What is Regenerative Agriculture?

Regenerative Agriculture is a term that we hear a lot today. It comes up in conversations about agriculture, climate change, food systems and even human health. It’s a phrase that has as many different meanings as the number of people talking about it. What does regenerative agriculture mean and what does it look like on the ground? Hopefully this post will shed some light on how we think about it on the Mannix Ranch.

We are all familiar with the term sustainability. Maintaining a practice indefinitely without destroying land or depleting resources is sustainable. It makes sense that businesses, especially farms and ranches, strive for sustainability. After all, they depend on the land for their livelihood. If their resources, the very land itself, are deteriorating, then they threaten the viability of their operation long term. While sustainability of farms, ranches, and rural communities is an obvious goal, it is still a challenging reach. Complex environments, changing economies, and diminished rural communities make caring for these resources incredibly difficult. 

Regenerative and sustainable agriculture are often used interchangeably, but regenerative goes beyond sustainability. Many of the ecosystems and rural communities that we live in are already functioning below desirable levels. Only sustaining those systems, while challenging, may not be enough. We may have to build them back up, regenerate them, and make them more resilient in order to survive future challenges. Regenerative agriculture is not a one size fits all practice, it is a way of thinking and way to approach problems. There are no wholesale, fix-all strategies that are innately regenerative. The active and ever changing work of using planned, adaptive management strategies that help us build (or regenerate) topsoil, increase biodiversity, improve mineral and water cycles, and increase biosequestration is regenerative. Regenerative practices are any kind of practices that yield those results. 

How then do we know if certain operations are going beyond sustainability? Is a ranch “regenerative?” No one person or operation is going to be successful at being regenerative 100% of the time. Nature is incredibly complex and we know and understand very little in the scheme of things. What is crucial is that as land stewards, we have regenerative mindsets. We must be committed to the lifelong uphill climb to leave our land better. We learn new things every day so as the Maya Angelou adage goes “Do the best you can until you know better. When you know better, do better.”

Neil Mannix is working to install a new water tank. Water is often a limiting factor to better grazing management.

A shot of the fish ladder that was installed at the Raymond Ranch, belonging to our Matriarch Darlene Mannix. It was a collaborative effort with the Big Blackfoot Chapter of Trout Unlimited and many other partners.

The third photo is of the sheep that come and graze for spotted knapweed control during June and July. This is a partnership with the Baucus family of Sieben Ranch.

A fence line image of our May and June calving first-calf heifers. These cattle were moved daily and calved out on green grass for the first time in 2021. The shorter grass on the righthand side was the pasture they had just finished.

It often seems that ranches are lumped into a category of “regenerative” or traditional (“non-regenerative”), but that is a gross oversimplification. As land stewards, ranchers are all striving to balance economic, environmental, and social resilience. Hopefully we are continually moving the dial, however slowly, in the right direction. These conversations can also come with a litany of practices that an operation “must” be doing in order to be coined as regenerative, such as: intensive grazing, no-till farming, direct-to-consumer marketing, winter grazing and never feeding hay, summer calving, not using antibiotics, etc. While many of those practices can create regenerative results, they cannot be applied in the same way in every environment and in all situations and be expected to yield the same results.  For example, a rancher selling beef to the commodity market and using antibiotics to treat sickness, may be more regenerative than a grass-fed, all natural, producer if they are managing grazing more effectively. The superior grazing management of the rancher selling to the commodity market may be building more soil, increasing more biodiversity, enhancing water and mineral cycling, and sequestering more carbon than their grass-fed counterpart. It is still possible to sell grass-fed beef locally and degrade land. These practices, as well as countless others, are simply tools. They can be selected, used, and adapted to attempt to improve an operation. Once implemented, their efficacy must be monitored, and, given how slowly land changes, those small gains are often hard to see. Many operations deal with this challenge by forming biological and soil monitoring programs that collect data and photo points over time. They allow managers to see small changes in ground cover, biodiversity, or water infiltration that would otherwise be missed in a typical walk through the pasture. 

While collecting data from a monitoring plot in the the summer of 2021 we noticed better soil aggregation and more earth worms at this location. When this site was last monitored 2-3 years beforehand, we had noticed that this sight had a build up of thatch that was not breaking down as quickly as we would like to see. The soil was also too wet and felt a bit slimy. Bryan Mannix made some changes both in grazing management and in irrigation and we are pleased with the results!

As a family we certainly strive to do no harm to our land, but we don’t just want to leave it at that. We really want to leave it better than when we began stewarding it. As a family we feel that we have been particularly blessed to have been raised by generations of people that have stewarded with that intention for many years, they have gifted us the culture of a regenerative mindset. It is our responsibility, then, to search for tools and management strategies that will keep moving us gradually in the right direction. We will certainly not be “regenerative” 100% of the time. We can select tools, adapt them to our environment, implement them, monitor the results, and then be ready to adapt them again as necessary. This process is very rarely clear and simple, and instead is complex and messy. If we do this intentionally, we hope that the end result moves us closer to our regenerative goals. 

-Erica