Will Farmers Adopt Regenerative Practices?

Tim Hammerich

News Reporter

Many think regenerative agriculture could be the solution for producing more food using less inputs, and sequestering more carbon from the atmosphere. Some farmers have been able to achieve tremendous results with these practices which include reducing tillage and agrochemicals, and incorporating cover crops and livestock. However, can this scale to the size of our massive agricultural economy? Dr. Jonathan Lungren is confident that it can.

Lundgren… “Everybody looks at these amazing farmers that are on YouTube, where they're like, 'well, that sounds really good for them, and that might work on their farm, but it's never going to work on my operation. It's too hot, too dry to wet, too cold'.”

Dr. Lundgren is a regenerative farmer and a researcher with the Ecdysis Foundation. They are researching the feasibility of these systems on farms of all types and sizes.

Lundgren… “We can test this across different scales, across different regions, growing conditions, to see. And what we've found is that yeah, there's constraints. But farmers have found ways in all of these different circumstances to make these systems work. And it does work. It works on 10-acre almond orchards. It works on 800-acre almond orchards. It works on, you know, 40-acre corn fields, it works on 1000-acre corn fields.”

The Ecdysis Foundation conducts research to back these practices with more data.