What role do regenerative practices play in all of this? 

A lot of people try to define regenerative in practice-based systems. We are not interested in practice-based systems. But we think there are some core principles that are going to help make this function. One is tillage. We have to reduce or eliminate tillage completely. The second is to keep a live root in the ground for as many days of the year as you can and increase that diversity. Winter cover crops are a highly diverse multi-species, and they are crucial. Not tilling is really crucial. We started our research by positing the importance of removing chemicals and fertilizers, but the work we are doing on our client’s farms is not to remove all of those components, and to still see huge increases in the health of that soil, and in carbon accrual. So it has become a matter of being able to ease farmers into reducing their chemical inputs without cutting them off completely, and in essence, that means a transition that is very gentle. They will see no yield differences, and they will see cost savings because they are using fewer inputs.

I would like to drive home that when you build a healthy soil biome, what’s obvious is that you see increased soil fertility, reduced costs, and increased profits for farmers. You also see increased drought tolerance and water percolation to reduce flooding. Furthermore, it increases biodiversity and food nutrient density, by all accounts seen. We are not just talking about climate, moreover, we are talking about life on planet earth and its health and vibrancy. When the amount of biodiversity is increased below the soil line, it’s increased above the soil line. And when you increase the biodiversity of the biology, you increase the health of the planet and therefore increase the health of the food we eat. All of that is the way nature inherently wants to work. It’s biology, and we just need to support it.

I decided that in order to change agriculture globally, we had to start here in the United States. Unfortunately, our understanding of soil and farming comes from a ten-thousand-year history of degradation, decline, and destruction; high inputs, high fossil fuel usage, and carbon lost to the atmosphere. So that’s a paradigm change that needs to happen, and needs to happen rapidly, for civilization to have a future. But historically, it takes a hundred years to change a scientific paradigm, and with climate change, we don’t have a hundred years. We have a decade, maybe, to turn this around. 

Right now, with the price of things like fertilizers and other inputs, we see this as an opportunity to have deeper conversations with farmers, discussing ways they can have an avenue out of writing these big checks. We are talking to them about ways they can move towards healthier soils, and more money in the bank, without coming at them with the arrogant purity and righteous indignation that a lot of organic people want to carry on their shoulders. It stays away from arguments, and just moves directly into, “Here’s how your farm can become more profitable”. They’re going to be accruing carbon whether they want to or not, because that’s what biology is going to do. So our hope is that they’re going to be on our team, maybe unwillingly at first, but that they’re ultimately going to be willing because they need to reduce their costs.