Regenerative agriculture springs from a global Indigenous view of agriculture. It’s not tied to a European/Western way of framing the issues, as was inevitably the case with organic agriculture. It does not settle for sustainability; rather it aims for something truly regenerative. “Dream no small dreams,” as Tommy Douglas used to say.

Regenerative agriculture is rooted in leaving the soil as nature intended, and basing food production on crops that can be grown without the violence of plowing, which upturns the earth and undermines the earth’s metabolism and gut.

The beauty of regenerative agriculture is that it can work on many scales. Its methods are appropriate to various scales of food-growing, from backyard gardens (North America has more land in lawns than in food production), green roofs and community gardens to small, medium and large farms – permitting universal access to food and land.

I’m delighted that regenerative agriculture is being supported by both small and big food enterprises, which is important in the successful delivery of viable efforts to improve the environment. It avoids the problem of turning the perfect into the enemy of the very good, which has been the bane of social-change movements for a century. I love the open-endedness of regenerative agriculture, its lack of clear, binding and dogmatic definitions, its openness to what good people can do as they try to accomplish what’s possible. That, of course, creates a vulnerability to greenwashing. But the answer to greenwashing is not dogmatism, but real action on the ground.

Regenerative agriculture also avoids sterile debates around anti-meat climate change policies. Pasture-raised animals can become the basis for both humane agriculture and a protected climate.

Carbon is not the problem; the problem is that the carbon is in the air, not the soil. We seem to have to turn everything into enemies, but nature is made for us to partner with if we just open our eyes.

On the future of food

I would like to see a food future that identifies three streams of food thinking, each a power in its own right:

1. Bringing food from farm to table in as humane and generous a way as possible.

2. Ensuring that the food that makes it to our table matches our love for delicious food as well as our need for nutritious food, and that this can be accessible to all.

3. And finally, what I hope will be my legacy is what I call “people-centred food policy” – thinking about food in terms of how it promotes personal empowerment, how it overcomes loneliness, how it brings people together and how it makes a celebration of joy a part of everyday life. People-centred food policy needs to become as powerful as farm-to-table and nutrition models of food.

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But after a decade of wild swings in weather patterns, crop prices and farm debt levels, some Canadian farmers are starting to look at ways they can do something about the climate while improving their farm business.

On February 11, Agriculture Day, a group of these farmers, backed by the National Farmers Union, Canadian Organic Growers and several food-related environmental groups, announced the formation of Farmers for Climate Solutions.

They own up to the fact that agriculture is a significant cause of global warming. They also insist farming can help solve the problem. “Canada can’t get to net-zero without farmers pitching in,” says Gillian Flies. She co-owns The New Farm in Creemore, Ontario, and represents Canadian Organic Growers on the new climate action group.

“Canada can’t grow enough trees to store enough carbon to get to net-zero by 2050,” Flies says. “We also need farmers who can store carbon in the soil, where it will create healthier crops and more resilience in case of drought or storms.”

As well as rebuilding their soil, some members of the new coalition say they can cut their on-farm fossil fuel use in half by 2050. The combination of energy conservation and carbon storage could make farmers a major contingent in the green business community of 2050.

Though the new coalition is anything but cash-rich, Flies is looking for help from the federal government’s Canadian Agricultural Partnership, which has a $3 billion budget to partner with farmers and communities to boost agricultural competitiveness, prosperity and sustainability.

Supporting Flies’s optimism is none other than the UN’s normally gloomy Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which published a report called Climate Change and Land in August.

Agriculture on its own is commonly held responsible for 13% of all emissions – mostly from methane gas and nitrous oxides from overuse of nitrogen fertilizers and animal manure stored in lagoons by factory farms. On a more upbeat note, the IPCC identifies sustainable land management as a positive force that can lock carbon in plants and soil, not the atmosphere. Farmers can plant more tree crops, reduce their tillage, keep their lands covered instead of bare during the winter, and feed livestock on wild and perennial deeply rooted grasses, the IPCC notes.

If such practices were applied to degraded or eroded soil – about half the food-producing lands on the planet – the IPCC suggests that farmers might store or sequester almost as much carbon in the soil as they release to the atmosphere.

