Regenerating What Works: New Focus on Ancient Idea of Farming to Improve Soil

Photos by Michael Piazza

REGENERATIVE AGRICULTURE. It’s a term that’s popped up frequently in the last few years—so popular that King Arthur has introduced a new flour called Regeneratively-Grown Climate Blend and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s website devoted a page to explaining it. But what does it mean? Is it the answer to saving the environment? Fighting climate disaster? Or just a fancy term for something farmers have been doing for decades, if not millenia? To Michael Zueger of Free Living Farm in Petersham, “Regenerative farming is making a comeback.” To others, like Steve Verrill of Verrill Farms in Concord, it’s the way he’s always farmed.

Looking at the term from the ground up, so to speak, most New England farmers view improving their soil as the entry point to regeneration. Although soil health is probably not the top priority for most consumers at the Somerville Winter Farmers Market shopping for turnips, sweet potatoes, honey and some greens on a frosty winter Saturday, farmer Andrew Johnson of Good Food Farm in Ashby does consider the soil. His winter crops can’t compare to the bounty of summer, but they’re a welcome sight to consumers who snap up all that’s available. For Johnson, the resilience of his crops connects directly to his beliefs: Healthy soil is a way to not only foster good environmental practices but insure healthy plants. “We focus,” Johnson says, “on giving the plants what they need” to withstand weather and pests.

In his small operation, soil testing is important to determine what elements the soil might be lacking, such as phosphorus, or micronutrients like silicon or iron, early in the season. Later, the soil might be fertilized with fish emulsion or compost teas. Residue from laying hens that are rotated on fields around the farm in warmer months and the hay they nest on in the barn in the winter “closes the loop” to produce rich compost. He gets straw from a dairy farm in Vermont and the mulch from that “does a lot to prevent erosion,” and helps to retain moisture.

Johnson is hoping to increase his acreage so he can practice crop rotation and to utilize more cover crops, interspersing vegetable plots with those planted in cover crops that enrich the soil and let it rest before the next growing cycle.

The ability to rotate vegetable crops, grains and animals benefits Freedom Food Farm in Raynham, says farmer Chuck Currie, who also sells an abundance of vegetables, grain products and meat at the Somerville Winter Farmers Market, and elsewhere in summer and fall. Currie grows vegetables on five and a half acres but leases 90 acres under the Agricultural Preservation Restriction program, much of it devoted to hay and pasture. Sheep and cattle are rotated on the pastureland, and overwintered in barns. The hay bedding and manure are used for compost, and grasses and clover are used for green mulch.

“Leaving the ecosystems and soil in better shape than you found it,” is Currie’s philosophy, and a key goal of regenerative ag. “Ideally, we’re creating fertility on the farm.” His tenets echo others who practice regenerative farming—mostly no-till, covering the soil as much as possible, controlling weeds with mulch and promoting biodiversity. There is “more life in the soil,” he says, adding that it holds water better and the crops are healthier.

Zueger, who owns Free Living Farm with his wife, Cara, views his work as kind of an intricate dance to enhance his land’s ecosystem. The plants have “a vibrant connection to the soil,” he says, and getting that soil into balance to produce healthy vegetables is his aim. He also tests his soil to determine what nutrients might be needed, whether it be rock-, plant- or animal-based, so that “the plants generally grow better.”

A native of northwestern Illinois, Zueger saw the way large Midwestern farms use artificial fertilizers and herbicides to scale up operations in the service of efficiency, and thinks that soil health has often been compromised. In autumn, he plants oats, peas, clover, winter rye and hairy vetch as cover crops to help smother weeds and add nutrients. Then, as the growing season begins, he invests in mulch and compost, endeavoring to keep the soil covered in all seasons.

Steve Verrill is an old hand at farming: He took over his father’s Concord dairy farm, established in 1918, after he graduated from Cornell University in 1957. As the dairy industry waned in New England, the farm changed over to vegetables, and now Verrill’s corn, tomatoes and other vegetables, farmed on about 150 acres, are sold wholesale to restaurants and at the large farm stand near Nine Acre Corner. When asked about regenerative farming, he smiles, and says simply that Verrill Farm does “mostly the same things we’ve always done.” The soil is tested every two years, cover cropping is used yearly, and the residue is plowed under.

