Rediscovering the Roots of Regenerative Agriculture

As one drives through the American countryside and attends to the dominant agricultural landscape, one could well imagine the book of Genesis saying: “And God said, Let the Earth bring forth only one kind of vegetation across the land, one plant yielding seed of a constructible kind upon the earth.” For today, this is so. Man has made the earth bring forth one kind of annual plant across vast expanses of the earth. Only fifty years after US Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz advised farmers to work the land “fencerow to fencerow” and either “get big or get out,” farmers of commodity crops today are taking such losses that they are requiring bailouts. While the stock market seems to have adopted the meaning of the phrase “don’t put all your eggs in one basket,” modern commodity agriculture—ironic given the origin of the phrase—has not and so today appears too big to fail. 

But the loss of biodiversity in our agrarian landscape is not simply, or even primarily, a problem of economy or efficiency. Rather, it betrays a reductively narrowed view of creation and its creatures. The earth now rarely sees farms that imitate the diversity that Genesis states: “plants yielding seed and fruit trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind.” Eschewing plurality of both plants and trees for monocultures, the modern agrarian view is premised on an antagonism between man and the land whose ultimate result is self-deracination and the land’s despoiling.[1]

Under current Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins, the USDA has sought to address soil degradation from conventional agricultural practices with a so-called “Regenerative Pilot Program” whose aim is “to help American farmers adopt practices that improve soil health, enhance water quality, and boost long-term productivity, all while strengthening America’s food and fiber supply.” The Butz era drove farmers to scale up, till land set aside for conservation, and use chemicals to make farming more profitable. Soil degradation was, if anything, an externality and one that could be made up for by synthetic fertilizers. The current USDA regenerative agriculture pilot program proposes to restore soil health and to treat soil as something tied to farm productivity and the economic success of farmers.[2] But does the USDA’s understanding of farming and the world in fact support a genuine regenerative agriculture and adopt a significantly different way of farming, or will greenwashing win the day? It may be true that economic well-being is tied to improved soil health, but Earl Butz promised the same thing, so that the promise of economic success alone cannot be what differentiates regenerative agriculture from its conventional counterpart. Contrary to some companies that claim to employ regenerative agriculture while still spraying the earth with toxic chemicals,[3] regenerative agriculture begins with a different gaze on the world: instead of working against creatures it works with creatures and their constitutive relations for the flourishing of the whole, from the soil to plants to animals to man, and ultimately, to God.

In an article entitled, “What is Regenerative Agriculture?” a team of scholars led by environmental scientist Peter Newton reviewed 229 journal articles and 25 practitioner websites to characterize the term “regenerative agriculture.” Their review revealed many definitions and descriptions “based on processes (e.g., use of cover crops, the integration of livestock, and reducing or eliminating tillage), outcomes (e.g., to improve soil health, to sequester carbon, and to increase biodiversity), or combinations of the two.” But processes and outcomes alone are inadequate to explain what regenerative agriculture is. In dealing only with practices, the authors of the review point only to what regenerative agriculture strives to do while leaving undefined its nature and substantial difference from a modern agricultural outlook. Rightly understood, regenerative agriculture involves something far more radical: it isthe rational animal’s participation in a gaze upon the world-that-is-good, a gaze that transcends and rejects the commodification of creation into something that is merely ours to construct, a gaze conveyed by the account of Genesis when it records God seeing and saying “that it was good” (cf. Gen. 1:4, 10, 12, 18, 21, 25, 31). Regenerative agriculture is a participation in God’s gaze on the creation that sees the good that things are and works with their integral goodness within the good of the whole land.[4] It sees the chicken as good in itself before the chicken is good for me. It shapes the “good for me” of the chicken according to the “good in itself” of the chicken. The regenerative agriculture farmer will not ignore that the chicken has legs and so desires their use on fresh pastures. 

Treating creatures as creatures and not as mechanisms increases the long-term viability and fertility of both land and a genuine humanity, since the health and wholeness of each is indissolubly wedded.