“Canada can’t get to net-zero without farmers pitching in.” 

– Gillian Flies, Farmers for Climate Solutions

The optimism that buoys Flies and Farmers for Climate Solutions also draws on a November 2019 report for the National Farmers Union (NFU) by energy and agriculture expert Darrin Qualman, author of Civilization Critical: Energy, Food, Nature, and the Future.

A Saskatchewan farmboy who’s a former researcher for the NFU, Qualman was asked to present a think piece to the NFU conference in November. The report, Tackling the Farm Crisis and the Climate Crisis, has not been officially adopted by the NFU, traditionally Canada’s scrappiest voice for farmers, but is presented by NFU leaders as “the beginning of a conversation on the links between the farm crisis and the climate crisis,” Qualman says.

He says we shouldn’t blame agriculture for increased emissions; instead, blame what he calls “petro-industrial inputs.”

In the NFU report, Qualman links both crises to the push for farm exports that the federal government has put on steroids since 1990. To gird themselves for mass exports, Canadian farmers upped their intake of fertilizers and loaded up on debt to buy heavy machinery. As inputs went up, emissions went up in lockstep, Qualman argues.

Use of nitrogen fertilizers (made primarily from natural gas) doubled, leading to a major rise in nitrous oxides, some 300 times more powerful in their global warming impact than carbon dioxide. Overall global warming emissions from agriculture went up 20% in that time period. All the while, farm debt load grew, doubling since the turn of the century and reaching $106 billion in 2018.

On the positive side, Qualman also believes that farmers can protect both the climate and their family farms by moving away from high-petrol inputs. By cutting back on inputs, they will dramatically cut down their costs and keep more of the money that people spend on food. At present, farmers keep only five cents of every dollar of food sales. They need to adopt a more-from-less approach – higher margins on less volume.

The NFU report contains a catalogue of “on-farm measures and government policies that can, as a package, reduce GHG emissions from Canadian farms by approximately 30% by 2030 and perhaps by 50% by 2050.” It lays out three ways farmers can cut costs and global warming emissions:

First, farmers can reduce their emissions from energy use through changes such as switching to electric cars and tractors and increasing their use of solar and wind power.

Second, farmers can reduce their use of nitrogen fertilizers by using “green manure” (cover crops rich in nitrogen), rotating perennial crops and implementing other sustainable techniques.

Third, farmers and ranchers can mitigate the global warming impacts of livestock through various methods. They can reduce the absolute number of cattle and dairy cows they raise, although Qualman cautions that there are important carbon-storing benefits to raising cows and steers mainly on pasture and leaving their manure on the land, where it adds soil fertility – particularly in areas that are too rocky to support crops. The global warming impact of ruminant emissions could be offset or countered by solar panels and trees dispersed through the fields and by carbon stored in the soil covered by pasture. Such strategies are commonly called low-input sustainable agriculture.

All three energy conservation strategies are a bold departure for protest groups, which normally protest governments’ failures to take action. Here they are calling for farmers and ranchers to act, and for governments to support and enable that grassroots action.

This is where the story circles back to organic farmer Gillian Flies’s hopes for the Canadian Agricultural Partnership (CAP).

Flies hopes CAP will give a hearing to farmers keen on making their farms more sustainable. She worries that too many of the grants require the farmers to pay 50%, which is often not an option, given that the great majority of farmers are losing money.

Flies also worries that the CAP program is too tied to boosting exports and isn’t looking for the multiple benefits that climate-friendly agriculture can bring. When farmers plant more trees on their land, those trees provide shade for animals, raise nutrients from deep in the ground, protect soil from erosion during heavy rain and strong wind, and also store carbon in their trunks and branches.

All such benefits are public goods that can create as much value for Canadians as the sale of hogs to China. “The government is missing an opportunity to work with us to solve multiple problems,” says Flies.

Whatever the government decides in the near future, University of Toronto geographer Bryan Dale thinks the NFU report and the Farmers for Climate Solutions initiative are “a positive and deliberate provocation to get a new conversation going.”

