What Do Farmers Need to Embrace Regenerative Agriculture?

Regenerative agriculture is best understood not as a farming technique but as a private landowner’s decision‑making lens.

By Alex Rehbinder, Research and Teaching Assistant at The Ohio State University’s School of Environment and Natural Resources

A decade ago, an autoimmune condition I had been struggling with finally relented when I adopted a carnivore‑ketogenic diet. The approach was well outside the mainstream of either the public‑health or environmental conversation at the time, and a growing body of peer‑reviewed work is only now beginning to take the underlying mechanisms seriously.

That experience reshaped my life and career. Over the following years, I worked across nearly every major “stakeholder group” in the sustainable food system — inside a Danone portfolio that included major dairy and water brands; at food‑waste nonprofits like ReFED; and in government and impact‑investment roles. What kept catching my attention was how reflexively each of these institutions oriented around plant‑based alternatives, often at the expense of livestock systems that, when properly managed, are essential to ecological resilience and human health alike. So I went looking for the science that did not shy away from animal agriculture.

That search led me to rural Ohio, where I am now a graduate student at The Ohio State University’s School of Environment and Natural Resources. My work is sociological rather than agronomic: I am trying to understand what actually shapes the way farmers, and beef cattle producers in particular, decide whether or not to raise cattle using regenerative principles. Our team recently ran a six‑wave statewide mailed survey to Ohio & Missouri farmers, and I am now spending the spring driving around the Midwest speaking to beef cattle graziers directly. I have been to 40 operations so far, with hopes of reaching 8 more before the month is out.

What I have found, and what I think most readers will not expect, is that ‘regenerative agriculture’ is best understood not as a farming technique but as a private landowner’s decision‑making process. Whether someone takes up cover cropping, no‑till, rotational grazing, integrated crop‑livestock systems, or a general avoidance of inputs that kill what wants to live, those choices flow from how a particular landowner weighs a particular set of farm and household constraints. Agricultural decision-making science and sociology captures most of them: structure, infrastructure, access to capital and equipment, the scale of the operation, the economic and geographic contexts, and on top of all of that, the socio-cultural dynamics that influence who the landowner is as a person and what they hope their land will become.

The popular narrative casts farmers as the holdouts. That is not what the agricultural research, surveys, or my personal interactions with farmers suggest the full picture is all about. Our team has found that producers are largely persuaded of the benefits; they more or less understand the soil‑health gains, the ecological case, and the long‑run logic.

The reason they do not act on that conviction is not always belief, but rather perceived profitability and access to material resources.

Wells, fencing, springs, and water lines are all components in the unglamorous capital stack that make rotational grazing or an integrated livestock system viable in the first place. A farmer who cannot run reliable water to a field cannot rotate cattle through it, no matter how much he or she values the practice.

Many of the systems we have built reinforce this gap. Conventional production sits atop decades of accreted infrastructure, capital channels, and policy support, and alternative practices begin at a real material disadvantage. But those systems are still responsive to feedback, and one lever they can respond to is demand. This is where consumers come in, and it is where I want to be careful, because the conversation about how to “support farmers” has gotten a little decorative.

Farmer’s markets are wonderful, and I do not want to be ungenerous about them, but it helps to be honest about what they are. They are a taste test. They are a community‑development tool, an introduction, a handshake. They are not, in themselves, the demand signal that will shift a producer’s risk math. The signal that can is a household that knows a farmer by name and buys from them in volume — a quarter, a half, or a side of ground beef into a deep freezer at home. The American Grassfed Association maintains a producer directory (I have no affiliation) that is a reasonable starting point for finding nearby ranchers raising cattle in ways likely to conserve or rebuild topsoil. The deep freezer is the unlock. Once it is in your home, the per‑pound cost drops considerably, the relationship deepens, and the producer gets the kind of cash flow that justifies selling direct in the first place. Many producers will have a waitlist. That is a good sign.

It also helps to remember who you are talking to. Survey results show only about seven percent of Ohioan farms are supported entirely by farm income; the rest of those households piece things together with off‑farm jobs or a hybrid of the two. We say we want farmers to care more about practices that regenerate soil and ecology, but a farmer whose attention is split across two or three income streams cannot give the land the focus it deserves. Every direct relationship between a household and a producer is a small step toward letting that producer be more attentive to their land (to a degree, direct marketing efforts can be an unwanted distraction from production). On this point, I will allow myself one firm view: real ‘regenerative’ practices have to include livestock. You can conserve soil and slow soil loss without animals, but it is very difficult to truly restore it. The increases in carbon and water retention, in available nutrients, in biological diversity come back through properly managed animals on the land.

The farming puzzle is about more than telling farmers it is important. We have come a long way, and the buy‑in on their end is largely there. I may be biased, but what I think will carry us across to a tipping point is something quieter and more local: communities that know their growers, and the small, durable connections between a consumer and a farmer that turn good principles into a working local economy.

Alex Rehbinder is a Research and Teaching Assistant at The Ohio State University’s School of Environment and Natural Resources. He is also a member of the ACC Columbus branch.