In our passion for spuds, humans have consecrated an area of the earth roughly equivalent to the size of Great Britain. From those vast tracts we produce 375 million tons of potatoes globally, which is something like the weight of every car in the United States put together. The world’s potatoes are collectively worth US$116 billion, and the market is booming. 

What makes a potato good? Sure, it’s flexible in the kitchen and can be mashed for ease, scalloped for excellence or grated for latkes. But best of all it can be cut into strips and fried in oil until it is both crispy and soft – an unparalleled comfort food, adored by vegans and omnivores alike. 

Everyone eats french fries. (Well, 98% of North Americans, at any rate.) As you read this, you’ve probably got a bag of frozen fries in your freezer, just waiting for you to dump them on a pan and bake them in the oven at 425°F for 20 to 25 minutes the next time you’re too tired to cook. 

In the kingdom of frozen french fries, only one producer could rightfully claim the throne: McCain Foods, a Canadian company founded in the small town of Florenceville, New Brunswick, and now in its 68th year. Today, it is active in 160 countries across four continents, and its annual sales of frozen potato products exceed $16 billion. A major supplier for McDonald’s, McCain claims to produce one out of every four french fries eaten in the world. 

But McCain has a problem. It’s the same problem that confronts us all, to a greater or lesser extent: climate change is imperilling how we get our food.

A crisis for agriculture

“When we first started on our journey as a company, we probably would have experienced a climate event once every 10 to 15 years,” Charlie Angelakos said on a video call in April. “What we’ve found, particularly in the last 10 years, is that climate issues started happening with our crops on a more frequent basis.” 

Angelakos is McCain’s vice president of global external affairs and sustainability, and he’s telling me about a study the company issued in 2018 to assess its vulnerability to the impacts of a rapidly changing climate. The results were startling. “It showed that if we were to stay on the same trajectory, we would have more and more climate disasters with our crops in the different growing regions around the world.”

Today, Angelakos says the company contends with three to five climate events every year across the 3,900 farms globally that supply its potatoes. By “events” he means crop killers: entire harvests destroyed by fire, flood or drought, as well as wild swings in yield from year to year. The company’s executives realized they needed to act quickly to secure their supply chain. The solution, they realized, was hiding in plain sight: a traditional form of farming that preceded industrial monoculture agriculture, protects against droughts and floods, and even offers better returns for farmers – aka, regenerative agriculture. 

It’s an assured supply strategy. How do you build a sustainable, resilient food supply chain for the future?

—Charlie Angelakos, VP of sustainability, McCain Foods

So the company embarked on a new mission to attain 100% regenerative agriculture across its farms by 2030. Currently, 71% of its farmers are at the onboarding level.

Other large corporations like Pepsi and Nestlé have announced commitments to regenerative agriculture in recent years, but those pledges have largely been framed in terms of meeting emission-reduction targets. For McCain, the logic is more immediately existential: the goal is to better cope with environmental and financial shocks. “It’s an assured supply strategy,” Angelakos says. “How do we build a sustainable, resilient food supply chain for the future?” 

Replenishing the soil

“Regenerative agriculture” is a $10 phrase that sounds too wholesome to be interesting – until you consider the stakes. Namely, the viability of a food system that keeps us fed at the expense of nature and our health. 

Basically, it’s the opposite of monoculture farming, which has sustained the earth’s exploding population for decades but relies heavily on herbicides, pesticides, fungicides and synthetic fertilizers. Regenerative agriculture strives to cut back and eliminate all those harmful chemical inputs, so the farms can function as healthy, self-sustaining ecosystems. In other words, it’s a method for turning dirt into soil, by bringing back the micro-organisms and other stuff that make plants happy.

Really, regenerative farming is just the old ways of doing things, says Harold Perry, a potato farmer in Alberta and a supplier for McCain and Frito-Lay. Perry’s family has been farming 6,000 acres near the town of Lethbridge since 1909, beginning with his great-grandfather John. Perry’s daughter is studying agronomy and will take over next, the fifth generation to raise crops on that land. 

Perry, who is 54, has been fascinated by the science of soil health for nearly three decades. He received a scholarship from Nuffield Canada in 2006 to travel internationally and meet other farmers using regenerative practices, and he’s well-versed in the research and language of plant biology. But for all the complexity of modern agronomy, the techniques for achieving healthy soil are fairly straightforward. “Our major thing is to keep the ground green at all times,” Perry says over the phone, referring to the practice of planting so-called cover crops such as buckwheat, clover and hairy vetch during times when regular cash crops are not being grown. Cover crops not only deposit more nutrients and organic material into the ground; they also protect the soil from damage from extreme heat. 

This basic principle of regenerative farming – often referred to as “armouring” the soil – is also one of the six key principles in McCain’s Regenerative Agriculture Framework, produced in partnership with the U.S. Soil Health Institute, which the company is using to guide its network of farmers through the program and measure their progress.

While most other food producers that carry the financial heft of McCain would use brokers, the company contracts directly with farmers, which allows it to more effectively implement new standards and practices. 

Another key tenet of regenerative farming is tilling the ground less or not at all, which the company calls “minimized soil disturbance.” There’s a mechanical straightforwardness to the logic to this practice: by avoiding tillage and allowing the roots from cover crops to break up the soil, it becomes less dense and compacted, so more water, nutrients and micro-organisms can soak down into it. 