Agriculture, obviously, remains a practice. It is something human beings do through the use of reason, will, body, and affections with regards to other creatures, soil, plants, insects, animals, elements, etc., for the sake of particular ends. The human acts that comprise agriculture begin in the intellect’s receptivity of the embodied forms with which the former works. Agriculture thus stems from our social nature, we who live only by eating other creatures in community, and as incarnate beings who cultivate and guard land and animals in a way shaped by culture, tradition, and conditions. In America, the idea of “regenerative agriculture” is often discussed as an option set amongst different “kinds” of agricultural practices. But it’s important to note that distinctions between such things as organic, natural, conventional, industrial, or chemical techniques did not exist prior to the industrial era. There were different regionally specific practices that were culturally embedded and sustained through narrative and myth, but they were not treated in the ideological and fragmentary way our culture frames such things today. Rather, the very word “agriculture” carried the sense of being directed towards the ideal or end of our social nature, so that it always involved an act of restoration or “regeneration” to this original image and purpose. An example might illustrate the difference. When I once told a colleague of mine about our regenerative agriculture farm, he said, “Why? The soil cannot regenerate. The land cannot heal.” He thought I was speaking of a technique, and a poor one at that, but the prevailing assumption of his comment is that land is merely something to be used up as efficiently as possible for the purpose of producing food. However, what I had meant by regenerative agriculture was something more radical, the wild claim that life is regenerated by death, that soil has an integrity of which we are not the authors, and that land becomes “better” only when we work within a more holistic view of the soil’s natural integrity. 

 Much like my colleague, classics scholar Smith Palmer Bovie comments that Virgil knew as we do that “life cannot be regenerated,” when remarking on that famous and enigmatic ending of the Georgics where Aristaeus regenerates a swarm of bees through ritual sacrifice.[5] Bovie here gives voice to our modern gaze, that life is something only used and used up “according to our kind.” But it strikes me that Virgil’s text is enigmatic to Bovie for two reasons: first because I think it unlikely that Bovie has ever seen bees swarming on a dead carcass, and second, because he does not inhabit Virgil’s worldview and cannot thereby interpret this moment as an instance of life’s regeneration by death. Our modern gaze evacuates the world and its creatures both of their own goodness and of the way that their goodness informs their being good for me, by already viewing them as mere products (e.g. food and fiber). Their good is left for us to construct, or to manipulate for our own ends. Where the good is merely my own construct, or something I choose, or where my choosing is what makes it good, one is left not merely in an ethical emotivism, but in a metaphysical and anthropological one where all statements, not merely moral ones, are reduced to mere personal preference. In such a culture, conversations about food and farming turn into interminable arguments, yelling matches about which diets or farming practices you like most.[6] The judge in all these cases is you: the one who eats. More to the point, the judge is your will, not your intellect, it’s what you choose, not what you see to be true since to be true means to conform to a reality that precedes your willing it and that presents itself as good. Such a worldview leaves a genuine “regenerative” approach to agriculture impossible, because generation becomes itself meaningless insofar as it defines nothing about the creature’s reality.

The genetically modified organism is the paradigmatic manifestation of this modern notion of freedom. We use “science” not to perfect a thing according to its kind but to alter the nature of an organism in a way impossible to that organism’s natural structure, thus treating it as something entirely conformable to our will. “Kinds” in the order of creation no longer represent a limit to our freedom, they become themselves mere materials subject to our mastery.[7]

Contrary to the technocratic paradigm incarnated in the GMO, former Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack suggested a return to an organismal way of thinking. When speaking to the GOP 20, he explicitly says that “Part of the fundamental rethinking of our AG and food systems involves moving from a linear to a circular economy, where we are not just extracting and consuming finite resources but also regenerating them in a sustainable matter.”[8] What synthetic fertilizers are to a linear economy, compost is to a circular economy. He emphasized the need to transition to sustainable and regenerative practices, implying that the previous practices were neither sustainable nor regenerative and yet were and are still the dominant practices of the Western World. They are not practiced because, with René Descartes, we see the material world to be a res extensa, made of mutable and flexible neutral matter, mute “stuff” malleable to our wills. To take Descartes’s ideas to their logical conclusion, the cosmos is ultimately a GMO and so are we. This is why even the human body becomes something to be manipulated and altered according to some a-personal, disembodied conception.[9] However, historically this has been neither a coherent view of agriculture nor of the human person. 

