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How do you define regenerative agriculture?

For many years now, organizations of all types have publicly stated their definition of the term “regenerative agriculture.” We at the Savory Institute are often asked to sign on to different definitions, but we have always politely declined.

As firm believers in holism over reductive thinking, we see how placing a label on something immediately reduces its vast complexity into a finite set of attributes often loaded with assumptions, diluting its true essence and providing an easy attack point for anyone looking to make a strawman argument against it.

We also see how defining the term to be a certain set of practices can wrongly give the impression that regeneration is a guaranteed outcome from said practices. As anyone well-versed in Holistic Management can attest, there is no one-size-fits-all set of practices that can guarantee regeneration. What works at one farm might not work at another, and on that same farm it might not even work year after year. The actions a land manager takes should be dependent on the specific landscape, the desires of the people involved, the socioeconomic factors at play, and so much more. 

Is regenerative agriculture a set of practices?

Regenerative agriculture has become all things to all people. Since the term is unregulated, anyone can put it on a product label or in their marketing even if the landscape from which the product was derived was worse off because of it. This is commonly known as “greenwashing” and has become a growing threat for those actually regenerating landscapes through their management.

Further, we are seeing “regenerative” being used alongside any agricultural product that carries desirable attributes (e.g. organic, sustainable, biodynamic, grass-fed, non-GMO, fair trade, etc.) or coming from a specific set of practices (e.g. permaculture, no-till, cover crops, rotational grazing, agroforestry, etc.) 

While these practices/attributes are admirable, desirable, and usually what we ourselves look for when making a purchase, they do not necessarily speak to the health of a landscape’s ecosystem function and are not addressing the root cause of biodiversity loss and all that follows.

Defining “regenerative agriculture” as merely a set of practices strips agency from a land manager and – while it may in some contexts regenerate land – it in no way guarantees it. 

Some expect the USDA to define “regenerative agriculture” so as to create a standard by which every product must align themselves, but given that 1) agriculture affects everyone across the globe and not just the US, and 2) USDA also finds themselves in the position of supporting the current industrial agricultural system, resting our laurels on a USDA definition would likely have undesirable outcomes.

History of the term “regenerative agriculture”

The term “regenerative agriculture” was first proposed by Bob Rodale, who had long been associated with and promoting organic agriculture in the United States. Bob began talking publicly about regenerative agriculture following discussions with Allan Savory at the Rodale Center (now the Rodale Institute) in the mid-1980s.

At the time, Allan Savory was an independent scientist, consultant, and political exile who had developed a new way of using livestock to reverse desertification, now known as Holistic Management. He had been commissioned by the Soil Conservation Service in the USDA to train 2,000 officials from all government agencies as well as agricultural faculty members from major universities in the Holistic Management framework he was known to be developing.

According to Jeff Moyer, CEO of Rodale Institute:

“When Bob Rodale talked about regenerative agriculture, in his mind, organic was already the launching pad from which you stepped forward into these other conversations. He would say regeneration really goes beyond agriculture. If you can regenerate a farm’s soil, you can regenerate a farmer; if you regenerate a farmer, you can regenerate a farm community; if you regenerate a farm community, you can regenerate urban areas. He saw it as a series of concentric rings that keep growing out from this very concept of first focusing on soil health.”

Allan and Bob were initially unaware of each other’s work. However, they met and discussed their ideas. Allan had been seeing biodiversity loss and desertification as prime movers even in destroying ocean shelf fishing grounds around Africa, and he had been guided to soil’s role in reversing desertification by the earlier work of Sir John Russell and Albert Howard. 

From his earlier work in Rhodesia, Allan had already started seeing great success in reversing desertification by using livestock with what is now known as the Holistic Planned Grazing process. But despite promising early results, failures continually crept in. Analyzing the failures, Allan found they were the result of consultancy dependence, divorces, easy government loans for irrigation, and other social and economic reasons not associated with the grazing planning process itself. To ensure consistent and guaranteed results, Allan began working with sociologists and family counselors and then recruited two economists, Hanssen and Parsons, into his consulting business to help him solve the puzzle of agriculture beyond soil health.