In conventional agriculture, the soil can’t hold water nearly as well, so it’s more vulnerable to flooding. “When it rains a lot, a significant amount of soil is washing away from your field, and the top layer is very important because this is where there’s more nutrients and more organic matter,” says Claudia Goyer, a molecular biologist for Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada. Flooding carries not only topsoil into the watershed, but fertilizer as well, where the fertilizer feeds algal blooms.

Surging adoption

Unlike many other solutions to society’s most pernicious problems, regenerative farming has one overwhelming advantage over conventional agriculture: it’s more profitable – as much as 75% to 80% more profitable, according to research by the Soil Health Institute. “Conventional systems are focused on yield, whereas regenerative systems are more focused on profit,” explains Salar Shemirani, CEO at the certification provider Regenified. “Yield can go down for a year or two during the transition, but you are using less inputs, less fuel, less labour.” Fewer costs means better returns. 

This is especially important as conventional farming can be a low- or no-profit business, and farmers lately have been forced to contend with historically high costs of doing business. The prices for fertilizer, seed and other inputs have all soared, while commodity prices for their products have plunged. In the United States, President Donald Trump’s universal trade war has made the situation even worse.  

Still, farmers can take a hit at the very outset of their transition. “We do know that in the early years there will be a slight dip in profitability for the farmer, and then over time, as yields increase, it does become a profitable endeavour,” Angelakos says.

McCain has partnerships with financial institutions in eight different countries to offer low-interest loans and other discounted financing options to help its farmers invest in things like cover crops and new equipment. 

Transitioning to regenerative practices can be an uphill struggle for other reasons too. “A lot of growers felt that it was forced on them,” Perry says. When big companies insist on new practices, it can feel like they’re saying that farmers don’t know what they’re doing, and this can be an impediment to adoption. 

It is essential that companies set up frameworks that lead to steep reductions in agrochemical use in their supply chain at an urgent pace.”

—Sarah Starman and Kendra Klein, Friends of the Earth

Still, because of its many upsides and few downsides, regenerative farming is rapidly gaining traction; stakeholders using the language of change curve models now say it has moved past the early adopter phase and entered the early majority phase. A market analysis by Grand View Research projects that regeneratively farmed products will see a compound annual growth rate of 15.7% from 2023 to 2030. 

Gabe Brown, the well-known advocate for soil health and co-founder at Regenified, says that he’s seen more change, more commitments and more progress in the past two years than in the past 30 years combined. 

Among regenerative agriculture’s most notable fans is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., currently serving as the U.S. secretary of health and human services. His Make America Healthy Again plan lists “advancing regenerative and precision agriculture” among its top goals. The former environmental lawyer advocates for a “nutrition-based approach to disease prevention” that starts with soil health. Kennedy points the blame at “highly chemical, intensive processed foods.” 

But surging interest in regenerative farming has made it vulnerable to greenwashing. Bloomberg News warned in 2023 that Big Food’s regenerative agriculture push was running a greenwashing risk, due to the lack of established targets. A report by the investor network FAIRR found that among 79 agrifood companies worth US$3 trillion, most (50) had announced some kind of regenerative initiative with their suppliers, but few were measuring their progress and only four were actually supporting farmers financially to deploy regenerative practices. Lots of talk; not much meaningful action.  

Regenerative agriculture intrinsically means taking a holistic approach to farming, and industry greenwashing can generally be identified by its reductivity – especially by equating the whole methodology with the single practice of tilling less, while continuing to pour agrochemicals onto the soil.

A new report published in April by Sarah Starman, senior food and agriculture campaigner, and Kendra Klein, deputy director of science, at Friends of the Earth, found that “the vast majority (93%) of U.S. corn and soy acreage grown in no-till and minimum-till management systems relies on toxic pesticides that harm soil health and threaten human health.” 

Asked about McCain’s regenerative framework, the authors wrote in an email to Corporate Knights that the company had made a great start by explicitly lifting up agrochemical reduction as a pillar of its program and by using an accepted benchmarking system to effectively measure its progress. But key aspects of their approach could be improved: “McCain doesn’t share a specific timeline for moving growers in their supply chain beyond the first level, ‘Engaged.’ Given the devastating impacts of agrochemicals on biodiversity, climate, soil, and human health, it is essential that companies set up frameworks that lead to steep reductions in agrochemical use in their supply chain at an urgent pace, not leave the door open for a continuation of the status quo.” 

Despite its commitment to regenerative farming, McCain is not otherwise a leader on environmental, social and governance metrics. Sustainalytics gives McCain an “average” rating for its management of ESG material risk. McCain does not disclose enough information to be a contender for Corporate Knights’ Best 50 list of Canada’s most sustainable companies.

Making the case

As auspicious as the overall trend looks, conventional agriculture remains extremely entrenched, and most people don’t know or care about regenerative practices. “According to our most recent research, most people aren’t sure what regenerative agriculture is, or its potential in mitigating climate change,” Angelakos says. Fewer than one in 10 Canadians understand the concept of regenerative agriculture practices; 26% of Canadians had never heard about it. 