The two greatest works on farming in the Western canon, Virgil’s Georgics[10] and Hesiod’s Works and Days[11] recommend practices similar to that of regenerative agriculture, including minimal tillage and crop rotations.[12] Virgil discusses amending soils with organic compost or manures as opposed to synthetic chemicals.[13] But even more significant is the way these works combine to challenge the materialist ideologies of their day. Smith Palmer Bovie, for instance, shows how Virgil deliberately employing some of Lucretius’s imagery from De Rerum Natura to undermine Lucretius’s reduction of all things, including man, to the movement of atoms.[14] Virgil rather asserts that there is a transcendent order at work in creatures that shapes and fruitfully orders man’s freedom and thus, with Hesiod, writes that seasons and soil, people and livestock, are owed justice. When Virgil writes of the importance of good animal husbandry,[15] crop rotations, and even the burning of fields,[16] or practices almost identical to modern regenerative agriculture practices such as minimizing tillage, compost and manure, ashes and liming. These are never merely promoted as techniques to produce food but rather for the purposes of bringing forth “a secret strength and fertile sustenance.”[17] In other words, Virgil is not making a consequentialist claim that if you do this, your crops will be better and more productive. Rather, the crops will be “better” because they and the land are more truly themselves. That is why the crops “rejoice” in the opening lines of Virgil’s poem. Through just practice, the crops come to participate in the transcendent goodness more perfectly and thus come to bear more abundantly. Virgil is operating within a worldview where the wellbeing of the land and the wellbeing of the man that lives by it are united and both subject to the demands of justice. Moreover, this wellbeing is rooted in piety to the gods. Right relation with the Divine, Man, and the Earth are inseparably unified, and in such a way that disorder in one, just as in the body, affects all. Hence, Virgil ends his Georgics with the role that ritual sacrifice plays in restoring right relationship, so that even the sub-human world is regenerated. This secret “strength and fertile sustenance” is what underlies Secretary Vilsack’s exhortation to move us from a “linear economy to circular economy” whether he himself sees it or not. A circular economy would certainly be one where the farm produces at least some its own fertility and is not dependent on outside sources. This is why Virgil, and Vilsack if he is consistent, require the crop farmer to also have animals—the best source of soil fertility in the cosmos because it respects not only the nature of soil but requires myriad creatures, including unseen ones, to make its nutrients available to the plants. 

But let’s step back from the subject of practices and point to what is perhaps more conspicuous but less obvious in Hesiod’s and Virgil’s accounts (even Lucretius, for that matter!): the foundational agricultural texts of the Western canon are poems, not Greek or Roman or USDA instruction manuals. In fact, Hesiod and Virgil’s recommended farming practices are subordinate to poetic form. This is the essential element that links Hesiod and Virgil with the heart of regenerative agriculture: their gaze upon the world is first, in both operation and priority, a gaze of wonder and attentiveness to the poetic depths incarnated in the creatures with whom they are essentially related and on whom they depend for their existence.[18] This gaze and recognition of each creature as “according to its kind” bears within the farmer the necessity of contemplating the creature and shaping his actions to the perfection of their nature. In other words, what something is is not ethically vacuous but ethically fecund. The “is” of the creature implies an ought in how I should respond, because it is good the way that it is is-ing. My freedom is shaped and limited by what something is (including what I am).[19] My freedom must conform itself to an attentive contemplation of the creature that I am attending to. Rather than constructing a Cartesian “mutable, extended, flexible” materiality for what Sir Francis Bacon would call the “betterment of man’s estate,”[20] my freedom must conform to an order that precedes my choosing and an order that is good both in itself and in relation to other creatures, including me. In the Cartesian and Baconian world, man’s estate can only be bettered by the loss of other creatures: it is a zero-sum game and an antagonistic, extractive relation. The idea that we can only feed people beef by ignoring the legs and rumen of the cattle or keeping it inside the confinement of an animal feedlot would never have occurred to an Aristotelian, for Aristotle attends to wholes in relation. The more excellent the cow is as a cow, the better the man who eats from her and the soil from which they both live. Cows are, by nature, ruminants who digest green herbaceous plant matter, converting it to their own flesh and blood for their own sake before being for ours. Grain adversely affects a ruminant by lowering the pH of the rumen, thereby decreasing the ruminant’s immune system. In cases where the ruminant eats too much grain or sugar, the ruminant (sheep, cattle, giraffe, etc.) suffers a disease called acidosis which can lead to death.[21] Moreover, the meat of the ruminant, for example, in cattle, has compounds that cannot be obtained except by being grass-fed and finished.[22] It turns out that the contemporary science Secretary Valsack references is only now discovering what Homer and Virgil knew: treating creatures as creatures and not as mechanisms increases the long-term viability and fertility of both land and a genuine humanity, since the health and wholeness of each is indissolubly wedded.[23]

