What on earth is regenerative farming?

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.