Guide to Regenerative Agriculture

Today, the average farm in America is still losing over 4 tons of topsoil per acre per year. Facing record crop losses from flooding, drought, and weather extremes farmers are also adding to their outstanding debt at about 4% per year.

Most conventional farming has focused on improving yield by using lots of expensive fertilizers, chemicals, and seeds, but over the long run, that system is failing.

Regenerative practices that can reduce erosion and even build topsoil by improving the amount of carbon stored in the soil can have a significant impact on a farmer’s bottom line.

Farmers 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? A deeper understanding of how soil functions within the ecosystem are critical to becoming more profitable.

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 still get yields even when there are droughts and they can save money on irrigation costs.

Healthy soil makes more nutrients available to plants, which means less money needs to be spent on fertilizers. Healthy soils lead to healthier plants, which means farmers are less likely to need expensive insecticides, herbicides, pesticides, fungicides, etc. Healthier plants should have healthier yields of more nutrient-dense food. Healthier plants also have longer shelf lives, and typically look and taste better, which can all help a farmer earn higher prices for their product. Reducing tillage while improving soil health, can also reduce equipment, labor, and fuel costs. Farmers can actually improve their soil health each year while improving their bottom line.

Healthy soil creates a positive feedback loop across the ecosystem. By supporting nature’s natural processes with indigenous wisdom and sound science humans can create soil that improves 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.

Soil health begins and ends with a diverse microbiome. Agricultural systems somewhat mimic dominoes – when you strip away animals from an agricultural system, for instance, 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 the same size and the same shape, the pieces of a regenerative system are all different sizes, and affect each other at varying degrees of impact. This complexity is what makes restorative agriculture both exciting and amazing to observe. 

While there may be no one-size-fits-all, there is a best practice rule: inspire diversity. Restorative agriculture holds the methodology and philosophy to re-install, encourage, and build a diverse microbiome in our soils once more.

Regenerative agriculture reduces greenhouse gases because it not only causes fewer emissions, but these practices simultaneously sequester and reverse 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 live in terrible conditions all the time, not to mention the workers. Just pick up Michael Pollan’s book Omnivore’s Dilemma, and you’ll get a clear image. 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, and you wouldn’t want to smell it. Methane (CH4), is one of the primary gases coming off of CAFO ground. 

Cows grouped together every day are also farting and burping constantly. One of the byproducts of their digestive gas is also methane gas. 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.

CO2 is another gas released from animal feedlots. Remember, there is no photosynthesis occurring in a feedlot.  You won’t see a single blade of grass and absolutely no soil biology. Picture that.

Now, visit a grassland where you have quite literally 50 or more species growing in a native pasture. In that pasture, there are all kinds of life both above and below the ground, and photosynthesis is driving that entire cycle, diverting CO2 from the atmosphere into the soil and through the plants, feeding soil biology. Further, there are carbon-based lifeforms in that soil which ultimately create more microbes in the soil, including more root mass and overall organic matter, all of which contain carbon. 

Earlier we’d mentioned conventional farming as practiced during an 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 certified as organic.

There are plenty of agricultural tiers from conventional before we reach regenerative. The USDA Organic Certification has made its mark, and organic sales have widened in all food categories. 

Regenerative practices – and therefore produce and meat – take it a few steps further. Besides reducing pesticides, producing a healthier and more nutrient-dense yield, when you purchase something regeneratively grown, you’re contributing to climate change reversal and the restoration of ours oils. Right now, regenerative certification is in progress. Right now, you can find information about a 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, it’s a problem, because no photosynthesis is occurring – you’re not feeding any soil microbes. When you don’t feed the soil, its 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 that make the nutrients available. 

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.

For starting off, minimal tillage or “low-till” is best, and there are reasons other than the obvious to till. 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 and there is no hard and fast rule. 

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

If a farmer for example 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? We need to look at the microbes. 

Most farmers or growers that want 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. Further, 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, and healthier plants 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. 

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 still grow the same crop 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 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. 

If we think about nature – some wild spot you know – is the soil bare? Unlikely. Soil is rarely bare in nature. Perhaps, after a really intense fire or natural disaster, it remains bare for a period of time, but generally speaking, the soil is always covered. This is important because the soil is a living organism with many organisms living in the soil from the microscopic to the macroscopic. They all need a food source, and they need protection. If we have bare soil, there is no food going in to feed them. 

Cover cropping enhances the food chain, and without covered soil we create a large gap. When the soil is bare, larger organisms that eat tiny microbes don’t have anything to eat, and they 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. Dr. Christine Jones would advise you to gather 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 also makes the soil microorganisms behave better, and will also increase 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 – a tendency when not covered – 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 dissipates because the heat turns it 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. 

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 they are choosing to eat the unhealthy produce. So farmers are now asking, “Why am I getting this pest?” They may learn a bit more by 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. 

What does regenerative cattle grazing look like? The earth has evolved with huge amounts of grazing animals and ruminants. If we look at North America with its large herds of bison, those bison didn’t create the great desert, they created the great plains, some of the most fertile land in the world. Africa has a similar history. These are large examples that show having vast amounts of animals created richness, not the problems some worry about, like greenhouse gases. 

Back in time, 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 fertilized it until t 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. While there, the 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.

Regeneratively grazed animals are also typically healthier – they’re not fed de-wormers nor antibiotics, and eat fresh foliage without chemicals. Healthy intake, healthy poop. The good news about good poop is that it invites a host of insects and dung beetles to break it down into fertilizer. You know poop is healthy if it breaks down completely, disappearing from sight. 

When you install a planned grazing system, you’ll see more perennials – meaning more green during the dry season – healthier cattle, fertilized soil, more biodiversity, and finally, a stronger ability to draw down carbon. 

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.

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.

For example, picture a farmer growing a grain crop without trees. She can only capture so much sunlight with the wheat crop because it doesn’t have a lot of height. But, if she adds in rows of trees about 75-100 feet apart, all of a sudden she’ll start capturing more sunlight with the newfound height. When it comes down to it, farmers, growers, and gardeners alike should try to intercept as much sunlight as possible to the land, even if that sunlight is filtered through tree branches.

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:

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.

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!

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™

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.

About Kiss the Ground

Kiss the Ground, a 501(c)3 non-profit based in Los Angeles, California. Our mission is to awaken people to the possibilities of regeneration and inspire participation in the movement through media, communications, education, workshops, immersive programming, and advocacy.