Transforming to a regenerative U.S. agriculture: the role of policy, process, and education

Abstract

AbstractU.S. agriculture is both a major source of global food and a key contributor to multiple interconnected crises. Climate change, biodiversity loss, and severe impacts on soil and water quality are among the challenges caused by U.S. industrial agriculture. Regenerative methods of farming are necessary to confront all these challenges simultaneously, in addition to addressing the increasing challenges to farm labor conditions. Transforming U.S. agriculture to a regenerative system will require a focus on creating traction for the values, beliefs, worldviews, and paradigms that effectively support such transformation while decreasing the friction that works against them. With a focus on creating traction for transformation, we review the factors and processes that tend to promote and maintain ecological improvements on farms. Starting from a case study that points to some of the sources of friction and traction in the current U.S. agricultural system, we use the framework of three spheres of transformation to focus discussion on how processes that form beliefs and values shape and can reshape farming. We develop a series of points of entry for engaging the systemic changes that will offer farmers traction for transformation. We review literature on agricultural networks, polycentric governance, social learning, agricultural education, and farmer characteristics that lend themselves to ecologically mindful change, thereby identifying interventions that tend to provide traction for change. These approaches, and the supports that allow rural communities and the people that work in them to survive and thrive, are necessary to create the traction needed for farms to undergo a shift to regenerative agricultural practices. We link these changes to the promise of the twentieth century New Deal agricultural programs and the potential of the Green New Deal.