By Caleigh Wells for KCRW.
Broadcast version by Suzanne Potter for California News Service reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

Mollie Engelhardt’s farm looks messy. 

Every inch of Sow a Heart Farm in Fillmore, Calif., is growing one of more than 300 types of plants. In between the rows of fruit trees, Engelhardt has got organic peppers, garlic, broccoli, and cauliflower, all covered with a thin layer of grass or clover. On a recently harvested plot, chickens and sheep are eating the scraps, churning the soil so it’ll be ready to plant again.

“The neighbors' farms are perfect rows of the exact same thing with bare soil underneath. The trees are managed by spraying herbicides,” Engelhardt says. “You can see that every inch of my farm is covered.”

The chaos is all by design.

This farm is an experiment in regenerative agriculture, intended to grow healthier food at the same time as tackling climate change.

This is still far from the norm in farming – less than 1% of American farmland uses regenerative ag techniques. But this year the Farm Bill, a major piece of U.S. agriculture legislation, is up for renewal, and regenerative agriculture practitioners hope that could change.

“Folks in D.C. are already starting to think about what they want to see changed in the Farm Bill,” says regenerative agriculture expert Arohi Sharma with the Natural Resources Defense Council. “The fact that we're talking about soil health, the fact that we're having hearings on regenerative agriculture, is a huge step in the right direction.”

The world’s oldest carbon capture technology

The term regenerative agriculture refers to a handful of practices that create healthy soil. The most visible is the wild mix of plants in Englehardt’s lush, chaotic plots. She carefully picks what grows where so the plants work together to thrive.

“Fennel is actually an insectary. So the fennel is keeping the bugs off of the kale without spraying any pesticides or anything,” she says.

She grew corn next to young avocado trees a few years ago, so the tall stalks could provide shade during a hot autumn. When she harvested the corn, she planted fava beans, since they’re good at restoring nitrogen in the soil 

Englehardt’s also keeping the ground covered and hand-harvesting her crops. All of that makes the soil healthier.

“By diversifying what you grow, you're providing different kinds of nutrients to the soil. It’s like diversifying our human diets,” Sharma says.

Better dirt means more plants photosynthesizing, sucking carbon out of the atmosphere, pulling it into their roots, and shoving it into the ground. That makes it a useful climate change tool. Sharma estimates if every farm in the U.S. operated this way, it would remove as much carbon as shuttering 64 coal plants.

Englehardt says the climate benefits don’t stop with carbon capture.

“Not only are we sequestering carbon, I'm recharging the aquifer far more than the neighbor is,” she says. “And the water filtering through my soil is clean, has no glyphosates, has no Roundup, it has none of that.”

In drought-ridden Southern California, Engelhardt’s soil is better at soaking up whatever water it gets. After the giant storms last month, her dirt roads were flooded but her plots were just soft and damp.

The future of farming?

Making regenerative agriculture a mainstream practice has been an uphill battle.

“It's an overhaul of our food and agricultural system, which is rooted so deeply in our commodities, in our subsidies, in our insurance policies, in our financial system,” says Jesse Smith with the White Buffalo Land Trust just north of Santa Barbara, which does trainings and courses on regenerative agriculture. 

Sharma agrees: “From the 1970s onwards, decades of agricultural policy have prioritized unsustainable farming practices over regenerative ones,” she says.

Take the way crop insurance is structured. Right now, a corn farmer who had a bad year can claim the loss on that crop, and the government helps them out. A farmer growing corn and soy would write two claims. But what if you, like Englehardt, grow 300 different crops?

“It's a lot harder for them to write an insurance policy or claim insurance rewards because of just the number of crops that they have to keep track of,” Sharma says.

Plus, farmers using these techniques need to pay for more labor, because mechanical harvesting harms the soil.

Englehardt says she grows more food per acre than the conventional farms next door, but four years in she still hasn’t turned a profit.

“You can't expect to be making money right away in any business. The guy down the street? The first four years, he had lemons and avocados planted, he certainly wasn't making money either,” she says.

But convincing a farmer who’s currently turning a profit to change their practices even though they won’t make money for a few years is a tough sell. 

Still, Smith says he’s seen an increase in people coming to the farm for their regenerative agriculture trainings and courses.

“We’ve had cowboys from the Midwest, young up-and-coming farmers from the inner cities, to grandparents looking to figure out what to do with their property, to people who don't have land looking to get into agriculture, to people who are in computer programming, figuring out how to put their skills in service of natural ecosystems,” he says. ”It’s such a broad range of people.”

The farms trying it so far are small, Smith says, not like the thousands of acres devoted to Smuckers jam or Cuties mandarin oranges.