Still, the market indifference to regenerative agriculture could be taken as an indicator that McCain is being honest about its motives and serious about its transition. But they aren’t leaving consumers to find their own way. The company is working hard to promote the idea of regenerative agriculture, through ad campaigns, partnerships with influencers and a demonstration project with the Sustainable Markets Initiative in the United Kingdom to show the strong business case for regenerative farming. It even made an augmented-reality game, whereby a cartoon farm is projected onto a surface using your phone’s camera. Users gain points by growing potatoes and then investing in pollinators, crop cover, livestock and technology. 

But change happens on the ground, not on our phones. Our food system needs more biodiversity, not more industrial inputs. Fortunately, farms really do work best – and farmers do better – when nature takes the lead.

*Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated the number of countries in which McCain is active. 

Cover image: Harold Perry inspects fresh piles of compost and digestate at CKP farms near Coaldale, Alberta on May 23, 2025.

Mark Mann is a journalist in Montreal and the associate editor at Corporate Knights. 

Photography by Guillaume Nolet.

The post How McCain Foods embraced regenerative farming appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Soon after, he bought his first farm, in northern Arizona, and started growing his own food.

Like most land in the American West, this 37-acre property had been extensively over-grazed by cattle. It was the late 1990s, and Videle relied on agricultural industry magazines and farming norms of the day to fertilize his farmland. He used liquid Miracle-Gro and dried manure paddies to get some summer squash going and built his first chicken coop.

By 2005, he had adopted certified organic protocols, which lean heavily on the use of manure as fertilizer instead of synthetic nitrogen, but a question lingered in his mind: was it possible to grow fruits, vegetables and herbs productively without animal inputs like manure?

The true regenerative agriculture

We’ve turned our planet into an animal farm. Globally, 3.8 billion hectares – more than a third of all habitable land – is used for farming animals. The latest 2021 research in Nature Food estimates that animal agriculture is responsible for more than 19% of direct greenhouse gas emissions. If we include the lost-land opportunity to draw down carbon dioxide from the atmosphere into rewilded pastureland, that estimate jumps to 28% according to the largest meta-analysis on food and the environment, published in Science in 2018. And this doesn’t factor in wider environmental implications like the billions of tons of manure produced each year.

In just five days, America’s 10 billion farm animals produce enough manure to cover the entire U.S., exceeding what farmland can safely absorb. A noxious mix of natural and synthetic fertilizers washing off farmers’ fields and down the Mississippi River has resulted in dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico that stretch more than 20,000 square kilometres.

Given this dire situation, how do we change farming? Agriculture norms are protected over generations by a cultural shield, seemingly untouchable politically. Organic agriculture has become synonymous with spreading manure. But we can learn from those who have changed their minds despite the pressure to conform to common practices.

Transformational changes in farming don’t come easy. They certainly didn’t at first for Videle. But after several years of working on tropical farms throughout Hawaii and Latin America, Videle discovered the ease in exclusively plant-based composting and farming. Just like in a healthy native forest where the only manure deposited is by wild animals that pass through, he learned that the vast majority of organic matter should come from the plants in agricultural systems.

In 2014, after settling down in Boileau, Quebec, Videle and his wife, Mélanie Bernier, established La Ferme de l’Aube, a vegan organic farm on a six-acre parcel of land featuring mixed forest and open spaces for cultivation. They now cultivate more than 400 varieties of fruits, vegetables, herbs, flowers, shrubs and trees, yielding 5,000 pounds of food from less than half an acre, leaving the rest of the acreage for nature.

“Nobody wants to believe that it works, but by taking out manure and putting in plants, you’re gaining nutrients,” Videle says.

The rise of veganic farming

While the term is new, veganic – or vegan organic – agriculture practices date back millennia and have their roots in Indigenous methods. The “three sisters” method of growing squash, beans and corn together was practised by the Iroquois, Cherokee and other Indigenous Peoples throughout Turtle Island (North America) and Mesoamerica and often involved a minimal amount of animal inputs. Veganic methods naturally fertilize the soil by using soil-feeding crops, cover crops and compost without animal products or byproducts. One can also find similar ecological motivations in “stock-free” (livestock-free) organic and conservation agriculture movements.

While there are tremendous benefits in simply shifting away from farming animals to growing plants for human consumption – and efforts are underway to support this “transfarmation” – a shift to veganic farming is seen as the pinnacle of regenerative agriculture by proponents.

A seven-year research study we did at La Ferme de l’Aube showed an increase of soil organic matter of 38.46% while increasing yields and biodiversity on and near the farm.

Dominating discussions around regenerative agriculture, including Big Ag–funded projects, has been the grazing component – using “regenerative grazing” to rotationally graze cattle on pastures, allowing fallow areas to recover to help rebuild soil health. Yet replacing intensive feedlot beef production in the U.S. entirely with grass-fed cattle isn’t feasible, and U.S. pastures could support only about 27% of the nation’s beef production. Regenerative ranching would use two and a half times more land than the niche movement of grass-fed beef.

A more sustainable approach would involve moving away from manure and scaling up veganic compost, which could include municipal and commercial fruit and vegetable scraps, yard and field waste, or chipped wood.

Synthetic fertilizers or manure: The false dichotomy

Organic farming, dominated by manure application rather than synthetic fertilizers, faces challenges with lower crop yields, leading to the need for more land and resources to match conventional farming’s output, according to a 2011 meta-analysis. This synthetic fertilizer or manure comparison is agnostic to the animal-versus-plant-based debate, which largely ignores that it’s more important to look first at what we eat versus how it’s grown. One can also argue that yields should be measured over longer periods of time, taking into account land degradation.

