Regenerative agriculture is big news these days, with companies from ADM to Walmart to Bayer promoting it as the key to improving soil health, biodiversity, and the climate crisis. An invaluable goal, but one that not all practices touted as regenerative are currently meeting. With billions of dollars—and the future of our food system—at stake, it’s important to ensure that these investments are truly helping to make our farms more regenerative and resilient.
A new report from Friends of the Earth sheds light on why we need to rethink one key farming practice frequently lauded as regenerative—no-till. This practice dramatically reduces tillage and plowing. Major corporations are investing in no-till as part of their climate commitments, and state and federal programs have invested in it as climate-smart.
While no-till farming can be done without harmful chemicals as part of truly regenerative agriculture, U.S. Department of Agriculture data analyzed in the report show that most no-till systems are so heavily dependent on herbicides to manage weeds that a full one-third of the United States total annual pesticide use can be attributed to no-till corn and soy production alone.
The science is clear: these synthetic chemicals devastate the very soil life that is central to regenerative agriculture, harming the soil microbiome and invertebrates like worms and beetles that help build healthy soils that can sequester carbon, conserve water, and cope with droughts and floods. They also come with a significant cost to our health, having been linked to cancer, birth defects, infertility, neurotoxicity, disruption of the gut microbiome, endocrine disruption, and more.
The report found that 93 percent of the 107 million acres of U.S. corn and soy grown in no-till systems use toxic herbicides like Roundup. It also found that no-till corn can be associated with approximately 7.6 billion pounds of synthetic nitrogen use each year. This use of fossil fuel-based fertilizers and pesticides has a major carbon footprint—equivalent to that of 11.4 million cars on the road over an entire year. That’s approximately the number of cars in the top nine no-till states combined.
What’s more, while it’s widely assumed that no-till farming can help combat climate change by pulling carbon down from the atmosphere into the soil, the report summarizes extensive scientific research showing that there’s no clear connection between no-till and soil carbon. That means conventional no-till is not a tool to mitigate climate change.
With a rapidly warming planet and extensive investments needed to address it, regenerative agriculture remains an essential arena with enormous momentum and possibility. But no-till on its own isn’t the answer. To ensure that investments in this burgeoning field truly meet their ambitious and critical biodiversity and climate goals, companies, investors, and policymakers should:
We need to make agrochemical reduction a central pillar of all regenerative agriculture initiatives. Establish time-bound, measurable goals to phase out toxic pesticides and synthetic fertilizers and transition towards ecological, least-toxic approaches in agricultural supply chains.
And no-till as a standalone practice is not regenerative. Instead, companies and policymakers should provide financial and technical assistance to farmers to support a broad transition to ecological, low-input growing systems—which may use tillage or not, depending on context.
There is a need to expand organic offerings. Decades of research show that organic is a leading form of regenerative agriculture. The organic seal has the benefit of being backed by federal law, unlike other emerging regenerative claims.
And we need to be beware of greenwashing. Because there is no set definition of regenerative agriculture, the term is being applied to degenerative forms of agriculture like chemical-intensive no-till. Companies and policymakers should put appropriate safeguards in place to ensure that investments in regenerative agriculture are effective and impactful.
The public health, biodiversity, and climate crises we are facing threaten humanity’s livelihood, as well as businesses and their investors’ bottom lines. The good news is, we can ensure the growing investment in regenerative agriculture is harnessed in service of robust approaches with positive outcomes for nature, communities, and the economy.
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Photo courtesy of Gaspar Uhas, Unsplash
