From the ground up: Regenerative agriculture revives farmland while curbing climate change

Paid for by

General Mills

Now is the time to save the world’s farming systems – and it all starts with the soil

In recent years, the agriculture sector has been seeking more sustainable roots. But there’s a problem with sustainability – current practices including constant tillage and over-fertilizing simply aren’t working. Sustaining a broken system doesn’t address massive-scale issues like climate change, suffering rural communities and a growing number of mouths to feed around the globe.

Now, farmers, suppliers and food brands are working together to turn over a new leaf — they’re looking to regeneration instead of just sustainability. The nomenclature is important. While sustainability focuses on maintaining natural resources by improving efficiencies and reducing harmful effects of current processes, regeneration fundamentally rethinks the whole system.

“We need transformative change, and that’s part of the reason why we need to talk about our goals differently,” says Steve Rosenzweig, PhD, a soil scientist at General Mills. “It’s not enough to sustain the current degraded state of our ecosystems; we really need to build resilience back into them.”

Regenerative agriculture (or “regenerative ag”) looks at modern farming through a holistic, long-term lens by treating farms as individual ecosystems that can be redesigned to work in sync with nature. At the same time, this method aims to dramatically cut the industry’s carbon footprint — land clearing and conventional farming is responsible for about one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions — while strengthening the food supply chain. In fact, regenerative ag takes it one step further, drawing carbon from the atmosphere and storing it in the soil, which can contribute to slowing down climate change.

It’s not enough to sustain the current degraded state of our ecosystems; we really need to build resilience back into them.

Steve Rosenzweig, soil scientist

To help farmers adopt regenerative ag and reap the benefits — including economic resilience — General Mills has committed to advancing six core principles, detailed below, on one million acres by 2030. The food company’s multi-year pilots with customized coaching and consulting for farmers are already underway.

“We’ve seen regenerative ag bring hope back,” says Rosenzweig. “Regenerative farmers feel like they have more control over their fate. They’re more optimistic and hopeful about the future. Combined with being more profitable and having a resilient system, these are the ingredients needed to stem the flow of people leaving these rural communities.”

Getting granular: 6 principles of regenerative agriculture

To understand why regenerative ag is a game changer, it’s important to know how it works. Like many history-making movements, it starts underground — in this case, literally.

Soil is a live organism, complete with bugs, bacteria, fungus and other living things that decompose organic matter and recycle nutrients back into plants. It also holds – and feeds off — carbon. When soil is tilled, it releases carbon into the atmosphere. When farmland is managed inefficiently, the more carbon and pollutants like fertilizer or pesticides are leached into the air and waterways.

Regenerative ag can be broken into six principles. Each can be applied on its own, but the happiest soil and best results occur when all are put into action together. It’s an interconnected system, just like nature.

1

Consider how each farm is different

  • Factors like location and soil composition inform each farm’s custom plan
  • It’s also important to consider geography, climate, current crops, water infiltration and drainage
  • It’s not just farms across different geographies that need a tailored approach. Even within a farm, fields can vary
2

Reduce soil disturbance

  • Tillage or applying excessive fertilizer or manure degrades soil
  • Too much fertilizer or manure can cause acidification or buildup of salts
  • Minimizing disturbances helps keep soil healthy and soil structure intact

When soil is being tilled, it actually releases carbon into the atmosphere, and it breaks down that soil microbiome.

Mary Jane Melendez, chief sustainability and social impact officer for General Mills
3

Maximize plant diversity

  • As a living ecosystem, soil needs food — carbon, pulled out of the air by plants and photosynthesis — to survive and thrive
  • Soil prefers a variety of nutrients from different plant and animal sources. But many farms today only grow one type of crop in a field – a practice known as monoculture
  • By diversifying plants and animals, the soil is fed a more diverse diet, which increases the amount of life it can sustain
  • Increasing crop diversity also acts as a natural defense against pests, weeds and diseases that hurt yields

Like every other living thing, soil needs food in order to survive. And the food that it needs is carbon… putting that carbon in the soil is not only good for the ecosystem, but it helps to mitigate climate change, because we’re pulling carbon out of the air.

