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A Nanoscale Idea With Global Potential
Steve Rosenzweig is a soil scientist the company hired to help achieve that goal. Rosenzweig says, for General Mills, regenerative agriculture has to do with improving soil health and farm profitability and increasing biodiversity. The company has an online tool that farmers can use to see how many regenerative practices they’re using on their land.
But, when asked if he’d like there to be a certification for regenerative agriculture the way there is for organic, Rosenzweig said …
Steve Rosenzweig: Regenerative first and foremost is a mindset. It’s just a different way of thinking about, you know, the farm as an ecosystem. And so I think, you know, that idea has to stay clear, and it shouldn’t get … I think we run the risk of having that kind of mindset get muddied if we tried to clearly define what is and what is not regenerative.
Eilís O’Neill: In other words, General Mills is trying to transition one million acres of land to a form of agriculture it isn’t in a hurry to see defined more clearly. And the current state of things is pretty muddy.
Some farmers who call themselves regenerative don’t till the soil at all; others till rarely. Some plant cover crops between cash crops; others alternate which cash crops they plant; others plant mixes of crops in the same field. Some regenerative farmers include livestock; others don’t.
In 2018, a group of organizations introduced the “regenerative organic” certification. And there are other, smaller organizations that offer certifications — Poole has one for being no-till. But none of these certifications has really taken off yet. Some farmers are excited about certification and others are resistant to the very idea of having to fill out paperwork and prove their practices are improving soil health.
Montgomery has tried to clear things up by distilling regenerative agriculture to three main rules.
Number one: don’t disturb the soil.
Dave Montgomery: So stop tilling, stop plowing. … When you plow a field, it’s highly disruptive. Think, you know, if only of what it does to the worms in the soil to plow them up.
Eilís O’Neill: Number two: always be growing something — anything.
Dave Montgomery: Keep a living root in the ground at all times — so no bare soil. Don’t farm naked.
Eilís O’Neill: And number three: Switch up what you grow. Plant diverse crops in rotation, or even at the same time.
Dave Montgomery: That combination is the recipe for building up soil organic matter, building up life in the soil.
Eilís O’Neill: In addition to boosting soil health, these rules also work as a weed management plan. No-till farming often gets a bad rap for using a lot of herbicides, since farmers can’t churn weeds into the soil to kill them off.
But regenerative farmers like Poole say, by keeping their soil covered at all times, the plants they want growing crowd out the weeds, so they don’t need to use much in the way of herbicides.
Montgomery says herbicides helped make no-till farming possible originally, but, since then, regenerative farmers have come up with new ways to reduce their reliance on herbicides. Some of the regenerative farmers he interviewed for his book were using no herbicides at all, while others were using less than a third of the herbicides that their conventional neighbors were.
Montgomery says less than 5 percent of U.S. cropland is fully regenerative, but about a third has gone no-till.
With all this debate about the meaning of regenerative, it’s hard to verify General Mills’s one million acres goal.
Here’s Rosenzweig again.
Steve Rosenzweig: Candidly, we’re still trying to, we’re still figuring that out — exactly what that looks like. … Outcome measurement is really kind of the ideal and hopefully we’ll have a scalable solution for tracking soil health and biodiversity and all this stuff in our supply chains.
Eilís O’Neill: Rosenzweig adds that General Mills doesn’t always know specifically what farm its grain comes from. Often, all the, say, wheat farmers in a region dump their product into one communal grain elevator. In those cases, General Mills is trying to convert whole regions over to a new way of farming in order to say the grain they bought from that region came from a regenerative farm.
Rosenzweig says another barrier is crop insurance. Depending on what county they’re farming in …
Steve Rosenzweig: Farmers can’t get insurance for their wheat if they do some of these regenerative practices.
Eilís O’Neill: Rosenzweig is trying to gather data to help demonstrate to risk management agencies that regenerative farms are as good a bet as conventional farms — or maybe even better.
The Natural Resources Defense Council and other non-profits are also advocating for reform in the U.S. crop insurance program.
It’s not just food companies trying to get in on this regenerative craze. New companies are springing up, promising to pay farmers for the carbon they sequester by farming regeneratively.
Here’s how regenerative agriculture theoretically sequesters carbon: As plants grow, they push carbon out of their roots into the soil. As long as the soil isn’t disturbed, that carbon stays there.
That’s why several startups want to pay farmers to leave their soil alone, storing carbon. The details of the business model vary, but most of these startups plan to take money from philanthropic individuals, or even companies and countries trying to offset their carbon emissions, and give that money to regenerative farmers. The startup would get a cut of the fee for making the connection.
We mentioned Indigo Ag earlier in the story. Another example is Nori. They say this could be part of a suite of climate change solutions. Christophe Jospe is a co-founder of Nori.
