Eight questions for the regenerative agriculture movement

Following my recent blog exploring the opportunity that regenerative agriculture offers as a shared ambition for the food and farming sector, here, I share eight questions I’m currently holding about regenerative agriculture.

A little context. In addition to my work at sustainability non-profit Forum for the Future, I’m excited to be doing a Nuffield Farming Scholarship to explore the regenerative agriculture movement. So it’s a particular focus at the moment and in this piece, I draw on some of the thinking we’ve already been doing at Forum for the Future.

1) Does it matter if regenerative agriculture means different things to different people?

One thing I’ve learned with my colleagues at Forum for the Future as we’ve explored regenerative agriculture is that it means different things to different people. This is hardly surprising. The term is not protected and it’s a relatively young movement, with advocates across different types of organisations and geographies. So how much does this matter?

Will the term “regenerative” be akin to generic and vague terms such as “sustainable” or “eco”? Or does it communicate a clear and transformative ambition for our farming systems? 

Over the next 18 months, I will aim to speak to various farmers and organisations using the term to understand what it means to them. In particular, I want to understand the levels of ambition and how much this differs between people and geographies. I’ll include organisations that have proposed definitions as well as those developing and testing the new Regenerative Organic Standard. As I do this, I’ll draw on the range of other sustainable agriculture movements and philosophies (see below) to find out how people see regenerative agriculture as being distinguished. What, for example, is attracting some people towards regenerative agriculture, but not to organic, which has a much more established history. Ethan Soloviev’s proposed lineages of regenerative agriculture is one useful insight to draw on here.

Figure 1. Different farming movements: where does regenerative agriculture fit in?

In exploring this question, I would also like to test a set of common principles and practices (outlined below) related to regenerative agriculture, to understand how much consensus there is around what it means, how this is shifting and whether people think consensus even matters.

Figure 2. Example principles and practices associated with regenerative agriculture. These focus on environmental, rather than social regeneration. Many agree that regenerative agriculture is not about simply ticking some of the boxes above. Rather it’s a process of understanding the specific farming system or landscape and working to continuously improve it. Covering outcomes such as soil health and carbon, biodiversity, nitrogen and water impacts.

2) Can the regenerative agriculture movement uphold a high level of ambition and integrity?

The term regenerative agriculture is occurring with increasing frequency, with farms and companies starting to use the term fairly liberally to describe their approach or ambitions. 

Working with the assumption that the scaling-up of regenerative agriculture is ambitious and would be transformative for our food system, there is a danger of the term becoming diluted or losing its integrity as more people use it to describe their ambitions. The risk is higher especially if there is no consensus around measuring what is regenerative. What can the regenerative agriculture movement do to uphold a high level of ambition and integrity?

3) Measuring regenerative agriculture: how do we know it when we see it?

Without using a standard or certification, how do we know when we are seeing a “regenerative agricultural” system? This leads to the question: “how might we measure “how regenerative” a farming system is? Is measuring regenerative agriculture even viable?

This is an important question because organisations working to promote regenerative agriculture are often looking for a consistent means to measure it that works across farms and geographies. Why is this? Perhaps because of the interests to monetise changes in practices (e.g. to create market incentives or enable funding) but also because measurement typically underpins most certification approaches. 

To explore this question, I intend to speak to some of the organisations involved in standards and monitoring, such as the Rodale Institute, NSF, the Savory Institute, the Farm Carbon Cutting Toolkit, Sustainable Food Trust, Cool Farm Alliance and Indigo Agriculture. I’m anticipating a spread of opinion as I explore perspectives on this question. For example, for many people, regenerative agriculture is about continually improving soil health and soil organic carbon. But for others in this space, regenerative agriculture might include additional and broader positive outcomes, such as continually improving local water quality, biodiversity and even livelihoods.

Ethan Soloviev and writes about regenerative agriculture being more like a continuum and with his work at Terra Genesis, they have proposed levels of regenerative agriculture

Figure 3. To uphold the integrity and increase its potential benefits to the systems of the world, Terra Genesis have proposed a ‘Levels of Regenerative Agriculture’ framework.

Exploring how we measure or witness regenerative agriculture also raises questions related to timescales. For example, some farms are working from a baseline where past management has resulted in highly degraded soils, and now, continual restorative improvements to the soil health and other ecosystem services is very much needed. Other farms might have a long history of sustainable practices and are starting to use the “regenerative” moniker. How might markets and the general public distinguish between the two? How can we have confidence that the benefits from regenerative agriculture (such as carbon sequestration) stick long into the future?

4) Is regenerative agriculture challenging what we grow?

If we are to really embrace the principles and philosophies of regenerative agriculture, I believe it challenges what you produce, not just how you produce it. For example, moving towards more mixed farming systems, more perennial crops and much greater crop and livestock diversity.

