These trends are corroborated in a 2022 study published in PeerJ, stating that regenerative farms produced crops with higher levels of organic soil matter, soil health scores, and levels of certain vitamins, minerals and phytochemicals. Healthy soils have increased water-holding capacity, which means rainfall on a regenerative farm is captured and stored by the soil, rather than causing run-off and erosion. Although it varies depending on soil type, according to the United States Department of Agriculture, every 1% increase in organic soil matter helps soil hold 20,000 gallons more water per acre — notable for a water-intensive industry like fashion, which counts reducing water usage as a major sustainability hurdle, and is susceptible to both flooding and drought in the natural fiber production stage.
Biodiversity
“One of the first things that you end up seeing as you start to transition to a regenerative farming system, whether it’s croplands, rangelands, orchards, or vineyards, is that life comes back first,” says Lundgren.
While it is widely accepted that regenerative agriculture can reverse the trend of declining farmland biodiversity in industrial agriculture systems — across plant life, birds, and insects — the supporting evidence from long-term, field scale studies is rare.
Early data from 1,000 Farms shows regenerative farms support more than twice the bird species of conventional farms, four and a half times the insect species, and nearly 20 times the plant species. This was on display at Jigsaw Farms in southwestern Victoria, Australia. For years, as farmers Mark Wootton and Eve Kantor implemented a range of regenerative practices, pollinators and wildlife returned. Eckard worked with them to quantify the changes they were seeing; they went “from something like 34 bird species on the property to 176 bird species”, he says. Diverse ecosystems and the return of pollinators enhance natural pest and disease control, improve animal welfare, and make landscapes more resilient to extreme weather events.
Carbon sequestration
According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, livestock accounts for 14.5% of greenhouse gas emissions each year. The most contentious claim made by regenerative agriculture’s proponents relates to the potential for carbon sequestration to mitigate the industry’s emissions, on both rangelands and croplands. Several brands have even used regenerative agriculture to imply that their products are “carbon positive”, as the carbon sequestered outweighs that emitted.
Healthy soils do sequester carbon (or carbon dioxide equivalents), as do trees and plants. While the science behind tree carbon is reliable, what scientists struggle to agree on is how long carbon stays in the soil, and whether or not carbon can continue to be sequestered, indefinitely.
“Carbon can’t be built forever. We see the biggest gains in those initial years [of switching to regenerative management] and we typically see bigger gains in a more degraded system,” says Dr. Shelby McClelland, a researcher and lecturer at Stony Brook University’s school of marine and atmospheric sciences. Eventually, the carbon stores in the soil and plant biomass will reach what’s called a new steady state.
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