"Regenerative Agriculture's tantalizing ecological and socio-economic promise will not be realized through further advocacy alone; scaling adoption will require coordinated leadership and the grit to confront the financial realities facing farmers."
Scott McKenzie
March, 2025
All Rights Reserved
The Wild Alberta Food Project Preliminary Conclusion:
How can regenerative agriculture improve Alberta’s food system?
Fundamentally, regenerative agriculture is a farmer-led social movement that improves soil health through regenerative agricultural practices (RAPs). Increasing the adoption of such practices will improve Alberta’s food system because they improve both soil quality and farmer wellbeing: the two essential components from which the numerous benefits and positive feedback loops of regenerative agriculture (RA) are derived.
Regarding soil quality, the process of improving Alberta’s food system via RA begins with improving Alberta’s soil through recarbonization: a natural consequence of RAPs that simultaneously mitigates climate change through carbon sequestration, stores vast amounts of water underground, and increases soil nutrient levels and biodiversity. Consequently, the biofueled food produced using RAPs is nutrient-dense, and healthier than the chemical-dependent food produced using industrial agricultural practices. Regeneratively produced food is also much more resilient to the negative impacts of climate change, such as increased drought and catastrophic weather events. By working with nature instead of against it, regenerative agriculture produces healthier soil; healthier soil produces healthier plants; and healthier plants produce healthier animals; all of which combine to produce healthier food and ultimately, healthier humans. The improved collective health of Alberta’s population would alleviate the unsustainable financial burden of nutrition-related chronic disease on the healthcare system. Here, the progression from positive ecological outcome, to positive social outcome, to positive economic outcome is illustrative of how regenerative agriculture can improve Alberta’s food system.
Regarding farmer wellbeing, because RA is a farmer-led and farmer-maintained social movement, prioritizing the wellbeing of Alberta farmers is an essential element of improving Alberta’s food system. Fortunately, improved farmer wellbeing is a natural consequence of RAPs, which enable farmers to care for their land instead harming it through persistent extraction. As farmers witness the positive ecological impacts of regenerative practices on their land, they develop an increased sense of self-efficacy and a greater capacity to adapt to change. This shift in farmer mindsets promotes further RA adoption and leads to fully integrated regenerative farming operations. This process illustrates regenerative agriculture’s natural tendency to establish self-reinforcing positive feedback loops.
The Alberta government can facilitate the RA movement’s success through public policy initiatives, beginning with the commissioning of an Alberta-specific White Paper of Regenerative Agriculture to determine where Alberta currently sits on the continuum of regenerative outcomes, and identify what research is needed to facilitate RA becoming Alberta’s dominant agricultural system. The White Paper should include an account of how new technology can be assimilated to fully leverage Alberta’s existent carbon market apparatus, which, although a relatively unknown variable, could be an x-factor in regenerative agriculture adoption reaching the tipping-point necessary to supplant the current industrial agricultural regime.
Further policy initiatives should be aimed at reforming all levels of education to facilitate necessary mindset shifts. Educators should teach students about the role of RA in climate change mitigation and food production sustainability, and also the transdisciplinary research methods required to address the complexities inherent to such issues. Through enacting sound public policy informed by comprehensive Alberta-specific research, and by utilizing Alberta-developed technology to measure, track, and share environmental feedbacks, the Alberta government can validate and incentivize both RA adoption, and RA investment.
With these policies in place, given the financial support provided companies looking to capitalize on increased consumer demand for sustainable products; the ascent of social financing; increased acceptance among venture capitalists; and the potential for Alberta’s carbon market to augment farmer income, the outlook for RA in Alberta is positive. More so, in light of the environmental, social, and economic unsustainability inherent to the current industrial regime which has become increasingly vulnerable to food-borne infectious diseases, supply chain disruptions, and the negative effects of climate change.
Beyond mere viability, Alberta farmers who adopt regenerative agricultural practices should see their profits increase due to a significant reduction of input costs, including the fueling and maintenance of heavy machinery which can be sold to offset the revenue loss that may accompany early transition. Once fully operational, increased biodiversity would eliminate the need for costly pesticides and fertilizers while enabling farmers to diversify and multiply income streams: an act that further increases farmer self-efficacy and overall wellbeing. Here, an ecologically driven economic outcome has reinforced the positive social outcome of increased farmer wellbeing. Thus, it is reasonable to infer that the widespread adoption of RAPs in Alberta would result in a biologically and financially resilient agricultural sector, operated by happy, purpose-driven managers of food system transformation.
There is a widely-held belief among regenerative agriculture advocates that once regenerative practices become regionally recursive, the ecological and socioeconomic benefits will only increase over time, creating a regenerative food system that essentially functions within a single integrated positive feedback loop. For this reason, scaling regenerative agriculture to reach the recursive tipping-point should remain a primary focus of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research and innovation.