Animist farmer & writer Paul Feather reviews the book Six Inches of Soil and finds that progressive stories about regenerative farming could better integrate their roots in Indigenous practices of reciprocity and respect and tap the deeper implications of radical perspectives.
2,900 words: approx reading time = 11.5 minutes
“Despite all our accomplishments, we owe our existence to a six-inch layer of topsoil and the fact it rains.” – Paul Harvey (1978) U.S. radio broadcaster
The stories that we tell each other, the stories that we were told perhaps by teachers or parents when we were young, those that we tell not simply in words—though words are very much a part of it, and I return to words in a moment—but that we enact with our choices and continue telling as they were told to us: these stories are the meat and potatoes of culture.
As I write this, my impatient daughter leans over to me and whispers that she is hungry. She speaks softly so as not to interrupt her mother’s conversation with two neighbors about these stories we tell and how we might gather over food one day soon to retell them together. Out of respect for this conversation, or simply because she judges me more likely to stop what I am doing—to stop typing these words—my daughter interrupts me instead of these others to tell me that she is hungry.
Eat another cantaloupe, I tell her. There are leftover potatoes in the skillet on the stove. You made bread at school today, and there is some left. Go eat it.
And we each will have our stories about this. I think to myself that she is bored more than hungry, but I don’t know what her stories are. Maybe that I am boring, or that someone should have made dinner, or that eggs are easy to make but she is tired of eggs.
Every meal has a story.
The stories we all tell about food are bound up with other stories: sometimes with stories about how we gather in community to cook it or eat it or grow it, or about the meaning of the soil and the Earth. They’re existential. They influence how we all act.
Our food is globalized, so now our stories about food are further bound up with other stories about geopolitics and climate and war and just about everything else. It’s gotten rather complicated.
Social movements, scholars, and corporate or government bodies have been trying to unravel this complication and to converge on a viable global story about food, and the collective story has grown to encompass billions of words worth of books, academic papers and all the rest; but anyone with a lick of sense can tell that we haven’t really got it figured out just yet.
So writing about food is a tricky business.
Six Inches of Soil
Over the last few days, I’ve been reviewing Six Inches of Soil, a book accompanied by a documentary of the same name (which I did not watch) that describes the English movement for regenerative agriculture (RA).
The book starts off by introducing itself as a continuation of the documentary project and then the first three chapters establish the background for a conversation about regenerative farming.
The first chapter summarizes the Green Revolution with a more-or-less mainstream analysis presenting it as “a miracle that created a disaster.” Some readers might object to this analysis and argue that the Green Revolution wasn’t as miraculous as it’s sometimes made out to be, since small family farms have always been more productive than industrial corporate operations. In her 2016 book Who Really Feeds the World, Vandana Shiva points out that small family farms—most less than 2 ha in size—produce 70% of the world’s food while being relegated to less than 25% of the farmland [1]. But Six Inches of Soil sticks to the mainstream narrative here about the miraculous productivity of industrial agriculture, and so that’s uncontroversial in a sense. In any case, every legitimate analysis agrees that whatever the initial value of industrial agriculture, it has made a very big mess.
The second and third chapters attempt to define regenerative agriculture and lay out the soil science behind it. Defining RA is a bit tricky: the billions of words of story about food is sometimes vague on distinctions between regenerative and other frameworks like organic, permaculture, agroecological, conventional, etc. Six Inches of Soil presents RA as a methodology that conforms to certain principles and practices intended primarily to increase soil health—which mostly means incorporating organic material, sequestering carbon, and increasing biodiversity—all good things.
It is a problem that Six Inches of Soil presents ecological farming as an outgrowth of the Green Revolution. The book’s claim that regenerative farming paradigms are a response to the destruction caused by chemical industrial agriculture is completely false. [2] & [3]
Regenerative farming has been practiced for thousands of years by Indigenous people all over the world, and while the book mentions that European scientists began to think about organic farming after studying Indigenous growing methods, its failure to meaningfully and consistently acknowledge the origin of regenerative agriculture in Indigenous thought and practice as well as Indigenous people’s continued contributions to the movement will have implications for later chapters.
