When we first started getting serious about regenerative agriculture, I don’t remember anybody asking us what certification we had.
Nobody asked if we had a regenerative logo.
Nobody asked if our farm met some national definition.
The questions were much simpler.
Are the animals healthy?
Is the soil getting better?
Are you building fertility or mining it?
Are you moving animals in a way that benefits the pasture?
Can the farm actually make money?
And probably the biggest question of all:
Does it work?
That last question is where things get interesting.
Because regenerative agriculture is having a moment right now.
And I mean a really big moment.
The federal government announced a $700 million Regenerative Pilot Program. Large food companies are putting money into regenerative supply chains. Researchers are studying regenerative farms. Consumers are seeing the word “regenerative” on food labels and products.
Regenerative agriculture has gone from something discussed mostly by farmers, ranchers and soil people to something that corporations and governments are trying to scale.
That sounds like a good thing.
Maybe it is.
But I think there is a question we should ask before we celebrate it:
What exactly are we scaling?
One of the strangest things about regenerative agriculture is that there isn’t a universally accepted definition.
That’s not me saying regenerative agriculture isn’t real.
It is.
Farmers all over the country are using practices intended to improve soil, water cycles, biodiversity, animal integration, and farm resilience.
But ask ten farmers what “regenerative” means, and you’re probably going to get several different answers.
A 2025 study that specifically interviewed farmers in Indiana and Ohio found exactly that problem. The researchers noted that regenerative agriculture lacks a consistent definition or implementation.
Interestingly, the farmers themselves frequently connected regenerative agriculture to healthier soils, livestock integration, and cover crops. Some even described regenerative agriculture as simply “being a farmer” and taking care of the resource that has to support the next generation.
That’s an important distinction.
Because there is a difference between:
“We practice regenerative agriculture because we have a philosophy of farming that revolves around improving the land.”
and:
“We use these five practices, therefore our product is regenerative.”
Those aren’t necessarily the same thing.
One part of that Indiana/Ohio research really caught my attention.
The farmers interviewed in the study generally preferred information from other farmers over other sources.
Many of them used books, workshops, and podcasts featuring farmers such as Joel Salatin, Greg Judy, and Mark Shepard.
Government agencies were mentioned less frequently.
And opinions about university extension and academic information were divided. Some farmers valued it. Others felt that extension information was aimed more toward larger farms and wasn’t particularly useful for smaller operations.
That doesn’t prove the farmers are right.
But it does tell us something important about the agricultural information problem.
Farmers don’t necessarily reject information.
They may simply reject information that doesn’t match what they are seeing on their own land.
And I think that’s an important distinction.
Joel Salatin has spent decades developing systems at Polyface.
Greg Judy has spent decades grazing livestock and experimenting with genetics, stocking density, land access, and rotational grazing.
Will Harris took a conventional cattle operation and spent decades rebuilding it around a fundamentally different philosophy of agriculture.
These aren’t people who read a book about regenerative agriculture and decided to start talking about it.
They’ve put animals on the ground.
They’ve bought hay.
They’ve lost animals.
They’ve dealt with drought.
They’ve dealt with markets.
They’ve paid employees.
They’ve fixed fences.
They’ve watched pastures fail and recover.
And they’ve had to make payroll.
That’s a type of knowledge that is very difficult to reproduce in a laboratory.
It doesn’t make these farmers infallible.
It makes their experience worth listening to.
And some of their current conversations are particularly interesting.
In an August 2026 Working Cows interview, Will Harris was asked to define regenerative agriculture.
His answer centered around restarting the cycles of nature rather than simply following a checklist of practices. He also talked about regenerative agriculture as something that has to work economically, not just ecologically.
That second part gets overlooked.
A farm isn’t regenerated if the soil looks fantastic but the farmer can’t afford to keep farming.
This is where I think we have to be careful.
It would be very easy for a farm like ours to look at conventional agriculture and say:
“They just don’t understand.”
But that’s not good enough.
There are millions of acres of conventional agriculture being farmed by people who have spent their entire lives trying to make their farms work.
They have knowledge too.
There are farmers using no-till systems who have dramatically reduced erosion.
There are conventional farmers improving soil structure.
There are farmers using cover crops, grazing livestock, planting buffers, and reducing inputs without ever calling themselves regenerative.
And there are regenerative farmers whose systems have failed.
There are regenerative practices that work beautifully in one climate and poorly in another.
There are soil types where something that works on one farm won’t necessarily work on another.
There are economic realities that don’t disappear because we use the word “regenerative.”
That is why I don’t think the answer is to replace one agricultural dogma with another.
This is where things get really interesting.
In December 2025, USDA announced a $700 million Regenerative Pilot Program intended to help farmers adopt practices that improve soil health, water quality, and other outcomes.
On paper, that sounds pretty good.
