Guide to Regenerative Agriculture
What is Regenerative Agriculture?
Regenerative agriculture takes a systems-based, holistic look at the land being stewarded and applies various principles with the goal of making the land more productive and biodiverse over time. In most situations, improving soil health and function is the key to improving productivity and biodiversity. One of the key components of healthy soil is organic matter, which is anything that is alive or was once living, such as a plant root, an earthworm, or a microbe.
Much of our cultivated land has lower soil organic matter levels than they used to due to degenerative land management practices, which include poor grazing management practices.
Improving organic matter in our soil has the ability to reduce and stop erosion, and improve the following: aggregate stability, water infiltration, water retention, nutrient cycling, plant health, crop yields, crop resilience, biodiversity, and more. Increased organic matter in the soil also means we are moving carbon from the atmosphere and depositing it into the soil, where it can be a net positive for the planet instead of sticking around in the atmosphere as a greenhouse gas.
There are no hard and fast rules to learning, implementing, or transitioning to regenerative agriculture, as the approaches and techniques will vary by grower and region. Soil health practices go beyond agriculture and can involve integrating thoughtful landscapes throughout non-agricultural land, whether it’s a city park, a front yard, or a school playground. Individuals, communities, and even large cities around the globe have started to wake up to the importance of soil and its critical role in our ecosystem.
6 Key Principles of Regenerative Agriculture
When we are looking at a farm or ranch, regenerative agriculture incorporates six key components. The first one is unique to each person, the other five are the principles that are employed depending on your context.
Understand Context
Economic, personal, community, ecological, climate, bioregion, etc.
Minimize Disturbance
This refers to tillage, chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and more.
Establish a “Living Root”
When plants photosynthesize, they pump carbon-based exudates into the soil to feed microbes throughout the growing season. The more living roots there are, the more this can occur.
Provide Soil Armor
Also referred to as “cover cropping”. Bare soil exposed to the elements harms soil health, so it’s recommended to always have some living or dead debris covering the soil.
Integrate Animals
Integrating grazing animals into your fields, if it can work in your context, is extremely helpful for a variety of reasons, including: fertilization, aeration, increased organic matter, water infiltration, resistance to soil erosion, and more.”
Enhance Biodiversity
Add diversity to whatever it is you are growing. This could look like planting diverse hedgerows throughout your farm, installing owl boxes, integrating honeybees, or planting diverse multi-species cover crops.
Not all these principles must be used at the same time, although they tend to work more effectively in combination.
Why Regenerative Agriculture
Most people are unaware of the impact agriculture has on our planet. The way we currently grow the majority of our food, fiber, and fuel is damaging our planet’s ecosystem at an alarming rate through loss of topsoil, loss of biodiversity, desertification, habitat destruction, and air and water pollution.
Conventional agriculture is a massive contributor to climate change. This is not a new phenomena but has been going on for thousands of years, due to a poor understanding of how soil and ecosystems function. Our current large-scale “conventional” agriculture systems are degenerative, destroying the natural systems that we need to survive on this planet.
Regenerative Agriculture looks to not only stop damaging our ecosystem but improve it, all while continuing to produce our food, fiber, and fuels. Regenerative Agriculture does not have a single, agreed-upon definition. However, most experts would agree that it focuses on improving soil health by moving carbon from our atmosphere back into our soils using a variety of agricultural management practices that work in alignment with natural systems.
These are not “new” practices. Indigenous cultures have been interacting with nature in a restorative, reciprocal manner for thousands of years. We have the opportunity to blend indigenous wisdom with science and rapidly transform the way we practice agriculture around the globe, creating an abundant future instead of one of scarcity. We need to remember that we are nature and not separate from it, and how we treat nature has profound effects upon our society and planet.
Climate Impact of Regenerative Agriculture
Though some cultures around the globe have practiced restorative land management for centuries, more dominant cultures have ignored holistic practices that take soil health and ecosystem function into account.