Case studies in regenerative farming
The middle portion of the book describes three different regenerative farms. The first is an 800-acre commodity grain operation that has brought sheep into their fields to build fertility and transitioned away from plowing in favor of less impactful cultivation methods. The second is a small start-up market garden that also integrates sheep for fertility and tills only minimally with hand tools. The final case study is a rotationally grazed cattle operation that experiments with silvopasture.
The case studies give the book a more grounded center and—along with the dialogical style arising from the book’s origin as a documentary film—make this a relatively easy read in spite of the complex topic.
All of the case studies present regenerative farming as bit of a struggle—though a rewarding one—and none of the operations are exceptionally profitable. Indeed, none of the featured farms pay their operators a living wage. These growers seem to be motivated mainly by a passion for their work and a sense that they are contributing to a positive social and environmental movement.
What does regenerative farming regenerate?
The final two chapters of the book present first a more spiritual dimension of regenerative agriculture and then a view of the future. These chapters taken together—along with several interludes sprinkled between the chapters—illustrate a fundamental tension within the RA movement. I perceive this as a tension between a mainstream, progressive, modern paradigm and a smaller more radical current that finds in agroecology far deeper implications about cosmology, epistemology, or spirituality. (In full transparency I am firmly committed to the more radical interpretation.) Somewhere in between, we might discern a dialogue that promotes relatively radical restructuring of our economic and social value systems, but does not find modernity to be completely bankrupt and would attempt to evade an epistemological crisis.
The book as a whole maintains a very progressive—and I would argue mainstream—synthesis of regenerative agriculture as a strategy to mitigate climate change. The book promotes a theory of change in which consumer choices and movement-building put pressure on governments and corporations to enact better policy. Most of the interludes and much of the final chapter offer policy suggestions or regulatory strategies that would support a healthier food economy. Progressive readers will be very much at home with all of this, while readers less enamored with progressive politics may be underwhelmed by these portions of the book.
I judge that the mainstream progressivity of the book as a whole arises from viewing RA as a response to the Green Revolution and from failure to acknowledge that Indigenous people have been doing regenerative agriculture for thousands of years and continue to do it in many places.
A 2023 article exploring anti-colonial definitions for regenerative agriculture finds that neglecting the paradigm’s Indigenous origins results in over-emphasis of its biophysical dimensions and tends to omit socio-cultural aspects that are critical to the movement’s success in mitigating global catastrophe. The authors suggest an anti-colonial definition for RA that foregrounds these socio-cultural aspects by making them a container for the biophysical farming practices:
A way of farming comprised of entangled values and practices, and founded in Indigenous principles of loving-caring for the Earth. This approach to farming values 1) reciprocity, 2) respect, 3) collective (human and non-human) wellbeing, 4) knowledge co-creation, 5) (re)localization, and it is often practiced through some combination of 1) minimizing soil disturbance, 2) maintaining vegetative soil cover, 3) maximizing diversity, 4) integrating livestock, and 5) minimizing synthetic agrichemicals. [3]
When we abstract regenerative agriculture away from its origins and away from this broader cultural container of reciprocity and respect, when we pay attention only to its biophysical dimensions, what we end up with will not address the roots of the global environmental crisis. Choices enacted from this narrower interpretation of RA will likely perpetuate environmental crisis.
On spirit
Chapter seven is about the more spiritual side of agroecology.
Chapter seven brings a deeper ecological perspective to the book by gesturing toward the unfathomable microbiological complexity in the soil popularized by scientists like Anne Biklé or Martin Sheldrake; more radical perspectives such as Vandana Shiva’s statement that our sense of self could or should arise from having our hands in the soil; and by including several poignant observations from contributors like Satish Kumar, who observes,
In our modern mechanistic world view we only recognise things which can be measured. What cannot be measured does not exist. I think this worldview needs to change.
This chapter seems intended to address the deeper cultural implications of agroecology—and it more or less does—but there is a difference between including a chapter about something and making that something a container for the entire book.
