The ‘Regenerative Organic’ storyline in regenerative agriculture

There are nine different stories of regenerative agriculture that I identified in my PhD research. These stories impact the way people interpret, talk about and practice regenerative agriculture. They are consequently important for understanding debates about how regenerative agriculture should be defined and measured. Each story comes from a different agricultural lineage (e.g., organics, holistic management or permaculture) and subsequently emphasizes different things when defining regenerative agriculture. This blog post is an extract from my recent publication in Sustainability Science. You can read the paper here for more information: Regenerative agriculture: a potentially transformative storyline shared by nine discourses

Artwork by Hannah Cox of Nanny Potts Illustration. Regenerative Organic actively regenerates soils and addresses issues of social fairness and animal welfare. In this artwork, we see two farm workers, in safe working conditions, harvesting a polyculture alongside happy animals and healthy soils.

In the Regenerative Organic storyline, regenerative agriculture is about building on the tenets of organic agriculture to regenerate soil health, animal welfare and social fairness

The Regenerative Organic storyline extends the tenets of organic agriculture, e.g. cover cropping, crop rotation and composting (Rodale 2019). It uses these as a foundation and expands to include practices that actively regenerate soils, and address issues of social fairness and animal welfare. Participant 15 said, “organic isn’t enough—you don’t have to plant cover crops to be organic. But you have to plant cover crops to be regenerative. You don’t have to graze animals to be organic, but you have to graze them if you want to regenerate the soil.”

This story is promoted by the Regenerative Organic Alliance and its Regenerative Organic Certification (ROC), supported by the Rodale Institute and Patagonia. In this storyline, the term regenerative was coined by Robert Rodale, whom with his daughter Maria articulated the seven tendencies towards regeneration (Rodale and Rodale 1989). Regenerative agriculture has come to be clearly defined through the ROC and “applies specifically to measures of soil health, animal welfare and social fairness” (Rodale 2019).

Adherents to this type of regenerative agriculture do not use chemical or synthetic inputs; participant 16 said this was a universal principle, “if we get chemicals out of the system, we free up the soil’s innate ability to improve and regenerate itself.” Social fairness is also an important part of the storyline, which seeks “fair payments and living wages for farmers and farmworkers, safe working conditions, capacity building and freedom of association” (Rodale 2019). As reflected in the ROC standard, this story is process-based: “you can build a standard based on outcomes; but the reality is, you have then built a standard on cheating” (participant 15).

They said, “one of the by-products of old coal mines is coal dust. It contaminates waterways, clogs fish’s gills and all sorts of things; it’s a pollutant. But if I take coal dust, and I spread it on my land, I can change my carbon tremendously, while I’m actually polluting the soil.” Adherents to this type of regenerative agriculture disagree with outcomes based verification standards like the Savory Institute’s Land to Market: “we don’t think it’s enough. They don’t talk about chemicals in the system, and they don’t talk about social justice. We think you need more of a complete package if you truly want to say you’re regenerative” (participant 15).

Participant 16 said, “all these big companies have started to pick up the word regenerative agriculture to market themselves. If everyone is using the word, and everyone is defining the word differently, then it’s becoming meaningless. That’s why the Rodale Institute works very hard to promote the idea of regenerative organic.” This storyline differentiates itself from the ambiguity of regenerative agriculture. This differentiation is discursively critical, “is it regenerative agriculture or regenerative organic agriculture?” (participant 14). The rise of this story coincided with Organic 3.0 (Leu 2020), which envisions organics moving back towards its founding principles (Arbenz et al. 2017).