Dale, who completed his PhD on farming and global warming in Canada in 2019, likes the way both groups talk about all the benefits that good farming can produce, from more nutritious food to safer habitats for pollinators, to cleaner water, to reduction of greenhouse gases. In these “post-political times,” Dale worries, too many discussions zero in on one bad factor, such as carbon, that can lead to a quick technical fix. “We need to open up a broader discussion,” he says, “maybe even talk about a Green New Deal for food and agriculture,” as is being discussed south of the border.

Qualman hopes his report “will start a heck of a conversation. Farmers are paying attention because they know that either they come up with good solutions or someone else will impose solutions on them. If farmers don’t lead, bureaucrats will.”

Wayne Roberts is a Canadian food policy analyst and writer and former manager of the Toronto Food Policy Council.

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The west-end Toronto company reclaims a chocolate legacy that might seem un-chocolatey to many — a healthy, spiritual, dark and bitter-tasting food and drink hailing from Mexico Profundo, the ancient Indigenous Mayan culture of Mexico.

ChocoSol is in the business of selling chocolate bars and drinking chocolates, though its business would more accurately be described as a mission to sell goods or services with a social or environmental purpose.

Even by the standards of a “social enterprise,” ChocoSol’s business model seems quirky. Its unbleached packages feature a Mexican Day of the Dead-inspired skull, with bike chains for eyes and teeth. The company’s “ChocoSolistas” also call themselves chocolate “pedallers” and take pride in using bicycles to transport their display tables and power the blenders that make chocolate drinks at farmers’ market stands across the city. The bicycles brand them as supporters of neighbourhood technologies that feature sweat-equity over bank financing.

ChocoSol founder and owner Michael Sacco, who has a side hustle as a PhD student at Trent University in Peterborough, likes to call the company a learning enterprise, because its staff and customers are learning how to produce and live in tune with the environment. But the real learners may well be today’s conventional businesses that can be taught a thing or two about engaging sought-after youthful customers hungry for food choices that smack of authentic and sustainable experiences.

In its latest Flavor & Trend Forecast, marketing agency THP predicts that in 2020 “brands will need to champion a collective appreciation for sustainability, whole ingredients and minimal processing in order to thrive within this emerging consumer narrative.”

ChocoSol has that whole package down pat.

That’s a way of telling informed customers that ChocoSol’s chocolate comes not from monoculture plantations with reputations for using pesticides and child labour, but from diverse gardens planted with vanilla, achiote peppers, coffee, hardwood and fruits alongside cacao trees.

As a Toronto food policy enthusiast and chair of the Coalition for a Green Economy, I toured these forest gardens with Sacco in 2007. Through “horizontal” trade, ChocoSol cuts out the vertical supply chain relied on by most big companies and deals directly with producers, commonly offering them 15 per cent above the going international wholesale price (up to 300 per cent more for some rarer beans). Relying on face-to-face relationships, direct traders reduce the red tape common with fair trade labels that deal with large-volume producers.

But behind its social, ethical and small-scale artisanal production methods, ChocoSol runs as much on hard-edged business forecasts as integrity and soul.

“They’ve got what all their competitors would die for,” says Barry Martin, owner of the communications firm Hypenotic, which handles ChocoSol’s account, as well as that of many others in the “purpose-driven” space of Toronto food-based businesses.

“ChocoSol makes what people need, does it in a way that’s memorable, generates an experience, tells a great story that makes it bigger than life,” Martin says. “Of all my clients, ChocoSol best expresses the whole range that companies need to strive for” to avoid the downward spiral of competing as a commodity for lowest cost.

Sacco, who brands himself an “ecopreneur,” has raised up the company by its bootstraps since 2006, when he launched with a $15,000 line of credit and $15,000 “from the bank of friends and family.” Purchases from these “bankers” and their contacts probably accounted for most of the $20,000 in ChocoSol sales that year.

In 2019, says Sacco, ChocoSol will clear $1.8 million in sales, half to wholesale accounts — despite the fact it retails for twice the price of conventional chocolate.

The company won top prizes at the 2016 and 2017 Canadian National Competition for chocolate-makers and took gold for its Jaguar Pure, and bronze and silver for its Jaguar Swirl and Crunch, in this year’s International Chocolate Awards.

