The Science is Settling
The ambiguity and greenwashing that mired regenerative agriculture practice adoption in the past is lifting like a morning fog.
Thanks to the countless new programs and policies that have been announced and launched in recent months supporting regenerative agriculture, common themes have emerged about what that means. One of the biggest and simplest to come out yet is the global framework released last month by SAI Platform, which narrows the focus of regenerative agriculture down to 4 common areas:
Soil Health
Water
Biodiversity
Climate
What It Is
And with that, this ‘new’ global framework has cemented the validity of regenerative agriculture communities of practice around the world. Supported by 33 founding members representing the world’s largest corporations, together on arguably the most established platform, this program provides backing to many other smaller regenerative certifications already working to validate new value chains in sub-sectors and specific regions.
Notably, what’s not mentioned in this document, nor the many other leading protocols reviewed in this research series, is carbon. Until effective new technologies like Soil In Formation’s new probes are widely available and field-tested around the world, trading of carbon credits will remain stagnant and risky, mired in faulty economics.
Where to Start
SAI’s framework starts the development of an implementation plan with an environmental and productivity risk assessment. A farm’s trusted advisor and/or agronomist is engaged to co-create a plan to achieve outcomes in at least 2/10 areas for measurement, reporting and validation (MRV) of continuous improvement:
Maximize soil organic carbon content
Minimize soil erosion from water and wind
Optimize infiltration
Optimize available water holding capacity
Optimize water use
Minimize water pollution
Maintain and enhance on-farm biodiversity
Protect on-farm habitat
Minimize greenhouse gas emissions
Maximize carbon sequestration
Each area is considered and scored for the frequency and severity of risk associated with the farm’s current production system. Some measurements are provided to help quantify the degree of each impact, in order to translate risks into priorities.
What to Do
Within the current context of an individual farm, the implementation plan will strategize new practice adoption to have the greatest impact in terms of measurable outcomes. For example, consider the case of:
A medium-sized commercial grain farm in the Red River Valley region of North America,
Producing corn, soybeans, wheat and canola in rotation,
Using tillage-based land management,
Taking yield-centric retail crop input recommendations.
What we already know from the priority-setting work of big food brands aiming to reduce the Scope 3 emissions throughout their supply sheds, nitrogen fertilizer in the production of primary crop ingredients represents upwards of 80% of their footprint. As a farm selling into food supply chains, this is an obvious risk, especially if the farm hasn’t been soil testing to discern its fields’ actual nitrogen requirements.
Options for reducing nitrogen fertilizer use are several, but an interesting one that ticks another box – biodiversity – is incorporating new crops into the rotation like more legumes and lower-input crops. Their yields may be lower but production costs are too, and the future score of a low-N crop rotation in regenerative protocols will be exponentially higher.
It’s important to keep crops’ relative return on investment (ROI) in perspective, and to calculate costs and returns honestly and thoroughly. Too many decisions are still being made based on what other farmers are applying, what the sales rep is pushing, or even whatever the farm did last year – all classic instances of: what got us here, won’t get us there.
Switching up the rotation might be enough in the first year for a beginning farm, since it will take new work to find seed, markets, insurance and crop protection options, etc. It should be enough for the market too, because come year 2, the agronomist or another auditor will be able to demonstrate an increase in biodiversity and a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.
Why Not?
The only answer that remains right now is habit. The economics of grain production continue to shift with government program payments, new market incentives, and evolving commodity spreads, towards negative returns in the medium to long-term for traditional industrial crop rotations.
Already the economics over four years of a slightly more diverse crop rotation are comparable, thanks to the step-wise increases in seed and crop protection costs with yields. When long-term ROI and the reduced risk of lower-input crop options are appropriately considered, together with government payments, there is no cost to change rotations in most cases today.