The Green Revolution that started in the 1960s brought in waves of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides and higher yields across the world, lifting billions out of food insecurity. Some describe this as a positive step, while others have documented negative tradeoffs, including mass runoff creating land and ocean dead zones affecting all forms of life, along with other adverse effects on the environment and public health.

What would have happened if, instead of growing more than a third of all crops to feed farmed animals, we had built an agricultural system focused on feeding diverse and healthy plant foods directly to humans? We could potentially feed 3.5 billion more people, according to one 2013 study published in Environmental Research Letters.

Preliminary research from Videle’s farm has found that veganic can be 2.3% more productive than conventional synthetic-fertilizer-based farms and 41% more productive than organic-manure agriculture. Sweet potatoes and tomatoes grown in rich humus soil had yields 21% to 45% higher than those grown with inorganic fertilizer.

Beyond Videle’s small farm, there is a growing network of veganic food producers.

Nobody wants to believe that it works, but by taking out manure and putting in plants, you’re gaining nutrients.

Jimmy Videle, veganic farmer

Iain Cleator, a recently retired University of British Columbia medical school professor, now has a 2,650-acre farm in Wynyard, Saskatchewan, emphasizing ancient grains such as Red Fife and spelt, crop rotation and biodiversity to enrich soil naturally without synthetic fertilizers or manure.

On several stock-free organic farms in Eastern Europe, Strassner Family Farms grows cereals, corn, soya, pumpkin seeds and beans and has become a critical supplier in the area.
If this style of farming is easier, helps the ecosystem thrive, yields an immense amount of food per acre, and provides a great farming lifestyle, why aren’t more doing it this way? “There’s an awareness issue, there’s pervasive beliefs and ideals, but the bottom line is there’s the undeniable pressure from animal agriculture that makes agricultural universities, schools and organic programs promote that manure and animal products need to be used,” Videle says.

While the transition would be complex, veganic agriculture is the pillar of regenerative agriculture since it can increase soil organic matter, increase production per hectare over any animal-based system, and free up land to address the extinction crisis.

Videle now spends a significant amount of time helping other farmers throughout North America become certified veganic (there are currently a dozen certified veganic farms in North America). In 2023, he published a veganic farming handbook with practical and accessible steps to farm this way.

Careful consideration of potential reduced food yields needs to be taken with any sweeping change to global farming practices, as was evident in the decision to abruptly ban agrochemicals in Sri Lanka, resulting in food insecurity and increased reliance on expensive food imports. What is clear is that the organic versus conventional debate misses the mark. Instead we should be focusing on what we produce – more plants for human consumption – and shifting to more stock-free veganic methods if we want a win-win for the planet.

Our society as we know it faces an existential crisis. By incentivizing transformative changes, such as those undertaken by Videle, we can foster a profound regeneration of nature, benefiting wildlife and enhancing our collective well-being.

Nicholas Carter is an independent ecologist with Plant Based Data and is the director of environmental science at the Game Changers Institute.

Check back here as we roll out our Plant Power package this week, along with the release of the 2024 Spring issue of Corporate Knights.

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If it weren’t for the plastic tags in the cows’ ears and the overhead drone of occasional passenger planes, we could be 600 years ago. That’s about the last time storks nested wild in England, Isabella Tree told me. A writer, farmer and owner of the Knepp Estate, Tree strides across this magnificently disheveled landscape crafted by herself and her husband, Charles Burrell.

Rewind 23 years and this place was a debt-ridden, subsidy-dependent farm, its already poor soil made worse by intensive agricultural practices. There were certainly no storks.
Old English longhorns resting under an oak tree at Knepp.
Old English longhorns resting under an oak tree at Knepp. Disturbance from large herbivores has restored this landscape by reactivating natural processes that foster healthy ecology. Image by Elizabeth Fitt for Mongabay.

But Tree and Burrell have helped nature reestablish its course at Knepp since then, in a process known as rewilding. Reintroducing white storks (Ciconia ciconia) is merely the icing on the cake. Fencing has been ripped down, large mammals introduced, drains smashed, even a river rewiggled. Reintroduced beavers have masterminded a whole new wetland.

Now the place is thriving. Harvest mice (Micromys minutus), hedgehogs (Erinaceus europaeus) and hobby falcons (Falco subbuteo), dormice (Muscardinus avellanarius), dung beetles and dingy skipper butterflies (Erynnis tages), among many others, have established themselves here. Surveys have found an astounding 1,800 invertebrates species (almost 10% of the U.K.’s known vertebrates).

Humans have increased too: When a stork couple at Knepp became the first since 1416 to naturally breed in the U.K. during one of the 2020 lockdowns, the BBC show Springwatch featured it. The day lockdown was lifted, more than a thousand people rushed to see this marvel, Tree told me.

“Storks are this kind of symbol of hope and rebirth and regeneration. And I think rewilding is giving a lot of people hope, and the storks are such an amazing emblem for that,” lead ecologist at Knepp, Penny Green, told Mongabay.

