Regenerative Agriculture: Healthier Food, Healthier Soil, Healthier Planet

Regenerative … it’s a word that once you’ve seen or heard it, you will suddenly notice it on all sorts of food and beverages from eggs to turkeys to rice and whiskey. It’s not confined to brands that have suddenly adopted new ways of doing things or brands originating in the USA or EU. South Africa’s famous Hartenberg Wine Estate (in Stellenbosch), whose history dates to1692 and which has made regenerative agriculture its “core philosophy” for more than 30 years, won the international Best of Wine Tourism’s Conservation Pioneer Award for 2025 and has earned the internationally recognized Savory (named for Allan Savory) Institute’s Ecological Outcome Verification™ certification.

But what is regenerative agriculture? Why are there podcasts devoted to it, finance platforms for it, and even a Netflix documentary, Kiss the Ground focused on it? Why is it being studied and championed by soil scientists, farmers, consumer brands and consultancy firms like McKinsey & Company?

A Soil-Focused, Holistic, Back-to-Basics Approach for Better Food and a Healthier Planet:

Using a holistic approach and practices, some of which date back millennia, regenerative agriculture promotes a healthy soil structure, in which erosion is limited, soil and the plants grown in it are more climate resilient and pest resistant, and various soil microorganisms thrive and contribute to the nutrient cycle, all while reducing or eliminating the use of inputs like synthetic “chemical fertilizers and pesticides.” Regenerative agriculture both relies on wildlife and creates environments in which wildlife can flourish. As one certification program, Regenefied™, notes, the goal is to be more than sustainable, the goal is to "actively enhance[] biodiversity, soil health, and water quality while producing flavorful nutrient-dense food." As Napa Valley's Regenerative Organic Certified ROC ® Grgich Hills Estate winery explains on its website, “[t]he basic tenets are very similar to those practiced by subsistence farmers throughout human history but [which] have been mainly abandoned in mainstream agriculture. It focuses on the diversity and health of microbes, microscopic organisms that live in soil, that transform soil materials into nutrients for plants.”

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“[T]he soil is where it all starts. There’s organic matter in there and it’s building at a really fast rate because of the management that we’re utilizing here on the farm.”

Blake Alexandre, an Owner of Alexandre Family Farm™ in a video on the farm's website.

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Tools in the Regenerative Toolkit:

The regenerative agriculture toolkit includes cover crops — crops not planted for the purpose of harvest, but rather to help with soil structure and weather tolerance — think of mulch or newspaper you might use in your flower bed. Other tools include low or no till farming, that is “growing without digging, disrupting or overturning the soil.”  Tilling is harmful because it can release carbon from the soil or create compaction that leads to erosion. Crop rotation and the use of perennials, to help with soil structure, climate resilience, and pest resistance, are also important. In a reversal of what journalist, author, and Harvard lecturer Michael Pollan calls “one of the most fateful decisions in American agriculture,” regenerative farming reintroduces the presence of animals to plant farming to restore a mutually beneficial relationship and to create what he terms an “ecological loop.” 

As Regenefied™ explains, “[b]y foraging plants, grazing livestock stimulate root growth and the [outpouring] of plant sugars that feed soil microorganisms, in turn accelerating nutrient cycling to build soil organic matter.”

The Alexandre Family Farm™, which is the “first and only US dairy” to earn the Savory Institute's Ecological Outcome Verified™ certification and whose dairy products are also Regenerative Organic Certified (ROC®), is illustrative of the “loop” Pollan describes. The Alexandre website shares how their dairy cows are “integral players in improving the soil…[t]he grass and its roots grow, then …the cows [rather than equipment] ‘cut’ the grass, which also makes some of the plants’ root matter die off. These sloughed off roots become the food for microorganisms in the soil that turn the food into more biomass that ‘grows’ the soil.”

The benefits of healthy soil extend beyond agriculture. Carbon-rich healthy soil is considered a promising tool for climate change mitigation. The concept is that healthy soil captures and stores more carbon than it releases. This is due in part to the plants’ use of atmospheric carbon dioxide, CO2, in photosynthesis to make sugars comprised of carbon, which they then store both in their leaves and roots in the soil. Healthy soil is often called a carbon sink because it holds more carbon than it releases into the atmosphere, kind of like a carbon storage tank.