During the Industrial Revolution, the pace of soil degradation sped up due to landscapes being rapidly transformed using machinery and synthetic fertilizers. Large mono-crops of corn and wheat were produced to feed the hungry during the two world wars. Some of these innovations were incredible achievements in terms of efficient caloric production, but had troubling long-term consequences.
This lead to highly functional, complex ecosystems being stripped of biodiversity and less organic matter being present in soil. This set the stage for major soil erosion, loss of biodiversity, less nutrient density in our food, flooding, droughts, and more carbon in our atmosphere.
Due to the majority of human land management practices and our growing population, we are experiencing soil degradation and desertification at an alarming rate. Rich living soil has been turned into dysfunctional dirt. Drylands now cover about 46% of the earth’s surface, 9% of which are facing severe desertification. In the last 40 years, we have lost about 1/3 of our arable land.
How it Helps Farmers
Today, the average farm in America is still losing over 4 tons of topsoil per acre per year. Through record crop losses from flooding, drought, and weather extremes, farmers are adding to this outstanding debt at about 4% per year.
Most conventional farming has focused on improving yield by relying on expensive fertilizers, chemicals, and seeds. While it may be a short-term solution, this system is proving to be a failure long-term.
Regenerative practices that have the ability to reduce erosion and build topsoil by increasing the amount of carbon stored in the soil can have a significant impact on a farmer’s bottom line.
The major human drivers of desertification interacting with climate change are expansion of croplands, unsustainable land management practices and increased pressure on land from population and income growth.”
— Special Report on Climate Change and Land, Desertification, IPCC
Farmers already know they can make more money by improving yield, improving quality, raising prices, and reducing production costs. But how can any or all of these be accomplished by regenerative practices? To become more profitable, a deeper understanding of how soil functions within the ecosystem is critical.
Regenerative agriculture practices focus on improving soil health and biodiversity, by protecting the soil from erosion and increasing the number of carbohydrates (food) that get pumped into the soil via plant exudates.
Because healthy soil can infiltrate and store more water, farmers can get great yields (even when there are droughts) and can save money on irrigation costs. Healthy soil also makes more nutrients available to plants, which means less money spent on fertilizers. Healthy soil can lead to healthier plants, making farmers less likely to pay for insecticides, herbicides, pesticides, and fungicides. Healthier plants often have healthier yields of more nutrient-dense food and longer shelf lives, which both typically look and taste better. Reducing tillage while improving soil health, can also reduce equipment, labor, and fuel costs. These can all help a farmer earn higher prices for their product, and reduce operational and input costs.
How it Helps the Environment
Healthy soil creates a positive feedback loop across the ecosystem. By supporting nature’s natural processes with indigenous wisdom and science, humans have the ability to create soil that increases resiliency and reduces greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and water vapor. There is even the potential to cool the climate if large enough areas are regenerated.
Improve Soil Health
Soil health begins and ends with a diverse microbiome. Agricultural systems somewhat mimic dominoes. For instance, when you strip away animals from an agricultural system, you strip away the cow’s ability to graze the grass, which when done right, would allow each grass stalk to grow to a level suitable for annual soil renewal.
The difference between restorative agriculture and dominoes is that instead of being uniform in size and shape, the pieces of a regenerative system are different sizes and affect each other at varying degrees of impact. This complexity is what makes regenerative agriculture both exciting and amazing to observe.
While there may be no one-size-fits-all, there is a best practice rule: inspire diversity. Regenerative agriculture holds the methodology and philosophy to re-install, encourage, and build a diverse microbiome in our soils once more.
Greenhouse Gas Reduction
Regenerative agriculture reduces greenhouse gases because it not only causes fewer emissions, but simultaneously sequesters and reverses emissions.
There are two major gas-emitting factors related to agriculture: livestock and crops. When you’re talking about cattle emitting gas, you’re actually talking about animal feeding operations (AFOs), or a concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO). For the purpose of this article, we’ll address CAFOs, which are stinky dirt pits, put plainly. Right now, cows in the United States and their workers live in terrible conditions. CAFOs emit massive amounts of greenhouse gas from the soil – which isn’t actually soil. The ground at CAFOs is largely urine and fecal matter. Methane (CH4), is one of the primary gases coming off of CAFO ground.