Steve Rosenzweig, soil scientist
4

Keep a living root in the ground year-round

  • This principle goes hand in hand with maximizing plant diversity – it helps keep the soil well fed
  • With conventional monoculture, plants only populate fields a few months every year
  • By growing other plants alongside primary crops, regenerative ag keeps a vigorous root system in the ground all year long for constant soil enrichment
5

Keep the soil covered

  • An armor of crop residue and living plants on the surface of the soil helps prevent degradation
  • This protective layer helps beneficial microbes near the surface
  • It mitigates destructive natural forces like wind, rain and baking hot sunshine. It also keeps nutrients from blowing or washing away
  • Covering soil reduces evaporation, preventing groundwater salts from creeping to the surface and degrading soil quality
6

Integrate livestock

  • It’s not just a variety of plants that helps keep soil healthy – grazing animals, wildlife and insects all work together to improve soil health
  • Livestock diversity can build resistance to pests and diseases
  • Adaptive or holistic grazing and feeding cows a mix of crops improves the health of the animals and also contributes to resilience of the entire ecosystem

Why is regenerative ag so important?

Now that we’ve covered how it works, it’s time to focus on why shifting to regenerative ag is so necessary. From fields to farm systems to the global food supply chain, everything is interconnected. We need to transform our agricultural systems – and the time is now.

Creating healthy, farmable soil

"Over time, by implementing these regenerative principles, we’re able to restore health to our soils, which then can store more carbon and hold more water, without requiring the use of so many synthetic inputs like fertilizers and pesticides." Mary Jane Melendez

95% of food is grown in the uppermost layer of soil (topsoil)
The world loses 24bn tons of soil due to erosion each year
Just 1/32 of the world’s soil is farmable, and this amount is shrinking

It helps mitigate climate change and preserves resources

50-70% of organic carbon stored in soil has already been lost due to cultivation
2% increase of carbon content in the Earth’s soils could offset all greenhouse gas emissions

It promotes biodiversity

1 out of every 3 bites of food we take are thanks to pollinators like bees, butterflies, moths, beetles and other insects
1bn bacteria can live in just one teaspoon of rich soil
40%+ of global insect species are declining, and one-third are endangered

It alleviates pressures in the agricultural economy

“[With conventional farming], on average, about 40% of the nitrogen — the most abundant fertilizer – is completely lost because farmers are reliant on 'leaky' synthetic fertilizers and there are no cover crops to keep them in the soil. It’s going into water, it’s going into the air and it doesn’t do good things there. That’s not good for the farmers, because fertilizer is really expensive. If they’re losing 40% of it, that’s just money going down the drain, literally.” Steve Rosenzweig

$38.7 estimated spending on farm fertilizers and chemicals in 2016
$415bn amount of farm debt in the US in 2019
10.9bn people expected to populate the planet in 2100 = farmers must find financially viable ways to be even more productive

Embracing regenerative ag

1m acres the amount of land General Mills aims to convert to regeneratively managed farmland by 2030
73 farms currently enrolled in General Mills’ regenerative ag pilots

Steps to healthy soil

To further advance regenerative agriculture efforts, General Mills has launched pilot programs in the Northern and Southern plains and Great Lakes region—including US states like North Dakota and Michigan and the Canadian provinces of Manitoba and Saskatchewan. The programs pair “renaissance farmer” coaches who are experts in regenerative agriculture with farmers hoping to apply the principles and enhance operations on their own farms.

The pilots, first launched about a year and a half ago, begin with inviting farmers to participate in two-day General Mills-sponsored Soil Health Academies. The academies educate farmers on the six regenerative agriculture principles and elaborate upon how they might be applied within the context of each unique piece of land.

Next, farmers interested in learning more and participating in pilot programs submit an application. General Mills then selects participants for a three-year program, pairing farmers with a coach from agriculture consulting and education firm Understanding Ag. Together, coach and farmer develop a custom implementation plan, which might include steps like identifying fields best suited for regenerative ag trials and selecting optimal cover crops.

A key part of program success is tied to helping farmers develop a network of others seeing positive results; it helps fuel optimism and interest. “We want to show that farmers really can be profitable in growing food for the world today,” says Melendez. For the first couple of pilots, farmer interest doubled General Mills’ initial expectations, which led the company to expand upon the initiative.

We want to show that farmers really can be profitable in growing food for the world today

Mary Jane Melendez

These collaborative, customized programs yield crops that ultimately find their way into General Mills products – a farmer might apply regenerative agriculture principles when growing oats used in Cheerios or Nature Valley granola bars. The dairy pilot that’s underway supplies milk to General Mills’ Yoplait plant in Reed City, Michigan.

This snowball effect can create real and lasting change, pushing agriculture beyond just the realm of sustainability. “The magnitude of the challenge requires a different goal. What we’re trying to do is systems-level change,” says Rosenzweig. “And it’s ambitious, but that’s what the moment requires.”

Learn more about General Mills’ commitment to regenerative agriculture