Some might argue that the conception of justice operative in Hesiod and Virgil is not actually transcendent but confined within the operative immanent deities of the Graeco-Roman pantheon and therefore actually reductively immanentist if not materialist. Three responses can be given. First, Hesiod demonstrates that even the gods and titans are judged by justice by giving Cronus the epithet: “a sinner, a contriver of reckless mischief.”[24] One can only be a sinner or contriver if there is some non-changing source to judge so. For Virgil, justice transcends the gods, such as when he writes on the first page of his Aeneid, “Can anger / Black as this, prey on the minds of heaven?”[25] This question is not merely rhetorical. Rather, just as Plato’s Republic challenges the false narratives of the Greek gods, so Virgil is challenging the Roman pantheon itself. 

Similarly, Plato’s Republic indicates the transcendence of justice since justice is good-like but not the Good. As a participation in the Good, justice shares a kind of transcendence insofar as it is not reducible to the human agent. The debate between Thrasymachus and Socrates in Plato’s Republic, Book I only works if justice has a role in agriculture. Socrates argues for a justice transcendent of human making, determined instead by the good present in and to each creature. His interlocutor Thrasymachus disagrees and argues instead that justice is determined by the rulers, using shepherds as an example to prove this. Thrasymachus asserts that shepherds, like rulers, rule their sheep for the shepherd’s own benefits and not for the sake of the sheep at all. The sheep exist for the shepherd simply and exhaustively; they exist for the shepherd to do with as he wishes (343a ff.). Socrates retorts, 

You do not think a shepherd—to the extent that he is a shepherd—fattens sheep with the aim of doing what is best for them. But you think that, like a guest about to be entertained at a feast, his aim is to eat well or to make a future sale—as if he were a moneymaker rather than a shepherd. But of course, the only concern of the craft of shepherding is to provide what is best for that with which it deals, since it itself is adequately provided with all it needs to be at its best, as we know when it does not fall short in any way of being the craft of shepherding. (345d ff) 

Our dominant contemporary agricultural practices are essentially Thrasymachean, confusing the craft of agriculture with both the craft of money and the craft of alchemy, i.e., turning something into what it is not. Our production of corn is so gluttonous that 40% of corn is changed into fuel for vehicles. About 15% of soy produced in America is used for soybean oil. This agricultural alchemy overproduces to the detriment of the farming community and the benefit of the money-making corporates who can get over-supplied goods on the cheap and transform them cheaply, reselling them in a different package at a higher price. The Thrasymachean gaze on the world has won. In contrast, regenerative agriculture is an attempt to reorder agriculture by, in, and with creation. 

There is one further point to note, and that is how Virgil’s Georgics concludes with a sacrifice offered to the gods for the regeneration of a swarm of bees.[26] What Virgil does in shadows is similar to cultures across the world, which sacrificed the fruits of the earth and the works of their hands.[27] It is clear from Virgil’s account of the story that this sacrifice is being offered not simply to gain some thing, but to restore right relation: “Entreat their [the Nymphs] peace / by humbly offering gifts, and venerate / the gracious Dryads; they will pardon you, / Repress their wrath in favor of your vows.”[28] The gift of regenerating swarms is a sign of the restored relationship, not merely that which is sought. Ultimately, Virgil expresses here what Plato saw: “Everyone seeks things that are good, not just believed to be good. Every soul pursues the good and for its sake does everything. The soul has a hunch that the good is something . . . The good is beyond being superior to it in rank and power.”[29] Ultimately, the human yearning to receive good from the Good despite that we don’t deserve it undergoes the purgative transformation in Jesus Christ. The Judeo-Christian transformation of desire both affirms the impulse to sacrifice but radically qualifies it by affirming that sacrifice is not something God needs, but rather is something done for the re-ordering of the cosmos in Christ back to the Father. The desire to sacrifice keeps the heart of man vigilantly ordered to the transcendent and sustains man in relation to God who ultimately regenerates the cosmos through Jesus Christ, true God and true man (cf. Col 1:19–20). Even Virgil, pagan prophet that he was, saw that regeneration without the Deity is impossible. Rather, regeneration only can be achieved when sacrifice is offered according to the patterns of the cosmos, to the logos of creation in the Logos, and all its creatures made according to their kinds.