Cows, when fed the wrong diet, are farting and burping constantly. When grouped together, the byproducts of their digestive gas (methane gas) is substantial. But don’t blame the cow – there’s an important distinction between a cow on a CAFO and a grazing cow. When cows are eating a diet as they do in CAFOs – consisting of corn and soybeans, both of which cows are not designed to digest – their stomachs become upset. Cows have evolved to digest grasses, not modified corn. Instead of looking at their diet, the agriculture industry has masked the issue by giving them antibiotics, which damages their gut biome further and shows up in the meat we purchase. All of this activity is causing a lot of methane – whether it is the manure pits or the cows themselves.
If we switch over to a regenerative state, where cows are out on open pasture and eating grasses they digest well, they aren’t burping and farting constantly. This is step one.
Conventional farmers may use medicine like dewormers, which kill dung beetles. Again, if you’re in a natural setting without medicine killing the beetles, then you’ll observe this beautiful process where the beetles break down the poop, and after a couple of days, the poop breaks down back into the soil, acting as a fertilizer. It’s incredible what nature can show us when we allow it.
In a regenerative system, cows move around the pasture more regularly, and if humans are supporting them correctly, they’re performing a process called “tall grazing.” In tall grazing, a cow only grazes the grass up until a certain end, so each piece has enough green matter left, allowing it to go through a continuous process of photosynthesis throughout the year. This in turn makes it grow faster and helps to keep methane in the soil.
If you visit a grassland where you have 50 or more species growing in a native pasture, there are all kinds of life both above and below the ground. Photosynthesis is driving this entire cycle, diverting CO2 from the atmosphere into the soil and through the plants, thus feeding soil biology. Furthermore, there are carbon-based lifeforms in the soil which ultimately create more microbes, leading to more root mass and overall organic matter, all of which contain carbon.
Try to picture the gases emitted by an animal out on a pasture. Do they still go to the bathroom? Yes. But, what happens in a healthy pasture is the presence of methanotrophs – tiny microbes in the soil that digest methane. There are more of them out in a natural system than there are in a feedlot. The environment was designed with this! In fact, there are all sorts of things that break down fecal matter naturally, such as dung beetles. And dung beetles can’t live in a CAFO.”
— Don Smith, Stewardship Program Advisor & Teacher, Kiss the Ground
Nitrogen is also an issue. In conventional agriculture, we use nitrogen as a fertilizer. But we use too much of it, which off-gasses into nitrous oxide. We could potentially make nitrogen fertilizer from the atmosphere, as 78% of the air we breathe is made of nitrogen.
Nature is great at taking nitrogen out of the air and converting it into plant food. Soil microbes will convert atmospheric nitrogen into plant-available nitrogen – some which will turn into ammonium, nitrite, and nitrate. It also makes amino acids, which are the building blocks of protein. More good news is that we will never run out of nitrogen. There are many cases where farmers tap into this type of fertilizing resource successfully. Farmers can also save money by not using fertilizer or not over-using it, which will also help nitrogen to stay out of the atmosphere.
The ways described above are mitigating the ‘bad gases’ going up into the atmosphere because we can sequester CO2 into the soil while minimizing methane and nitrogen out in the atmosphere.
Incorporating forages and ruminants into regeneratively managed agroecosystems can elevate soil organic matter, improve soil ecological function by minimizing the damage of tillage and inorganic fertilizers and biocides, and enhance biodiversity and wildlife habitat. Regenerative farmers can put carbon back into the land.”
The last potent greenhouse gas that some people may not think about is water vapor, which we have a lot of. As the climate warms, we have more water in our atmosphere, which holds onto heat. When we have water vapor in the atmosphere, we have another layer of greenhouse gas. Healthy soil can combat this, through storing and infiltrating more water due to its higher levels of organic matter.
We have the potential to store more water in our soil than all the dams, rivers, and lakes combined through practicing regenerative agriculture and increasing our organic matter in soil.
