Regenerative Ag: A brief introduction

If you’re like me and are curious about Regenerative Ag - due to its multi-pronged approach and loose definition - there is a great resource recently released. 

It comes from the global leaders - who I have enormous respect for - in seed applied innovations and agricultural formulations: Croda/Incotec. Together, alongside other stakeholders within the industry, they created this collaborative whitepaper.

In it, they walk us through “RegenAg” and how it differs from say Organic Farming which is very clearly defined. One of the primary goals is soil health, certainly a buzzword I was steeped in while working in the biochar space. 

RegenAg hopes to optimize farming practices with the goal of ecosystem recovery. I used to work in habitat restoration when I was managing weeds in Illinois and leveraging an Index of Biotic Integrity approach to assessing the Choctawhatchee watershed, so curious how it applies to crops. In the context of farming they highlighted different practices summarized here:

- Adoption of low/no till practices, and reducing fertilizer inputs

- Year round soil coverage with residue/cover crops, with cover crops the goal being keeping living roots in the soil year round

- Avoiding monoculture cropping if possible (diversify crop offerings)

- Introducing grazing livestock

For those facing thin profit margins, staff shortages, and regulatory hurdles it’s especially difficult to balance these practices with profitable yields (especially season after season), and taking on herd management as well can be quite daunting. 

Still, I’m hearing of farmers being successful at taking on these practices, it just takes a lot of work and time to refine them. If you are interested in seeing some field data on some of these practices I recommend checking out the annual reports generated by the PTI farm.