Regenerative agriculture means health and wealth

SYCAMORE, Ill. — The Midwest is strategically positioned to be a solar collector with adequate water resources to grow healthy plants.

“Our job in agriculture is to harvest sunlight,” said Emily Heaton, professor of crop sciences at the University of Illinois and director of the Illinois Regenerative Agriculture Initiative.

“We use plants to harvest sunlight and turn it into forms of stored chemical energy that we do something with later, whether it’s to feed us, feed an animal, run a car or build a house,” said Heaton during a presentation at the Illinois Crop Management Conference, hosted by U of I Extension.

Plants use carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

“They make something out of nothing and as they do that plants connect the atmosphere and the geosphere,” Heaton said. “We wouldn’t have nutrients in our soil layer if it wasn’t for plants bringing those up and cycling them.”

“And we wouldn’t have water in our soil layers, particularly in areas like the Midwest that are far from big bodies of water on the coast, if evapotranspiration didn’t pull up deep water and recycle it,” she said. “So, if we lose plants, we lose rain.”

Regenerative agriculture is based on the cycling of carbon and nitrogen, as well as energy and water through the system.

“Grasslands help to make our rich soils and animal action is part of the reason we have the soils we do,” Heaton said. “Separating animals from plants is a recipe for failure so putting them back together must be done for sustainability, but it’s not easy.”

Heaton talked about six principles of regenerative agriculture that include managing holistically, integrating livestock, minimizing disturbance, maximizing diversity, maintaining living roots and keeping the soil covered.

“Managing holistically is not easy, but we try to think about the crop and animal operations as part of the whole operation,” she said. “We want to use all the sunlight and land we have year around and use all the tools we have as much of the time as we can.”

One example is the addition of cover crops to the crop rotation. Heaton talked about a study of farmers who planted cover crops after soybeans and overall there was not a huge change in net returns.

“But some people saw negative $100 to plus $50 increase in the value of their soybean yield the next year,” she said. “Some people were doing a bad job when they incorporated cover crops and some were boosting their soybean yield, so there’s potential to do it right.”

Some farmers also had extra revenue from grazing.

“They boosted the value $150 per acre so it’s not trivial,” Heaton said. “But it doesn’t mean it’s easy; it takes more management.”

Some new crops may help farmers with regenerative agriculture practices.

“There is a new hybrid rye that has been grown in the Netherlands and Belgium and is now being grown across the upper Midwest for grain and forage,” Heaton said. “Kernza is a perennial intermediate wheatgrass that has a good nutritional profile and it is great for improving water quality.”

A perennial rice is now grown in China.

“They get three to four crops before it has to be replanted,” Heaton said. “That’s a huge water savings because they don’t have to flood irrigate during the planting stage every year.”

Integrating livestock into operations can impact soil health.

“This study shows they didn’t find an increase in soil organic carbon unless they added animals,” Heaton said. “Rotational grazing accumulated more soil organic carbon, 18% to 29% higher, than all annual cropping systems after 29 years of management.”

However, crops and livestock don’t always help infiltration due to surface compaction.

“The key to realize infiltration benefits is you have to move your animals so they don’t compact the soil,” Heaton said.

To maintain living roots in the soil year-round, farmers may add crops like kernza, which can grow in temperatures down to 33 degrees.

“We can have crops making use of times like this,” Heaton said. “Putting living roots in the soil along with the microbial community fosters healthy soils.”

The plant and microbe interactions are key to keeping plants that grow in those soils healthy, the university professor said.

“In fields where we had four-year rotations of corn, soybeans, oats and alfalfa, we didn’t see any sudden death syndrome,” she said. “But in the two-year rotation of corn and soybeans, the soybeans got wiped out.”

Keeping the microbial community diverse, Heaton said, provides insurance.

“It also means their pooping, dying and covering the soil in particles are going to protect the aggregates, which then give space for more microbes to grow and for the water to infiltrate, so the soil is a healthy apartment complex for creatures,” Heaton said.

“My definition of regenerative agriculture is health and wealth,” she said. “It means healthy soils, fields, people, communities, ecosystems and all of those need to generate wealth and retain it for organisms that live in those places.”