🌾 #008 — Regenerative Agriculture

A more sustainable, long-term approach to farming

January 18, 2023

Hi friends,

We’re back in business after an extended holiday break.

In CTB #6, I explored Nature-based solutions. This week we’re diving into an old but re-remerging subset: Regenerative Agriculture.

Traditional farming and grazing practices like soil erosion, loss of biodiversity, usage of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides have negative impacts on the climate.

Regenerative agriculture practices like crop rotation, cover cropping, and conservation tillage result in more sustainable, long-term farming, and provide opportunities across carbon credits, consumer packaged goods, and agroforesty analytics.

📣 TLDR

Regenerative agriculture promotes biodiversity, improves water quality, and reduces soil erosion while addressing a variety of environmental and social challenges.

😬 Problem

Traditional farming and agriculture relies on synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, causes soil erosion, and requires heavy water usage.

🎯 Solution

Regenerative agriculture is a holistic farming and land management approach that aims to restore, improve and maintain the health and fertility of soil.

This improves productivity and resilience of farms, reduces the need for chemical inputs, sequesters carbon and reduces greenhouse gas emissions, and conserves water.

The key practices of regenerative agriculture include:

  • Conservation tillage: minimal disturbance of the soil and retention of crop residue on the surface to improve soil health and reduce erosion.

  • Cover cropping: planting a diverse mix of plants to improve soil structure, fertility and biodiversity.

  • Crop rotation: rotating the crops grown in a field to improve soil health and reduce pest and disease pressure.

  • Managed grazing: using livestock to mimic natural grazing patterns and improve soil health and biodiversity.

💪🏼 Innovators

  • Klim helps farmers scale up regenerative agriculture to make agriculture part of the climate solution.

  • CIBO Technologies scales regenerative advanced platform technology that connects growers to incentives and enterprises to growers.

  • Regrow combines agronomy and scenario planning with monitoring, reporting, and verification.

  • Aigen unlocks regenerative agriculture at a planetary scale—with a pesticide-free, solar powered robotics platform.

  • Perennial is building the world’s leading verification platform for soil-based carbon removal.

  • Propogate makes it easy for farms to transition acreage to agroforestry with their analytics and project development platform.

  • Yard Stick enables soil carbon removal at scale by measuring accurately, instantly, and affordably with Yard Stick technologies.

  • Indigo uses natural microbiology and digital technologies to improve grower profitability, sustainability, and consumer health.

⚡️ Opportunities

  • Provide carbon offsetting and carbon credits

    • Truterra provides customized efficiency tools to improve yield and reduce nutrient loss while protecting natural resources.

    • Agreena is a startup that mints, verifies and sells carbon credits generated by farmers.

    • Sylvera develops machine learning-based tools to track the performance of carbon offsets.

  • Market regeneratively-produced food products

    • Pasturebird is changing the poultry industry with chicken that's better for the land, animal, and consumer.

  • Improve water conservation and retention

    • Glanris makes a sustainable, low cost hybrid filtration media that removes organics as well as metals from water.

    • Genesis Systems is a developer of an industrial technology that provides water resource generation and environmental transformation.

  • Pesticide and chemical reduction

    • Terramera provides intelligence developing safer, more effective plant-based replacements to synthetic chemical pesticides and fertilizers.

⚠️ Challenges

  1. Many farmers and land managers may not be familiar with regenerative practices and may need education and training in order to implement them successfully.

  2. The initial costs of transitioning to regenerative practices can be high, and farmers may not have the financial resources to make the transition.

  3. Climate change and weather variability can make it more difficult to implement regenerative practices, as well as making it harder to predict crop yields and production.

  4. Some farmers may find it difficult to change their traditional farming practices, and may be resistant to the idea of regenerative agriculture.

🚀 Takeaways

  • Current farming and grazing practices have negative impacts on the environment such as soil erosion, loss of biodiversity and climate change.

  • Regenerative agriculture improves soil health, increases biodiversity and enhances ecosystem services while reducing the need for synthetic fertilizers and pesticides and increasing water retention.

🔗 Dive Deeper