclusive of where people are in the journey. These are all things that we need to think through. We need to include people at different stages of the journey and celebrate that journey, rather than celebrating a destination — after all, that’s what regeneration is all about.

However, I’ve been revising my perspective on the possible value of regenerative verification. I believe that we are missing context about the principles of soil health — ironically, since “context” is itself the sixth principle of soil health.

About 15 years ago, a group of innovators within USDA and a group of farmers developed what were known as the five principles of soil health — adding biological diversity, not disturbing the soil, keeping the soil covered, maintaining living roots and integrating livestock. And then, more recently, a sixth element — context — was added. And then those six principles of soil health were rebranded and are now called the six principles of regenerative agriculture.

I believe that calling these the principles of regenerative agriculture, as opposed to the principles of soil health, is a problem. This is a problem because it defines regenerative agriculture only in terms of improving soil health. This is a very seductive approach. It’s seductive because soil health is the underlying common denominator for many of the ecosystem benefits and ecosystem services we want to create and that we want to be established on significant scale with the adoption of regenerative agriculture. Soil health is at the foundation of sequestering carbon dioxide, storing it as stable organic matter, regenerating local hydrological cycles, and regenerating local landscapes and local ecosystems. Soil health is the common denominator that lies underneath all that.

Public Health

But regenerative agriculture needs to be about more than just restoring local landscapes and ecosystems. I would propose that there are two fundamental pieces — two macro pieces — that are missing from this conversation.

One is that regenerative agriculture should be not just about restoring soil health and landscape and ecosystem health, but also about public health — the health of you, your family, your neighbors, the people in your community, and the people in our macro community.

I look at this from the biblical perspective that there is a directive to be our brother’s keeper. But are we really our brother’s keeper when our brothers — the people we’re supplying food to — are consuming food that is making them sick? We need to have a conversation not just about regenerative agriculture and putting a neat boundary around types of agriculture that are excluded, but also about regenerating public health — because agriculture is a significant stakeholder in that conversation.

We have this popular marketing slogan that “agriculture feeds the world.” But as soon as we want to have a conversation about what that responsibility means in terms of the quality of the food we’re feeding to the world, many people want to shift that responsibility away. It’s not farmers’ responsibility, they say, to feed the world healthy, high-quality food that can make people well rather than ill. It’s the responsibility of the medical system — the healthcare system (or, I should say, the sick care system) to make people healthy.

We need to have this conversation. What does it mean to produce crops that have nutritional integrity? I’m specifically using that phrase — not nutrient density — because foods that have nutritional integrity are foods that transfer nutrition and immune function to the livestock and the people who consume that food.

What is the impact on our collective public health and on our individual health of the food we produce? This is perhaps something that regenerative agriculture verification needs to address in the future. We still need a lot of information and a lot more data, but we already know enough to be able to include this as one of the goals that we aspire to.

The Capacity for Stewardship

The second piece that we need to include in regenerative agriculture verification is, in my opinion, even more important than the need to enable public health. I would describe this element as regenerating the capacity for stewardship.

There are two very different philosophical points of view about the role of humans in the landscape. One, which is held by many environmentalists and people with a rewilding point of view, is to suggest that humans are the plague. Humans are a pest. The best way to regenerate landscapes is to remove humans from the landscapes.

The other point of view is that humans are here to be stewards — that we are the ultimate keystone species, and that we have the capacity to influence and guide and shape all other keystone species. Those in this camp affirm that having loving, caring stewards and humans in the landscape is the fastest way to regenerate ecosystems and the fastest way to restore our planet’s health.

These are two very different points of view. I, of course — and, I believe, many of you — subscribe to the second point of view: that humans are the ultimate keystone species. This means if we want to regenerate landscapes, we need to have more caring people as stewards in the ecosystem — not fewer.

But in order to have more stewards in the landscape, there has to be an economic wherewithal for them to be in the landscape. When we talk about regenerating agriculture and regenerating ecosystems, we also need to regenerate the capacity for stewardship. And in plain and simple language, that means we need more money flowing into rural landscapes. We need to revitalize rural economies and farming communities with more money flowing into them.

Regenerating Supply Chains

Right now, regenerative agriculture is defined in terms of regenerating soil health, and to achieve that, there are different regenerative verifications that are emerging. There are several in the marketplace right now. But each of these puts 100 percent of the responsibility on the farmer. The farmer bears the cost of getting the certification verification and the farmer bears the cost of implementation.

This is a problem. This does not take into consideration the relationships of the supply chain. Regeneration, at its most fundamental level, is about regenerating relationships — about regenerating relationships between plants and soil microbes, or between livestock and the landscape, or between humans and their responsibility as stewards of that landscape. And then there’s also the relationships between the farmers and the rest of the supply chain. What might it look like when we have regenerative supply chain relationships, instead of extractive relationships?

I believe that we do not need regenerative-verified farms. What we need is regenerative-verified supply chains. The pressure — the responsibility — should not rest exclusively on farmers. The pressure should really be brought to bear on the supply chains. It is the consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies of the world — the ConAgra, the General Mills —that need to bear the responsibility of regenerative verification. They need to become regenerative verified. They need to not just bear the fiscal and the financial responsibility; a part of the regenerative verification process needs to be them verifying that they are transferring a “fair-trade” amount of money back into rural landscapes.

In other words, these supply chain companies need to regenerate the capacity for stewardship. They need to bear responsibility — not just the farmers themselves. If that is not the case, this will simply become another extractive relationship.

An example of how this type of relationship functions beautifully is in the Netherlands. There are three organizations in this system. One is Albert Heijn, a brand of corner-grocery fruit and vegetable stands where people do their day-to-day shopping on their way back and forth from work — they have a very different food culture than we do here. Albert Heijn has 60 to 70 percent of the total supply chain of fruits and vegetables in the Netherlands. The second organization is called Bakker, a company that operates the fruit and vegetable distribution and processing facilities across the country. And the third is the farmers.

These three organizations work in very close collaboration, and very transparently. All of their books and finances are open to anyone else in those organizations, so there’s complete price transparency, and margin transparency, across all organizations. None of those organizations have buyers, and none of them have sellers. The farmers set the prices and the sales discounts on the products that will appear on Albert Heijn retail shelves. So, this is an example of what a regenerative supply chain might look like.

We need to have similar regenerative supply chains. As this conversation about developing regenerative verifications develops, here in North America and around the world, we need to make certain that the burden of responsibility does not fall exclusively on farmers. We need to have regenerative supply chains — not just regenerative soil.

The time for us to have this conversation is now. If we, as farmers, don’t own this conversation — don’t step forward, take ownership and bring our voice to the conversation — then other people in the space will define for us what they believe regenerative agriculture should be. And there’s a very high probability, if that is the case, that we will once more end up with an extractive relationship between the supply chain and producers, rather than a regenerative relationship between people who eat food and people who grow food.