Cristophe Jospe: We’re outcome-focused on removing carbon and storing it in your soils for at least 10 years. If you can prove to us that you’re doing that and you can commit to it, then you can join our marketplace.
Eilís O’Neill: Jospe says agriculture alone can’t solve the problem.
Cristophe Jospe: Croplands are kind of like the appetizer, like where we’re getting started.
Eilís O’Neill: And it’s not just private money that’s moving towards this form of farming. It could soon be public money as well.
Senator Cory Booker has introduced a bill that would pay farmers for regenerative practices, and there’s a bill in the works in the House as well. That money would go towards the cost of transitioning, like buying no-till drills and other new equipment.
But there’s a catch: As more and more resources get invested in it, regenerative ag is still controversial. That’s because a lot of the claims regenerative farmers make — or companies and advocates make on the farmers’ behalf — still haven’t been vetted by scientists.
Paige Stanley: Science is behind.
Eilís O’Neill: Paige Stanley is a Ph.D. candidate at UC Berkeley. She researches whether — and how much — carbon can be sequestered by regenerative systems that incorporate livestock.
Paige Stanley: I like to think of the farmers and ranchers that I see doing regenerative agriculture as kind of the OG scientists. So I think we as scientists really owe it to them to finally shift our gaze and look, you know, what are they doing? Are the ecosystem responses that we see in the scientific way mapping on top of what these farmers and ranchers say they’re getting?
Eilís O’Neill: Dave Montgomery, the geology professor, says the reason for that is that most scientists want to look at one variable at a time, and regenerative agriculture is about all the variables working together.
Dave Montgomery: What scientists like to do is take a system and break it into individual pieces and study each one in isolation. But what if it’s the synergistic interaction of all three pieces that’s giving you the net beneficial effect? If you break it into its pieces, it doesn’t work. It’s kind of like, you know, if you take an old-fashioned watch apart. … The individual pieces don’t work anywhere near as well as the watch as a whole, right?
Eilís O’Neill: Montgomery says there hasn’t been much money on the table for funding systems-level regenerative agriculture research, but he expects that to start to change.
Dave Montgomery: We’re going to start seeing a lot more scientists sort of focusing on these systems.
Eilís O’Neill: In the meantime, because of the lack of scientifically vetted evidence, there are those that say: the principles are solid, but the claims are crazy.
One of the most vocal skeptics is Andy McGuire, an agronomist at Washington State University. He says there’s good evidence for some of the tenets of regenerative agriculture:
Andy McGuire: The no-till, the cover crops, the incorporating livestock, protecting the soil.
Eilís O’Neill: But he isn’t sold on everything.
Andy McGuire: Some of the claims that it makes kind of fly in the face of our existing scientific knowledge in terms of how fast they can improve the soil, … that if we could get enough regenerative agriculture, we could actually reverse climate change, the claims that you can drastically reduce or eliminate nutrient inputs by stimulating the soil microbes.
Eilís O’Neill: McGuire says a big reason regenerative farmers need less fertilizer is because, over time, they’re growing less food per acre. Farmers say their yields are up, meaning that, when they grow wheat on a field, that field yields more wheat. But they’re no longer growing wheat on that field all the time; they’re growing cover crops, which people can’t eat, part of the time.
The biggest questions revolve around carbon sequestration. McGuire says it’s unclear how much carbon agricultural soil can sequester, and how long it will stay there.
Andy McGuire: I don’t think we’re at the point where we can say, you know, “In this area, we can store this much carbon in the soil,” because it’s highly variable on where you are, what kind of soils you’re working with, what your starting point is.
Eilís O’Neill: But Dave Montgomery, the geology professor, says he thinks regenerative agriculture could help.
Dave Montgomery: The idea that it could completely offset fossil fuel emissions by putting carbon back in the soil … I think that’s kinda overblown. You can only put so much carbon back in the ground before you saturate it. So it’s not a forever solution to fossil fuel emissions. It is something that could help us make the transition to a carbon-neutral economy.
Eilís O’Neill: The role of livestock is the most controversial piece of all of this. Cattle emit methane, a potent greenhouse gas, so some people argue these animals have no place in any climate policy. But others counter that, when cattle and other ruminants graze, they cause plants to push carbon out of their roots faster — so they help speed up the process of sequestering carbon in the soil.
The crucial question is whether or not that carbon sequestration more than makes up for the methane. That’s the question UC Berkeley researcher Paige Stanley has spent the past few years trying to answer. She found that, in a regeneratively farmed system in Michigan …
Paige Stanley: That system was sequestering enough carbon in the soil to totally offset and then some all of the greenhouse gas emissions emitted by the cattle. But Michigan is a very temperate system, whereas most grazing is actually happening on semi-arid rangeland.
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