Amidst the din and the rancor of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s first confirmation hearing for the Secretary of Health and Human Services position, he issued a stern warning that cut through the chaos like a knife: “Agronomists now estimate that we only have 60 harvests left before our soil is gone,” the bronzed Kennedy intoned in his iconic rasp. Kennedy referred specifically to chemicals like glyphosate that farmers use to kill weeds, which in turn destroy the microbiome of the nation’s most important natural resource. Despite modern innovations in agriculture, the mechanics of soil generation and loss have not changed.

Topsoil is largely composed of dead and decaying organic matter that, in nature,

accumulates at a rate of one inch every 100 years. But when exposed to the elements, topsoil will either wash away with the rain or blow away with the wind at a much quicker rate. Fortunately, there are ways to encourage topsoil growth and guard against erosion. Unfortunately, they are not widely practiced except by a small, but growing minority of farmers who work the land with all this in mind and employ the label “regenerative” to proclaim their mission.

“We’re six inches from starvation,” former Tennessee State Senator Frank Niceley tells me over the phone from a Lowe’s parking lot somewhere in eastern Tennessee. “That's the average depth of our topsoil, six inches.” Food security is an obsession that colored Niceley’s career in state politics. He authored and sponsored various bills that made it easier for small farmers to grow, raise, and sell their own food. And while you might hear about the undue influence held by the big four meatpacking plants or the harmful effects of RoundUp, what often goes undiscussed is the foundation of our entire food system: that six inches of topsoil.

Niceley’s concern echoes a quotation commonly attributed to radio personality Paul Harvey: That man—despite his artistic pretensions, his sophistication, and his many accomplishments—owes his existence to a six-inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains. Only since the dawn of industrial agriculture has this hard-won piece of wisdom fallen out of favor. Today, it feels old-fashioned—almost irrelevant—as fertilizers, pesticides, genetically modified crops, concentrated feedlots, and all manner of technical and procedural innovations give the impression that we’ve overcome the limitations of nature.

A bird dog keeps watch at Fairfax Farms in McEwan, TN, as cattle graze on the pasture. Noah Tidmore

Farmers like Niceley have held tight to this inherited knowledge. “That six inches of topsoil is loaded up with microorganisms,” he continues. “They say if you plowed up and collected all the microorganisms from an acre of ground, they would weigh more than a cow.” And no matter how much fertilizer we plow into otherwise infertile dirt or how many seeds we modify in labs to thrive in increasingly specific conditions, it remains true that soil is more than just an inert medium into which we place seeds. It is an ecosystem of living organisms largely responsible for producing conditions optimal for supporting all life on our planet.

What does Regenerative Mean?

Depending on where you go and who you ask, you’re bound to get a slightly different answer about what regenerative farming is, but every person you ask will root their understanding in the production of soil.

Robert Rodale coined the term "regenerative organic" in the early 1980s to de scribe a “holistic approach to farming that encourages continuous innovation and improvement of environmental, social, and economic measures.” A more useful description of what that means in practice comes from the Noble Research Institute, which defines regenerative agriculture as “the process of restoring degraded soils using management practices (e.g., adaptive grazing, no-till planting, no or limited use of pesticides and synthetic fertilizer, etc.) based on ecological principles.” Put more simply, regenerative agriculture is about tending to those six inches of topsoil and ensuring they don’t disappear.

You can’t talk about the growing popularity of regenerative farming without mentioning Joel Salatin. Farmers in this milieu recite the story of Salatin taking over his family farm and incorporating what we now define as regenerative practices with the power of a foundational myth. Salatin has produced a stack of books on agribusiness and farming, with titles like "Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal". His influence is wide and diffuse, and many regenerative farmers’ journeys started between the pages of one of his books.

But Salatin didn’t invent regenerative agriculture; he just popularized it in an American context. Salatin’s approach amounts to using all available resources on a farm to improve the fertility of the soil and guard against its depletion. Ruminants are rotationally grazed such that they never exhaust a paddock. Chickens follow behind them, picking larvae out of the manure and spreading it in an even layer over the surface to fertilize the soil. After a period of growth, the cows are brought back to the area for grazing, and the cycle repeats itself. Cows, chickens, plant growth, then cows again.

Cattle live stress-free lives here compared to factory farming. Noah Tidmore

On a row crop operation, farmers sow cover crops like clover to prevent soil erosion in the offseason and dig them up before the growing season to incorporate organic matter back into the soil.

Crossing Creeks Farm in Shelbyville, Tennessee, is one such place. Shane and Elizabeth Stuart, their two sons, and Elizabeth's parents own and operate the farm they describe as “rooted in regenerative farming.” The genesis of the farm came from the family’s desire to produce the most nutrient-dense food possible for themselves. “For us, regenerative means we are regenerating the soil, which is then regenerating new protein sources, healthier protein sources, more nutrient-dense protein sources for ourselves and our community,” Elizabeth Stuart tells me.

Crossing Creeks Farm utilizes intensive grazing practices to both enrich the soil and produce high-quality beef, pork, chicken, and eggs. Their beef cattle are moved every twenty-four hours to a fresh slice of grass. Depending on age and stage, chickens are moved two to three times a day. Pigs are moved every two days. This agrarian dance occurs in sequence to concentrate the efforts of each animal on slivers of grass, such that by the time the cattle return in four to six weeks, the land has been able to rest, rejuvenate, and regenerate itself. “In turn, we actually have much higher grass production; therefore, our beef cattle only receive grasses,” she says.

