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Olivia B

Apr 9, 2025

min read

Regenerative Agriculture: Healing Soils to Heal the World

Regenerative agriculture offers a new way to restore soil health worldwide.

“Regenerative agriculture” is a concept we often hear, but what does it mean and what does it do? To understand its aims, we must first understand soil and its place in the environment. “Soil” and “dirt” are terms often used interchangeably, but they differ in critical ways: put simply, soil is alive while dirt is dead, and we are turning the former into the latter at a high rate. This is concerning and potentially catastrophic for our environment and economy, so the difference is worth exploring in more detail.

Soil vs. Dirt

Soil is a structured, complex, thriving biosphere that supports and promotes all manner of life. Its fertility comes from organic matter that hosts a variety of microorganisms, which in turn create stability in this tiny ecosystem by absorbing carbon, recycling nutrients, and supplying vital resources like water and gas. A healthy soil might take thousands of years to form. It’s also the planet’s second-largest carbon sink, topped only by the oceans.

Dirt, meanwhile, is composed of clay, sand, and silt. The minerals it contains are only accessible to plants once they’ve been processed by microorganisms. Soil might contain dirt, but dirt is not enough to support life on its own. Soil becomes dirt through degradation, which removes its fertile properties and releases its trapped carbon into the atmosphere. In short, soil is a precious and increasingly limited resource.

Soil Degradation: A Global Problem

Alarming metrics are everywhere: Earth's soil is vanishing. According to the FAO, fully a third globally has already degraded. UNESCO projects that 90% of the planet's terrestrial surface could be degraded by 2050. From 2015 to 2019, 100 million hectares were lost annually, totaling an area twice the size of Greenland over those four years. Impoverished areas disproportionately carry this burden: today, Africa bears 40% of our degraded soil, and the rest mostly occupies communities already afflicted by food insecurity.

Poor land management and harmful farming practices over the last century are largely responsible for this damage. For instance, monocropping, growing a single crop year after year, degrades soil by continuously diminishing the same nutrients, killing the microorganisms that could replenish them. Synthetic fertilizers and pesticides like fumigants can also be lethal to soil dwellers (and detrimental to human health, as well). Heavy farm machinery and excessive tillage cause soil compaction and erosion, which hinders water absorption and filtration and makes the land more susceptible to flooding and desertification. Unsurprisingly, this leads to dire consequences not just for the environment but for human livelihoods, and the economy: one study estimated that damage from soil erosion alone globally costs $400 billion per year.

The American Dust Bowl of the 1930s is one potent example of soil degradation’s very real perils. Drought, heat, and corrosive farming methods resulted in severe soil erosion on a massive scale, leading to dust blizzards in the Great Plains that devastated entire states and impoverished millions of people during the Great Depression. The lands affected have still not fully recovered nearly a century later. To avoid repeating history, something must be done to reverse degradation, and here regenerative agriculture enters the picture.

Restoring Soils with Regenerative Agriculture

Where past sustainable farming has focused on simply avoiding degradation, regenerative agriculture aims to not only prevent further damage, but also actively improve the quality of the earth. It strives to offer a holistic approach, starting with the soil but also accounting for the plants, animals, and workers, essentially building agroecosystems that form a mutually beneficial relationship with nature rather than a purely extractive one.

In the micro, regenerative agriculture revitalizes soil by reintroducing organic matter, prioritizing the biodiversity of its inhabitants, encouraging water absorption, and restoring ground nutrients. In the macro, regenerative practices lead to carbon recapture, healthier and more robust crops, less food insecurity, and more economically bountiful yields.

So, what methods does regenerative agriculture use? There are many. Cover cropping maintains soil quality by ensuring the earth is never bare, which decreases erosion during the non-growing season. Intercropping (the practice of growing multiple crops in the same place simultaneously), rotational grazing by livestock, and crop rotation add nutrients to the soil, disrupt pests that thrive on monocrops, and increase yield as well as populations of beneficial bacteria. This allows farmers to use fewer pesticides and synthetic fertilizers, which further keeps soil microbiomes diverse and thriving. Agroforestry protects crops from wind and water damage. Limiting excessive tilling and heavy farm equipment keeps soil absorbent and aerated, potentially garnering greater yields that would eclipse efficiency gains created by those tools.

Many of these methods have long been used by small farms and Indigenous peoples. Native American tribes, for instance, practiced intercropping with the “Three Sisters”: beans, squash, and corn. Now that regenerative agriculture is gaining wider traction, however, we could revolutionize food systems on a global scale — healing soil, boosting economies, and making the future more fertile for all.

Want to learn more? On May 7, the Global Impact Collective will host our next Community Networking Event at Tactile Studios and bring together a panel of regenerative agriculture experts. Join us for a deep discussion of motivations and challenges to adopting regenerative practices, the use of technology, how impact is being measured, the role of policy/standards, and the importance of partnerships and collaboration between businesses and farmers. We hope to see you there!