While some farmers wait on the government to make regenerative agriculture more profitable, Smith says it’s catching on with people like Englehardt prioritizing their positive impact.

“There is a misconception that this is a fringe niche movement. And it's not. People are transitioning large, large swaths of land,” Smith says. “It may not be a windfall, but in the hearts and minds of people who are watching, what is being demonstrated is greatly impactful and will set the stage for the coming decades of agricultural production in this country.”

CLARIFICATION: In the initial release of this story, the photo caption included a typo that resulted in an unintentional racial slur. In discussions with every staff member involved in the story, it was clearly a typing error, with no intention of including an offensive term. We deeply apologize for the error. (9:35 a.m. CST, June 23, 2025

From poultry to beer, Minnesota has an avid interest in producing food with ingredients and practices mindful of the state's water resources and the latest recipients of specialized grants are taking charge.

The grants were awarded by the "Continuous Living Cover" program under the Minnesota Department of Agriculture. Food manufacturers and others in the supply chain use the funds to develop larger markets for crops that help stabilize the soil in which they are planted.

Sandy Boss Febbo, co-owner of Bang Brewing in St. Paul, said their grant allows them to use more "Kernza," a sustainable alternative to wheat. She called it a "beautiful grain."

"Once we tried it and saw how well it performs in beer and what it lends to beer flavor profiles, we were hooked," Boss Febbo explained.

Boss Febbo pointed out crops like Kernza have root systems that keep nitrates from flowing into waterways, preventing algae blooms and providing other environmental benefits. One catch is Kernza is more expensive than traditional beer ingredients. This legislative session, Minnesota lawmakers approved $450,000 for future grants under the cover crop program.

Boss Febbo noted the state aid is not just for the processing of Kernza at her brewery. Marketing is a key strategy as well. Bang Brewing plans to retrofit a van with a mobile tap setup so they can travel to licensed events around Minnesota and spread the word about this largely unknown crop.

"Agricultural practices have a massive impact on the health of our land and water," Boss Febbo emphasized. "To bring that message, to get more people involved and more people supporting, that is really our goal."

According to program backer Friends of the Mississippi River, other grantees include a hazelnut company, as well as a farm raising chickens on forested pastures. The farm will also use its grant money to help market its product to schools, retailers and restaurants across Minnesota.

With more than 95,000 farms, Missouri ranks among the top farming states in the nation. Now, a national agriculture group is warning that bills moving through Congress could hurt rural communities.
According to the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, the Senate's reconciliation bill, sometimes called "The Big Beautiful Bill Act," would deepen hunger and hinder small farmers. At the same time, the group contends the House's 2026 spending plan slashes funding for conservation, research and local food programs.

Mike Lavender, the coalition's policy director, said the consequences of these cuts will be felt directly by those working the land.

"These cuts, even to relatively small programs, are going to mean that fewer farmers have access to resources and information that help them have a successful livelihood, help their business work and help them be successful in providing for their family," he said.

Supporters have said the bills promote responsible budgeting by cutting spending and boosting efficiency. The Senate's agriculture bill awaits full debate, while the House's 2026 funding bill has cleared committee.

Nearly 90% of Missouri's farms are family-owned. Lavender said his organization has been working closely with members of the Senate and the Appropriations Committee to make sure they understand the importance of these programs for farmers across the country.

"Don't do what the House did. Don't undercut farmers, don't undercut rural communities by reducing funding for these programs," he said, "but rather they deliver funding for these programs based on demand, and we know there's a high demand and a high need for these programs across the country."

Lavender added that the 2026 spending bill has "one bright spot" in its support for direct purchases from local producers, but he said that's overshadowed by cuts that hurt those very farmers.


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By Jessica Scott-Reid for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Terri Dee for Ohio News Connection reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration

Regenerative agriculture continues to capture attention - praised in star‑studded documentaries like "Kiss the Ground" and "Common Ground," and featured heavily in Biden's "climate-smart agriculture" programs. The promise sounds compelling. With the right type of cattle grazing and soil-enhancing farming practices, we can eat all the beef we want, guilt-free. But as climate scientist Jonathan Foley explained in a recent webinar hosted by the Food and Farming Journalism Network: "We're finding that the results of real field trials, replicated at scale, aren't producing the results we see in the movies." According to Foley, many of the promises of regenerative agriculture "have been overhyped."

Around a third of global greenhouse gas emissions come from food, with most of those emissions driven by meat -- especially beef. Regenerative agriculture has remained a popular initiative for many, but the math that its carbon-saving calculations are based on simply doesn't pencil out.