When it rains – instead of flooding over bare soil and taking topsoil with it – the water will go back into the soil as a carbon sponge. These days we get big rain events at 24 inches in a day all around the world. And it’s causing massive flooding, mostly due to poor soil infiltration because our soil is unhealthy due to agriculture. It’s the biggest no-brainer of our time: get our soils healthy.”
— Don Smith, Stewardship Program Advisor & Teacher, Kiss the Ground
Regenerative Farming Vs Conventional Farming
Earlier, we mentioned that conventional farming was practiced during the industrial boom in Western nations. New machine-driven processes defined for production were quickly transferred to the agricultural sector, so much so that nuances were overlooked at an extreme scale.
Conventional agriculture is defined by the USDA as the use of seeds that have been genetically altered using a variety of traditional breeding methods, excluding biotechnology, and are not organic certified.
There are plenty of agricultural tiers from conventional agriculture we must reach before reaching regenerative agriculture on a mass scale. The USDA Organic Certification has made its mark, and organic sales have widened.
Regenerative takes it a few steps further than Organic. Besides reducing pesticides and producing a healthier and more nutrient-dense yield, when you purchase regenerative, you’re contributing to climate change reversal and the restoration of our soil. Right now, the regenerative certification is in progress. You can find information about the Regenerative Organic Certification™ formed in 2017, and select products that proudly tout its label, such as Dr. Bronner’s coconut oil.
Another component is bare soil. When soil is bare, no photosynthesis occurs, leaving soil microbes malnourished. When you don’t feed the soil, you are depriving the base of the food web. If you don’t have the food web in place, it’s harder for plants to grow and microbes to thrive that make nutrients available.
Regenerative Agriculture Practices
Regenerative agriculture practices vary by region, context, and history. The following methods are aspects farmers and ranchers can adopt best suited to their land’s story.
No-Till
Let’s return to carbon. If we’re practicing conventional farming, we are tilling a lot, which means turning the soil over. Tilling breaks up the soil aggregates and disturbs the organic matter while exposing it to oxygen. Once it oxidizes, the carbon and oxygen form CO2, which then enters the atmosphere. So, tilling can be a problem.
Context is key when it comes to tilling. You’ll hear plenty of enthusiasts preaching “no till” agriculture, and while this may be the ideal for low disturbance agriculture, it’s often not the reality when you’re facing land that’s been mistreated for centuries.
While minimal tillage or “low-till” is best long-term, there are obvious short-term benefits to tilling. For example, a farmer could do a one-time tillage event that will create the yield she’s looking for for years to come. Or, a rancher may plow just once to break up a resistant hardpan so their cover crop will germinate. When it comes to tilling (or not tilling) your soil, context is the most important factor – no scenario is identical.
Compost
Compost is a more commonly known practice associated with regenerative living. Rightfully so — in the U.S. alone, over 60 billion pounds of mineral-rich food materials go to landfills each year, when they could be composted.
Watch: The Compost Story
For example, if a farmer is thinking about using compost, the first thing they have to deal with is cost, because well-made compost is not cheap. How can farmers use compost it in a cost effective manner and reap the same benefits? First, we must look at the microbes.
Most farmers or growers wanting to use compost have damaged the microbes in their soil. A good start is with a small dose of compost through an extract, meaning you add compost to water, and dilute it plenty. Farmers can also inoculate their seeds – coat them or put in a little dilution drip around them, which is similar to putting a probiotic around tee seed. Once that seed sprouts, it does a few things. Compost speeds up the germination process. Seeds are amazing in their own way. Somehow they know when to germinate, which then produces exudates, feeding the soil microbes. It has its own internal microbiome inside the seed itself, and those start multiplying. With a little bit of compost extract, a farmer can make the microbiome more diverse, which will then help with nutrient acquisition and protect the plant from other diseases. The list goes on.
