What on earth is regenerative farming?

Apr 16, 2024

About 2,000 years ago, the most powerful thing in the world were the Legions of Rome. About 200 years ago, the most powerful thing in the world was the British Royal Navy. Today, the most powerful thing in the world has neither sails nor swords – we’ve learned that blowing up vast portions of population isn’t practical after all – so we find in our era of mass media and instant communication, that the most powerful thing in the world is words.

We largely form our understanding of reality via language, and so when a new chunk of verbiage comes along, I think it’s important to closely examine it and question what is actually being said. Over the past few years in the world of ag media and marketing “regenerative” is a slogan that we hear over and over again. What does it mean?

I got on the phone with Terry Good, of Good Family Farms, outside of Meaford, Ontario, where he and his sons Mitch and Marcus raise grass fed beef, pastured hogs and certified organic cash crops on 1,500 acres of owned and rented ground in the rolling hills of Grey County. Terry has decades of experience in conventional fertilizer sales, and 10 years ago set out to develop a decidedly low input mixed farm that reflected a lifetime of lessons in the industry. With his new farm underway, Terry was explaining to his father (a man of the land born in 1931) the sort of regenerative agronomy they were carrying out: Long crop rotations, ploughing down legumes, integrating livestock and so on – all this ‘natural’ stuff – and dear old dad couldn’t help himself: “We used to just call that farming.”

And so, it was with a bit of scepticism that I started looking into what regenerative means to those who actually practise it. Are they just trying to reinvent the wheel, or is there something genuinely novel taking place? I was surprised by both the passion and depth of its practitioners: the movement is a genuine response to problems on farms and in the food system, and its primary mission is a make a future for farmers and a healthier diet for consumers.

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Video: Root Exudates, Soil Biology, and How Plants Recruit Microbes | Field Talk Friday

Field Talk Friday | Dr. John Murphy | Root Exudates, Soil Biology, and How Plants Recruit Microbes

Most of us spend our time managing what we can see above ground—plant height, leaf color, stand counts, and yield potential. But the deeper you dig into agronomy, the more you realize that some of the most important processes driving crop performance are happening just millimeters below the surface.

In this episode of Field Talk Friday, Dr. John Murphy continues the soil biology series by diving into one of the most fascinating topics in modern agronomy: root exudates and the role they play in shaping the microbial world around plant roots.

Roots are not passive structures simply pulling nutrients out of the soil. They are active participants in the underground ecosystem. Plants constantly release compounds into the soil—sugars, amino acids, organic acids, and other molecules—that act as both energy sources and signals for soil microbes.