Picture yourself sitting down at the dining room table, surrounded by the people you love.
Your family, your friends, all gathered for a healthy, home-cooked and delicious meal to share.
Spread across the table is a beautifully roasted chicken, and you see it’s decorated with warm bread rolls, butter, and an array of colorful fruits and vegetables.
You’re probably not thinking about where all of this food came from, where it was grown, and how it was grown.
What is Regenerative Farming?
Regenerative farming is an approach that aims to restore and enhance ecosystems by working with nature rather than against it.
It focuses on building soil health, biodiversity, and resilience, using techniques like cover cropping, crop rotation, and minimal tillage.
By sequestering carbon, conserving water, and promoting biodiversity, regenerative farming seeks to create sustainable agricultural systems that benefit both the environment and society.
How long did it take to travel from the soil onto your plate?
What are the environmental effects this meal is costing to the world’s survival against global warming and climate change?
While these are pretty open-ended questions, they matter. How we grow, cultivate, process, and distribute the food we eat plays a crucial role in the strength of our Earth’s soils, our health, and the longevity of the planet.
While we decrease our consumption of plastic, reduce, reuse, and recycle, very few of us are actually looking at how our food systems play a role in the health of our planet.
According to research by the EPA, nearly half of all greenhouse gas emissions are linked to our current food system.
Additionally, one-fifth of produced fossil fuels are used for agricultural means, more than all the fossil fuels produced from cars, planes, and ships…combined.
Moreso, The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported that while our planet is at risk, our global agricultural system is also in jeopardy, pointing to soil degradation, desertification (land that is stripped of fertility through deforestation or inapt agricultural practices), and an influx of atmospheric carbon dioxide as main causes.
Taking a look at our current agricultural systems based on research from the University of California, 220 pounds of methane is produced per factory-farmed cattle, making cattle the number one agriculture source of greenhouse gasses throughout the world.
Additionally, beef cattle take up nearly half the land in the United States, resulting in overgrazing of lands that further degrade soil health.
So what if you cut meat out of your diet? Well, that’s not the perfect solution either. Meat replacements, such as the popular Impossible Burger, are ultra-processed with GMO soy.
Not only is it low in nutrients, but it also heavily relies on industrial soil-killing chemicals and pesticides such as Roundup (glyphosate).
These meat alternatives can contain up to 110 times the amount of glyphosate that damages your gut and microbiome health.
Oh, and that soy burger you love adds over 7 pounds of carbon dioxide to the environment. Big yikes.
Okay, so how about you go vegan and cut out all animal products completely? Would you still eat all those delicious vegetables if you saw all the harmful pesticides that were used during their growth?
Probably not. According to Zach Bush MD, an educator and a triple board-certified physician who specializes in internal medicine and endocrinology, the Mississippi River collects up to 85% of the water-soluble residues of glyphosate.
Because of this, its surrounding regions and states rank as one of the highest rates of cancer in the world.
More alarming, the land and crops that glyphosate is used on contain high levels of the carcinogenic chemical that directly go into our bodies.
Yes, you read that right. Research shows that eating foods containing glyphosate limits the body’s access to essential amino acids needed for microbiome resilience, linking to widespread chronic diseases including asthma, Alzheimer’s and cancers, as well as autoimmune and neurological disorders.
Bush’s research continues to explore the exposure effects of glyphosate, showing that second and third generations do not need to be exposed directly to suffer the health consequences of infertility and immune dysfunction.
So when you’re munching on those delicious roasted carrots, you could be swallowing a mouthful of toxins and chemicals that not only affect your health, but future generations to come.
This is pretty startling, and yet most of us are unaware.
Now, imagine a world where we treat our land as sacred, removing the harmful practices of chemicals and pesticides, and instead relying on balanced farming and livestock management that utilize the photosynthesis of plants and trees which captures carbon dioxide out of the air and stores it in the soil.
This is called regenerative farming, which could be our solution to reversing global warming.
Based on ancient principles that restore the Earth’s natural systems, regenerative farming helps to increase biodiversity and nutrients, focusing on topsoil regeneration, improving the water cycle, and strengthening the health of local land.
Instead of using farming as a means for mass production of crops, regenerative farming understands that the soil used to grow plants and crops for consumption needs to be healthy.
Current mass agricultural practices leave soil without microorganisms, which then release additional carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Regenerative farming focuses on biosequestration, the storage and removal of carbon from the atmosphere by photosynthetic plants and bacteria.
Through this process, regenerative farming uses longer crop rotations and cover crops – crops planted to protect and revitalize the soil’s natural ecosystem and microbial community such as wheat, rye, and clover – to ensure the soil contains its nutrients and produces healthy and nutrient-rich harvests.
Through this, planting cover crops during a land’s “off-season” increases the area’s plant matter that naturally filters carbon dioxide from the air.
Healthy soils lead to healthy plants, healthy humans, and a healthy environment/climate.
Additionally, regenerative farming understands that animals play a key part in the natural biological cycle to create and foster sustainable and regenerative ecosystems.
Through this, regenerative farming focuses on utilizing as much farm waste as possible and uses green manures, compost, and fertilizers to naturally boost the land’s nutrients and organic matter.
Animals are integrated into the farm not just to produce milk or meat, but as creatures to regenerate the soil.
Remember earlier when we mentioned that one soy burger produces over seven pounds of carbon dioxide? A regeneratively raised beef burger removes seven pounds of carbon dioxide from the air.
Drawing from decades of scientific research, regenerative farming is also more profitable for farm owners and produces higher-quality yields of crops!
While most large farms focus on “no-till” practices, regenerative farming focuses on land ecology and holistic management, so crop yields naturally increase and the soil becomes more resilient against extreme weather and insects.
That means that farmers don’t need to spend a lot of time and money on poisoning their crops with harmful and carcinogenic pesticides because the crops are naturally resilient to those insect pests that could potentially destroy them.
This sounds like a dream come true. So what can we do to make this widespread not only in the United States, but across the world?
Making small steps to integrate healthier food choices into your life and further educating yourself and those around you is a great start.
We’ve been inspired by award-winning films like Kiss The Ground that left us hopeful for integrating regenerative farming practices throughout the world and educated us on what we can do within our communities to regenerate the soil and land that feed us.
How about planting more trees? In order to soak up all that carbon dioxide, we need to re-carbonize and regenerate our 10 billion acres of forests and wetlands.
Instead of cutting down 15 billion trees every year, the regeneration of the world’s forests could contain over four billion tons of atmospheric carbon every year. That’s 40% of all current human emissions!
Another great practice: vote with your money! While grocery shopping look out for the Regenerative Organic Certified (ROC) label on your food.
Buy from your local farmers at farmers’ markets or go visit your town’s farms to meet who is growing your food.
You can even get a cow share from a regenerative farm, which will save you money on the local meat you buy knowing that it's regeneratively fed and sourced.
We think regenerative farming could be the solution to global warming.
There is something to be said about reconnecting with our land, acknowledging that food is medicine and that all ecosystems must work together to co-create life.
If we want to see our home planet prosper and live for future generations, it starts with choices made on the personal level and up through those who grow and cultivate the world’s food to make an active and positive change.
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