There's no way to make regenerative agriculture work, at least not if Americans and others in Global North countries continue to eat the same amount of meat. "Regenerative [agriculture] can only happen if our thinking, our philosophy, our diet and our food, changes," Rattan Lal, distinguished professor of soil science at Ohio State University, tells Sentient. That includes drastically reducing meat consumption, not just making meat "better."

What Does 'Regenerative Agriculture' Mean?

Regenerative agriculture doesn't have a single, universally accepted definition, but core practices of regenerative farming tend to include planting cover crops, avoiding soil tillage and rotating livestock - especially cattle - across pastures to graze. Mainly drawn from Indigenous knowledge, these practices can benefit soil health.

As a climate solution, however, the evidence doesn't stack up. The basic idea behind regenerative meat as a climate solution goes like this: whatever emissions that are produced as a result of raising beef are offset by regenerative farming practices. Those practices, the argument goes, can capture carbon out of the air and into the soil permanently, which is what you need for an offset to be effective, so that the climate pollution from the meat doesn't count.

But research shows regenerative farming is not effective at permanent, or even long-lasting, carbon sequestration (again, that's what you need for a carbon offset to work).

Foley, who is also the Executive Director for the climate solutions research group Project Drawdown, summed it up this way in the webinar: "if you don't cherry pick the data, and you look at it more systematically, regenerative grazing in particular doesn't look quite as strong as it might at first appear."

Regenerative Grazing Has a Land Problem, Which Is Also a Climate Problem

Regenerative grazing can only do so much with carbon. Unlike what happens in native forests, prairies and wetlands, on a farm, carbon is indeed added into the ground, but only transiently and only in the topsoil.

At that depth, rapid microbial turnover releases much of the carbon back into the atmosphere, and does not store it permanently. In order to be an effective offset, the carbon needs to be stored in the ground permanently.

Regenerative grazing also uses more land. In addition to the methane burps, that's a big part of why beef - no matter how you farm it - has such a massive climate cost is the land.

A 2020 study found that regenerative ranching requires up to 2.5 times more land than conventional beef production. In practical terms, that means to produce the same amount of meat that we consume now but with regenerative farming practices, the "footprint of animal agriculture" would have to increase substantially.

Even switching from factory-farmed to grass-fed beef in the U.S. would take a heavy toll. Research shows that grass-fed beef production actually emits more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional farming.

That's because factory farms, for all of their problems, are just far more efficient at raising meat. And efficiency is a good thing, at least if you are solely focused on greenhouse gas emissions (critics of this perspective sometimes call this view "carbon tunnel vision"). Grass-fed beef production, being far less efficient, emits more methane per cow and requires more land.

One study from 2018 estimated that shifting the beef cattle population to grass-fed cows would require increasing the national cattle herd from 77 million to 100 million - about a 30 percent jump.

Eat Less Meat and Rewild More Land

Lal, who is supportive of regenerative agriculture, says that the only way for the regenerative approach to work at-scale is with a reduction in meat production and consumption, and a return of some agricultural lands to nature, otherwise known as rewilding.

"Agriculture has been a problem," Lal says, because over time, we humans have deforested massive amounts of carbon-storing forests and other native landscapes to produce food for a growing global population.

But that deforestation came with a major climate pollution cost, and our ongoing deforestation to feed our global meat habit today is only adding to that cost.

Now, both global temperatures and populations are continuing to increase, and if we want to stave off the worst effects of climate change, while also feeding a lot more people, we need to take a few important steps, both Lal and Foley agree.

According to Foley, "we've got to cut the emissions in the first place." One way of doing that is by eating less beef. In 2018, a report from the World Resources Institute found that U.S. beef consumption needs to be reduced by about 40 percent to limit global warming effectively.

There are other measures needed too. In addition to eating less meat, Foley said during the webinar, we need to "restore nature, shrink the footprint of agriculture, put back the forest, put back the natural prairies, put back the mangroves. If we could do that through curbing our diets and curbing our waste, that would be a great, great idea."

Lal describes the task ahead in stark terms. We have an obligation, he says, "not only technologically and economically, but also morally and ethically, to return some of that extra land back to nature."

In order to do that through regenerative practices, "some productivity has to be sacrificed. So we [have to] change our diet, [to eat less meat]." After all, "Do we need to eat meat three times a day?" asks Lal, rhetorically. "Three times a day meat-based, is not healthy for people and not healthy for the planet."

Lal has many big changes in mind: "our thinking, our diet, our way of life, our food habits, our food system - all that has to change. It is really transformation and regeneration [that's needed], not only of agriculture, but of our own thinking and lifestyle as well."


Jessica Scott-Reid wrote this article for Sentient.


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