What Is Regenerative Organic Agriculture?

Conventional Agriculture

Conventional agriculture depends on synthetic fertilizers, pesticides and fungicides to boost food yields. It often follows a factory model, with vast swaths of land producing single crops and animals raised in cages and feedlots. Conventional Big Ag contributes one-third of the world’s total greenhouse gases, erodes topsoil, generates toxic runoff, and damages human and animal health.

Organic Farming

Organic farming bans synthetic inputs, genetically modified organisms (GMOs), antibiotics, and growth hormones. To nourish their crops and care for their livestock, organic farmers often use centuries-old techniques such as composting, crop rotation, intercropping and managed grazing on pasture. This kind of organic farming works with nature rather than against it.

Regenerative Organic

Regenerative organic builds on the best practices of organic farming and then raises the bar,  prioritizing building soil health as a way to fight climate change. A holistic system, regenerative organic sees the well-being of Earth, humans and animals as interconnected. A truly regenerative farm, one that restores health on multiple levels, avoids toxic chemicals. By definition, it is regenerative organic.

The Rewards of Regenerative Organic

When an agricultural system is healthy, many benefits flow. These are some of them.

Restored Topsoil

If we keep farming conventionally, the world’s topsoil, which produces nearly all our food, will continue to disappear at an alarming rate, according to United Nations reports. Regenerative organic farming creates thriving populations of microbes, which break down organic matter (dead plants) into topsoil. Also, regenerative organic systems like agroforests and no-till farms planted with perennials have well-developed roots that keep topsoil from eroding.

A Climate We Can Handle

Regenerative organic systems are rich in trees, perennials and living, microbe-rich soil. Trees and perennials (such as certain cover crops) excel at drawing down carbon dioxide, a major greenhouse gas causing the climate crisis. They drip it through their roots into the soil, where microbes ingest the carbon and store it in the ground. Regenerative organic systems are also better at coping with effects of climate change like drought and flooding.

More Nutritious Food

Evidence suggests what common sense has always told us: that fruits, vegetables, nuts and grains regeneratively grown in rich, organic soil contain more nutrients. Eating a tomato grown with these practices can also deliver more cancer-fighting flavonoids than one raised conventionally.

Regenerative Organic Farming Practices

By using regenerative organic farming practices that rely on ancient traditions—many of them indigenous—and layering in modern science, we can restore balance and health to our home planet and ourselves.

Cover Cropping

Farmers grow cover crops like lentils, alfalfa and clover instead of letting land lie fallow between the main cash-crop seasons. Cover crops increase soil organic matter, produce natural fertilizer, draw down carbon and reduce erosion.

Composting

Waste from the farm gets converted into compost, teeming with soil-building microbes. Compost acts both as a natural fertilizer and mulch—helping soil retain moisture and suppressing weeds.

Rotating Crops

Crop varieties are rotated each year to avoid depleting specific nutrients in the soil and stop disease and pests from proliferating. By rotating crops, nitrogen-fixing crops like legumes can actually add nutrients to farmland.

Intercropping

Multiple types of crops are planted closely together to increase yields and soil health over time. This system of intercropping imitates natural polycultures, where plants of different species benefit one another.

Low- to No-Tilling

Tilling involves breaking up soil to plant seeds or control weeds. Unfortunately, it increases erosion, disturbs the soil microbiome and releases carbon into the atmosphere. Less tilling (or none at all) protects the life of the soil and helps carbon stay underground. It also helps soil retain water.

Agroforestry

Like wild forests, agroforests have multiple tiers of plants—trees, bushes and vines. They’re far more biodiverse than monocrop systems, draw down carbon and improve water retention.

Restorative Grazing

Grazing animals, if managed properly and regularly moved over the land, can bring pastures back to life. Their nutrient-rich manure could potentially increase biodiversity below and above ground, and then the restored pasture could draw down carbon, too.

Planting Perennials

Unlike annual crops, perennials live for many years in one spot. Their well-developed root systems draw down carbon and deliver it deep into the soil. Those extensive roots also help prevent erosion.

Regenerative Organic Farming Practices

In 2017, we partnered with several other brands, including Dr. Bronner’s and the Rodale Institute, to establish Regenerative Organic Certified®, the world’s highest-bar organic designation for food and fiber. To be Regenerative Organic Certified, farms must meet stringent standards for soil health, animal welfare and worker fairness. Well over 5 million acres of farmland are now certified around the world.

Why Regenerative Organic?

Learn more in the following three-part video series.

Part 1: Big Agriculture Is Broken

Industrial farming allowed us to produce more food cheaply, but at a huge cost to our environment and health.

Watch

Part 2: Soil Is the Solution

Soil is the foundation of our food system—and life itself. It’s time for a soil-centric revolution.

Watch

Part 3: What We’re Doing (and Why)

Our new Regenerative Organic Certification sets a high bar for soil health, worker fairness and animal welfare—interconnected parts of any food ecosystem.

Watch