The Marine Carbon Project shows the long-term benefits of compost. In one study, a group of researchers showed that a single application of composted organic matter led to sustained increases in net primary productivity (NPP) for at least three years, with no sign of diminishing effects. Furthermore, one application alone shifted the carbon balance of annual grassland ecosystems and resulted in greater carbon storage. There are plenty of studies showing the benefits of compost, and for a farmer, it’s just a matter of what’s the most cost-effective way to apply it.
Compost supports a healthier crop, which in turn are more resistant to pests and diseases, photosynthesize more easily, and ultimately are able to sequester more carbon into the soil. If we start adding compost to our rangelands, we’ll see healthier returns, and healthier soil.
Think about a sick plant thats only photosynthesizing at 20% capacity. It’s leaf is going to be not only smaller but thinner. It doesn’t have as much chloroplast. It can’t make as many carbohydrates. It’s not healthy. But a healthy plant – whose leaf is 3x the size, thicker, with way more chloroplast – it will convert way more sunshine into carbohydrates, which will pump those into the soil and responsible for the nutrient update to the plants.”
Crop Rotation
Many people refer to the term crop rotation in regenerative agriculture, which means that instead of growing the same crop year after year (which tends to become a familiar territory to pests and diseases), you rotate crops to keep the soil healthy.
Crop rotation can be effective, but there may be other ways to keep soil healthy and while grow the same crops over and over. The method a grower may choose to start with entirely depends on the original state of their soil. Soil testing can help growers know with more certainty. For most regions, the soil isn’t healthy, so crop rotation is an easy way to step forward.
Cover Cropping
Cover cropping is an effective way to nourish the soil. If a farmer’s goal is to try and have living roots in the soil for a live plant above ground photosynthesizing, then cover crops play an important role in keeping the soil covered, and well-fed by the plant exudates.
When you’re walking through a wild, untouched piece of nature, is the soil bare? Unlikely. Soil is rarely bare in nature. Perhaps it would be bare after a fire or natural disaster, but generally speaking, the soil is always covered. This is important because the soil is a living organism, acting as a home for many other microscopic and macroscopic organisms. These organisms need a food source and protection to survive, and with bare soil, this is not viable.
Cover cropping enhances the food chain, and without covered soil we create a large gap in the food chain. When the soil is bare, larger organisms that eat tiny microbes don’t have anything to eat and starve. For example, farms that have bare soil can’t support earthworm populations, mainly because their food source– microorganisms –is missing. Employing cover crops when not growing your cash crop is a great way to keep your soil fed.
What do you want to have in a cover crop? Again, it depends on the land and the farmer. Some experts advise gathering at least four different plant families, or eight different plant species, at different heights and leaf sizes. For example, avoid having all species from just the legume family.
Biodiversity is key and creates diversity up the food chain to insects, birds, and so forth. Great diversity allows the soil microorganisms to behave better, and increases the number of plant species producing exudates, which in turn feed soil microbes. The goal is to have as many microbes as possible and to pump carbon in as much as possible.
Cover cropping prevents erosion. If soil is bare, it’s going to blow and wash away. If you have a cover crop and it rains, it will absorb into the soil, what is known in the farmer community as “effective rainfall.” A cover crop will stop erosion (even if it’s windy – the dust cant blow around because the plants are buffering the soil). When it rains, instead of seeing pesticide runoff damaging our watersheds, the water stays in the soil.
A cover crop quite literally keeps the air temperature low. When the soil is bare, you’ll see what is known as a “heat island effect.” Even on a true, 70 degrees Fahrenheit day – if your soil temperature is dried out – it can get up to 130 degrees Fahrenheit or higher just from the sun shining on it!
Heat isn’t only bad for microbes, but the heat rising from the land impedes cloud formation and creates a more humid environment. This means that if a cloud is coming through an area without covered soil, the cloud will dissipates due to the heat turning into water vapor, rather than remaining a cloud.
If we keep our soil covered instead of bare, we would be doing a host of positive things for our atmosphere. That’s why cover cropping is one of the most important parts of regenerative agriculture.
Reducing Pesticides
Another issue of conventional agriculture is the use of large amounts of fertilizers and toxins, which both negatively impact soil biology.
