Why Regenerative Agriculture (Still) Isn’t a Climate Solution

Regenerative agriculture continues to capture attention — praised in star‑studded documentaries like “Kiss the Ground” and “Common Ground,” and featured heavily in Biden’s “climate-smart agriculture” programs. The promise sounds compelling. With the right type of cattle grazing and soil-enhancing farming practices, we can eat all the beef we want, guilt-free. But as climate scientist Jonathan Foley explained in a recent webinar hosted by the Food and Farming Journalism Network: “We’re finding that the results of real field trials, replicated at scale, aren’t producing the results we see in the movies.” According to Foley, many of the promises of regenerative agriculture “have been overhyped.”

Around a third of global greenhouse gas emissions come from food, with most of those emissions driven by meat —– especially beef. Regenerative agriculture has remained a popular initiative for many, but the math that its carbon-saving calculations are based on simply doesn’t pencil out.

There’s no way to make regenerative agriculture work, at least not if Americans and others in Global North countries continue to eat the same amount of meat. “Regenerative [agriculture] can only happen if our thinking, our philosophy, our diet and our food, changes,” Rattan Lal, distinguished professor of soil science at Ohio State University, tells Sentient. That includes drastically reducing meat consumption, not just making meat “better.”

What Does ‘Regenerative Agriculture’ Mean?

Regenerative agriculture doesn’t have a single, universally accepted definition, but core practices of regenerative farming tend to include planting cover crops, avoiding soil tillage and rotating livestock — especially cattle — across pastures to graze. Mainly drawn from Indigenous knowledge, these practices can benefit soil health.

As a climate solution, however, the evidence doesn’t stack up. The basic idea behind regenerative meat as a climate solution goes like this: whatever emissions that are produced as a result of raising beef are offset by regenerative farming practices. Those practices, the argument goes, can capture carbon out of the air and into the soil permanently, which is what you need for an offset to be effective, so that the climate pollution from the meat doesn’t count.

But research shows regenerative farming is not effective at permanent, or even long-lasting, carbon sequestration (again, that’s what you need for a carbon offset to work).

Foley, who is also the Executive Director for the climate solutions research group Project Drawdown, summed it up this way in the webinar: “if you don’t cherry pick the data, and you look at it more systematically, regenerative grazing in particular doesn’t look quite as strong as it might at first appear.”

Regenerative Grazing Has a Land Problem, Which Is Also a Climate Problem

Regenerative grazing can only do so much with carbon. Unlike what happens in native forests, prairies and wetlands, on a farm, carbon is indeed added into the ground, but only transiently and only in the topsoil.

At that depth, rapid microbial turnover releases much of the carbon back into the atmosphere, and does not store it permanently. In order to be an effective offset, the carbon needs to be stored in the ground permanently.

Regenerative grazing also uses more land. In addition to the methane burps, that’s a big part of why beef — no matter how you farm it — has such a massive climate cost is the land.

A 2020 study found that regenerative ranching requires up to 2.5 times more land than conventional beef production. In practical terms, that means to produce the same amount of meat that we consume now but with regenerative farming practices, the “footprint of animal agriculture” would have to increase substantially.

Even switching from factory-farmed to grass-fed beef in the U.S. would take a heavy toll. Research shows that grass-fed beef production actually emits more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional farming.

That’s because factory farms, for all of their problems, are just far more efficient at raising meat. And efficiency is a good thing, at least if you are solely focused on greenhouse gas emissions (critics of this perspective sometimes call this view “carbon tunnel vision”). Grass-fed beef production, being far less efficient, emits more methane per cow and requires more land.

One study from 2018 estimated that shifting the beef cattle population to grass-fed cows would require increasing the national cattle herd from 77 million to 100 million — about a 30 percent jump.

Eat Less Meat and Rewild More Land

Lal, who is supportive of regenerative agriculture, says that the only way for the regenerative approach to work at-scale is with a reduction in meat production and consumption, and a return of some agricultural lands to nature, otherwise known as rewilding.

“Agriculture has been a problem,” Lal says, because over time, we humans have deforested massive amounts of carbon-storing forests and other native landscapes to produce food for a growing global population.

But that deforestation came with a major climate pollution cost, and our ongoing deforestation to feed our global meat habit today is only adding to that cost.

Now, both global temperatures and populations are continuing to increase, and if we want to stave off the worst effects of climate change, while also feeding a lot more people, we need to take a few important steps, both Lal and Foley agree.

According to Foley, “we’ve got to cut the emissions in the first place.” One way of doing that is by eating less beef. In 2018, a report from the World Resources Institute found that U.S. beef consumption needs to be reduced by about 40 percent to limit global warming effectively.

There are other measures needed too. In addition to eating less meat, Foley said during the webinar, we need to “restore nature, shrink the footprint of agriculture, put back the forest, put back the natural prairies, put back the mangroves. If we could do that through curbing our diets and curbing our waste, that would be a great, great idea.”

We have an obligation not only technologically and economically, but also morally and ethically, to return some of that extra land back to nature.

Rattan Lal

Lal describes the task ahead in stark terms. We have an obligation, he says, “not only technologically and economically, but also morally and ethically, to return some of that extra land back to nature.”

In order to do that through regenerative practices, “some productivity has to be sacrificed. So we [have to] change our diet, [to eat less meat].” After all, “Do we need to eat meat three times a day?” asks Lal, rhetorically. “Three times a day meat-based, is not healthy for people and not healthy for the planet.”

Lal has many big changes in mind: “our thinking, our diet, our way of life, our food habits, our food system — all that has to change. It is really transformation and regeneration [that’s needed], not only of agriculture, but of our own thinking and lifestyle as well.”