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Olivia B

Apr 9, 2025

3

min read

Regenerative Agriculture: Healing Soils to Heal the World

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

Regenerative Agriculture: Healing Soils to Heal the World

“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

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  • Writer: James Bernard
    James Bernard
  • Jan 8, 2024
  • 3 min read

We’re excited to have just launched the Global Impact Collective, a consultancy focused on helping your organization use design thinking to shape a world where people have access to safe, reliable food sources that reduce waste; where high-quality healthcare is available to all; and where climate change can be addressed through innovation. 

 

Our Team has decades of collective experience working with some of the most impactful organizations in the world. We’ve seen firsthand the power of design thinking as a way to drive innovation – now we want to help you apply this to impact and sustainability programs at your organization.   

 

We will work with a variety of organizations of any size and scale. Read on to see how.  

 

Are you attending GreenBiz 24 in Phoenix in February? We’re conducting a circularity workshop on the first day of the conference. We’d love to connect with you in person any time that week!  


Companies with a mission-driven ethos 

 

Companies can prosper and do good in the world. In fact, that’s exactly what employees, shareholders, and consumers expect. Over the last decade, worked with dozens of companies that have a mission-driven ethos, including Unilever, Cargill, PepsiCo, and others. 

 

An example of how this plays out: At Microsoft, I headed up Partners in Learning, a global program that worked with teachers and school leaders to use effectively in classrooms. We trained millions of teachers, school leaders, and policymakers.  

 

Founding Advisor Don Coyner also worked in Microsoft Education, helping design relevant products for teachers, including Teams for Education, OneNote, Immersive Reader and the Reading Coach. Don recalls how important it was to visit a variety of schools to see the challenges that teachers face when using new technologies in diverse classrooms.    

 

If you work for a company – whatever size -with a mission-driven ethos, we can help you infuse human-centered design into future product, program, and partnership development. Our expertise in product development, industrial design, user experience, conservation, partnerships, branding, and storytelling means we will bring a multi-dimensional approach your work, ensuring that future solutions are designed, first and foremost, with the human experience in mind.  

 

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New forms of private philanthropy and investment have recently taken shape, including impact investments, taking equity in small businesses, and other investment vehicles. If you work at a foundation or family office, we can help you use design thinking to ensure that you are deploying resources to the most impactful initiatives around the world. 

 

Co-founder Carey Renn worked for 16 years at Vulcan, Paul Allen’s investment, innovation and philanthropic organization. She and her team led many of the major social impact and conservation efforts across multiple sectors of interest to Paul. Carey led the development of the Allen Brain Atlas, was instrumental in the launch of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, led the launch of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, the Great Elephant Census, Earth Ranger, Sky Light, and several other initiatives at the intersection of conservation and technology.   

 

Carey epitomizes what sets the Collective apart: her formal training in neuroscience, which evolved into technology and human centered design, allowing her to carve out a unique niche at the convergence of science, data, technology, and discovery. This extensive experience positions her take on the challenges the Collective looks to address.  

 

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Nonprofits often have the best perspective on what people need in a community – they are the eyes and ears with true local perspective. Founding Advisor Surya Vanka has worked with numerous non-profits to deploy design solutions, including an organization focused on girls' education in Sierra Leone and a group working on homelessness in Seattle.  

 

Our partner, Judith Hochhauser Schneider, led corporate partnerships for the World Wildlife Fund, working with the likes of Walmart, Coca-Cola, and Starbucks on environmental sustainability programs. Each of these companies, and their corporate foundations, are making significant investments in improving supply chain transparency, increasing circularity, and driving conservation efforts.  

 

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Government agencies are investing in new technologies, both domestically and internationally, leading to more efficient delivery of government service and improvement of lives in emerging economies. With the growth of better connectivity and access around the world, we believe there’s unlimited potential to apply human-centered design principles with government organizations. 

 

I once worked on a donor-funded tech platform called OpenLMIS that helped governments in developing countries ensure delivery of medicines to remote clinics. The success of the partnership was dependent on understanding the needs of health workers, ministry officials, patients, and others in the supply chain, many of whom had limited connectivity, literacy, and access to electricity. 

 

If you work for a government institution, we’d love to help you consider the best options for designing new tools, platforms, apps, programs, and approaches to your audience.  

 

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