t’s already been a month since I returned from my visit to Minnesota, where I took a closer look at the state of regenerative agriculture in the bread basket. Since then, I’ve been trying to understand the transition to practices such as cover cropping, reduced tilling and planting perennial crops and how we could speed it up to advance soil carbon sequestration and other environmental benefits.
Impactful work is already happening regarding carbon market programs and other financial conservation incentives. But low adoption rates demonstrate that these efforts aren’t enough for a large-scale transition to regenerative practices to succeed.
From my conversations with farmers in Minnesota and many other practitioners over the past months, three pockets of work ask for more attention: independent and data-driven technical assistance, program alignment and standardization and supply chain infrastructure for crop diversification. Why are these issues critical? Read more…
