A Cautionary Tale: What Regenerative Agriculture Can Learn from the Organic Movement
This is the second post in a series exploring the agricultural revolution we need. In our first post, we established the crisis of chemical agriculture and why returning to an agriculture based on biology could transform food production. Here, we reckon honestly with how we got here, why previous movements that promised transformation fell short — and what regenerative agriculture must do differently.
by Sallie Calhoun
The System We’re Trying to Change
To appreciate what went wrong, it helps to understand what’s at stake biologically. Healthy soils communicate with plants, delivering precise nutrients through microbiome interactions. Healthy plants develop natural immunity to pests and disease. Thriving microbial communities in roots and leaves allow plants to use less water while producing more. It becomes a virtuous circle that cannot exist alongside agrichemicals and bare ground. Synthetic fertilizers destroy soil microbiomes, weakened plants become more vulnerable to pests and pathogens, and toxic pesticides eliminate the beneficial insects and above-ground biological communities that hold everything together. The result is a treadmill that demands ever-increasing inputs to maintain yields while degrading the very systems that make farming possible.
This is the context in which previous reform movements arose — and why understanding their limits is so critical.
Learning from History’s Cautionary Tales
The story of organic agriculture over the past fifty years offers crucial lessons for the regenerative movement. In the 1970s, a small group of farmers recognized the consequences of post-World War II agricultural practices and launched what became the organic movement.
Their approach centered on the idea that food grown without chemicals would be healthier for people and planet – and therefore deserved a premium in the marketplace. But this required creating an entirely separate infrastructure running parallel to the conventional system—separate silos, train cars, processing lines, and products. Because they operated entirely separately, with different methods and fundamentally different goals, the organic system never meaningfully changed the conventional system. The result: about 1% of US agricultural land is certified organic, a figure that isn’t growing, and organic food remains accessible only to affluent consumers willing to pay premium prices.
The national organic standards, intended as a minimum, became a ceiling that has been continually lowered since the 1990s. Industrialized organic operations entered the field and met minimum requirements by maintaining the same fundamental mindset and simply replacing synthetic inputs with organic ones. Without a clear definition of soil health, the explicit goal of organic agriculture was largely abandoned. The organic transition can become a three-year process that farmers complete rather than an ongoing journey.
The sustainability movement presents an even more challenging example. As global crises deepened and sustainability became a buzzword, agriculture responded with changes that represent only a fraction of what’s actually required. Major players jumped on the sustainability bandwagon, created certifications that require minimal tweaks, declared their production sustainable, and moved on without fundamental change. Sustainability became a marketing layer over business as usual, rather than genuine transformation.
We should note: there are many who farm with the original integrity of the early organic movement (rooted in context and biology), some of whom have never engaged in any kind of certification process – whether it be organic, or any of the other related certifications like Biodynamic, Certified Naturally Grown, etc… We hold up and celebrate these farmer as heroes trying to infiltrate and change the dominate system, and acknowledge how hard it has been for them to function in a system that wasn’t designed for them to thrive
The Challenge Ahead
The lessons from organic and sustainability movements are clear: parallel premium systems and minimal-change certifications will not address the scale of crisis we face. Regenerative agriculture must become the new conventional agriculture, not an alternative to it.
Organic’s mistake wasn’t just creating standards—it was building an entire economic model around consumer premiums that only the affluent could afford, creating separate infrastructure that never threatened the conventional system. If regenerative follows this path, it will simply remain another niche market, perhaps stealing organic’s customers while leaving industrial agriculture untouched.
That’s precisely why how we scale this movement matters as much as whether we scale it. In our next post, we’ll explore what a transformation framework actually requires — and why protecting regenerative agriculture’s integrity while growing it rapidly may be the defining challenge of this moment.