“Every day I feel like what we’re learning here is actually making a huge difference. It really does you know, we get land owners, whether smallholders or large landowners coming here on workshops learning about how they can make a difference on their land — whether it’s regenerative farming, nature friendly farming or rewilding – whatever you can take away from this that might suit what your doing.” Penny Green, Lead Ecologist and Safari Manager at Knepp told Mongabay. Image by Elizabeth Fitt for Mongabay.

Rewilding Knepp

Tree and Burrell inherited the Knepp estate in 1987. They spent 13 years battling the farm’s heavy clay landscape, which they said is “like concrete in summer and the rest of the year unfathomable porridge.”

They made money, dependent on subsidies, just twice in all that time. Something had to give.

In 2000, they sold off their dairy herds and machinery to offset huge debts and contracted out their arable land. But that was also the year Grazing Ecology and Forest History, by Dutch conservationist Frans Vera, was translated into English. The book so inspired Burrell and Tree that they went to see Vera and the landscape he stewarded in Oostvaardersplassen, the Netherlands.

The following year, armed with a Countryside Stewardship government grant, they withdrew their first fields from intensive agriculture.

“We weren’t brave enough just to say, ‘let’s rewild the whole thing,’” Tree said. It took six years to bring it all out of production, worst first.

By 2022, a green paper from the U.K. government’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs was hailing Knepp as a “huge success,” showing how restoring natural dynamics can quickly lead to nature recovery.

The estate’s income stream now includes renting out converted farm buildings as offices and event spaces, ecotourism safaris and accommodation, organic meat and their ongoing Countryside Stewardship grant.

“[The grant] is important to us and we hope that it will continue,” Tree said. “But if it doesn’t, we feel that we are actually now a self-sufficient business, which we never would have been if we’d have had subsidies removed from us when we were farming.”

On top of all the nature-hungry tourists, the farm now provides jobs to more than 50 workers.

The depths of success

The success of Knepp runs deep, quite literally. Today, the soil alone is storing carbon at least as fast as models predict 25-year-old broadleaf woodlands do, according to research using new technology from the soil sampling company Agricarbon.

The U.K. government-funded research found that the rewilded soil absorbed up to 4.8 tons more carbon dioxide per hectare per year than soils in a conventional farm close by.

These data are “absolutely crucial for underpinning any kind of incentive or investment in the restoration of carbon to the soil,” Annie Leeson, the CEO of Agricarbon, said. “You can’t go to investors and say, ‘I want you to invest in 0.2% increase in soil carbon.’ You have to say, ‘I want you to invest in something that’s going to deliver 3,000 or 30,000 or 300,000 tons of carbon removal.’”

Knepp’s soil data is the first to show that rewilding a farm can lead to statistically robust carbon sequestration in soils.

“It’s wonderful to have projects like Knepp producing the credible evidence that can help to convince policymakers that this is a viable way forward,” Global Rewilding Alliance director Alister Scott said. “In order for rewilding to grow rapidly and scale globally, we clearly need to enable the flow of finance into a myriad of rewilding projects.”

Tree hopes the research will help secure a seat for rewilding at the carbon market table, as so far there are no investment products or market mechanisms that support rewilding.

“If you don’t have the [carbon] measurements you just cannot build any of that structure,” Leeson said. But Agricarbon’s technology and new findings unlock “a level of integrity that allows soil carbon to become part of carbon accounting.”

Buying carbon credits allows companies to compensate for their greenhouse gas emissions. But researchers have found the true quantity of carbon saved through regulated carbon credits is questionable. Carbon credit investment is going through an “ethical shakedown,” said Ivan de Klee, the head of natural capital at the U.K.-based nature recovery investment company Nattergal. There is a “cry for integrity” for real data, rather than modeling-based carbon offset options, de Klee added.

Nattergal is using Agricarbon’s analysis of how much carbon is stored in Knepp’s soil, together with field analysis of how much carbon is stored in the scrubland’s woody biomass, to develop a more comprehensive, nature restoration investment tool.

“It’s a set of guidelines for people to use to make sure that what they’re selling is real, and that they’re maximizing the potential of rewilding systems,” de Klee said.

Birds and butterflies

One of Knepp’s achievements is its sheer diversity of life. Biodiversity, put simply, can clean our water, protect us from flooding and drought, increase how much food we grow and regulate our climate.

To rewild depleted areas, you have to “add stimulus to get the dynamism happening,” Tree said. Following Vera’s recommendations, Tree and Burrell introduced “stimulus” in the form of old English longhorn cattle, red (Cervus elaphus) and fallow deer (Dama dama), Tamworth pigs and Exmoor ponies. These animals act as proxies for their ancient cousins, aurochs, elk, wild boar and wild horses — former architects of English landscapes in bygone eras.

“Almost everything they do is contributing in a domino effect to a more functioning system that’s sequestering carbon,” Tree said.

This gradual tango between animal disturbance and plant growth is crucial to Knepp’s success. Tree explained that it’s the “constant competition” between vegetation and large herbivores — including their use of hooves and antlers as well as their eating habits — that creates homes for so many creatures.

“We cannot understand how these things reach us; it is extraordinary! I mean, we have a dung beetle, the violet dor beetle (Geotrupes mutator) that hasn’t been seen in Sussex for 50 years. And it’s proliferating here!” she said, poking a cowpat with the toe of one of her navy ASICS.

