Progress: As we prepare for a future where the global appetite for meat is expected to double by 2050, ranchers must juggle the responsibility of producing nutritious meat while also maintaining and rebuilding the health of ecosystems. In recent years, press reports have questioned the validity of farmers touting “carbon neutral meat” in the wake […]

Health: Since the emergence of the chemical industry after World War II, agriculture has grown increasingly dependent on herbicides and insecticides to control weeds, fungi, and pests that crowd cropland. In 1970, Dr. John Franz, a Monsanto chemist, identified the herbicidal activity of glyphosate, the main active ingredient in Roundup weedkiller. In the time between […]

Progress: Every time a farmer grows cash crops, including corn and soybeans, the plants extract valuable nutrients (nitrogen and phosphorus) from the soil. To keep yields stable, the amount of nitrogen applied to farmland in the form of synthetic fertilizers has risen more than 300 percent in the last 60 years. And between 1973-2014, as […]

Progress: On a global scale, humankind is facing an environmental crisis connected to the way we use and abuse the land. Modern agriculture’s reliance on monocultures (one-crop production systems) threatens the fertility of our soil. And in the long term, these extractive practices threaten the well-being and prosperity of humanity. To prevent this outcome, a […]

Health: When decoupling the roots of our global climate crisis, carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane emissions garner the majority of mainstream media attention. But those are not the only pollutants that pose intractable problems for our planet. For years, scientists have warned about the risks associated with one greenhouse gas (GHG) in particular – nitrous […]

Health: In a recent interview with the MIT Technology Review, Bill Gates struck a chord when he asserted that all “rich countries” should enact legislation requiring citizens to convert to eating “100% synthetic beef” to combat climate change. Ironically, Microsoft, the company Gates himself co-founded, recently purchased more than 40,000 tonnes of sequestered soil carbon […]

Policy: Back in November we covered the Biden Administration’s $2 trillion climate plan that calls for the conservation of 30 percent of the US lands and water by 2030, in addition to a carbon-free electric grid by 2035. Biden campaigned on a plan for rural America that recognized the important role that agriculture must play […]

How Big Food is Moving to Regenerative Agriculture Progress: It is no secret that our centralized food system grants a large amount of influence to a small number of packaged food corporations like Mars and Nestle. These manufacturing giants make daily decisions about where to source ingredients, which not only determine what large, medium, and […]

Farming: In this week’s newsletter, we are addressing the most common question we receive: What is the difference between organic and regenerative farming? Since 2000, the US Department of Agriculture’s National Organic Program (NOP) has offered growers the option to have their goods Organic Certified. In doing so, the NOP has paved the way for […]

Health: For more than 450 million years, mushrooms and fungi have grown beneath our feet – serving as ecological connective tissue. Mycelium – found inside of the greater fungal organism – threads its sprawling root structure through the soil, plant bodies, and along river beds to deliver sustenance to all living species. As a result, […]