Regenerative Agriculture Battles the Nutritional and Environmental Enemy, Erosion:

According to the consulting firm McKinsey & Company, one fourth of the world’s global workforce are farmers and the world’s “demand for crops will increase by as much as 61 percent by 2050.” However, as the McKinsey report states, conventional agriculture, through its “greenhouse gas emissions, nutrient pollution, and land and water use” has negative environmental impacts which, in a vicious cycle, then adversely affect it. Erosion is a prime example of agriculture's negative environmental impact. A summary of the EU's 2024 State of the Soils Report says, “[u]nsustainable water erosion affects about a third (32%) of agricultural land. The mechanical agitation of soil, called tillage erosion and a common practice in agriculture, can also initiate soil degradation.”

Erosion is the enemy not only because it washes away soil, but because it depletes ultra-important carbon from the soil. As the USA’s National Science Foundation explains,  “[c]arbon-rich soils hold more nutrients, so plants growing in those soils tend to be more productive and the carbon changes the physical properties of the soil, which [in turn] prevents erosion.”

Because it reduces crop yields, meaning fewer crops grow and are harvested, it's as if erosion has actually removed land from production, or put another way, as if the land wasn't planted in the first place. In its 2022 report, the UN’s Food and Agriculture agency explains that “[b]y decreasing the nutrients available to plants as well as the space for them to put down roots, soil erosion can decrease crop yields by up to 50 percent. In addition, crops that do grow tend to be of a lower quality: misshapen, smaller and less nutritious.” The data analytics and marketing consulting firm SPINS says in its 2024 Consumer Trends report, “soil erosion may reduce up to 10% of crop yields by 2050 — the equivalent of removing millions of acres of farmland.”

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 “Agriculture needs to find a way to maintain production of food, while reducing its environmental impacts in a changing climate.”Dr. Michel Cavigelli, the lead soil scientist for the USDA’s Farming Systems Project, as told to the USDA's Under the Microscope.

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Erosion also negatively impacts other parts of the earth’s ecosystems. According to the WWF, soil erosion “has led to increased pollution and sedimentation in streams and rivers, clogging these waterways and causing declines in fish and other species. And degraded lands are also often less able to hold onto water, which can worsen flooding.” 

Erosion, because it interferes with the ability of soil to retain carbon and the ability of plants to grow in the soil, also interferes with the soil's ability to be a carbon sink. Ultimately then, it interferes with the use of healthy soil as a climate change mitigation tool.

Soil Is Like Muscle ­— Easier to Lose Than to Build:

It's not easy to replace soil. While it takes 25 years to form one millimeter of soil, according to one study, the “erosion of agricultural soils” will remove that millimeter, on average, in just two years. In a study supported by the US National Science Foundation, the USA’s University of Massachusetts “found that the rate of soil erosion in the midwestern US is 10 to 1,000 times greater than pre-agricultural erosion rates.” The European Science Advisory Council, in discussing the EU’s 2024 State of the Soils Report observes that, “[t]oday approximately a quarter of EU soils are affected by erosion, mainly in cropland, with projections referring to a possible increase of 13-25% by 2050.”

In a 2025 interview with the US Department of Agriculture’s Under the Microscope, Dr. Michel Cavigelli, the lead soil scientist for the USDA’s Farming Systems Project, crystallized the problem facing agriculture this way: “Agriculture needs to find a way to maintain production of food, while reducing its environmental impacts in a changing climate.” He concluded that while “there is no magic bullet… regenerative agriculture provides a roadmap for how to do that.” He said, “I think regenerative agriculture is defining the direction in which agriculture as a whole has to move.”

The consulting firm McKinsey & Co agrees. According to the firm, corn and soy are farmed across “nearly 180 million acres” in the US. In its 2024 paper, Revitalizing fields and balance sheets through regenerative farming, McKinsey estimates that by adopting both cover cropping and no till practices, farmers could “anticipate yields that are 10 to 30 percent higher on average, than those of their conventional peers, which means that the same amount of food can be produced using 10 to 25 percent less land.” As The Nature Conservancy observes, [f]arming can be a low-proft-margin enterprise, especially for the 600 million farmers, [the majority of the world’s farmers] who work on small holder farms [less than 5 acres or less than 2 hectacres].”  It concludes that regenerative agriculture can help farmers because “grow[ing] multiple crops at different times of the year, [will give] farmers multiple sources of income and security in case a main crop fails.”

