The ‘Restoration for Profit’ 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. Restoration for Profit is focused on soil health to increase productivity and profitability. In this artwork, we see a healthy, bio-diverse soil ecosystem.

In the Restoration for Profit storyline, regenerative agriculture is about restoring soil health to increase productivity and profitability, whilst also reversing climate change

The Restoration for Profit storyline focuses on restoring soils to be more productive and profitable. It “appeals strongly to conventional farmers by … focusing on bottom line profits through increased soil health” (Soloviev 2019, p. para 11) and integrating methods such as no-till, conservation agriculture and carbon farming. The shift to regenerative agriculture is fundamentally linked with regenerating soil to be more productive. As participant 3 in my research said, “these sharp implements that we’ve driven into the soil time and time again, in mono-cropping, have actually destroyed our soil base, so what was there to help us to be more productive, has now ended up making us less productive.”

Carbon farming has become a powerful subset of this story to “save the planet by sequestering carbon in the landscape” (participant 3). As participant 5 said, “if you’re building soil carbon, you’re being regenerative.” Adherents to other types of regenerative agriculture would disagree with this broad, outcomes based definition, pointing out that a carbon-rich farm could still be undertaking practices that damage the environment. Nonetheless, some adherents to this storyline are hyper-focused on carbon farming and natural capital: “you stick a value on the environment and pay someone to look after it, you’ve just protected the environment. It’s as simple as that” (participant 3).

The profit and production orientation of this storyline makes it inviting for corporate investors, because adherents argue that “the profitability of regenerative agriculture is identical to conventional agriculture” (participant 5). It is also focused on scalability, which aligns with goals such as Cargill’s to “advance regenerative agriculture practices across 10 million acres” (Cargill 2020). This storyline does not challenge the industrial supply chain, as pointed out by participant 11, who said that transformation is isolated to the farm and people are still commodity producers: “Goodman Fielder or Cargill or someone like that might be promoting regenerative agriculture, but they’re still running their corporate palaver; they’re not changing. All they’re doing is rebranding.”

Restoration for Profit is a powerful stepping-stone for conventional farmers interested in regenerative agriculture; its critique of industrial agriculture is mild, and it departs the least from the mainstream. This similarity with the status-quo means that adherents accept many practices that other proponents of regenerative agriculture do not support. This puts the Restoration for Profit story at risk of co-optation and greenwashing because it can be absorbed into the rhetoric of industrial agriculture without changing behaviours, e.g. chemical companies relabelling themselves as ‘regenerative’ to market and perpetuate chemical use. Accusations that regenerative agriculture is being used for greenwashing are most often directed towards adherents to this storyline.