Jaguar is a ChocoSol standout specialty, inspired by a woman elder from San Pablo Etla, just outside the city of Oaxaca. She took Sacco under her wing when he was a graduate student doing action research on Indigenous food traditions in Oaxaca, the unofficial capital of Mayan corn, cacao and grasshopper-based cuisine.

Struck by Jaguar’s commercial potential to support forest-based peasant-style agriculture in village communities in the Oaxaca region, Sacco developed “direct trade” relationships with small family farmers who sold him chocolate, coffee and vanilla from their communal forest gardens. To support a premium niche market around Jaguar, Sacco and community groups planted more than 50,000 trees yielding the Jaguar species of cacao around tiny villages such as Felipe de Léon.

“Our vision is to reimagine opportunities, techniques and organization models for small-plot intensive and underfinanced producers,” Sacco says.

These forest gardens are an economic boost to villagers and also sink enough carbon in the soil and generate enough plant and insect biodiversity to offset any environmental costs of taking cacao and vanilla beans by boat and train to Toronto.

 

Compassionate cacao

Business analyst Grayson Bass, who’s taught innovation strategies at the University of Toronto and is about to launch an Applied Innovation Certificate program there, thinks ChocoSolistas are spot on the money for a wide spectrum of change- and profit-making economic transformations of the near future.

Sooner rather than later, Bass says, social enterprises “will make the Fortune 500.” Why? Because they have compassion, he says. Compassion is not just a sign of emotional intelligence, he reasons. A “strong compassion muscle” is the precursor to business smarts, he says, because it leads innovators to ask the central question: What good does this do?

This gives compassionate entrepreneurs the edge they need to move up the ladder of innovation, he says.

On the lower steps on the ladder, innovators can optimize — find a faster, cheaper, more effective way of doing the same thing. They can also sustain — keep ahead of competitors by adding new services to an existing device.

At the top rung are disruptive innovators who change the nature of the game. To reach the highest rungs, entrepreneurs need to ask a “why” question, says Bass. That’s where companies such as ChocoSol excel, he says. Their “why” — a passion for a tasty health food that supports peasant producers and environmentally friendly production and distribution — leads them to change the consumer market for chocolate.

“Compassionate organizations have an advantage in solving problems and creating disruption because they have a problem to solve, not just a structure to fit into,” Bass says.

Sacco winces when business people call him compassionate or idealistic. “I don’t want to be called a hippie entrepreneur,” he says. “I’m offering a different value proposition.”

This fall, ChocoSol introduced “Halloween chocolate that isn’t scary” — no child labour and no environmental destruction. But that’s true of all their chocolate, including their seasonal Christmas Cranberry bar, dotted with local organic cranberries, or their Merry-Mint, made with dried mint grown on ChocoSol’s green roof. That roof is where cacao bean shells and other food wastes are composted to become soil to nourish new plants for tomorrow’s bars — the model of a circular economy, where yesterday’s waste becomes tomorrow’s food.

“My biggest challenge is focus,” says Sacco, who struggles with finishing his PhD, on the role of cacao and maize (corn) in Indigenous agriculture, while raising three children and managing an underfinanced social enterprise.

Affinity marketing

There are hidden strengths in a social enterprise, Sacco says. Having a cause helps define ChocoSol’s niche and also helps with customer loyalty, staff retention and developing new revenue streams, such as workshops for students, he says.

“We don’t lose any time selling, persuading or convincing customers to pay extra for real cacao mindfully produced. We work with the willing. That’s affinity marketing,” he says. “Our customers are our ambassadors, which is the best advertising we can afford.”

Sacco would like to see other social enterprises feature hundreds of other overlooked plant medicines that can be vehicles for stories — stories that are often suppressed by the way food is commonly marketed as a no-name and placeless commodity divorced from culture or social purpose.

This vision corresponds with the business scenario laid out to an agribusiness summit in New York in early December. Nick Fereday, of Netherlands-based Rabobank, a major banker to the global food and agriculture sector, predicted that today’s classic “Big Food” brands are doomed.

