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“We have to be producing food while building resilience and rebuilding the health of ecosystems. Steve Rosenzweig, a soil scientist at General Mills, which funded this research, says regenerative agriculture is the best way to meet the company’s goal of reducing greenhouse gases emissions by 30 percent by 2030. “The ‘regenerative’ piece, specifically, is even more contentious because there have been some unscientific claims made about the benefits of regenerative ag,” says Stanley.

“Part of it is putting a dollar value on ,” says Rowntree. The contention surrounding regenerative agriculture’s climate benefits is complex, multi-faceted, and only heightened given efforts to create market incentives around carbon. “At its core, is more a question of values rather than whether or not things improve under model,” says Stanley. And beef raised using rotational grazing is more expensive than conventional commodity beef, and that fact could reduce over demand for it. But improving degraded land is also a critical need for future production. But people who view food production solely through a lens of feeding up to 10 billion people by 2050 tend to focus on the land area needed to do that, she says. No one is denying the improvements shown across soil health metrics, adds Stanley.

student, highlighting some of the more vocal conservation and food production factions. “People will read and take the conclusion with them that fits whatever they already think-whether it be land sparing, land sharing, rewilding, half-Earthers,” says Stanley, a University of California at Berkeley Ph.D. In fact, new research finds that sustainable, optimized grazing and restoration of degraded pasture will be crucial to maintain the cooling effects of grassland carbon sinks. For example, Richard Waite, a senior researcher at World Resources Institute (WRI), pointed out that converting cropland to grazing land will sequester soil carbon for a while, but the growing global demand for crops would limit the ability to realize conversion at the massive scales needed.įor Stanley and her colleagues, the bottom line is simple-the sequestration rate is meaningful, especially since grasslands play such an important role in storing carbon. Critics were quick to note that the study did not confirm net negative greenhouse gas emissions at White Oak Pastures.įurther, some suggested widespread adoption of regenerative agriculture could drive further deforestation to meet beef demand. The beef over beef production can get heated. Still, a lingering debate-about the degree to which regenerative agriculture is a climate change solution, given the added land use-predictably flared up on social media once the new paper was published. The catch is that the regenerative approach requires 2.5 times more land. The findings confirm that multi-species pasture rotations sequester enough carbon in soil to create a greenhouse gas footprint that is 66 percent lower than conventional, commodity production of beef. In November, a group of eight scientists published a comprehensive, peer-reviewed life cycle analysis on the research done at White Oak Pastures. But it hadn’t been peer reviewed-until now. With so few quantitative studies yet conducted, however, the Quantis claims yielded a fair bit of criticism. In recent years, awareness of regenerative practices have been picking up as several groups rush to create labels and certification schemes for farms that claim to be improving the soil and working to draw carbon out of the atmosphere. White Oak Pastures promoted its “carbon negative footprint” in the wake of press reports questioning the validity of carbon neutral beef amid the regenerative agriculture boom. So, the promise of a practice that offsets that methane by storing carbon in the soil is tantalizing to many consumers and industry insiders. In 2019, White Oak and General Mills, which buys the ranch’s beef for its Epic jerky line, published a life-cycle analysis by Quantis, a sustainability consulting group, which claimed the farm “offsets at least 100 percent of grass-fed beef carbon emissions and as much as 85 percent of the farm’s total carbon emissions.”īeef production is a significant source of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, and livestock is responsible for 14.5 percent of human-caused emissions globally, according to the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Now, White Oak Pastures is at the center of a larger conversation about the climate impact of beef and the power of regenerative grazing to store carbon in the soil. Will Harris walks beside his regenerative beef