Response to Criticisms of Regenerative Grazing

There have been criticisms about regenerative grazing systems and their ability to sequester greenhouse gases to assist our climate change efforts. These criticisms stem from academics steeped in the current industrial agriculture systems.

They are part of the push to blame livestock farming for greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and for policies that will close it down or severely reduce it and replace the products with fake meat, eggs, and milk made from ultra-processed food from industrial agriculture. The fact is that they see nature-based systems such as regenerative grazing as a threat to this policy and thus the repeated attacks.

Industrial agriculture is an existential threat to all life on this planet. These systems are responsible for 80% of the forest destruction, up to 50% of greenhouse gases, the loss of soil organic matter, the pollution of our waterways and soils with fertilizers and toxic pesticides, the dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico, Mediterranean, Baltic and other seas, the loss of biodiversity through large scale monocultures, the crash of insects, amphibian, birds and other species due to the widespread contamination of pesticides, endocrine disruptors and forever chemicals, the continuous loss of millions of farmers, and the chronic disease epidemic from toxic pesticide-laden ultra-processed food that is empty of nutrients. These degenerative toxic systems are pushed as necessary to feed the world. The fact is that there are more food-insecure people now than at any time in history.  Industrial agriculture is an abject failure.

We started Regeneration International because agriculture needs to move from the toxic, destructive, chemical-based industrial systems to nature-based systems that use the living sciences of agroecology. Agriculture needs to be regenerated.

One of the significant problems with the papers and articles criticizing regenerative agriculture is their lack of a correct definition. We started the international regenerative agriculture movement in 2015. Before that, hardly anyone had heard about it. It was an exceptionally rarely used term.

We have made the definition very clear in numerous publications and on our website:

Regenerative systems improve the environment, soil, plants, animal welfare, health, and communities.

The opposite of Regenerative is Degenerative

This is an essential distinction in determining practices that are not regenerative.

Agricultural systems that use Degenerative Practices and inputs that damage the environment, soil, health, genes, and communities and involve animal cruelty are not regenerative.

Synthetic toxic pesticides, synthetic water-soluble fertilizers, genetically modified organisms, confined animal feeding operations, exploitive marketing and wage systems, destructive tillage systems, overgrazing, and clearing high-value ecosystems are examples of degenerative practices. These systems are, by definition, the opposite of regenerative.

Consequently, the examples given in some of these papers of regenerative grazing systems that are not improving soil organic matter and, therefore, not removing CO2 are invalid. By definition, these systems are degenerative – the opposite of regenerative. This invalidates these papers and their academic authors. They should be retracted from scientific journals for promoting falsified data.

Methane Reduction

The push to reduce livestock reduction is based on their methane emissions using an incorrect method to calculate the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) contributions to climate change. Most publications will quote them as a percentage of anthropogenic GHGs, not in their measured contributions to trapping infrared (heat) energy as a cause of climate change. The extra trapped heat energy fuels the extreme weather events that we are seeing—floods, storms, droughts, and fires.

The study, which has the most comprehensive datasets and solid methodology, states that CO2 is the main anthropogenic GHG as it amplifies the GHG effect of water vapor and clouds, the primary GHGs.

CO2 is responsible for 20% of the total GHG heat-energy increase. Water vapor and clouds are responsible for 75%. All the other anthropogenic GHGs are responsible for 5%. The contribution of methane, at most, is a 1.6% increase in GHG heat energy. (1)

Most methane emissions come from leaking gas, oil wells, and permafrost melting. Ruminants are only a percentage. The bulk of this comes from Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs).

While the output of methane and other greenhouse gases is considerable for concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) and intensive industrial livestock production systems, this is not true for regenerative grazing livestock practices on pasture. Many quality studies show that these practices sequester more greenhouse gases than they emit, making them greenhouse gas negative.

In ranch ecosystems, much of the methane emitted by animals on pasture is degraded by soil and water-based methanotrophic (methane-eating) microorganisms. These organisms do not exist in CAFOs and intensive livestock systems, so 100 percent of their emissions go into the atmosphere. Furthermore, methane is a short-lived greenhouse gas with a half-life of 12 years. It decays into CO2. This CO2 is sequestered into the soil by photosynthesis in correctly managed grazing systems. This does not happen in CAFOs and industrial animal production systems.

