When it comes to regenerative agriculture, Kevin Elmy says good data up front makes it easier to track what’s working — and what’s not.
With rising input costs producers are looking at incorporating regenerative agricultural management practices into their operations. There are examples of producers successfully weaning their land from high use of synthetic inputs and tillage, but where do you begin? What are the first steps? How do we do it without losing the farm?
The concept of regenerative agriculture is to increase the resilience of our soils, reducing reliance on chemical inputs, and improve profitability. Sounds like a golden egg, but how do we start down the path? First step is to identify what you want to improve. What are the production issues you face? Are they soil constraints? Climate? Next, you need to determine if that issue is a symptom of the problem or the actual cause. If it is a symptom, the solution will not fix the actual problem. You need to dig deeper, or there may be more than one cause of the problem.
For example, low water infiltration rates. It may be due to low soil aggregate stability, relating back to a bacterially dominated soil. But if we only use shallow rooted species to address it, a compaction layer below the rooting depth may be the main cause of the low water infiltration. We need to create a plan, do baseline measurements, execute your plan, observe any changes, measure late in the season, and then reevaluate the plan’s success.
Another issue in moving forward can be bottlenecks, something unnoticed that will impede our progression. Things such as salinity, nutrient or microbial deficiencies and imbalances, low plant diversity, rotation, tillage, or synthetic input usage. These bottlenecks need to be addressed before success can be achieved.
Some of the bottlenecks can be attributed to creating more damage than you are fixing. Using the soil aggregate example, having a vegetative plant growing builds aggregates, but by using fungicides, excessive tillage, over fertilizing, and using anhydrous ammonia as a fertilizer source, you will destroy soil aggregates — potentially faster than you can rebuild them.
Using a tight rotation of low carbon-returning crops like canola will reduce soil aggregation, creating compaction and slow water infiltration. A systems view is needed to see how your system works and evaluate the implications of changing management. There may be a series of management changes to start seeing positive results.
When you’re trying out regenerative practices, it’s important not to rely on just one measurement to judge whether things are improving. For example, if you only check how quickly water soaks into the soil (infiltration rate) and don’t see much change after one season, that doesn’t necessarily mean your efforts aren’t working.
Soil health is complex, and improvement often shows up in other ways first. You might notice fewer weeds, better soil structure (less compaction), improved nutrient levels, better nutrient exchange (cation exchange capacity), more water retention, and more air spaces in the soil — all of which support stronger crops over time.
Also, don’t judge success based on a single year. Changes like these pay off over a full crop rotation. Some benefits (like reduced input costs or improved drought resilience) take time to show up in your bottom line.
Just looking at one year may not give a true indication of the value of the change in management. What does increasing soil aggregate stability return financially in the first year? Maybe something, but over a rotation, being able to store more soil moisture will help reduce drought stress and prop up yields in moisture-deficient areas. Reduced weed pressure is often noticed quicker, because being able to use less expensive herbicides or lower rates, or better yet reduce the number of passes, can be translated to economic numbers faster.
Doing more aggressive changes like livestock integration will take a few levels of calculations because it is a more dramatic change. Adding livestock creates a new income stream, whether it is owned livestock or custom grazing, and will change nutrient cycling speed. This will change the nutrient applications for the next crops, change the potential weed pressure, water infiltration, and rotation. If improperly integrated, then you face overgrazing leaving the soil exposed to erosion, compaction issues, weed infestations, and animals getting out of the fencing. Feces and urine in the soil can influence nutrient availability for a few years so reduced reliance on synthetic fertility will be reduced. Over application of manure can create problems like over supply and imbalances of nutrients, compaction, salinity, and weed growth.
Researchers are looking at the beneficial weight of different practices on the rate of change of different soil properties. Working on it, not quite the end all cure all solution yet, but they are working on it. This will help you determine what practices you should consider implementing in changing your management system. It will be up to you to figure out the benefits of doing the change, within the boundaries of the economic and logistical parameters your operation has.
Easing into a more regenerative management system makes the most sense for most operations. It reduces the stress of major sudden changes, emotional, economic, and logistical. Doing things differently will create the potential for different outcomes. Focus on an issue, find the potential causes of it, and look for solutions to potentially fix it. If it is out of our management, like drought, ask what management steps can we do to reduce the impact of it. It may be including new management or stopping old management. Look at natural systems and see if your issue is a problem in nature. Most of our problems are created by us, including weed and disease issues by the overuse of biocides and synthetic fertilizer trying to manage using chemistry instead of biology.
Take a small parcel of land to apply different management to it for a series of years, like a rotation time frame. Try to do more building practices while minimizing the damage we do to the soil system. Monitor and observe what changes. Once the system starts to heal, problems start to disappear. Problems indicate the system is damaged. Time to start changing to allow the system to become functional again.
