What’s next for regenerative agriculture?

A PCC symposium explored organic and regenerative practices

What is regenerative agriculture? What can it become?

More than 80 participants from 40 organizations recently gathered at PCC’s Convening on Regenerative and Organic Food Systems to share their perspectives on those questions and start creating paths for answers.

The event organized by PCC at Daybreak Star Indian Cultural Center brought together a cross-section of people with a personal stake in regenerative and organic foods, from farmers to policymakers to educators to tribal members. Participants explored issues like the relationship between regenerative and organic agriculture, how to define the term “regenerative” and how to protect it from fading into a meaningless “greenwashed” term like “natural.”

Those issues go to the heart of PCC’s mission and history: Over the decades, co-op staff and members helped pioneer organic standards in Washington state and then the nation (see some of that story here.) One question now is whether regenerative practices include and improve upon that hard-won organic certification, or whether their priorities just overlap.

Clearly attendees wanted to support sustainable, safe foods no matter how they are labeled — the same mission that fueled the organics movement decades ago.

And achieving a truly regenerative diet is possible, some participants shared, because we’ve already seen it can be done.

Regenerative agriculture stakeholders

Valerie Segrest, a keynote speaker, is an enrolled member of the Muckleshoot Indian Tribe and a nationally respected Native Nutrition Educator. She talked about the ways Indigenous people have kept their different foodsheds healthy and vital over the centuries, from the essential Northwest salmon runs to the camas bulbs that were once so plentiful that Lewis and Clark saw a prairie in blue-violet bloom and “thought they were looking at a body of water.”

Tribal members still lead substantial investments in restoring watersheds and nurturing soil and foraging, supporting a variety of healthy foods rather than the monocrops that are standard in modern agriculture. And Indigenous people remain key to regenerative agriculture, Segrest said — “not because of our trauma, but because we have answers.”

As recently as the 1970s, “organic” food was as amorphous a concept as regenerative seems now. Different farmers disagreed on details, and the entire system ran on trust. It wasn’t until 2002 that federal standards went into effect with standardized requirements and government oversight. (Washington state pioneered organic regulations earlier, in 1988.)

Creating federal rules around organic certification had obvious benefits, with their protections and guarantees leading to more than 60 billion dollars in organic food sales in 2022. But the certification also had shortfalls. Organic regulations don’t address human rights for farmworkers. They originally lacked extensive animal welfare protections, though standards were tightened last year after nearly two decades of struggle. And controversies remain about whether the letters of organics are living up to the spirit, such as when organic rules allowed plants to be grown hydroponically in a liquid nutrient solution rather than soil, a decision that sparked considerable dissent.

“When we made the government standard, we got a clear legal definition of organic, one that’s enforceable by government actions” and allowed for stable domestic and international trade with some protections against fraud, said keynote speaker Joe Dickson of Merryfield, a former member of the National Organic Standards Board and former director of quality standards for Whole Foods Market.

However, “We lost, I believe, the ability to evolve the standard with any sort of agility.”

Some of that loss comes from gov any monolithic standard that applies coast to coast with no regional variations. Event participants generally agreed that some shortfalls in USDA organic would never be filled.

Setting the bar

The question now is whether “regenerative” agriculture can or should fill those gaps, and whether a new national standard even makes sense.

PCC organized the event after seeing rising interest in regenerative practices, more products carrying “regenerative” labels, but no universal consensus on what the term means and how to guarantee its claims. The co-op’s product standards support organic foods and products, but there is currently no way to provide the same sort of transparency and consistent guidelines for regenerative claims.

While there is no set definition for what “regenerative” means, there are some general agreements. As this Sound Consumer article noted, regenerative practices show promise for reducing the impacts of climate change, and generally include “reducing soil disturbance through minimal or no-till farming, planting diverse cover crops instead of leaving fields bare, diversifying crop rotations instead of planting monocrops, fostering biodiversity, and using rotational livestock grazing to fertilize fields with manure and stimulate plant growth.”

National non-governmental certifications already exist for regenerative agriculture and use USDA organic certification as a prerequisite. Regenerative Organic Certification (ROC), focused on soil health, animal welfare and social fairness, is overseen by the Regenerative Organic Alliance, founded by Rodale Institute, Patagonia and Dr. Bronner’s soap. ROC Executive Director Elizabeth Whitlow was another headlining speaker at PCC’s event and noted that the certification already has significant support; nearly six million acres in the U.S. are currently certified under ROC, representing 400 types of crops and 147 brands. (The Real Organic Project (ROP), while not using the term regenerative, focuses on growing in soil and pasturing animals as a “higher standard” for organics. More than 1,100 farms have received its certification.)

Whitlow also serves on a taskforce advising the California Department of Food and Agriculture on that state’s efforts to define what regenerative means for its policies and programs. Washington residents are welcome to participate and make written comments; the final listening session is scheduled for May 29 (see here for details). “You can come to listening sessions and make comments, and your comments are welcome. The state is being incredibly inclusive and transparent, they seem to realize…we’ve got a lot more to do here.”

Brenda Book, program manager of the Washington State Department of Agriculture’s Organic Program, said that Washington has traditionally been a leader in these issues. If residents want to set the bar higher than it is now, she said, if organics are not at the level we think they should be, “let’s talk.”

A social movement

Farmers and producers at the event were clearly dedicated to the spirit of sustainability as well as the letter of regulations.

But “farming is already hard, and getting more unpredictable” said speaker Elizabeth Bragg, co-founder of Long Hearing Farm, a certified organic farm and workers co-op. Farmers are overburdened and often losing money despite their backbreaking work, she said. Most farms rely on off-farm income, according to federal statistics, which averages around half the annual total income for small family farms.

While Bragg can’t imagine working on farmland that isn’t organic — her land is leased from farming mentor Anne Schwartz, a Washington organics pioneer — Bragg also thinks farmers can’t shoulder the added burden and new expense that would come with new certifications.

farming is already hard, and getting more unpredictable

“The way we keep regenerative strong is to see ourselves as players in a big social movement,” she said. We could learn from people like Schwartz, Whitlow and Book, who helped lead the original charge for organics in Washington.

It may sound daunting, but Bragg, who has Blackfeet, Cherokee and Gros Ventre heritage, reminded the group of the history of the place where they gathered. Daybreak Star, home of the United Indians of All Tribes Foundation, was created thanks to a peaceful occupation where 20 acres of the former Fort Lawton military base became a cultural home and services for Indigenous people in the region.

“I mean, we’re sitting here in Daybreak Star! The place we’re sitting in is only possible because people believed, and made good trouble for us to be sitting here today,” she said.

PCC is collecting feedback from conference attendees and working on what happens next.

As Segrest said during her presentation, though, these tasks take time and are worth the investment.

“We have to get back to our ancestral roots,” Segrest said.

“It’s our generation’s work to be able to pick up these recipes and make sure they’re transmitted to the next generation so we can set them up for success. And that may mean we are not going to see all our goals in this lifetime, and that’s OK, because thinking generationally is actually key.”