Agriculture

Unlocking the creative potential of mission-driven organizations

James Bernard
Dec 19, 2023
4 min read

Updated: Jan 4, 2024

At its core, design thinking is a human-centered, iterative approach to problem-solving that places empathy for end-users at the forefront. In many ways, it maps perfectly to the mission of social sector organizations.

Over the last several decades, design thinking has emerged as a potent tool driving innovation and problem-solving across diverse industries. Companies in dozens of sectors, including healthcare, manufacturing, agribusiness, and consumer packaged goods have applied the concepts of design thinking or even built entire internal design organizations to better support their business.

If you are a leader in a mission-driven organization, you may have heard or read about design thinking and wondered how it could apply to your organization. The good news is that social sector organizations—NGOs, nonprofits, charities, and other mission-driven entities—are recognizing the transformative potential of design thinking to address complex societal challenges.

By launching the Global Impact Collective, we seek to capture this important momentum by teaming a diverse group of world-renowned design experts with social impact and sustainability experts. We believe that together, we can help mission-driven organizations unlock their creative potential to solve some of the biggest challenges facing people and the planet.

Here’s why incorporating design-thinking methodologies can be a game-changer for social sector entities.

At its core, design thinking is a human-centered, iterative approach to problem-solving that places empathy for end-users at the forefront. For example, when our co-founder, Steve Kaneko, was designing keyboards and mice for Microsoft, his teams would talk to dozens of consumers and end users before ever considering product features. They then apply the design thinking process to better define the problem, ideate solutions, prototype, and test—all aimed at building products that would be both innovative and functional. Design thinking encourages creativity, collaboration, and a deep understanding of the root causes of problems.

Below are six reasons that you should consider design thinking as a part of your organization’s planning and program development:

1. Embracing Human-Centric Solutions

Social sector organizations are dedicated to serving communities and addressing critical societal, environmental, equity, or economic issues. Design thinking aligns seamlessly with these objectives because – by its nature design thinking places the needs and experiences of beneficiaries at the center. At the end of the day, social sector organizations serve people. The programs you create must be relevant to those people. Using this process and empathizing with the people you aim to help, these organizations can gain profound insights, leading to more effective, contextually relevant interventions.

2. Iterative Problem-Solving

Complex social challenges often lack straightforward solutions. For example, a lack of affordable housing in many US cities, combined with a lack of mental health and drug rehabilitation programs, has led to a greater number of homeless people. Design thinking thrives in such ambiguous and complex environments because it fosters an empathetic, iterative, and collaborative approach. Following the pandemic, Surya Vanka, a partner at the Global Impact Collective, was asked by the City of Seattle to organize and facilitate a series of workshops focused on homelessness in the region. These sessions included input from advocates, government organizations, non-profits, neighborhood groups, and the unhoused themselves. Through this process, solutions were continuously refined and evolved based on feedback, learning, and real-world testing, culminating in a new understanding of the issues surrounding homelessness, especially for women, and innovative new solutions.

3. Encouraging Collaborative Innovation

Cross-disciplinary collaboration is a hallmark of design thinking; in fact, you will land on better results if you involve organizations and stakeholders from outside your own. By involving diverse perspectives—ranging from beneficiaries to stakeholders, volunteers, experts, and community members—organizations can unlock a wealth of creative ideas and approaches. This collaborative environment encourages fresh insights and promotes a collective sense of ownership in addressing societal problems.

4. Flexibility and Adaptability

Social sector organizations often face evolving external challenges that can be influenced by multifaceted factors. In the Seattle example above, organizations were dealing with much post-pandemic uncertainty, a slow economic recovery, an increase in opioid addictions, as well as a new mayoral administration. Because design thinking is a very adaptable and adaptive process, organizations can pivot and adapt swiftly to changing circumstances. It encourages a mindset that welcomes change and embraces experimentation, fostering resilience in navigating uncertain environments.

5. Problem Redefinition and Deep Understanding

Design thinking challenges organizations to redefine problems by delving deeper into their root causes. It encourages reframing issues, asking probing questions, and seeking nuanced insights. This process often unveils unconventional solutions by challenging preconceived notions about the nature of the problem.

6. Impact Measurement and Validation

For social sector entities, demonstrating impact for funders, board members, partners, and beneficiaries is critical. Design thinking emphasizes prototyping and testing solutions in real-world settings. This approach facilitates continuous feedback loops, enabling organizations to measure the effectiveness of interventions and validate their impact, thus ensuring resource allocation towards solutions that truly make a difference.

While the benefits are evident, adopting design thinking in the social sector comes with challenges. Limited resources, hierarchical structures, and resistance to change might impede its implementation. However, overcoming these hurdles through leadership buy-in, capacity-building, and a commitment to fostering a culture of innovation can pave the way for its successful integration.

In a landscape fraught with intricate societal challenges, social sector organizations stand as catalysts for positive change. Embracing design thinking methodologies empowers these entities to innovate, collaborate, and craft sustainable solutions that truly resonate with the communities they serve. By placing empathy, creativity, and adaptability at the forefront, design thinking becomes not just a methodology but a mindset—an approach that fuels transformative impact in the pursuit of a better world.