Buzzword or buzzworthy?

Like many other food-related buzzwords— from grass-fed to organic to cage-free, the word “regenerative” has begun to gain purchase with consumers seeking the most healthy, natural food available. However, unlike greenwashed labels, such as “organic”—which are defined and regulated by the USDA—the term “regenerative” is elusive. Regeneratively farmed beef or regeneratively grown flour doesn’t tell us anything about the end product except that the farmer might have kept the health of his topsoil in mind.

“The first thing that comes to mind is your typical farmer mantra, where you leave the land better than you found it,” Bryan Peterson of Whitaker Farms in Hendersonville, Tennessee, tells me when I ask him what “regenerative” means. Peterson bought a farm in the middle of Tennessee after a stint in Major League Baseball. He is a first-generation farmer who, like Stuart and other farmers I spoke to, was drawn to a sustainable approach to farming owing in part to his desire to produce the most nutritious food possible.

“Guys took steroids in baseball, and that wasn't something that I wanted to do,” Peterson says of how his athletic career informed his perspective on food. “I had to figure out a different way to make my body better without synthetics. I was already a nerd when it came to figuring out what the best stuff to buy or to eat was, so I just took that into farming.” On Peterson’s website, he describes the meat he sells as “pasture raised,” emphasizing the fact that the animals under his care spend their entire lives on fresh pasture with ample access to rich grass, clean Southern air, and plenty of sunshine.

But he’s cautious about employing the term “regenerative” to market his products, even if he employs practices that might fall under that label. “How do you quantify it?” he asks. “Does that mean your soil test is better than a conventional soil test? Does it mean you rotationally graze? How big are your paddocks when you do rotationally graze?"

Peterson brings up a good point. Unlike the labeling defined and regulated by the federal government, the limits of what regenerative farming is remains up to interpretation. “The only way that you can verify a farm's practices is by going and talking to the farmer and visiting the farm,” he adds. A farmer's footsteps are the best fertilizer, after all, and you wouldn’t know about those footsteps without seeing them in person.

A farmer walks his land.Noah Tidmore

For other first-generation farmer like Fax Landstreet of Fairfax Farms, the decision to run his farm more sustainably is, in part, aesthetic. “I live where I farm. I spend all my time on the farm,” he tells me as we observe cows grazing peacefully on the pasture. “I don't want it to be a gross operation where you don't want to be downwind of it.” Like Peterson, Landstreet prefers the term pasture-raised, but his approach to farming is rooted in an understanding of the profession that shares common characteristics with more explicitly regenerative operations.

Critics point out that regenerative farming has nothing to do with actual food production and, therefore, see it as pure marketing jargon. “It is a way for unproductive farmers to move the goals of their farm from an objective goal (producing food) to a subjective goal (the health of the soil),” one farmer tells me. “It’s pure marketing,” another says.

While some farmers might abuse the label, the methods adopted by regenerative advocates are not new. They have antecedents that go back to the first agricultural civilizations. And despite what critics might say, history is littered with stories of civilizations whose ruins lie on once fertile, now parched, land.

In the early days of America, when land was cheap and readily available, the incentives to cleave to one particular plot and tend to the soil on it were weaker than in more geographically constrained areas like Europe. One could always go West if he exhausted the productivity of his farmland. The Manifest Destiny native to the time shaped the culture and attitude of American farmers for nearly two centuries. Even still, soon after the Revolutionary War, Ameri can writers and political leaders cautioned against the allure of endless plains of fertile land running west.

The pigs on the farm are considered top quality due to their ability to forage for food naturally. Noah Tidmore

“It must be obvious to every man who considers the agriculture of this country . . . how miserably defective we are in the management of [our lands],” George Washington wrote in 1796 to Alexander Hamilton. “A few years more of increased sterility will drive the Inhabitants of the Atlantic States westward for support; whereas if they were taught how to improve the old, instead of going in pursuit of new and productive soils, they would make these acres which now scarcely yield them anything, turn out beneficial to themselves.” Washington was no doubt aware of the fact that the security of a nation started with its ability to produce its own food. And exhausted and abandoned fields posed a threat to this.

We may be unconcerned with such matters today, but the intuitive understanding that our flourishing is due, in part, to sewing seeds in fertile soil is still embedded in euphemisms and cultural symbols all the same. There is Jesus’s parable of the sower. We speak of fertile ground for the growth of ideas and enterprise. Investors seed a business with capital to get it off the ground. Most of us do not farm, but most of our forebears did, and their legacy lives on in our language. In modern scientific parlance, our understanding of soil sits at an uneasy position. It’s non-renewable in that once it’s gone, it’s gone. But it can be renewed if it is properly stewarded.

A calf stares down the camera at Fairfax Farms. Noah Tidmore

On an ideal regenerative farm, the entire system is self-contained: No grain from abroad; no artificial fertilizers; no pesticides or glyphosate. The regenerative farm is an Edenic garden, where every component exists in symbiosis with all the others. Every bit of manure is retained and spread. Every plant that goes to seed is dug under or harvested for human or animal consumption. Although it might be more labor-intensive, in theory, regenerative farming saves money by reducing inputs. Therefore, as supply chain issues disrupt fertilizers and drive up the price of food, the regenerative farmer is protected from the whims of the global economy, resilient and self-reliant, autonomous and in control. As the Founders envisioned him.

Davis Hunt is a writer and filmmaker. He founded and serves as the editor of the Pamphleteer, Nashville.