I sat down to write this piece after a five-inch April snowstorm gave our newly planted wheat fields their first drink of the season. Wheat is one of five crops we raise on our farm just outside Belgrade, Montana, that work in rotation to help build our soils, minimize weeds, and produce high yields—all without using expensive and toxic synthetic fertilizers, herbicides, and insecticides.
We also grow flax, yellow peas, alfalfa, and durum; you might have seen our peas and durum in Annie’s mac & cheese. Our flax is grown for seed and also ends up in bulk bins at grocery stores, our durum is made into pasta, and our alfalfa keeps organic dairy cows producing delicious milk, butter, and cream.
“As the term ‘regenerative’ has gained ground, many have lost sight of the fact that organic is the oven-ready set of standards to define regenerative ag.”
When I started my first-generation farm in 2004, I dove head first into regenerative practices, partly out of interest in the fascinating agronomy, but mostly out of necessity. If I was going to make a career in farming, producing high yields without expensive inputs would be my only way towards profitability.
As regenerative agriculture has gained steam in recent years, I’ve been thinking about its potential and how important it is that we direct the energy behind it towards real solutions. Since there’s no set definition of the term, I’ve seen “regenerative” increasingly being used to describe practices most farmers can agree don’t regenerate much soil.
The idea of “no-till” has become nearly synonymous with “regenerative” agriculture, the farming practice of reducing tillage and plowing. A new report from Friends of the Earth sheds some light on why this is concerning. It shows that, while no-till can be done without harmful chemicals, most no-till systems are so dependent on herbicides to manage weeds—since a key reason farmers till their soil is to get rid of weeds—that a full one-third of the U.S.’s total annual pesticide use can be attributed to no- and minimum-till corn and soy production alone. (The term “pesticide” includes herbicides, insecticides, and fungicides.)
A tractor sprays pesticides on a farm. (Photo credit: sircco, Getty Images)
This impacts a lot of land. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) data shows that 107 million acres—about 60 percent of both corn and soy—are under no- or minimum-till management. The report’s analysis of USDA data shows that 93 percent of those acres use herbicides linked to health and environmental risks, like Roundup.
This means the majority of no-till farming in this country is focused on herbicides, not regeneration. These chemicals devastate soil life—the microbes and bugs that farmers need to regenerate soil and to build resilience to droughts and floods. And they threaten our health, with scientists linking them to cancer, birth defects, infertility, and more.
No-till corn also uses a massive amount of synthetic fertilizers that can harm soil life and our health—about 7.6 billion pounds each year.
On top of that, the report shows conventional no-till farming is not scientifically linked to increasing carbon in the soil, despite most investment in no-till as “regenerative” being based on the faulty assumption that it is.
If conventional no-till is not regenerative, then what is? The key question is not “to till or not to till.” A narrow focus on single practices like tillage is misleading. Truly regenerative agriculture works with the farming system as a whole. Research shows that careful tillage in holistic farming systems can achieve better soil outcomes than chemical-intensive no-till systems.
