“This is weird,” Lundgren said recently in an online interview. “This is grassroots science.”
With his 1,000 Farms Initiative, Lundgren is attempting to quantity what exactly changes in fields, pastures, and orchards when farmers decide to shift their methods toward regenerative practices. In service of that goal, he’s now deployed groups of around eight scientists to about 2,000 farms to collect 500 data types at each operation.
“If we were to implement regenerative row cropping systems on a national scale, it represents the best climate solution currently available.”
“The farmers were saying that they were achieving these remarkable outcomes, but we had to know whether this was real, whether this was scalable, whether this was transferable,” Lundgren said. “The only way to do that is with a huge experiment. We had to study the entire system and all of the regenerative outcomes, from carbon capture and storage to biodiversity, water, nutrition, food quality, agrichemical use, pollution, farmer wellness, and economics.”
Now that the experiment is rolling, his team plans to publish many studies over the next several years, and he’s starting with a big splash. In August, Lundgren published the first flagship paper from the project, a study comparing conventional and regenerative farm outcomes measured in 2022 and 2023 on 200 large-scale farms growing corn, soybeans, wheat, and other field crops.
Scientists collect data at farms across the country to compare outcomes from conventional and regenerative farming operations. (Photo courtesy of the Ecdysis Foundation)
Among other outcomes, the researchers report in the study that the most advanced regenerative farms stored nearly 40 percent more carbon in their soils compared to the conventional farm controls. If all field crop farms converted to these systems, Lundgren concluded, cropland soils in the U.S. could hold carbon equivalent to 1.5 years of the country’s annual greenhouse gas emissions.
“Life on farms is the answer to the climate crisis,” Lundgren said at the Food Solutions Summit during Climate Week in New York City in September.
Civil Eats sat down with Lundgren and asked him about the findings and what they mean for the future of farming on a warming planet.
How are you finding and selecting the farms you’re focusing on?
It started out with an email campaign, and when we entered an area, we would develop relationships with a few farmers. By the time we would leave a particular area, farmers were usually lining up to join the study. The farmers were really engaged in the actual sample process, they were meeting the scientists, and it was just kind of this cool, uplifting event.
Now farmer groups around the country have become self-organized, and they’re approaching us, like, “Hey, we’re trying this new thing with this group of farms. Would you mind coming out and helping us by putting some data behind it?” And that’s exactly what this was always supposed to do. I don’t think we entirely knew how we were going to get there, but that’s kind of what has evolved, this democratization of science.
You’re studying all kinds of farms, including grazing systems, orchards, and more. Why did you choose row crops as the first focus?
When we got 1,000 Farms started, the mentality was, “Let’s focus on row crops, because geographically, if we could turn row crops into fully regenerative systems, think of the geographic footprint and the implications that that could have.”
Our study shows that if we were to implement regenerative row cropping systems on a national scale, that it represents the best climate solution currently available. And farmers don’t lose money or productivity.
That’s a pretty bold statement.
I mean, when you look at the numbers, it’s better than all of the other technology-based solutions to climate—carbon capture and storage combined, right? The other opportunities don’t even hold a candle to what our food system can do.
One of the biggest takeaways is that the regenerative soils contained 39 percent more carbon. But some soil scientists assert that soil has a maximum amount of carbon it can hold, so that extra storage doesn’t continue indefinitely.
No, in these fields that we measured, we went 60 centimeters deep. That’s pretty deep. And we found that carbon levels were changing all the way down. So, my guess is this is an underestimate of what our food system can do in terms of carbon capture and storage.
The other thing is: It builds on top of itself, such that organic matter and more life on farms ends up generating soil. Pretty profound. That’s how the prairies were made for crying out loud.
You’re saying that carbon storage is not maxing out because you’re finding that carbon is moving further down, while these regenerative farms are also potentially building another layer of soil on the top?
Yes, and those are different forms. Another thing that soil scientists have said is that inorganic forms of carbon are all related to parent material, the bedrock or limestone or something like that. So, they say that [land] management has no effect on total inorganic stocks.
Our research shows very clearly that at depth, inorganic carbon was significantly greater in regenerative fields, and it was correlated with how much fungal biomass and invertebrate life was in the soil, suggesting that . . . it was soil that comes from life, versus soil that comes from parent material or bedrock.
“We don’t need to clear more land to feed humanity. We just need to use the land that we’ve got to grow food.”
You’re studying farms that implement many different regenerative practices. Are you able to determine which of those are driving the outcomes the most?
We use a scoring system, and it’s based on eight yes or no questions. These are practice-based questions: “Did you till? Did you plant cover crops?” That kind of thing. But if we make regenerative ag about individual practices, we’re dead in the water before we even get started.
What’s unique about these practice-based questions that we use for our scoring system is that they are indicators. They are proxies of a management philosophy.