Pesticides go by many names: insecticides, fungicides, herbicides, etc.. There’s a “cide” for every organism out there, and with regenerative practices, we can minimize them. Think of pesticides as a form of an antibiotic. They are “anti,” meaning against, some form of life. If you use an herbicide, the chemical is not just killing the plant, it’s killing other living particles in your soil. The same goes for fungicides – you end up killing a whole host of fungi, which are key to many complex functions below ground. Each of these pesticides causes damage at the small microscopic level.
The goal of healthy soil is to have as many microbes and as much biodiversity as possible. It’s challenging to tell a current farmer to stop using pesticides. But if they both observe and test the soil, farmers can start to see some symptoms of use. New pests are an example of a symptom of “cides.” If a plant is being attacked by a bug, it’s telling you something. Because, if a plant is truly healthy, it’s more resistant to insects, pests, and fungi.
For example, you may observe a community garden where two plots host the same crop, but while one is healthy, another is attacked by aphids. The only difference is the management. The bugs are there, but are choosing to eat the unhealthy produce. So farmers are now asking, “Why am I getting this pest?” Their answer may lie within getting their plant the nutrients or the soil health it needs. Usually, healthy soil gives those nutrients – there’s a symbiotic relationship. Plants came after microbes and they need those exudates to keep the plant healthy. It’s still up for debate on whether the plant sends out needs for phosphorus, for example, or if the microbes do it. The bottom line is that healthy soil does make for healthier plants.
John Kempf, founder of Advancing Eco Agriculture, shows the tiers of plant health in his Plant Health Pyramid, as well as the typical pests involved.
Livestock Grazing
Livestock is a huge portion of agricultural land (around 70% of the world’s land, to be exact) and it needs proper attention and care.
Most livestock land is used for conventional grazing, which entails a rancher fencing off a large block of land, which is sometimes thousands of acres, and then allowing cattle, sheep, or goats loose to graze as they please.
Many farmers and ranchers don’t think there’s anything wrong with this picture, because their crops and grasses grows back at the end of the season. But with ungated grazing, the species in the grassland start to change. You’ll start to lose your perennial grasses, which don’t grow from seed every year. Perennial plants generally live for about two years and have deep roots that allow the grasses to remain green far into the dry season.
Imagine you’re a cow during the dry season. Would you rather eat a dead plant or a lush green one? Likely the latter. Every dry season, cows graze on a massive plot of land and eat only the greens. Thus, those greens get shorter and shorter, unable to capture light and photosynthesize as much as the prior year because the grass can’t catch up. Eventually, cows will just pull the green stub out completely, roots and all, until it dies.
Most conventional grazing plots are now just left with annual plants because of this. We’re talking decades of time – the perennials disappear (perhaps it was a perennial-dominated prairie), and as a result, the soil biology loses diversity, and farmers see sparser and sparser plant growth. Eventually, this is called desertification, and you can’t raise cattle there at all.
What does regenerative cattle grazing look like? The earth has evolved with huge amounts of grazing animals and ruminants. North American bison didn’t create the great desert, they created the great plains, which is some of the most fertile land in the world. Africa has a similar history. From these examples, we see how having vast amounts of animals carries the potential to create richness, not greenhouse gases.
Way back in the day, grazing animals were herded by predators. As a form of safety, Bison or other large prey herds would group together and stay moving. In turn, large herds never revisited a plot of land. They instead fertilized it until it was covered, then moved on (animals don’t revisit where they’ve used the bathroom).
Today, since we don’t have a lot of predators, regenerative agriculture asks: How can humans replicate this process?
Within a regenerative grazing system, rather than releasing thousands of animals on a vast piece of land, a rancher will fence them into a smaller section to impact it heavily for a short duration of time. In this small section, animals poop and pee, distribute seeds and break up the soil’s crust, each of which benefits soil biology over time. Finally, the rancher doesn’t allow them to return for some time, so the grasses can return to a select length.
This process is unnoticeable over 5-10 years, but over four generations of farmers, the difference is stark. Unfortunately, in many cases, the family of farmers doesn’t notice until the soil is bare and they can’t raise cattle. Not to mention, desertification at large scale over plots and plots of land leads to drought, what we’re seeing today.”