Last year the large tortoiseshell butterfly (Nymphalis polychloros), thought to be extinct in the U.K., formed a breeding colony at Knepp. The estate is also home to all of the U.K.’s five owl species, 13 of its 17 bat species and breeding populations of a dozen birds on the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds’ Conservation Concern Red List.

Landscape management shake-up

Since leaving the EU, the U.K. is pivoting to a new environmental land management framework, in the most significant agricultural policy and spending reform in a generation.

Conventional agriculture practices erode topsoil, leaving it open to being washed away into the water system or blown away as dust, research has found. “We’re losing the foundation of all of our food production,” Leeson said.

The world loses 24 billion tons of topsoil every year, reducing net economic output by up to 8%, according to a 2019 address by U.N. Director General António Guterres.

“With some extra investments, some incentives for farmers, you can restore soil carbon,” Leeson said.

Restoring organic carbon improves soil structure, allowing it to hold water, meaning more drought and flood resilience.

“So, all of these things that we’re experiencing that are problematic as a result of climate change … are reduced if you can restore carbon to the soil,” Leeson said.

In the U.K., conventional farm subsidies that incentivize growing arable crops “irrespective of the damage it caused” according to Tree, are being removed and replaced with payments that incentivize biodiversity conservation and ecosystem services.

A government commitment of 2.4 billion pounds ($3.1 billion) in annual incentives for land management practices that restore soil health, peatland and forests is part of the first revisions to the U.K.’s environmental improvement plan in 25 years. There is still a likely shortfall of up to 6.9 billion pounds ($8.8 billion) per year that will have to come from private investment, according to an Environment Bank white paper.

“If we can generate a market whereby enhancements lead to sustainable revenue generation, then this enables investment from the private sector to bridge the funding gap,” Andy Slaney, a future funding specialist from the government-backed Natural Environment Investment Readiness Fund (NEIRF), said.

NEIRF is currently funding 86 projects, with up to 100,000 pounds ($127,650) each, to help build viable private sector investments for more ecosystem-centric land management. Their projects include both Agricarbon’s research and Nattergal’s investment tool.

Still, rewilding has its critics.

The National Farmers Union (NFU) prioritizes conventional food production and promotes the status quo. A press officer told Mongabay that NFU was interested in “maintaining the high levels of environmental protection we currently enjoy,” adding that rewilding is not a preferred staple land management option. The NFU considers it a threat to “treasured cultural landscapes” according to a consultation document submitted to the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee.

“NFU think that we’re the devil,” Tree said. “They’re kicking back as much as they possibly can but there’s a lot of farmers out there who see the sense.”

Rewilding goes “hand in glove” with farming, she said. Rewilding spills over even into conventionally farmed land in terms of better pollination, natural pest control and better soil activity, which all lead to better yields and increased sustainability. It also buffers against increasingly extreme weather events, protecting land from drought, flooding and wind.

“It’s the life support system that’s gonna actually hold agriculture and keep it sustainable,” Tree said. “If we don’t do this, we literally have only got a few decades of soil left, of anything that is going to produce food.”

Hope for the future

Rewilding has the potential to address both the climate and biodiversity crises, according to Scott with Global Rewilding Alliance. What’s needed, Scott said, is more awareness of its credibility and to establish viable investment mechanisms. Countries would never have signed the Paris Agreement without the belief that cutting emissions could be economically viable.

“It feels like a similar process is now happening with rewilding,” Scott said.

The cool shady depths of the massive beaver pen back at Knepp, impervious to the heat of the day and surrounded by an herb-rich pasture a-flit with butterflies, affords a flash of promise for a better future.

“That’s the real value of Knepp, isn’t it? It’s the hope, you know?” Tree said. “You’ve got climate change and biodiversity loss and it’s huge and you think, how can I ever do anything that’s going to make a difference? And then people come to Knepp and they see that miracles can happen in a very short space of time.”

This article was first published by Mongabay.

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She’s hoping more Canadian farmers will convert their own farms to more sustainable operations – and she’s been asking the federal government to give them a financial helping hand. Bakker is part of a farmer-led coalition called Farmers for Climate Solutions (FCS) that has been pushing the federal government to boost the amount of funding it has committed to paying farmers to adopt greenhouse-gas-cutting methods, such as planting cover crops and using less synthetic nitrogen fertilizer. On Friday, the group had mixed success, as federal Agriculture Minister Marie-Claude Bibeau announced half a billion dollars in new funding “to support the sector’s sustainability and competitiveness.” 

These kinds of solutions can be important in two ways: by developing healthy, resilient soil in the face of the climate crisis, and by reducing the industry’s significant emissions, which will be vital for the country to achieve its emissions-reducing goals. Crop and livestock farming contributed 10% of Canada’s total greenhouse gas emissions in 2019.  

“More is less. The more of these practices we can put in place, the less it’s going to cost us down the line and the less greenhouse gas emissions we’re going to produce as well,” says Bakker. 

The federal government wrapped up a third day of talks Friday in Saskatoon with territorial and provincial counterparts to develop what’s known as the Agricultural Policy Framework – a document that will be a road map for government funding for food and farming over the next five years. Part of the discussion was about how governments can help the agriculture industry reduce its greenhouse gas emissions and become more climate resilient. FCS wanted to see the government spend $2.1 billion over the next five years to help the agriculture industry make this transition.  

The more of these practices we can put in place, the less it’s going to cost us down the line.