However, will the companies upstream who are advocating regenerative agriculture really support their suppliers to increase crop diversity in their farming systems? So far, I haven’t seen much evidence of this happening in practice. It’s an area at Forum we are increasingly trying to focus on with the organisations we work with.

5) Do we understand the barriers to scale?

Through my work with the sustainable nutrition team at Forum for the Future, we have identified various barriers that are preventing regenerative agriculture from scaling-up. These are summarised below. During my Nuffield Scholarship, I would like to explore these further, particularly focusing on the farmer’s perspective and how barriers shift across geographies.

Figure 4. Barriers to regenerative agriculture

6) The murky world of carbon markets: challenges in measurement and who claims the carbon saved? 

The possibility of carbon sequestration is a notable feature for regenerative agriculture. Carbon markets provide a possible route to finance a major transition to more regenerative agriculture. To explore this, I will explore initiatives such as Indigo Agriculture (Project Terraton) and examples such as Mootral’s ruminant feed entering carbon markets. But it is also worth learning from more established carbon markets that already exist, such as the reforestation and peatland restoration (where in the UK, Carbon Codes exist to enable a route for carbon offsetting). One of the many differences with regenerative agriculture is that the benefits from carbon sequestration could be quickly undone in a few seasons of intensive agricultural practice – which is perhaps less of a risk in a reforestation project.

Carbon sequestration in agriculture is fraught with uncertainties and complexity. To briefly explain a few:

  • Carbon sequestration rates in soil can vary depending on the soil type as well as the practices. Arable soils, for example, tend to have a greater scope for increase than grasslands, while the scope for sequestration on sandy soils can be as low as 2-3%, versus 30-40% for peaty soil. 
  • In trees, carbon sequestration varies with tree species and rates of growth. If those trees are cropped, then the carbon sequestered will depend on the end-use of that timber. 
  • There’s also a plateau with soil carbon sequestration. What happens when that plateau is reached? And how can we be sure that carbon remains locked-in?
  • We need to be realistic with the maths. As Dr Jonathan Foley explains in this thread, are claims of the huge sequestration potential realistic? 

How can we uphold integrity in carbon markets, ensuring a net reduction in carbon and avoid double counting?

Figure 5. Examples of climate mitigation potential of 20 natural climate solutions. From Bronson W. Griscom et al. PNAS 2017;114:44:11645-11650.

7) Exploring strategies to scale-up regenerative agriculture

For many, regenerative agriculture is just another banner for a movement that seeks to transform our food and farming system to work better with nature and provide healthy nutritious food for all. And there are many farmers already practicing it, simply because it’s the right thing to do.

But how do we create the enabling conditions to transform the entire food and farming system? What levers need pulling to bring everyone onto the same path? What does the transition look like?

Deliberately introducing systems thinking lens might help us to explore these questions. Frameworks and theories of how systems change, such as Rogers Innovation Bell Curve, Donella Meadows levers for change, and Forum for the Future’s Scaling Up Impact framework, can help us explore how to support regenerative agriculture to go mainstream. 

At Forum, we’ve already started convening organisations across the food system to explore what is required to scale-up regenerative agriculture. In particular, I would like to explore the role of policy/regulation to accelerate change. How necessary is government regulation to scale regenerative agriculture? And in what specific areas is regulation most effective to unlock or promote scale?

Figure 6 a) Proposed in 1962, Rogers Innovation Bell Curve provides a useful framework to understand how new products/services become mainstream
b) Forum for the Future’s Scaling-Up Impact framework pulls out the common building blocks of how scale has happened in the past, to enable the tipping point for a new paradigm.
(c) At Forum for the Future, we combined the scaling-up framework with expert interview insights to identify a set of eight interventions necessary to scale-up regenerative agriculture, summarised above.

8) Based on what we’re learning about mainstreaming regenerative agriculture, what are the different priorities for different actors?

Many different types of organisations influence our food system (as shown in Figure 7) and each has a unique role in supporting or influencing change. But who holds power? Who influences who? Where is pressure exerted? How might responsibility and risk be better shared? What would these organisations look like if regenerative agriculture was mainstream? How can organisations better collaborate to move faster towards regenerative agriculture?

During my Nuffield Scholarship journey, I’m keen to move beyond the theory and return with some practical suggestions to what the priorities should be for different actors in the food value chain to support the mainstreaming of regenerative agriculture.

Figure 7. Map of actors in the food system that influence agricultural practice

The journey continues…

So many questions and what feels like messy complexity right now. Thankfully, there are many smart folks out there working on this which I hope to meet over the coming 18 months. With each step of the journey, I will aim to keep writing and hope to get closer to answering some of these questions.