Agriculture takes many forms from wet-rice production in East Asia to cattle ranching in the Americas. In all cases, people are environmental engineers. They change or remove vegetation, re-route water, use fertilizers, and modify the soil.
Today’s agriculture is generally divided into two approaches: traditional and conventional. Traditional farming relies heavily on manual labor, limited machinery, and low-tech methods passed down through generations. Conventional farming is more loosely defined but is focused on scalability, often including genetically modified crops (GMOs), greater reliance on machinery (even going as far as self-driving tractors), and heavy usage of synthetic fertilizers generally composed of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. But there is another type of agriculture that is taking hold on farms from California to India.
Regenerative agriculture combines environmentally responsible and more resilient traditional methods with advanced technologies and data science. It is how these variables are managed that separates regenerative from conventional farming and ranching: Pest management, Pollination, Water & Soil Management, Environmental Resiliency, Economics… [READ FULL WHITE PAPER]