A brief overview of Regenerative Agriculture

Following up on my recent post on the Regenerative Organic Alliance Certification program, I thought I should provide some additional background on the topic of Regenerative Agriculture.

Regeneration International defines Regenerative Agriculture as

... a holistic land management practice that leverages the power of photosynthesis in plants to close the carbon cycle and build soil health, crop resilience, and nutrient density.

According to the organization, soil health is improved through practices that increase soil organic matter. These practices:

• Contribute to generating/building soils and soil fertility and health
• Increase water percolation, water retention, and clean and safe water runoff
• Increase biodiversity and ecosystem health and resiliency
• Invert the carbon emissions of our current agriculture to one of remarkably significant carbon sequestration thereby cleansing the atmosphere of legacy levels of carbon dioxide.

Terra Genesis International sees Regenerative Agriculture as a set of farming principles and practices that increases biodiversity, enriches soils, improves watersheds, and enhances ecosystem services. It 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."

In contrast to the foregoing, the Regenerative Agriculture Initiative relies on "outcomes-based criteria," rather than prescriptive practices, to bound its system. The outcomes that it seeks are Healthy Soils, Healthy Ecosystems, Healthy Communities, and a Healthy Climate.

The practices that comprise Regenerative Agriculture are drawn from a number of parallel disciplines, as shown in the figure below.

The soil health practices, and their associated objectives, are shown in the table below. I will explore a number of these in greater detail in future posts.

Objective	Practice	Outcomes
Increase soil fertility biologically		Restores plant/soil microbiome; promotes liberation, transfer, and cycling of essential soil nutrients
	Cover crops
	Crop rotations
	Compost
	Animal manure
Build biological diversity		Restore sol microbial community, population, structure, and functionality, restoring soil system energy
	Inoculation of soil with compost/extracts
	Full-line plantings of multiple crops
	Inter-crop planting
	Multi=species cover crops
	Borders planted for bee habitats/other beneficial insects
Soil conservation	No till	Enhance soil aggregation; enhance water infiltration and retention; enhance carbon sequestration
Animal welfare	Well managed grazing practices	Improved plant growth; increased soils deposits; overall pasture and grazing land productivity

The first area of coverage will be soil carbon and its role in climate change versus focusing on soil health.


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