‘Medicine to the Land’: How Regenerative Agriculture Might Help Avert Disaster

Grant Breitkreutz drops a weighty block of soil into my hands. It’s my second day of Soil Health School at Stoney Creek, his Minnesota farm that’s often considered a model for a more sustainable way of growing crops and raising animals.

Much of America’s soil—and the world’s—is ailing, depleted of nutrients by conventional farming practices and less and less able to host healthy crops. But this particular football-sized chunk of rich-smelling dark earth in my hands, filled with holes that mark the passage of earthworms, roots spreading throughout, with variations in color and texture and a tiny whitish pocket of fungal activity? This is what healthy soil looks like.

Grant has just dug it out of a pasture that used to be home to conventional row crops but has been revitalized using what are known as regenerative farming practices. Proponents of regenerative farming describe it as a holistic approach designed to support biodiversity, improve soil, preserve water, reduce pollution, store planet-warming carbon in the earth, use fewer chemicals, produce a more diverse mix of crops, improve the lives of farmers and their communities, and even perhaps boost the nutritional value of our food.