Regenerative, sustainable, organic, natural, carbon-neutral, carbon-smart — what do any of these mean for agriculture in reality?
They mean to be different from commodity agriculture when it comes to marketing. They also mean to approach farming differently. Whether they make a difference, or if these are truly new, is harder to answer.
Regenerative as a term has certainly caught the world’s attention. The last time such attention was paid to an agricultural term might have been “mechanized farming” or the “green revolution.” Those became big in the 1950s and 1960s, and most people would have to look them up now to understand the impact they had or even what they stood for.
Regenerative implies that farmers weren’t taking care of the land in a manner that maintained it so that it could carry on producing indefinitely. For many producers in Western Canada, that idea is insulting at best, and at worst it attacks their efforts to create sustainability on their farms.
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