Regenerative agriculture — a suite of farming practices that restores soil health, increases biodiversity, and sequesters atmospheric carbon — is moving from the margins of farming practice toward the mainstream.
The term has specific practical content: cover cropping (growing plants between cash crop cycles to protect and enrich soil), minimal or no-till farming, diverse crop rotations that break pest cycles and build soil microbiomes, integration of livestock with crop farming, and agroforestry (integrating trees with food crops).
Research published in the journal Science found that farms practising regenerative techniques for more than five years had 19% more soil organic matter, lower input costs, comparable or higher long-term yields, and measurably higher populations of beneficial insects including pollinators.
We spent 70 years extracting value from the soil. Regenerative agriculture is the practice of restoring it. And unlike most environmental solutions, it is also economically rational — once you get through the transition.