Regenerative Grazing

Many systems, known by different names, fall under the heading of regenerative grazing, such as AMP grazing, cell grazing, mob grazing, rotational grazing, and Holistic Planned Grazing.

Allan Savory is the primary pioneer of regenerative grazing. He developed the Holistic Planned Grazing process that is used today and inspired many of the other regenerative grazing systems. This process, which uses livestock grazing to regenerate biodiversity, has proven consistently successful on every arable continent for over half a century.

Allan realized that this was the solution to regenerating rangelands. While overgrazing was caused by letting animals graze for too long and returning them before the ecosystem had time to recover, many animals grazing briefly, provided that the vegetation had enough time to recover, mimicked natural grazing by herding animal systems and increased biodiversity. Even a low stocking density of animals that continuously eat their preferred species can kill plants because they never have the opportunity to recover.

Allan has repeatedly stated that scaling up Holistic Planned Grazing of grasslands can sequester enough CO2 to reverse climate change. He has been criticized by academics entrenched in industrial agriculture paradigms, who say this is impossible. Emerging peer-reviewed publications show that Allan is correct. Research by Richard Teague and his colleagues shows that changing livestock systems can significantly increase soil organic carbon (SOC) levels. They achieved an average of 11 tons of CO2-eq per hectare per year (11,000 pounds per acre), which, if scaled up across grazing lands, would sequester 37 gigatons (Gt) annually, resulting in reverse emissions.

In a later study, researchers found similar results and recommended the widespread adoption of regenerative agriculture practices not just for increasing SOC; they also found considerable ecological and biodiversity benefits.

Specifically, the researchers found that: ‘Incorporating forages and ruminants into regeneratively managed agroecosystems can elevate soil organic C, improve soil ecological function by minimizing the damage of tillage and inorganic fertilizers and biocides, and enhance biodiversity and wildlife habitat. We conclude that to ensure long-term sustainability and ecological resilience of agroecosystems, agricultural production should be guided by policies and regenerative management protocols that include ruminant grazing.’

Research has also demonstrated that changing practices can rapidly increase SOC. Tong Wang and his colleagues found that when poor management lowers SOC stock over time, transitioning to an improved regenerative practice will increase SOC stock at a higher rate. Researchers using regenerative grazing practices in the southeastern United States sequestered 29.36 metric tons of CO2-eq per hectare per year. Significantly, the authors gave other examples from research worldwide that achieved similar SOC sequestration levels through regenerative grazing. Hence, the results of this research paper are not an isolated outlier. If these best-practice regenerative grazing systems were implemented on the world’s 8.4 billion acres of permanent pastures, it would sequester 98.6 gigatons of CO2 per year, significantly more than the 28 gigatons of CO2-eq currently emitted annually. This would start to reverse climate change and regenerate the planet’s ecosystems.

Regenerative systems are GHG-negative. They remove more GHGs than they emit. Phasing out CAFOs and intensive industrial livestock systems and scaling up regenerative animal husbandry systems will help us reverse climate change.

Allan Savory has made a massive contribution to achieve this. He founded the Savory Institute, now headquartered in Denver, Colorado, the Africa Centre for Holistic Management near Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe, and Holistic Management International, headquartered in Albuquerque, New Mexico. These organizations work with ranchers and farmers worldwide to scale up Holistic Planned Grazing on every continent. As of this writing, there are 54 “Savory Hubs” in 30 countries with 203 accredited professionals who have trained 15,755 land managers on 55 million acres (22 million hectares) of land. We need these systems scaled up over billions of acres.

For more information on this, please read the Regenerative Agriculture Solution.

1. Schmidt, G. A., R. A. Ruedy, R. L. Miller, and A. A. Lacis, “Attribution of the present‐day total greenhouse effect,” Journal of Geophysical Research 115 (October 2010): D20106, doi: 10.1029/2010JD014287