Regenerative Agriculture
What is Regenerative Agriculture?
Regenerative Agriculture is a system of farming principles and practices that increases biodiversity, enriches soils, improves watersheds, and enhances ecosystem services.
Regenerative Agriculture aims to capture carbon in soil and aboveground biomass, reversing current global trends of atmospheric accumulation.
At the same time, it offers increased yields, resilience to climate instability, and higher health and vitality for farming and ranching communities.
The system draws from decades of scientific and applied research by the global communities of organic farming, agroecology, Holistic Management, and agroforestry.
Principles & Practices
Regenerative
Agriculture
Practices
NO-TILL FARMING & PASTURE CROPPING
COVER CROPPING
COMPOST & COMPOST TEA
INCREASED PLANT DIVERSITY
HOLISTICALLY MANAGED GRAZING
ANIMAL INTEGRATION
ECOLOGICAL AQUACULTURE
PERENNIAL CROPS
AGROFORESTRY
SILVOPASTURE
No Till Farming & Pasture Cropping
When soils are left undisturbed, abundance and diversity of soil microbes increase, driving improved soil microbiome communities and soil structure. These improvements provide both ecological benefits as well as resiliency to crop stressors, crop quality, and ultimately yield.
Ecologically, these practices improve soil structure, reducing both wind and water erosion of soils, reduce agricultural run-off into watersheds, and aid in soil carbon sequestration.
Pasture cropping is the coming together of cropping and grazing for the symbiotic benefit of both enterprises, economically and environmentally. It is the zero till sowing of annual crops into living perennial pasture. Its impacts are higher profitability, reduced pesticide use, rebuilding of soil nutrients, carbon and microbiology.
Cover Cropping
Promoting more continual plant and root growth in soils is also a key to soil health and regenerative agriculture. Cover cropping, as some regenerative agriculture theories state, systems can fix CO2 from the atmosphere, sequestering carbon as organic matter in the soils, feed carbon plant root exudates into the soil that promote soil biology, add nutrients to soils, and reduce soil erosion.
Many crops can be used depending on locations and soil needs. Cover crops can be excellent scavengers of excess nutrients left in the soil after crop harvest.
Compost & Compost Tea
Building soil organic is essential for rebuilding depleted soils. Composted biological materials such as crop residue, food waste, and animal waste to build soil organic matter are crucial in regenerative agriculture. These materials contain carbon, that when incorporated into soils breaks down slowly, building stable organic matter. The conversion into stable organic matter takes time.
Compositing can accelerate the decomposition of these materials, creating compost products that can be more immediately available for soil microbes and plants to utilize. Composting processes can be driven by bacteria, fungi, earthworms, nematodes, and other organisms.
Increased Plant Diversity
With the advent of larger-scale annual monoculture, this diversity disappeared, creating imbalances in our soils. The imbalances led to the need for increasing specific nutrients in the form of fertilizers, the degradation of healthy balanced soil biology, degradation of soil structure, and rapid depletion of soil organic matter. Crop rotation plays a critical role in trying to mimic the natural diversity of native plant balances in a way that mimics in part, some of the original benefits that native plant diversity can bring to the soils.
Holistically Managed Grazing
In managed grazing, divisions of a forage field are created. The divisions can be created using portable fences. The animals can then be shifted between the divisions periodically depending on the number of animals, the speed of forage growth, and the size of the divisions. Animals are then shifted between divisions periodically to allow recovery and re-growth of a division prior to animal rotation.
Managed rotational grazing is a critical regenerative agriculture practice that will improve soil health, nutrient and carbon cycling, grazing crop quality, animal health, and water retention while reducing soil erosion and run-off.
Animal Integration
Integrating animal grazing with crop production makes sense in many ways—animal grazing after annual crop harvest aids in the conversion of high carbon residues to low carbon organic manure. Grazing on cover crops can allow more nutrient cycling from crop to soil and carbon sequestration into your soils. This practice will mitigate many of the challenges and risks associated with concentrated animal feeding operations.
It is believed that these benefits to soil health, animal health, and the environment make animal integration a key practice for regenerative agricultural practices.
Ecological Aquaculture
Ecological aquaculture farms are designed, farming ecosystems. Sophisticated site planning occurs so that farms “fit with nature and society” and do not displace or disrupt invaluable natural aquatic ecosystems, conservation areas, or socially invaluable or iconic human systems. If localized displacement or degradation does occur, active support of innovative, collaborative research and development programs for ecosystems redesign, relocation, rehabilitation, and enhancement efforts are initiated and supported by the ecological aquaculture farms throughout the life of their farming operations.
Perennial Crops
Perennials plants that provide harvests for multiple growing seasons range from berries to tree crops and can be integrated into any size farm or garden. Because perennial plants don’t need to be planted each year, soil disturbance is minimized and soil organisms thrive.
These healthy soils hold carbon and grow vigorous crops. The plants themselves take carbon out of the atmosphere and store it in their trunks, stems, and leaves—as well as in their deep root systems that ultimately feed the soil microbiome.
Perennials have extensive root systems, with the added benefit of storing carbon deeper in the soil where it is more stable. When above-ground crops are harvested, the plants shed their deep roots and the carbon they’re made up of but retain enough to grow back the following season.
Agroforestry
While agroforestry includes silvopasture, the practice employs a broader array of tools with the goal of altering large agriculture landscapes in ways that provide broad environmental, social, and economic impacts. In addition to silvopasture, agroforestry incorporates cropping between the rows of trees, forest farming, riparian forest buffers between crops fields watersheds, and windbreaks.
When combined in a deliberate planned and managed fashion, these practices increase plant diversity, soil health, reduce agricultural run-off, guard against soil erosion, and provide habitat for native flora and fauna to thrive.
Silvopasture
Silvopasture is the integration of livestock grazing and trees grown on the same land. Essentially, it establishes grazing within a managed tree product operation. Silvopasture creates additional benefits beyond traditionally managed grazing though; this practice creates additional revenues and cost reductions for the tree operations.
Native perennial forage crops are often planted between the trees. Animals obtain nutrition from the forage crops and accelerate the cycling of nutrients and carbon to the soils. This practice can also provide shade in hot summer and protection from wind and elements to the animals. The tree operation benefits nutritionally from the manures, from improved soil health and from the additional cash flow of the integrated livestock operation.