“My farm manager and I disagree,” Verrill says. The manager thinks no-till—or planting into the residue of cover crops without disturbing the soil—is best, but Verrill thinks that plowing the cover crop under adds invaluable nutrients. Composting is still key, he says, adding “I miss the cows,” whose manure once enriched the compost. Now horse manure from a farm up the road is mixed with vegetable compost.

His mantra is simple: “Keeping the cover on the ground, maintaining the nutrients, doing tillage so it doesn’t disturb the soil too much, and making sure the rain doesn’t run off when it comes.”

To Jennifer Hashley—director of New Entry Sustainable Farming, which trains and aids beginning farmers—the term regenerative agriculture is more a reframing of what good farmers have already been doing than something new. Any success is a long-term goal, she thinks, because there’s “no instant money in, and out” in farming.

She points out that cover cropping, crop rotation and enhancing soil health are all practices used for years in the teaching programs and incubator farm plots in North Beverly. Though the terminology might have shifted, “we haven’t changed,” Hashley says of the New Entry program, an initiative of Tufts University School of Nutrition Science and Policy. On New Entry’s small plots, it’s difficult to do crop rotation since the farmers need to grow as much produce as possible. But Hashley says it’s being introduced as a way to aid soil health.

Animals, especially cows, are sometimes controversial in today’s environmental discussions because of methane from their waste and the amount of land needed to raise them. In the past, family farms used manure from cows and chickens to enrich soil over time, but today, as Hashley says: “It’s really hard to do the animal piece.” She and her family live at Codman Community Farm in Lincoln, where her husband, Pete Lowy, is the farm manager. There, besides other regenerative soil practices, the farm uses pigs to “do renovation” since they root out horse nettle and other invasive plants; goats clear out weeds. This prepares fields for cows that in turn provide manure to eventually use in composting. But there are a lot of challenges because animal waste must age before being used as part of compost and this requires sufficient space, time and equipment.

Ryan Harb, a renewable-energy project developer from Amherst, acknowledges that some consider the methane from large farm animals’ waste to be an environmental problem. However, “figuring ways to take something that might be bad” and use it to produce energy can “turn a problem into a solution.” Methane from animal waste is an energy source used for cooking and heating in parts of the world, and in the United States it’s increasingly being harnessed for energy. However, on the small-acreage farms in the Northeast—where it may not be possible to have the equipment to capture methane from the waste of large numbers of animals—using animal nutrients can cut or eliminate the need for artificial fertilizers.

Although all of these methods can move toward regenerative agriculture, there are some who chafe at the slow progress. “Good ideas have been around for a long time,” says Tim Griffin, who heads the Agriculture, Food and Environmental program at Tufts as well as teaching there. In past years, “we wouldn’t have called it regenerative agriculture, we would have called it conservation.”

It’s not that Griffin doesn’t applaud enhancing the soil or conserving water. But, he says, “we need to go further than that.”

Enhancing the soil, eliminating or reducing tillage, planting cover crops, utilizing animal waste—these methods can be part of regeneration, but he thinks it’s time to link all the practices in both small vegetable farms and large single-crop farms in the Midwest and elsewhere. “Can we do this at a big enough scale to make a difference?” he asks. “I’m looking for all the options, not just some of them.”

Griffin points to President Biden’s Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack as trying to encourage dialogue on the future of agriculture by bringing together agriculture, business and consumer groups. “We don’t have to agree about everything about regenerative agriculture,” he says, but the conversations need to begin.

Griffin thinks the efforts toward regeneration are too segmented, but when asked if he’s optimistic, he says that his students would say he is. “We know the things that are harmful and what can be done,” Griffin says.

“Let’s learn from the past and move to the future.”

codmanfarm.org
freedomfoodfarm.com
freelivingfarm.com
thegoodfood.farm
nesfp.nutrition.tufts.edu
verrillfarm.com

This story appeared in the Spring 2025 issue.