Regenerative agriculture has become one of fashion favored climate solutions in recent years. The set of farming practices that drives climate mitigation and restores soil health, biodiversity, and water cycles is upheld as a remedy for farmland degradation and chemical-intensive fiber farming. But in sustainability circles, regenerative agriculture is also one of the most-contested solutions, thanks to a lack of data around whether or not it’s actually doing what it claims. Now, a new study seeks to reconcile the difference between the science and what regenerative farmers experience on the land.
Even under the broadest definition, regenerative fibers account for just 2% to 3% of the natural fiber basket. The data about its exalted benefits — from landscape resilience to the return of pollinators, lower costs, and carbon sequestration — remains limited overall and contested where available.
Because of this, “regenerative agriculture belongs in the philosophy department, not the agriculture department,” says Richard Eckard, a professor in the school of agriculture, food, and ecosystem sciences at the University of Melbourne. “We’ve looked at [the claims made by regenerative farmers] a lot, and when you go looking for evidence, it’s not measured.”
The absence of data is partly due to the term’s ambiguity and that researchers prefer to isolate measurable variables rather than evaluating entire farming systems. Regenerative, however, is holistic by nature. “We do work on soil health, we don’t do work on regenerative agriculture,” says Eckard.
In addition to this, studies are expensive, difficult to replicate across landscapes and climate regions, often lack a baseline control, and can require decades of samples. Seasonal variations mean some metrics require near-constant monitoring. The confusion is not helped by a plethora of regenerative certifications flooding the market, each with its own framework and methodology. For instance, the Regenerative Organic Certification, used by brands like Patagonia and Eileen Fisher, has strict criteria about the specific regenerative practices farmers must adopt, banning synthetic fertilizers and emphasizing animal welfare and social fairness. Meanwhile, the Land To Market certification developed by the Savory Institute, which has been adopted by Ugg and Balenciaga, focuses more on measurable outcomes, like how much a landscape’s soil health has improved.
To complicate things further, some purists believe that to truly maximize a landscape’s potential, farmers must embrace the full suite of regenerative techniques and apply them according to their unique geography. Tensions rise when farmers adopt the label while employing just one or two techniques, are reluctant to change their ways, or roll their eyes at new buzzwords describing longstanding practices.
To address the regenerative agriculture data gap, scientist, agroecologist, and farmer Dr. Jonathan Lundgren has spent the last four years collectsing data from over 1,700 regenerative and conventional farms across North America. The study, titled 1,000 Farms, attempts to evaluate the entire “holistic, dynamic framework” of regenerative management by comparing biodiversity, water cycles, soil nutrition, pollution, profit, and farmer well-being to a conventional baseline. Backed by the Rockefeller Foundation, Lundgren deployed a team of scientists across hundreds of farms, collectsing thousands of soil, water, and plant biomass samples, and performing insect sweeps. Rather than isolated case studies, the research deployed full systems assessments.
“Taking a systems perspective is what makes this study extremely unique,” says Lundgren. “Looking at so many different elements simultaneously gives us a lot more power for understanding the full implications of what regenerative agriculture is capable of.”
The stakes for understanding exactly what regenerative agriculture can deliver have never been higher. Despite seemingly endless sustainability summits and pledges, the fashion industry’s carbon emissions continue to rise. With many brands anchoring their climate strategies to the promise of regenerative agriculture, while global warming wreaks havoc on the earth’s systems, from globally degraded topsoils and food insecurity, to rising sea levels and greenhouse gas emissions, it’s never been more pressing to have evidence that qualifies its potential.
Soil health and water cycles
While the science equivocates in some areas, it is relatively settled that regenerative farmlands have healthier soils than their conventionally managed counterparts, marked by organic matter, a porous structure, and diversity across bacteria and fungi.
Preliminary data from the 1,000 Farms initiative suggests regenerative lands may host significantly richer microbial life across the board. Total microbial biomass and bacterial abundance were approximately 60% higher than conventional soils, total fungi nearly tripled, with arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi — critical to nutrient uptake in plants — increasing by more than 350%.
These trends are corroborated in a 2022 study published in PeerJ, stating that regenerative farms produced crops with higher levels of organic soil matter, soil health scores, and levels of certain vitamins, minerals and phytochemicals. Healthy soils have increased water-holding capacity, which means rainfall on a regenerative farm is captured and stored by the soil, rather than causing run-off and erosion. Although it varies depending on soil type, according to the United States Department of Agriculture, every 1% increase in organic soil matter helps soil hold 20,000 gallons more water per acre — notable for a water-intensive industry like fashion, which counts reducing water usage as a major sustainability hurdle, and is susceptible to both flooding and drought in the natural fiber production stage.