–Sarah Bakker, Field Sparrow Farms

However, the agreement, which is now called the Sustainable Canadian Agriculture Partnership, does not seem to reach that level of funding. It did include a new $250-million cost-shared “Resilient Agriculture Landscape Program” the government says will “recognize ecological goods and services provided by farmers and ranchers.” Bibeau also announced a year-long review of business-risk-management programs to “explore opportunities to further integrate climate risk to identify incentives and conduct a pilot for producers who adopt environmental practices that also reduce production risks.” In a statement, FCS said it saw “many positive outcomes” in the agreement, but “the measures announced by the ministers fall short of the broad, systemic change that is necessary to tackle the climate crisis and make Canadian farms more reslient in the long term.”

FCS had assembled a group of agricultural experts and farmers to put forward recommendations they wanted to see included in the framework. The proposals included $341 million in per-acre payments that would go to farmers who use cover crops and better soil management that would help sequester more carbon in the ground and help limit the use of nitrogen fertilizer (nitrogen fertilizers emit the very potent nitrous oxide). The government has committed to reducing the emissions from nitrogen fertilizers by 30% by 2030, and FCS says its proposals would mean a 33% reduction. All combined, the recommendations could mitigate 16.2 megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalents by 2028, FCS says. The new agreement committed to a reduction target of only three to five megatonnes.  

“Climate change is going to cost us something, whether it’s up front or down the road,” says Bakker. “If we don’t address it, we’re going to continue to pay out those costs.” Failing to act in a meaningful way will also mean ruin for the country’s food security, she adds.   

While something is better than nothing, Bakker said before Bibeau’s announcement that she would be disappointed if the federal government didn’t adopt FCS’s recommendations, considering the urgency of the problem.   

“We’re at a tipping point. We need to take action,” she says.  

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Scholars and analysts are carefully exploring the potential of a wide range of solutions, from cellular agriculture to regenerative grazing, and asking whether they will scale – that is, whether they can be implemented widely around the globe. We see this question in all manner of debates over food practices – for example, in claims that agroecology and organic agriculture cannot feed a growing population or that cattle are universally problematic.

In many cases, however, this is entirely the wrong question to ask, and the answers it generates lead us to downplay essential and potentially transformative solutions.

Industrial thinking

It seems sensible enough: if our current food production practices use too much water or emit too much greenhouse gas, we ought to replace them with practices that use less or generate less. Better yet, we can replace them with practices that also reverse ecological harm and improve soil and water health while meeting current and future food needs.

However, evaluating radical new solutions based on whether they scale can be directly at odds with the very nature of these solutions. Approaches like agroecology and regenerative grazing do not entail a set of standard practices meant to be implemented everywhere. They’re meant to be highly tailored and responsive to the specifics of a place. It is effectively meaningless to evaluate one set of agroecological practices – in, say, Thailand – based on how those practices would perform if cloned and applied by different people of different cultures in different places around the world.

Scalability as a value derives from an industrial way of thinking: that the best solutions are those that can be replicated and implemented widely, and that uniformity breeds efficiency and productivity. This may work in a factory, but ecosystems are not factories. Ecosystem productivity derives not from uniformity but from diversity, flexibility and change. Accordingly, these, not scalability, are the traits that are key to success for the most exciting innovations in food systems.

A patchwork of solutions

What this means is that a global food system that is both truly sustainable and sufficiently productive will consist not of a few massively scaled practices, but rather a vast patchwork quilt of smaller-scale solutions that vary dramatically from place to place, over space and over time, in an interplay with local climate, ecology and culture.

Consider the debate over animal-based proteins. It is not uncommon to see this presented as a sort of global average that implies inherent impacts, regardless of where and how those proteins are being produced. Yet there is tremendous place-based variability to how different kinds of livestock are raised. In western Ireland, cattle are used at a small scale to great effect for ecological restoration. Likewise, one estimate shows that greenhouse gas emissions from beef from Canadian dairies are less than one-third the global average.

Finally, there is a colonial logic to be addressed here: that the validity of new approaches rests not on how well they work for the people implementing them, but on whether they meet a set of metrics construed by and for the Global North. That they must produce a certain amount of food in service of global populations, or eliminate a certain amount of greenhouse gases, for example. Many alternative innovations are not meant to simply be swapped into the existing system, but catalysts that support a complete reorganization of food systems around food sovereignty, community well-being and ecological health.

Thinking relationally

Rather than asking whether a practice “scales” – whether it works if adopted everywhere – we ought to instead ask whether a practice works in and for specific people and places, and whether it can align with or enhance existing culturally valued practices and systems in other places. “Is this approach in harmony with the people and other living things in this region?” “Does it work with or against the goals and needs here?” And so on.

Asking such questions changes the evaluative mindset from industrial to relational. Relational ways of thinking are increasingly recognized as necessary for achieving both sustainability and social justice. They also move us away from focusing on specific technologies to focusing on systems and ensuring that our food practices work with rather than against nature.

We face an opportunity today to foster in our food systems truly generative relationships between peoples and places, the domesticated and the wild. Such relationships are the engine by which much of the verdant biocultural diversity in the world today came to be. In certain circumstances, the question of scalability may indeed be relevant and useful. But given the high stakes of problems like climate change, it’s time to move away not only from the technologies that have failed us, but from the ideologies on which they are based as well.

This article was originally published by Ensia.

