Regenerative Agriculture Will NOT Save Us

I felt I needed to write this article because of all the greenwashing I have seen over the past year related to regenerative agriculture. I have been studying the topic since 2015 and I am a huge supporter of the practices. I wish all farming was regenerative which simply means "the way we used to farm" using little or no chemicals, multiple different crops per field and involving a variety of animals for pest and weed control. It would be better for humans, soil and biodiversity.

However, the stark reality is that we moved on from family farming years ago and the average farm in the US now is 445 acres and large farming operations typically have more than 10,000 acres. Even at the average size that is a large farming operation and it would be very difficult for them to adopt regenerative practices. While I want regenerative agriculture to take hold, I don't believe it will ever grow larger than 1% of farmland acreage in the US.

Why do I think that? Well first lets look at the difficulty of farming along the array of techniques. By far the easiest farming technique is what is called "conventional farming" whereby farmers typically growing one crop, corn or soybeans, across thousands of acres utilizing large scale farming equipment, fertilizers and a host of chemicals to control pests and weeds. Organic farming would be next and is often farmed similarly to conventional except that organic farms do not use chemical fertilizers or chemical herbicides and pesticides. Organic farming is harder than conventional farming but not exponentially harder.

Finally, we come to regenerative agriculture whereby a farmer needs to plant 7-10 different crops, use no-till planting techniques, cannot use chemicals and often has farmyard animals running around to control pests and weeds. It is exponentially harder than conventional farming, very labor intensive and much of the traditional machinery is not usable for this type of farming. If you want to understand the process better, I highly recommend the 2015 book The Lentil Underground by Liz Carlisle . She covers the birth of regenerative agriculture by a group of hippies that moved from California to Montana back in late 1970s. This will book will give you a great sense just how hard it is to farm regeneratively.

Now lets look at the penetration of organic farming as a proxy for the potential growth of regenerative farming. Organic has been around a long time and has strong demand in the marketplace. Organic food sales have grown dramatically over the past 10 years and in Q1 2023 represented about $2.4 billion, or 12% of all produce sales in the US per the Organic Produce Performance Report .

That sounds great, but not so fast. Between 2019 and 2021, the actual number of organic acres of farmland in the US actually declined by 11% to 4.9 million acres per the USDA. That is only 1/2 of 1% of the 893 billion farmland acres in the US and it has been stuck around this level for a long time. So, where do we get all that organic produce we buy in grocery stores -- South America, India, Russia and other countries that were never upgraded to high tech "conventional farming".

Why aren't organic acres growing in the US in the face of the strong growing demand for organic produce? There are three primary reasons. First, as I have mentioned it is a lot harder to farm organically. Second, if you don't farm "conventionally", you can't get crop insurance from insurance providers. Most lenders will not lend to a farmer that does not have crop insurance, so these farmers carry all the weather risk without and bank loans. Third, there is a 3-year transition to become certified organic which creates a limbo period where farmers are incurring higher costs but not receiving the higher organic produce prices.

Now with that backdrop, imagine a farming technique that is dramatically harder than organic farming and exponentially harder than "conventional farming", that also can't get crop insurance or bank loans --- that is regenerative agriculture.

Despite all these headwinds, the industry has jumped onto the regenerative agriculture bandwagon in a big way. In just a brief search, I found over 20mm acres of "conversion pledges" by big food companies (Cargill 10mm acres, Pepsico 7mm, General Mills 3mm acres, etc), but the sad truth is we still have not surpassed 5mm acres of organic farmland yet after 10+ years of trying. There is no way all 20mm of these acres will ever be converted to regenerative practices, but it is great greenwashing for consumers and their shareholders.

In reality, I believe regenerative acres will ultimately lag organic acres and maybe someday will reach 9 million acres, or 1% of US farmland acreage. But in reality even that will be a heavy lift for the industry. I would not be surprised if it never surpasses 5 million acres!

However, I am not all doom and gloom. I do believe there are solutions for our food system to reduce its carbon footprint, water usage and environmental damage in a meaningful way -- but neither solution relates to regenerative or organic farming. First, we need to reduce our reliance on animal agriculture. The US currently consumes 219 pounds of meat per capital per year, whereas the world average is only 154 pounds. The huge amount of food that needs to be grown to feed these animals is not sustainable as we head toward 10 billion humans. We don't need everyone to go vegan but we do need a meaningful reduction in the per capita consumption.

Second, we need to dramatically reduce food waste. An estimated 35% of all food is wasted and this happens throughout the supply chain. All of this food has a carbon footprint so wasting food has a huge climate impact. Solutions come in many different forms including upcycling manufacturing byproducts into food humans can eat, utilizing/repurposing ugly fruit/vegetables for human consumption, extending "use by" dates on grocery products (so less is tossed), recapturing unused restaurant food for homeless/food insecure and composting all post-consumer food waste.

I am optimistic that we will fix food system impacts over the next 15 years but its not going to be through regenerative agriculture which will only be a drop in the bucket of impact.