Upstarts “are tapping into the consumer trends of convenience, of health and wellness, of being a premium product and all wrapped up in a very, very strong mission statement,” Fereday told his audience of Big Food executives. If the big brands don’t smarten up, “we will see the end of iconic brands,” he warned. “By 2030, everything will be niche and focused on small markets.”

Alison Blay-Palmer, newly appointed UNESCO Chair in Food, Biodiversity and Sustainability Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, agrees that food has what it takes to attract change-makers.

“Food provides a lever to address many intersecting challenges: climate change, biodiversity, rapid urbanization, health, equity, community well-being and more,” she says. “People who can envision how these issues are interconnected understand the potential of food for far-reaching transformation.”

Most of all, having a cause gets Sacco and his team of 25 full- and part-time staff to work every day. “I don’t think you can start with a business plan,” he says. “You need to start with something that calls you, or you’re off to a bad start.”

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McDonald’s became the first company in Canada to serve up a portion of its Angus burgers (at least 30 per cent) from certified sources last year. Then Harvey’s began partnering with the Roundtable in August for its Original Burgers, joining A&W, Earls, Cactus Club Cafe and other food outlets in an effort to serve more environmentally responsible beef.

The fact that these restaurant chains are concerned about sustainable beef is welcome news. But what exactly is sustainable beef? The devil is in the details, and a closer look at the requirements imposed by the Roundtable reveals that they can be hazy and rife with loopholes.

The cattle conundrum

Beef cattle have been the bêtes noires of environmental movements for almost half a century.

Frances Moore Lappé skewered them in her bestseller of the 1970s, Diet for a Small Planet. She noted that it takes at least seven pounds of high-quality staples to produce one pound of grain-fed beef, in effect manufacturing scarcity and contributing to global hunger.

More recently, cattle have become symbols of consumer excess in the age of global warming. Our beef habit has been blamed for the carbon dioxide released when grasslands and forests in the Brazilian Amazon — long revered as the mainstay of global climate stability — are uprooted to grow soybeans for animal feed.

Booming sales of dairy and beef imitations are a sign of increased intentions to break loose from those environmental impacts and from the health concerns tied to eating red meat. Little wonder that beef sales are facing a decline in Canada.

All of which has prompted Canada’s beef industry to respond. The Canadian Cattlemen’s Association formed an alliance — the Canadian Roundtable for Sustainable Beef or CRSB — with McDonald’s Canada, Costco, Loblaws, the World Wildlife Fund and beef suppliers Cargill and JBS to “legitimize sustainable beef production in the public eye and underpin producers’ social licence to operate.”

To its credit, several aspects of the CRSB’s work go beyond hot air to grapple with issues of sustainability. The Roundtable deserves recognition for defining and benchmarking several pivotal and measurable sustainability challenges. It accepts the wide breadth of a “triple bottom line” approach and recognizes that sustainability is not as one-dimensional as reducing waste or greenhouse gases.

“Consumers are increasingly inquisitive about the food they’re eating and want to know it was produced in a socially responsible, economically viable and environmentally sound manner,” rancher Cherie Copithorne-Barnes, founding chair of the CRSB, said in a statement last summer.

To be deemed sustainable, ranchers and processors must show progress on issues such as soil health, water conservation, biodiversity, animal welfare and workers’ rights. From farm to fork, the Roundtable commits to delivering a product that “prioritizes planet, people, animals and progress.”

Green beef full of bull?

But how sustainable are those burgers advertised on in-store signs and menus across the country?

The CRSB’s basic requirements, as well as optional ratings for “excellence,” often appear vague and there are a few loopholes. On all-important matters such as air quality and greenhouse gases, for example, the only requirement is that operators should be “aware of management practices that support carbon sequestration and minimize emissions.”

The same loose wording goes for impacts on soil health, which should be “monitored and managed.”

On animal welfare, there are no requirements to minimize animal suffering beyond meeting Canada’s voluntary national farm animal code of practice, says Chronos Sustainability’s Darren Vanstone, who participated in Roundtable discussions as an animal welfare advocate.

“Research shows that one in five animals is injured or dies after 30 hours in transit,” says Geoff Urton.

An animal science expert and senior manager at B.C.’s Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, Urton has represented Canada during livestock hearings of the International Organization for Standardization.

