This guest post was written by Nate Crosser, J.D., is a food and agriculture technology investor.
Imagine a sandwich that actually made you – and the world – healthier by virtue of making it. This dream is held by hard-nosed ranchers, coastal vegans, corporate types, and hippy homesteaders alike. The term they often use to describe the dream is “regenerative agriculture.” Leo DiCaprio even has a venture capital fund that evokes the term. Surely we can’t all want the same thing for once, right?
Nobody knows because there isn’t a clear or agreed definition of what regenerative agriculture means, putting it at risk of being yet another term greenwashed into meaninglessness, like “humane” or “free-range”, 1984-style. Regenerative agriculture has been used to describe a plethora of agriculture practices: Cover-cropping, no-till biodynamic farming, organic permaculture, sustainable agroforestry, the three sisters, but, most frequently, livestock grazing. These forms of farming aim to restore the terribly depleted soil, which harbors microorganisms and fungi that naturally sequester carbon and nitrogen, fight pests, and reduce erosion and pollution.
However, the term is capriciously and liberally used by marketers, and is mostly used as a synonym for traditional ranching. Though “conservation” or rotational grazing is surely better than modern conventional factory farming, is that really where the bar should be set?
Some forms of ranching can improve soil health compared to certain baselines; animal dung has undeniable fertilizing qualities (and isn’t made of fossil fuels like most fertilizers). But, regenerative farming should do more than heal the soil, it should heal both human and non-human communities (i.e., societies and habitats, respectively). Our conception of re-generativity should take a systems-level view, rather than focusing on a single measure, like soil carbon, which can be deceiving and incomplete measures.
There are a few early efforts to create meaningful standards for regenerative practices, most notably the Regenerative Organic Certified® (ROC) certification for textiles, food, and personal care products that is backed by Patagonia. ROC goes a step further than most frameworks, with a focus not just on soil health but also the welfare of farmers, ranchers, workers, and animals. ROC is an important certification program, but is more of an “extra organic” stamp that doesn’t fully capture the possibility of regenerative agriculture; to heal the world through agriculture.
Regenerative agriculture should not just be an appeal to a pastoral food system, but instead should ask what agricultural practices help us move towards better systems, holistically? Can organic rotational ranching actually help us stop climate change and fertilizer runoff, boost soil biodiversity, reverse industry consolidation, reduce rising obesity rates, address environmental justice or land grabbing, and improve animal welfare? Can it do so better than processing feed crops directly into plant-based meat alternatives and re-wilding the excess cropland? Should regenerative even inherently mean organic and non-GMO? These are empirical questions that can be studied, but only if we engage in the requisite research and debate as an industry.
What about novel practices that are not even tied to the land itself, such as urban indoor vertical farming, precision fermentation, or meat cell cultivation (which has recently been cleared for sale for the first time in the US by the FDA and USDA)? These sound highly technological but might actually serve the goals of regeneration, so let’s not immediately give into the naturalistic fallacy and instead look at the data – regenerative means restorative, not rustic. Just because wild grass-eating cows existed does not mean that grass-fed beef is categorically good. Neither does it mean that non-GMO crops are inherently good. Both grass-fed beef and white rice can be huge methane emitters linked to human health conditions. One peer-reviewed study found that cell-cultivated beef could have almost 90% lower GhG emissions than conventional. Whereas grass-fed beef may actually be the single worst food you could eat, from a climate change perspective, and yet many conflate it to regenerative agriculture, but not so with cell-cultivated meat.
To create a meaningful “regenerative agriculture”, we need consensus, and regulations, not just one-off certifications from private companies. Luckily, the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) has recently kicked off the first state-led attempt to do so, which could have repercussions not only for the state’s $50 billion agriculture industry but also for the entire nation. As the country’s largest state, both in terms of agricultural production and population, California often bends the nation to its will. Take Prop 12, the California referendum that imposed very basic animal welfare improvements for poultry and pork within the state. The meat industry went all the way to the Supreme Court to overturn the law, claiming Prop 12 would send ripple effects through the national market. The law was ultimately upheld in a decision penned by Justice Gorsuch in May as a clear case of voter-consumer sovereignty. Maybe California will lead the way again here, as it is in the field of cellular agriculture.
As we weather another bad wildfire and hurricane season, we are reminded of the urgency of tackling the numerous global ecological crises. We must urgently change agricultural practices, which currently use half of the world’s land, emit over a quarter of humanity’s greenhouse gasses, and account for 70% of global freshwater withdrawals. We cannot afford to lose this chance to transform the food system, to give into greenwashing or Luddite tendencies. Let’s join together as producers and consumers around a bold, progressive vision for regenerative agriculture.
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