Coinciding with Bob’s concerns and seeing the issues at hand to be threatening civilization on the whole, not just agriculture, with the help of filmmaker Roger Brown he and Allan released the film Creating a Sustainable Civilization in 1995. 

Soon thereafter, Allan gave a keynote at a major conventional agriculture gathering, calling for an entirely new agriculture that would take the best of both organic and mainstream approaches to sustain civilization. While the founders of other major agricultural endeavors at the time condemned Allan for raising deeper issues when they themselves “had the answers,” Bob Rodale reacted openly to this appeal and came to stay with Allan and his wife Jody to discuss the matter further. 

When Bob talked about expanding agriculture to families, communities, and towns to regenerate not just land but all that was involved, Allan took a liking to the term “regenerative agriculture.” Sadly, neither Bob nor Allan defined the term clearly at the time. They assumed, incorrectly, that the term itself would be sufficient and no one could have foreseen Bob’s early death. 

Today, regenerative agriculture has come to mean many things to many people, and with its rising popularity on store shelves, in documentaries, and in the media, it is being hijacked by corporations just as has been done to the terms “sustainable” and “organic.” It is time to define the term as clearly as possible, without Bob Rodale here to help.

Savory’s definition of “regenerative agriculture”

Despite the Savory Institute’s reluctance to publicly define the term “regenerative agriculture” over the years, internally there have been ongoing and fruitful discussions between Allan Savory and our accredited educators about what “regenerative agriculture” means to different people. 

The following definitions of “regenerative agriculture” were brought up in the internal discussions amongst Savory Global Network members:

  • “An agriculture that replenishes the biological life on land and in oceans producing the food & fiber to sustain humans, economies, all businesses and cities by managing the complexity of human organizations, economy and Nature.”
  • “An agriculture that replenishes the biological life on land and in oceans while producing food and fiber for people, a foundation for economies, and sustaining civilization.”
  • “Restoring the land and oceans, through the holistic management of biological life, to provide for the production of food and fiber to sustain city-based civilization.”
  • “Restoring the land and oceans by holistically managing biological life to provide for the production of food and fiber to sustain city-based civilization.”
  • “Restoring the land and oceans by holistically managing biological life, economic policies, and social decisions to provide for the production of food and fiber that will sustain quality city-based civilization.”
  • “The production of food and fiber from the biological life of the world’s land and oceans, through managing simultaneously the indivisible complexity of human organizations, economy, and Nature to sustain all businesses, economies and civilization.”
  • “An agriculture that replenishes the biological life on land and in oceans while producing food and fiber for people, a foundation for economies, and sustaining civilization.”
  • “An agriculture that replenishes the biological life on land and in oceans producing the food & fiber to sustain humans, economies, all businesses, and cities by managing the complexity of human organizations, economy, and Nature.”

As you can see, there are some common threads that arose from these discussions, and they became fodder for some insightful discussions that we do not have the bandwidth to get into here.

Ultimately, this is the definition of “regenerative agriculture” that Allan Savory and the Savory Institute stand behind:

“Regenerative agriculture is the production of food and fiber from the biological life of the world’s land and waters through managing simultaneously the indivisible complexity of human organizations, economy, and nature to sustain all businesses, economies, and civilization.”

By defining the term “regenerative agriculture” as we have done here, we see an opportunity to open this discussion to the wider general public. Words and definitions matter, but even more important are the discussions that arise as we dig deep and explore the common ground, assumptions, and overlapping ideals that go into the definition of such an important term. 

Each one of us both benefits from and contributes towards agriculture in one way or another, and whether we call it “regenerative agriculture” or something else, the belief systems, decision-making frameworks, and resulting practices of our agricultural system are all of vital importance for the health of our global ecosystem.

Bobby Gill

Bobby Gill

Bobby leads development and communications for the Savory Institute. A Biological Resources Engineer by training, Bobby was a lead scientific reviewer at the FDA before making the leap into the regenerative space where he now explores the intersectionality of personal and planetary health, and how to distill the complexity of these issues to new audiences. Watch Bobby’s TEDx talk: “It’s Not the Cow, It’s the How”
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