The Canadian, and therefore Roundtable, maximum travel time is 36 hours, Urton says. American transport time is capped at 28 hours; Europe limits it to eight. The distinction is important for human as well as animal health, because stressed animals have lower resistance to communicable diseases that might infect the meat supply.

And while customers seeking more sustainable meat products now expect to see antibiotic-free and no-added-hormones/steroids claims at places like A&W or butcher counters, the CRSB standard doesn’t require either.

These gaps have been a bone of contention for a coalition of 50 American consumer, animal welfare, worker, public health and environmental groups south of the border, which called out the U.S. Roundtable for Sustainable Beef for being toothless in June of last year.

“Weak performance measures set a low bar, open the doors to greenwashing, muddy the waters of ‘sustainable’ beef marketing claims and undercut efforts to recognize and reward credibly more sustainable producers and brands,” said the coalition, including the Natural Resources Defense Council and the American Grassfed Association.

Smaller is better

Part of the problem is that the Canadian Roundtable doesn’t address systemic supply chain issues related to processors and retailers. Control of food processing and retail sectors by a small number of centralized corporations is “more pronounced in Canada than most countries,” says Rod MacRae, a professor of food studies at York University’s Faculty of Environmental Studies and a longtime food policy analyst.

Two corporations (Cargill Foods and Brazil-based multinational JBS) control 80 per cent of beef processing, and four retailers capture 72 per cent of retail sales, MacRae’s research reveals.

The limited number of slaughterhouses makes it almost impossible to reduce animal travel times. And, MacRae says, the concentration of corporate ownership makes it almost impossible for ranchers, farm workers and processing workers to enjoy sustainable working and living conditions. The Roundtable’s own research confirms that a rancher with a herd of 200 cattle earns $17,559 a year, which is below the rural poverty line.

That’s not a foundation for sustainable rural communities, says MacRae.

Franco Naccarato agrees on the need for more small players. He heads the Ontario Independent Meat Processors association — which has 250 members from small abattoirs and butcher shops scattered across the province. These shops, and the small farms that rely on them to do custom work for independent and local retailers and restaurants, are pivotal to the meat industry becoming sustainable, he says.

First is the distance factor: the short trips from farm to abattoir and abattoir to retailer can cut transportation emissions.

Small and local processors are also key to reviving the circular economy that once thrived across the Canadian meat sector, when many towns and cities had abattoirs, butcher shops and tanneries, which together made it their business to use all parts of the animal, from prime meat cuts to bone and blood.

“You can’t design for sustainability without this balance in local economies,” Naccarato says.

Naccarato’s argument suggests that a sustainable product requires a sustainable business ecosystem, not just a sustainable ranch or animal. The absence of any discussion or measures to foster that ecosystem may be the Achilles heel of the Roundtable’s claims of advancing sustainability.

It’s a pivotal point both the critics and defenders of sustainable beef miss. People on both sides focus on beef as a standalone commodity, not one product from a living whole animal, or a dynamic food web governing the entire life cycle of meat.

Regenerative ranching

Perhaps the Roundtable could take a leaf from the fast-rising notion referred to as regenerative agriculture. The idea is being talked up in countercultural communities within the food sector, as well as by corporate heavyweights such as General Mills. The basic proposition should be music to the ears of Canadian cattle ranchers because it’s founded on the widespread practice of feeding cattle on pasture.

Supporters of regenerative agriculture believe that raising livestock on pasture and prairie grasses reduces and offsets many environmental downsides. Pasture and grasses have deep roots, which purify water as it seeps down to the water table. The roots also draw down carbon to store underground, where it belongs. In regenerative agriculture, a no-till approach means that no carbon dioxide is unearthed by plowing. Nor are pesticides permitted (or required) on pasture, a blessing for insects, birds and biodiversity.

The Roundtable deserves credit for owning up to the problem of sustainability. But in an era when reducing beef consumption is front and centre for environmental and health advocates, they’ll also be watching closely to make sure any green labels on burgers aren’t a load of bull.

Wayne Roberts is a Canadian food policy analyst and writer and former manager of the Toronto Food Policy Council.

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