Philip Loring is the chair of food, policy and society at the University of Guelph’s Arrell Food Institute. 

The post When it comes to food production, ‘Does it scale?’ is often the wrong question appeared first on Corporate Knights.

In Canada, the agricultural sector accounted for roughly 10% of our greenhouse gas emissions in 2019. These emissions have steadily increased since 1990 thanks to yield-boosting petrochemical fertilizers and livestock farming – emissions that will need to come down fast if the sector is going to do its fair share in helping Canada meet its climate targets, said Ralph Torrie, head of research at Corporate Knights, at part five of our Earth Index series tackling the “say–do” gap in Canada’s high-emitting industries. 

But in the last year, the rate of emissions reductions in Canada’s agricultural sector was a mere 14% of what it needs to be to hit our 2030 targets. 

“We have little to show in terms of emissions reduction progress from this sector, which leaves a large ‘say–do’ gap,” Torrie told the panel February 2.

Carbon sink

In recent years, the National Farmers Union has been taking a fine-grain look at where Canada’s agriculture emissions are coming from. For the last century, we’ve done something unprecedented: “We’ve created a very high-input, high-emission food system,” said Darrin Qualman, the director of climate crisis policy and action at National Farmers Union (Canada). Qualman said government policies have only made matters worse: “In Canada, the core directive is to maximize exports. This leads to a production maximization policy and, unfortunately, an input maximization policy, and the unintended consequence is we’re also maximizing the emissions coming out.”

There are signs that’s beginning to shift. Last year, the federal government said it would spend $200 million over two years to help farmers keep more carbon in the ground. Part of these funds will go towards helping farmers reduce the amount of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers they use. Nitrogen fertilizers emit nitrous oxide – a potent greenhouse gas that is 300 times more damaging to the climate than carbon dioxide. The government has also said it would pay farmers to grow cover crops (which are grown between seasons to improve soil health) and use rotational grazing practices.

We have little to show in terms of emissions reduction progress from this sector, which leaves a large ‘say–do’ gap.

–Ralph Torrie, head of research at Corporate Knights

While “regenerative agriculture” is a buzzword being adopted by politicians and food companies, the ideas behind them are deeply rooted in Indigenous farming methods that go back generations. Terrylynn Brant, the founder of Mohawk Seedkeeper Gardens, told the panel that Indigenous people, who have farmed sustainably for millennia, often don’t get credit for having invented these practices.

Brant, who is a seedkeeper, said her community in Ohsweken, Ontario, plants crops like corn with just a stick with no need for tilling, and uses companion planting – growing crops together that are mutually beneficial – to limit pests. Her community eats seasonally, thinks of food as “life’s sustainer,” and considers its agriculture “Earth healing.”

“If you’re destroying the Earth, you’re not a farmer as far as our people are concerned,” she said. “You’re a killer.”

Mouths to feed

Some have questioned whether regenerative agriculture can be scaled to the level needed to feed the world’s growing population and claim that input-intensive industrial farming is necessary to make sure people don’t starve. But Gillian Flies, an organic vegetable farmer from Creemore, Ontario, and the president of Canadian Organic Growers, told panellists such arguments are a scare tactic by conventional agriculture. “It’s currently not working,” she said of today’s food landscape. 

Flies, who also co-founded the Farmers for Climate Solutions coalition, said that there is plenty of food but that a lot of it is processed (making poor use of higher-yield products, as Qualman noted), and that regenerative practices can bring old farmland, that has been desertified by industrial agriculture, back into production. 

While regenerative agriculture has attracted a lot of attention for its potential to lock carbon into the soil, the science on just how much carbon it can sequester in the ground is unsettled. Nature’s Path Foods has been piloting the use of Regenerative Organic Certified ingredients in some of its products, though the company’s organic program manager, Dag Falck, told the panel the benefits last only as long as farmers maintain the practices that support the very microbial organisms in soil that draw down carbon. “When we talk about locking carbon in the soil, we’re not locking into the soil forever – only as long as there are healthy organisms in the soil.” 

If you’re destroying the Earth, you’re not a farmer as far as our people are concerned. You’re a killer.

-Terrylynn Brant, founder of Mohawk Seedkeeper Gardens

Data is now coming in to support the shift to low-carbon agriculture, said Gary Csöff, a senior digital agribusiness consultant with IBM. “Data is kind of the new commodity on a lot of farms,” he told the panel. But he said that while momentum is building in support of climate action on farms, there is no silver bullet. “It’s not going to be ‘let’s turn a light switch on’ and all of a sudden we lose a bunch of emissions.”

One key way Canada can bring down emissions in the sector is by moving away from greenhouse-gas intensive livestock agriculture. Innovative cell-based cultured proteins and plant-based alternatives will be central to that effort. Adam Noble, the CEO of biotech start-up Noblegen, is making proteins using a microorganism called Euglena gracilis. “With the world primarily relying on animal sources as our protein source … we can’t afford to do that at the scale we’re going at,” he said. 

Scaling up solutions will require greater government support, noted Flies, pointing out that on a per acre basis Canada invests 73 times less than the EU and 13 times less than the United States on climate-friendly agriculture practices. “We aren’t going to get anywhere quickly without changing policy.”

The post Can we feed a growing planet while cutting agricultural emissions? appeared first on Corporate Knights.

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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