Biodiversity
“One of the first things that you end up seeing as you start to transition to a regenerative farming system, whether it’s croplands, rangelands, orchards, or vineyards, is that life comes back first,” says Lundgren.
While it is widely accepted that regenerative agriculture can reverse the trend of declining farmland biodiversity in industrial agriculture systems — across plant life, birds, and insects — the supporting evidence from long-term, field scale studies is rare.
Early data from 1,000 Farms shows regenerative farms support more than twice the bird species of conventional farms, four and a half times the insect species, and nearly 20 times the plant species. This was on display at Jigsaw Farms in southwestern Victoria, Australia. For years, as farmers Mark Wootton and Eve Kantor implemented a range of regenerative practices, pollinators and wildlife returned. Eckard worked with them to quantify the changes they were seeing; they went “from something like 34 bird species on the property to 176 bird species”, he says. Diverse ecosystems and the return of pollinators enhance natural pest and disease control, improve animal welfare, and make landscapes more resilient to extreme weather events.
Carbon sequestration
According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, livestock accounts for 14.5% of greenhouse gas emissions each year. The most contentious claim made by regenerative agriculture’s proponents relates to the potential for carbon sequestration to mitigate the industry’s emissions, on both rangelands and croplands. Several brands have even used regenerative agriculture to imply that their products are “carbon positive”, as the carbon sequestered outweighs that emitted.
Healthy soils do sequester carbon (or carbon dioxide equivalents), as do trees and plants. While the science behind tree carbon is reliable, what scientists struggle to agree on is how long carbon stays in the soil, and whether or not carbon can continue to be sequestered, indefinitely.
“Carbon can’t be built forever. We see the biggest gains in those initial years [of switching to regenerative management] and we typically see bigger gains in a more degraded system,” says Dr. Shelby McClelland, a researcher and lecturer at Stony Brook University’s school of marine and atmospheric sciences. Eventually, the carbon stores in the soil and plant biomass will reach what’s called a new steady state.
At Jigsaw Farms, in the early stages of implementing regenerative techniques, the farm’s soils and newly planted trees sequestered enough CO2 to offset its annual emissions from wool, lamb, and beef production. According to a study conducted by Eckard, soil carbon levels rose from 2.8% to about 3.6% over a 30-year period, but the increases began to “flatten out”, and now, they “just vary with rainfall”.
Meanwhile, Lundgren advocates for more cows and sheep to be run on time-managed rangelands, because his findings suggest that increased herd sizes equal greater carbon and nutrient gains. In support of this, a study from scientists at the University of California shows significantly higher soil carbon sequestration on farms that have been regeneratively grazed and that gains were especially pronounced deeper in the soil, suggesting the long-term stabilization of carbon.
The debate is at least, in part, difficult to resolve because carbon science is relatively new and how it behaves is poorly understood. Field research is often limited to shallow depths — deeper measurements are harder to take — and studies have found fluctuations in soil carbon even within the same field. “You soil sample one spot and then you soil sample one meter across from it and send both of those samples to the laboratory, you can get a 20% error in the field,” says Eckard.
The problems with soil carbon measurements cast a shadow over the rapid growth of soil carbon markets, says McClelland. As more and more farmers look to profit from their carbon, it’s important they “get the data they need, which is representative of what they’re actually experiencing and seeing before they put in all this investment”.
Will the science ever meet the regenerative farmers?
As someone who works on the land, for Lundgren, the new data reveals how much everything relates to biodiversity and what is audible and visible when he walks across a landscape.
“I tell farmers to go out on your farm every single day, and if you see something you’ve never seen before, you’re doing it right. And that’s more accurate than any of the scientific instruments I have,” he says. “Life on the farm is this linchpin for so many of those other outcomes, and it’s real hard to cheat at. You can’t just go out and release a bunch of lady beetles on your farm, right? They leave. It’s about building that system.”
Such observations that regenerative landscapes look, feel, and sound different to industrial farms are common in the regenerative farming community. Tree lines create shade, healthy soil that retains water is cooler to touch, birds and insects are tangible signs of life. If Lundgren has his way, it won’t be long before the science that supports this is undeniable.
