The Indigenous Roots of Regenerative Agriculture

Regenerative agriculture (RA) has greatly enhanced global food production and soil health through its advocacy for cover cropping, minimal soil disturbance, increased crop diversity, and animal integration. As a social trend, however, RA can inadvertently eclipse millennia of global Indigenous regenerative practice (IRP) when mistaken as an innovative or novel practice. The underlying principle of RA is that modes of food production can and should leave the soil and the land better than we found it.

Indigenous civilizations worldwide have done this for thousands of years, however, as reflected by prodigious archaeological and paleoecological evidence. Improving soil health, RA’s primary focus, is just one practice mastered by Indigenous communities worldwide. Others include habitat expansion, perpetual systems design, non-human-centrism, strategic augmentation of base trophic levels, methodical application of low-intensity fire, regenerative timber harvesting, and more. The propensity of dominant cultures to marginalize, omit, or misunderstand Indigenous cultural institutions has limited the ability of IRP to influence mainstream food production practices. Because Indigenous practices are (by definition) refined over millennial scales through trial and error, they hold profound institutional and place-based knowledge often lacking within RA. Until the Indigenous roots of RA are fully unpacked and applied, 21st-century RA will lack deeper efficiency and historical accuracy.