Our food systems are the nexus of our collective relationships with the environment and with one another. How we harvest, eat, share, and celebrate our food each reflects different facets of our broader cultural story.

Contemporary industrial and globalized approaches to food production are both directly and indirectly implicated in the many different environmental crises that our societies face. It is not the goal of this website to detail the various problems with and myths about industrial agriculture; this is ground well covered elsewhere. Suffice it to say that we cannot continue to produce food as we do, nor can we continue on this growth-quest to endlessly increase food production.

While there seems to be widespread agreement that our food systems need to change, few agree on quite what that change ought to look like. Regenerative systems is one emerging collection of solutions in this conversation; definitions for regenerative agriculture vary and consensus is rare, so I’ve crafted a new framework for understanding regenerative food systems based on the conservation of change principle. Published in Agriculture and Human Values, the paper argues that the regenerative potential of food systems is linked not to specific technologies or practice, per se (though they do matter), but instead is driven by how our food systems are organized.

I’ll get into the framework in a moment, but first some additional thoughts on what people mean when they say regenerative agriculture. In a nutshell, regenerative agriculture refers to a collection of integrated practices for food production that emphasize soil health, carbon sequestration, ecosystem resilience, and nutrient-dense foods. At the heart of regenerative agriculture is a commitment to improving the ecological (and sometimes social) outcomes of agricultural practices, usually starting with soil health as a foundation for addressing issues related to climate change, water quality, land productivity, and biodiversity conservation.

John Ikerd argues that at the heart of regenerative systems is a question of energy. He rightly notes that whenever we use energy, for example eating food, we are transforming that energy from more useful to less useful forms. Living systems are adapted to return energy from less useful to more useful forms, so whether our food systems are regenerative depends on whether our food systems are organized in a way that works with, or against, this capacity.

Flexibility and diversity are two of the most important organizational features of food systems. In this paper I present a framework for making sense of the various possible configurations of food production systems based on the intersection of these features. I identify four archetypical food system configurations: degenerative, impoverished, coerced, and regenerative.

Degenerative regimes are rigid in that they focus on only one or a few resources until they’re overharvested. “Fishing down the foodweb” is a degenerative pattern well known in fisheries

Impoverished regimes are often left in the wake of degenerative ones, for example where colonial settler states come in, degrade resources, and move on, leaving local people to contend with the impoverished and marginalized conditions left behind.

Coerced regimes are among the most common, I think. These are systems like monocultures that actively favour and cultivate one or a few highly valued resources. They can seem sustainable, but in fact require high levels of subsidization and they can become very vulnerable.

Finally, we have regenerative systems, where people are flexible and work with a diversity of resources and accept natural cycles of variability and change. Many regenerative systems, like swidden agriculture, regenerative ranching, and Indigenous fire management, are designed to mimic, or even enhance, the natural cycles of regeneration on the landscape.

The paper explores numerous examples of these regimes, and then offers suggestions based on existing research for how to transform degenerative, coerced, and impoverished regimes into regenerative ones. Hopefully, this new framing provides some clarity and helps address the greenwashing of the regenerative concept that is clearly well underway in the private sector.