Dr. Allen Williams with the Soil Health Academy has shown how quickly you can recover land. In just 3 years’ time, his farm increased its carrying capacity by at least 5 times. The land itself is completely covered – no bare soil – and the animals are grazing on grass at least 2 feet high. The animals themselves are healthier and fatten up faster –he’s shown it’s a profitable system.
Watch: Regenerative Secret Film
If you can picture us applying these practices to 70% of the land that animals are grazing on, the results are astounding. How humans manage animals makes all the difference. Remember: It’s not the cow, it’s the how.
Watch: Allen Savory’s Ted Talk: How to fight desertification and reverse climate change.
Silvopasture
Silvopasture takes livestock grazing one step further as the deliberate practice of integrating grazing livestock and trees into the same agricultural operation. Picture this: a tree crop, whether grown for timber, fruit, or nuts, integrated with livestock (perhaps sheep, chickens, ducks, turkeys, or pigs) roaming underneath the trees. For someone running a silvopasture operation, the key is diversity. Both the animals and the trees benefit from each other–a symbiotic relationship. The trees gain nutrients from the animal’s fertilizer, and the animals benefit from shade, windbreak, and foliage.
Read: In the Shadow of the Green Man, by Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin
Agroforestry
Agroforestry is similar to silvopasture in terms of mixing aspects of restorative practices. In agroforestry, you mix row crops with tree crops. The trees provide a certain amount of shade, windbreak, and habitat to other species (improving biodiversity), and the trees benefit because the crops sustain a level of biodiversity in the soil. Further, the trees support erosion and water loss due to wind and keep the temperature cool. If you’ve implemented agroforestry well, you’ll get higher infiltration rates and improved nutrient cycling.
How you can help
Education
Feeling inspired and motivated to see the possibilities of regenerative agriculture come to fruition? You’ve already taken the time to understand regenerative agriculture at a “topsoil” level. Further educating and inspiring yourself is a great first step. Here are a few ways:
Join over 4,000 graduates of Kiss the Ground online courses, immersive experiences, on your own time.
Explore Kiss the Ground’s free resources, from The Compost Story to Grow What You Know Seasons 1 & 2.
Become an Advocate for Soil Health
When you become an educated advocate for soil health, communities will benefit. Look to the farm for solutions, first. Head to your local farmer’s market and see what they have to say – it’s likely they are facing various challenges that may spark your interest.
An easy way to get your hands in the soil is by looking at the food we eat before, during, and after we eat it. Commit to starting small with a review of your shopping habits – you may already be a conscious consumer, but perhaps there are ways you can return to regenerative best practices. For example, try to shop for perennials when you’re at the store, eat locally twice a week, or eat seasonally in your favorite season. These small steps are the first steps to a new habit that will only expand.
Explore: Kiss the Ground’s Purchasing Guide.
Start Composting at Home
Composting is another way to practice regenerative living, and you don’t have to be a farmer or a gardener to compost. Whether you’re living in an apartment, in a house, or on a ranch, anyone can compost. Many cities have compost pickups, dropoffs, or hubs in community garden centers. If you live on a property with a backyard, perhaps your compost bin will add great value to a new or ongoing garden project.
Learn More: Compost at Home!
Learn about Agricultural Policy
Agricultural policy is a major deciding factor in the trajectory of practices. In the United States, the Farm Bill holds many of the keys to change. Kiss the Ground has convened Regenerate America™, an unprecedented coalition of farmers, businesses, nonprofits, and individuals from every corner of our country and all political stripes. The campaign coalition is elevating the voices of farmers and ranchers demanding that the 2023 Farm Bill shift resources & support toward regenerative agriculture.
Get involved: Learn more about Regenerate America™
Make a Donation
Regenerative agriculture is both a technical solution and a source of hope for planetary health and the climate crisis. If you are called to support and see its benefits come to life in the immediate future, become a member at Kiss the Ground, or considering donating today.