But if you spend any amount of time around farmers, you’ll hear a different question:
What happens when the government starts deciding what regenerative agriculture is?
That’s a fair question.
Especially because regenerative agriculture grew largely outside of government programs.
Much of the movement was built by farmers experimenting on their own farms, learning from other farmers and developing systems that fit their land.
Now government agencies, corporations, and large institutions are trying to measure and scale it.
That could bring resources to farmers who need them.
It could also create incentives for people to do whatever gets the government check rather than whatever actually improves their farm.
Both things are possible.
We shouldn’t assume either one before watching what happens.
This isn’t just a government issue.
Major food companies are investing heavily in regenerative agriculture.
Reuters reported this year on programs involving companies including McCain, PepsiCo and Nestlé, with investments designed to move regenerative practices onto more farms and into larger supply chains.
Again, there are two ways to look at this.
One is:
“This is fantastic. Big companies are finally paying attention to soil health.”
The other is:
“Be careful. When corporations start putting a marketing label on something, the definition can change.”
I think both deserve consideration.
If a potato company helps a farmer improve soil health and become more profitable, that’s a good thing.
If “regenerative” eventually becomes another meaningless label slapped on food because consumers are willing to pay more for it, that’s a problem.
The only way to tell the difference is to look past the label.
Personally, I don’t care nearly as much about whether someone calls themselves regenerative as I do about what is happening on the farm.
Show me the pasture.
Show me the soil.
Show me the animals.
Show me your inputs.
Show me what happens during drought.
Show me what happens when fertilizer prices double.
Show me your mortality rates.
Show me your fertility.
Show me your feed bill.
Show me your land five years ago and your land today.
And perhaps most importantly:
Show me whether the farm is still going to be there in twenty years.
That is much harder to fake.
This is where I think the conversation gets unnecessarily polarized.
There is legitimate research being done on regenerative agriculture.
For example, Jonathan Lundgren and the Ecdysis Foundation’s “1000 Farms” initiative has been collecting large amounts of farm-level information from regenerative systems. A July 2026 presentation described researchers working with roughly 2,000 farms across North America and collecting hundreds of types of measurements involving productivity, profitability, biodiversity, water, carbon and farmer wellbeing.
That’s interesting.
But it’s still worth asking questions.
How were the farms selected?
How is “regenerative” defined?
What are the comparison farms?
What outcomes are being measured?
How long will the measurements continue?
Which results are statistically strong?
Which are preliminary?
And who funded the research?
Those aren’t attacks on the research.
Those are the questions we should ask of every study.
Including studies that tell us what we want to hear.
A farm isn’t a laboratory.
A farm is a living system.
Rain changes.
Soil changes.
Genetics change.
Markets change.
People change.
Animals change.
The same management practice can produce different results five miles down the road.
That’s one reason I think farmer knowledge and scientific research should be working together, not fighting each other.
The researcher can measure something the farmer can’t easily measure.
The farmer can observe something the researcher may never see.
The researcher can help explain why something happened.
The farmer can tell the researcher whether the recommendation actually works when the tractor won’t start and the cows need moving before dark.
We need both.
Maybe that’s the wrong question.
The better question is:
Which regenerative practices work, where do they work, under what conditions, for which farmers, and at what cost?
That’s a much harder question.
It’s also a much more useful one.
Because I don’t think we need another agricultural religion.
We don’t need to believe that everything conventional is bad.
We don’t need to believe that everything regenerative is good.
We don’t need to believe every government statistic.
We don’t need to dismiss every university study.
And we certainly don’t need to believe a food company because its package says “regenerative.”
We need to learn how to ask better questions.
That’s really what regenerative agriculture has taught me.
Pay attention.
Watch the land.
Watch the animals.
Track your costs.
Measure what you can.
Listen to people who have been doing it longer than you.
Listen to people who disagree with you.
And then go back outside and see what your own farm is telling you.
Because at the end of the day, the pasture doesn’t care what we call it.
It either gets better or it doesn’t.
Sources & further listening
I intentionally used a mix of farmer experience, current reporting, research, and long form agricultural conversations rather than treating any one category as the final authority.
Will Harris — Working Cows, August 2026: discussion of the state of regenerative agriculture and what Harris believes regenerative agriculture actually means.
Joel Salatin — Working Cows, April 2026: discussion of food-system consolidation and decentralizing the food system.
Greg Judy: current agricultural podcast/video material and farmer-to-farmer grazing discussions.
Farmer perceptions study: interviews with regenerative farmers in Indiana and Ohio, including their definitions, information sources, and views of university/government resources.
1000 Farms Initiative: Jonathan Lundgren’s 2026 presentation on farm-level regenerative agriculture research.
Reuters: current reporting on government and corporate efforts to scale regenerative agriculture.
USDA: announcement of the $700 million Regenerative Pilot Program.