Regenerative ag stretches beyond just yields

URBANA, Ill. — It’s been a little over a year since the University of Illinois launched the Illinois Regenerative Agriculture Initiative and the program hit the ground running.

Emily Heaton, IRAI director, and Adam Davis, U of I Department of Crop Sciences head, gave insights into the unique program in a podcast led by Todd Gleason, U of I Extension media communications specialist.

What’s the difference between sustainable agriculture and regenerative agriculture, or are they the same?

Davis: They’re the same in that they’re both buzzwords. Sustainable agriculture is a buzzword that’s been used since the early 1970s. Regenerative ag has only been used the last three or four years. But I think operationally there are two big differences.

One, is it is very much practice defined — what are OK practices, what are not OK practices, what’s sustainable, what’s not sustainable?

The word sustainable kind of creates this image in my mind of a fairly static endpoint. Regenerative agriculture, in contrast, is an outcome-based approach to sustainability in agriculture in which you’re trying to measure things that help improve various aspects of agriculture.

So, it’s not practice-based; it’s outcome-based. You’re measuring improvements in the soil quality, biodiversity, resilience, equitable careers or livelihoods in agriculture. And I believe it allows us to pitch a very large tent to help people all the way along the continuum, from very conventional to organic, to begin working towards improving their ag systems along these metrics.

Heaton: Not surprisingly, my definition is quite similar to Adam’s. Regenerative agriculture is anything that helps regenerate the human and natural resources on which society depends. I distinguish it from sustainability the same way Adam does in terms of practices and outcomes.

To be frank, I think about it in profitability terms. If you put a dollar in the bank, do you want to sustain that dollar or do you want to grow it, and how do you know how much you grew it? Are you making 1% return? Are you making 20% return? Those metrics on return on investment are key to how we approach regenerative agriculture — what we measure and how do we know what we’ve achieved.

Why is it that the college, the department is interested in regenerative agriculture and what purpose and role should it play?

Davis: We’re interested in supporting regenerative agriculture because it’s outcomes are aligned with addressing the grand challenges of our time — global climate change, food security, renewable energy, sustainable livelihoods and a clean, safe, healthy environment. Addressing these challenges with regenerative agriculture also helps us improve the productive capacity of the land at the same time that we’re helping use ag as a management lever to address these grand challenges.

My own journey toward regenerative agriculture began in 2012 when we published an article that was result of work that I had started as a graduate student at Iowa State University with Matt Liebman called the Marsden Farm Study. One of the findings of that study is that it’s possible to balance productivity, profitability and environmental health in a field crop system. When that article came out, all sorts of NGOs in Illinois approached me and said let’s do something together and we’ve been building for 10 years towards this.

Regenerate Illinois began in 2016. That’s an organization that helps align the NGOs in Illinois. The IDEA Farm Network was established in 2017. And when I became head of the Department of Crop Sciences I was very interested in helping make this happen where the University of Illinois began to show up for these stakeholders.

The conventional stakeholder with a corn/soybean rotation probably will ask questions to both of you more often than not. What do you tell them about the projects you’re currently doing and the projects you hope to do that might have a direct outcome for them?

Heaton: I’d say we expect any producer, whether they’re corn and soy or anything else, to think about their operation critically and what new things they’d like to adopt and address. And if they find something that works for them in our portfolio, great, I think they will if they are open-minded and think critically about the opportunities that are available to them in a changing ag marketplace and in a changing climate.

Davis: I’d say be curious, start small, pay attention to how things turnout with your small experiments on your farm, and then repeat.

What other advice might you have for producers?

Heaton: I think the answer to the question is always the same. How does it make money? There are lots of ways farmers can look at their operation and figure out how it can make more money, and what we do in the Regenerative Ag Initiative and within the Department of Crop Sciences is we think holistically about sources of income and sources of loss and how you balance those.

In particular for landowners, we’ve found that bringing in some of these regenerative practices — changing tillage, changing cover crops, changing diversity on the farm — usually leads to improved economic outcomes. That’s also reflected in (Farm Business Farm Management) data. But it’s not easy. Figuring out how to do it is not easy. One of the best pieces of advice I’ve gotten is never make the same mistake twice. There’s going to be mistakes made every year and we support for farmers along the way as they are being curious, as they are trying new things.

Davis: I would say get very serious about diversifying your cropping system, and I’ll approach that as a weed scientist. From the perspective of herbicide resistance evolution we have dug ourselves into a tremendous hole with the two crop, summer annual only rotation. It’s getting worse. Dicamba-tolerant soybeans were not the magic bullet. We’ve got resistance now and in order to prepare for the future you’re going to have to grow something in addition to summer annuals on your farm. That’s going to mean learning how to grow them.

We need a supply chain that can handle them. We need markets and consumers that are interested in using them. That’s why our scope at the Illinois Regenerative Ag Initiative is not just on production. It’s the whole food system because in order enable cropping system diversification we’ve got to think up and down the supply chain.

When I speak with conventional growers, I begin the conversation with herbicide resistance because that’s a critical failure point of the lack of diversity. But you can also think about it with respect to resilience to climate change, a more diversified crop portfolio will allow you to survive those swings.

If you have an investment portfolio for retirement, you are not going to retire on a single stock, and the same thing in a healthy cropping system that’s going to be able to survive the swings of environment and global change, you have to think about actually making a resilient crop rotation.