There’s been increasing attention in recent years to the way conventional farming, in the United States especially, contributes to climate change. Some oft-floated solutions are the practices of regenerative agriculture, such as reducing chemical inputs, limiting plowing, keeping the soil covered at all times with plants or what’s left behind after a harvest, and incorporating livestock alongside crops.
It amounts to working more with nature. The key challenge is many of these practices come with upfront financial costs to farmers, while the economic benefits can take years to materialize.
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Giles Oldroyd, the new president of the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, argues a lot of that has to do with the way most widely grown crops, such as corn and soy, have been developed to thrive in very specific conditions. His comments came during yesterday’s keynote at BioSTL’s Global AgriFood Innovation Summit.
“What you get is what you ask for. If you breed in those systems, you get crops that perform in those systems,” he says. “But I consider these pampered crops. They deliver if we provide the perfect conditions for them.”
Oldroyd argues it’s possible to flip this paradigm around by focusing on developing crops that can be just as productive in fields employing regenerative farming practices.
“We have to get to the point where a regen farmer can say to their neighboring conventional farmer, ‘Why are you farming that way? I’m making more money.’ And the moment that happens, the markets drive the change,” he says.
To some of the farmers in the room, it’s still a tough sell. Steve Turner, who grows vegetables, corn, soybeans and keeps livestock on his Illinois farm, says the challenging economics of farming make any changes tough, especially with the gap between costs and earnings at its widest point in a decade.
In his experience, Turner says regenerative agriculture practices have made it more difficult to be timely in managing his farm.
“I can apply nitrogen to corn, there’s a window to do that, with [regenerative agriculture] I’m seeing that window is sometimes very much shorter,” he says. “With the economics [right now], consistency is the name of the game to survive.”
Fellow Illinois farmer Heather Hampton Knodle says there are other hurdles she, and others in the profession, are up against when adopting different practices, such as landlords who don’t want to engage with regenerative practices that don’t offer immediate economic returns.
“I found two [landlords] that will pay some money to put cover crops in the ground,” she says. “The others no. So there are some real, call it structural, hurdles. We can find all sorts of terminology and jargon, but it’s very real when you’re trying to make ends meet.”
Oldroyd acknowledges these challenges. It’s why he sees the responsibility of the Danforth Center—what he calls “public sector science”—as one of helping lead the way toward regenerative agriculture that’s also profitable.
“I’m sitting at the other end of the spectrum, right at the research end,” he says. “I see our role as making the new capabilities possible, expanding what is possible within regen farming systems, and facilitating the development of new crops, new traits that will facilitate the improvement in the profitability of your farming system.”
He’s confident this can happen because of the way many crops saw a massive growth in productivity (and thus profitability) in the past 100 years, aided primarily by better genetics and also different agronomic practices.
This boost, Oldroyd argues, has come within the bounds of systems that rely on heavy plowing and chemical inputs, meaning a massive, yet-to-be-tapped potential in aligning the agricultural system with regenerative principles. The same kinds of advances in crop genetics, which he says powered the overwhelming majority of productivity gains before, can happen again in a regenerative context.
It’s especially important since most regenerative agriculture focuses on changing farming practices, instead of the underlying crop genetics.
“You can design new crops, perennial crops for instance, and you probably got a potential quadrupling in their productivity,” Oldroyd says. “I think we can also re-breed some of our existing crops to perform, not in that conventional farming system, but to now perform in a regen farming system.”
And if institutions like the Danforth Center lead the way and “grease the wheels” when it comes to regenerative agriculture, Oldroyd expects major players in the industry will carry the momentum forward. It already helps that some major buyers of crops, like Nestlé Purina, are committing to purchasing plants grown with regenerative principles.
“That means that the buyers at the end [of the supply chain] are putting pressure on producers to actually farm in a certain way,” he says. “That you know there’s somebody to sell your products to.”