Cluck, Cluck, Moo and Data Too — Proving "Soil is Life":

"There is no life without soil and there is no soil without life," Ratan Lai, the world-renowned Distinguished Professor of Soil Science at Ohio State University, says in the Soil Is Life YouTube video on The Regenerative Organic Alliance website. The Alliance, which developed and oversees the Regenerative Organic Certified program ROC®, urges "farm like the world depends on it." Fifth-generation farmers Blake and Stephanie Alexandre, owners of the USA's Alexandre Family Farm™, whose Regenerative Organic Certified yogurt is sold in Hong Kong at the Nature's Village Lyndhurst Terrace location, have done just that for more than 25 years. Not only are their dairy products Regenerative Organic Certified (ROC®), they also carry the Savory Institute's Land to Market™ seal, which certifies that the land on which the dairy cows graze (and the hens roam) is "verified regenerative" by the Savory Institute in accordance with the Institute's outcome-based “land monitoring” protocol.

The "result[s]" of the Alexandres' "decision" almost 30 years ago to make their “singular focus [in farming] ... the health of their ecosystem” are demonstrable. According to the video on their website, the dairy's 3,500 "organic acres" are home to 4,200 grazing cows and 35,000 roaming hens. As sixth-generation farmer Vanessa Alexandre Nunes explains in a Savory Institute Land to Market™ video, the family has soil sample data dating back at least 30 years and so can “see the positive effect of the cattle regenerating the earth.” As her dad Blake shares on the website, the organic matter in their soil increased over eight years from 1 to 2 percent to between 7 and 15 percent, with ultra-important carbon making up just over 50 percent of that matter.

Beneficiaries of the Alexandres’ singular focus on the health of their ecosystem are not just the purchasers of their dairy products and of their mobile coop pasture-raised eggs — they move the hen coops twice a week so the hens always have access to different pastures — a variety of animals from bees to elk also are reaping the rewards. The website happily shares that a family of bald eagles nests on their land. The farm is on a migratory bird pathway and more than “200 species of birds have been spotted on the farm.” Alexandre Dairy is even mentioned on the eBird website maintained by Cornell University’s Ornithology Lab.

Ecdysis, the nonprofit research foundation former USDA entomologist Dr. Jonathan Lundgren started in 2016, is attempting to quantify and document on a larger and “unprecedented scale” success stories like that of Alexandre Family Farm.™  The  Ecdysis 10-year research project, 1000 Farms Initiative, whose funders and partners include The Rockefeller Foundation and the US Geological Survey, will generate “full site inventories annually on at least 1,000 [U.S.] farms that are in various stages of regenerative adoption.” The study’s goals are to “validate key regenerative agricultural systems around the U.S. relative to conventional systems [and to] develop data-driven roadmaps for transitioning key good systems from conventional to regenerative systems.”

In 2024, while only three years into the project, Ecdysis, which is headquartered at South Dakota's Blue Dasher Farm, reported that it already has data from 1,284, operating farms. According to an interview Dr. Lundgren had with the website Civil Eats, farmers from all over the world have reached out to Ecdysis to participate in the study. As Civil Eats reported, when he announced the 1000 Farms research project, Dr. Lundgren explained the overarching goal was to show that data supports the use of regenerative practices on a large scale. He told Civil Eats,“‘[f]or years, success stories about regenerative food systems and their potential for carbon sequestration, water retention, promotion of life and profitability have been dismissed because critics insisted on data to “validate” the impact of regenerative agriculture at a mass scale. This is that study.’”

The study measures nine buckets of information from the soil’s chemical and physical properties, including its deep carbon content, to soil microbiology, to water dynamics, to various detailed categories of information related to the plant, invertebrate, bird, and insect communities, to yields and nutritional analysis, and to economics and profitability.

The Ecdysis website says, “[w]e are analyzing key factors to show producers the health of their land, how their land compares with others, and how to incorporate regenerative methods into their agricultural production in order to disseminate these farm-level results back to the farmers and agricultural communities to inspire change.”

Ecdysis and farms like Alexandre Family Farm™ are indeed trying to prove that soil is life. Many invite you to come visit and get a taste of regenerative agriculture.