Beyond Lists of Regenerative Farming Practices

Mari Stuart is Materra's Head of Regenerative Agriculture with almost a decade of experience in this space. She's worked as a landscape designer and carbon farm planner, and co-founded a social enterprise focused on creating a regional agroforestry-based carbon credit platform. Most recently, her work as a regenerative agriculture and supply consultant included managing projects involving diverse crops, from coffee to oats and palm oil, but with a special focus on cotton and other fibers/textiles.

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Amidst its rapid adoption and in the absence of a common standardised definition, the notion of “regenerative” has risked being diluted and causing confusion in the best of cases, or becoming a tool for agribusiness greenwashing in the worst.

 The problem is not simply that there are too many attempts to define regenerative farming, but that the majority of them emerge from what we might call a certification mindset: list the practices that regenerative farming must involve, or the outcomes it must produce, and then we have a definition.

So the most common formula for defining regen ag is a + b + c:

a) a general statement that it’s better for the planet 

b) it involves the adoption of a certain set of practices (such as minimal tillage, reduction of soil disturbance, and cover cropping) 

c) it leads to certain outcomes (such as improved soil health, carbon storage, or biodiversity) 

The “checklist of practices” approach is limited, first of all, because it ignores the fact that farming systems and ecological contexts around the world vary wildly.

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This approach also lends itself vulnerable to greenwashing and being co-opted by, among others, large agrochemical companies: they can now claim to be “regenerative” by stating they build soil health or promote cover crops, while not changing the core of their business, which is to sell chemicals to farmers.

The “list of outcomes” approach, on the other hand, often encourages what is called “carbon tunnel vision”: climate mitigation through carbon sequestration has come to dominate the global regenerative agriculture conversation, even though it is simply just one indicator of overall ecosystem and farming system health.

Moreover, both of these approaches, the regenerative farming practices lists and the outcomes lists, tend to omit an important component in the system: people, and specifically farmers.

Right now, farmers around the world are subject to a system where they are under pressure to maximise yields and increase productivity at all costs just to make a decent livelihood.

It is very rare that a farmer has the resources and the buffer (financial and otherwise) to transition to a different land management regime and to bear the risk, such as new infrastructure investments combined with lower initial yields for a few years, that such a transition will inevitably entail. 

The regenerative agriculture movement as a whole – if we can call it a movement – has not adequately addressed equity and social and economic justice issues such as access to farmland and the economic struggles of farmers worldwide, or the indebtedness of modern “regen ag” to indigenous and traditional agroecological farming approaches.

Whatever our definition of regenerative agriculture is, it needs to include people. It needs to include what is needed for the farmers to farm regeneratively. Farmers need to be provided agronomic support or financial incentives, or both, to adopt practices that are better for the health of the entire system. This is not an icing on the cake, or a nice-to-have; it’s foundational.