By Nina Benjamin
Amidst the storied halls of an Ivy, students discuss circular economies and growing incomes for small-holder coffee farmers in Latin America. Across the country in Blythe, California, a team of students, researchers, and ag producers investigates the impact of regenerative practices on soil carbon accrual. And in America’s heartland, university professors and experts offer support to women landowners in Iowa, Kansas, and Missouri on how to better adopt conservation practices. These are just glimpses of the myriad projects underway by college and university regenerative agriculture centers that are working to grow awareness of regenerative practices and train generations of future farmers to responsibly care for the land.
What is regenerative agriculture?
While regenerative agriculture is undoubtedly a growing trend, only 6.8% of U.S. adults are aware of it, according to a recent research study by Kiss the Ground, a leading nonprofit promoting regeneration and healthy soil. Admittedly, defining the term can be a bit slippery. Dr. Rob Myers, director of the University of Missouri’s Center for Regenerative Agriculture (CRA), says the center characterizes it both by the outcomes they’re seeking—including improved soil health and water quality, increased biodiversity, and increased resiliency to challenging weather conditions—and the practices they’re implementing, such as cover crops, no-till, diversified crop rotations, use of buffer strips and pollinator plantings, and agroforestry.
Tagan Engel, a lecturer at the Yale School of the Environment who leads the Regenerative Agriculture & Just Food Systems Lab, says regenerative agriculture is “rooted in ancient indigenous farming practices, formalized and made popular by Dr. George Washington Carver,” and sees it as “a holistic nature-based approach to farming that aims to nurture well-being for the ecosystem as a whole, including the soil, water, microbiome, plants, forests, animals, and humans.” To implement this, she says, “we need to meet farmers where they are and make it viable for them to transition to regenerative practices.”
Partnering for progress
Through these initiatives, students, faculty, and researchers collaborate with regional farmers and community partners, a boon for all involved. Engel’s hope is that the work students do helps to “move our agriculture and food system from industrialized and chemical-focused towards real regenerative practices and outcomes.” The lab has given students the opportunity to study reparative investing with Black Farmer Fund and work with SEAmarron Farmstead, a BIPOC-led hemp fiber farmer cooperative. This work not only offers students real-world experience in “integrating the environmental and social elements of regen ag and food systems,” but also brings university resources to farmers, organizations, and businesses to support their work, which Engel says can activate needed visibility and funding.
At California State University, Chico, the Center for Regenerative Agriculture and Resilient Systems (CRARS) joins forces with ag producers in research projects and works to expand education, training, and technical assistance for farmers. Michele Auzenne, Associate Director of CRARS, says, “We work intimately with our cooperator farmers, who serve as co-investigators” in work such as the Soil Carbon Accrual project, which is using flux tower technology to measure the effect of regenerative agriculture on soil carbon. The research, which explores side-by-side contrasts on five farms to compare regenerative and conventional systems, provides growers with real-time soil carbon data that informs their practice on a day-to-day basis.
Among the 14 active CRA-managed grant projects are a virtual-fencing evaluation project for cattle and sheep fencing on several Missouri farms, and the $10 million National Cover Crop Variety Development Project, which entails working with 38 scientists from across the U.S. to develop improved, regionally adapted varieties of cover crops.
Students in Yale’s Regenerative Agriculture lab inspect plants at hemp test site.
Growing demand
Interest in the centers continues to grow. Auzenne says they’ve already impacted more than 40,000 acres in their projects—about 50% of the demand they’ve received to date—with inquiries from the local, regional, and state levels and beyond continuing to flow in.
Dr. Myers shares that the CRA’s Missouri CRCL Project, a five-year, $25 million grant project that provides educational support and incentive payments to Missouri producers to adopt a variety of regenerative agricultural practices, has about 1,000 farmers participating on over 100,000 acres—and he’s confident they’ll continue to grow that number. The CRA has also seen increased interest in their work from non-farmers, with 2,500 people signing up in the last couple of years for their newsletter.
Engel noted an “abundance of interest in the Regenerative Agriculture & Just Food Systems initiative, both from students and from farmers and organizations who understand the urgency of this work,” saying the lab had twice as many applicants as it did seats, and many more clients interested in partnering than it had the capacity for.
The inherent challenges of regen ag work
Like any enterprise working toward the greater good, these university initiatives have challenges to navigate. The biggest the CRA is currently facing, Dr. Myers shares, is how to help farmers best benefit in the marketplace from using regenerative practices. While a variety of private sector programs exist to help, “farmers are confused about which ones are best to use, and as a result don’t take advantage of opportunities that could increase their profitability.”
Engel notes that making transformative changes within the largely industrialized ag and food systems sectors, which are “set up to make profit at the expense of nature, animals, and people,” is inherently difficult.
Then there’s the issue of financial support, acknowledges Auzenne, who explains, “With such high demand, there is always the challenge of identifying sufficient resources to meet that demand . . . With increased funding, we could easily double our impact.”
Hopes for the future
As Auzenne, Dr. Myers, and Engel look ahead, they share their visions for their respective initiatives. At Chico State, Auzenne says they “hope to inspire other universities to create additional centers and programs that will provide services in regenerative agriculture within their regions.”
For Dr. Myers, the goal is simple: “improving the health of our soils while building increased resiliency for farmers and our food systems.” Beyond farmer outreach, the CRA works toward achieving this vision through various research, education, and extension efforts, including creating video and podcast series, offering one-on-one engagement with producers, and developing online certificate programs in regenerative agriculture topics for adult learners.
Bit by bit through their various projects and partnerships, these university initiatives are progressing toward creating a systemic overhaul, proving that real change can happen, even if it’s just one seed, one pair of work boots, or one small team of big dreamers at a time. As Engel muses, “To really thrive, regenerative agriculture needs to happen on a human and nature scale—it’s helpful to think of ‘scaling out’ solutions and re-regionalizing, rather than ‘scaling up,’ which has largely created the problems of environmental and human harms we are now trying to undo.”
At a Glance
Regenerative agriculture is having a moment—and colleges and universities are taking note. Here are some U.S. institutions currently offering certificate and degree programs in regenerative ag, as well as those with centers and initiatives that extend to the community and beyond.
Certificate and Degree Programs
- California State University, Chico
- Central Wyoming College
- Heartland Community College
- Kutztown University
- Maharishi International University
- Mount Wachusett Community College
- West Valley College
Centers and Initiatives
- California State University, Chico
- Michigan State University
- Texas A&M AgriLife Extension
- University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
- University of Minnesota
- University of Missouri
- Yale University
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