Regenerative Agriculture: On Policy
- Sisters of STEM
- Oct 19, 2021
- 2 min read
Policies on Regenerative Agriculture
According to the NRDC, the Natural Resources Defense Council,
“current food and farm policies are not designed to prioritize climate, ecosystems, water quality, people’s health, relationships within and across ecosystems, or fair pay and racial equity for farmers and farmworkers”.
In other words, many current farming and agriculture practices are not being regulated by the government to protect the health of the land and the people working it.
Some current regenerative practices are being recognized by the national government.
The growing focus on combatting climate change has sparked renewed discussions on this generational method. The United States government under the Biden Administration has begun to recognize the important practices of regenerative agriculture, with a recent focus on how farmers could plant crops that increase intake of carbon dioxide and its storage in the ground to reduce the carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere, according to an article written in January of this year by the Washington Post.
In states like Maryland, state governments are paying farmers to plant cover crops to help absorb nitrogen to prevent it from flowing into the Chesapeake Bay. While these incentives have proven to work, they are not established policies, and they limited to the states who deem these issues important. There are still plenty of other farmers around the country who still use practices that severely overwork the land to produce a greater yield of crop to sustain their own farming businesses.
There is a new proposal that contains notes on promoting regenerative agriculture practices.
Fortunately, there have been some moves to begin resolving this issue. In President Biden’s proposal for his Build Back Better plan, there are hints of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez’s Green New Deal, a rigorous proposal meant to address the United States’s growing climate change problem. Some components of the proposal include
“working collaboratively with farmers and ranchers in the United States to remove pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from the agricultural sector as much as is technologically feasible, including— by investing in sustainable farming and land use practices that increase soil health.”
That proposal did not receive the support in needed in Congress, so it was discarded altogether. These new appearances of provisions from the Green New Deal in the Build Back Better plan means a chance at enforced policy to implement regenerative agriculture practices in the farming industry, which will not only greatly reduce the carbon emissions that are inevitably produced by the current practices, but it will also promote healthier soils that will increase quality and quantity of our crops.
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