The book has 22 contributors, and for some of them it seems that the movement is mostly about moving carbon from the atmosphere into the soil so that it better delivers ecosystem services and mitigates global warming. This is entirely consistent with a modern mechanical worldview, does not require a deep cultural shift toward values of reciprocity and respect, and according to this interpretation a farm growing sugar for Coca-Cola on land stolen from Cambodian peasant communities could be regenerative if percent carbon in the soil is going up. [4]
Some contributors like Satish Kumar and Dee Woods do consistently foreground deeper epistemological and cultural issues, but the book as a whole does not.
Something missing
Sitting here now and returning to wrap up this review after letting it simmer overnight, I am again writing between interruptions from my daughter about the food we will eat. She is neither bored nor hungry today. She is chatting with me while cutting up pears and apples and roasting them as an after-dinner treat for company visiting this evening—a service she proposed as an exchange if I would boil potatoes for dinner, and to which I readily agreed.
And so today as every day we enact our stories about our food, and inside of this story where my daughter is cutting up pears I will try to cut to the center of my thoughts with these awkward words and to have time left over to boil the potatoes before the guests come.
There is a sense that however many billions of words we have written, there remains something missing from our stories about regenerative agriculture. A 2022 literature review comparing agroecology and RA frameworks explores whether politics are the thing that is missing:
One aspect of agroecology that does not always fit comfortably in the realm of regenerative agriculture is political activism, or the place and emphasis that the “social” dimension takes in the definition of the social-ecological system. This is perhaps one of the reasons why agroecology is more closely associated with peasant movements, for whom claims on rights and access to natural resources are urgent, while regenerative agriculture is an approach increasingly—but not exclusively—also adopted by commercial, often large-scale farmers or external investors less concerned with natural resource access or food sovereignty issues. [5]
The mainstream trend in the RA movement does actually promote political activism, but I think it somehow remains apolitical in the sense that it’s progressive rather than radical.
To the extent that an ecological worldview finds our disconnection from the land rooted in deep cultural dysfunctions, and to the extent that progressive politics fail to address those dysfunctions, I wonder if the mainstream current within RA might be agroecology without the ecology?
Whatever framework we use, if it isn’t held within a cultural container of reciprocity and respect, it is without a soul.
Six Inches of Soil could more naturally address these deeper dysfunctions if it better acknowledged agroecology’s roots in Indigenous farming practices and the cooption of those practices by Western academics and scientists who adopted “regenerative” methods without acknowledging the central values of the cultures who invented them and who, in coopting these methods, failed to perceive that regenerative values are integral to the methods themselves.
But these are fraught and thorny issues, and perhaps it isn’t reasonable to expect this book to adequately address the deep dysfunctions of our culture. If portions of Six Inches of Soil fall short here, it does also clearly advocate that consumers get their hands in the dirt and visit a farm—that we all build better relationships with growers and make some connection to the soil, and that we make opportunities for children to do the same. If the book is effective in that advocacy—if people read it and then tear up their front yards to plant a garden with their children, or even if they grow a bit of kale in a pot on the patio—then I think it is a successful project and I am grateful for it.
References
[1] For data to support this claim, see Hungry for land: small farmers feed the world with less than a quarter of all farmland (2014), published by GRAIN, a small international non-profit organisation that works to support small farmers and social movements in their struggles for community-controlled and biodiversity-based food systems.
[2] Six Inches of Soil p25: “There have been a series of ecologically or biologically based farming systems that have responded to the roll out of industrial farming. The first response was biodynamic farming, and then came organic farming in the late 1930s. Permaculture, agroforestry and agroecology arrived during the 1970s, and then finally, we have regenerative agriculture.” See also the chart on p26.
[3] Origins of regenerative paradigms in Indigenous agriculture are well documented, e.g. Sands, B., Machado, M.R., White, A. et al. Moving towards an anti-colonial definition for regenerative agriculture. Agric Hum Values (2023).
[4] This is just one example where this sort of claim gets made, e.g. ‘Nature-based solutions’: Land grabs in nature’s name (2022), published by PAN Asia Pacific (PANAP), one of five regional centres of Pesticide Action Network, a global network dedicated to the elimination of harm upon humans and the environment by pesticide use, and to the promotion of biodiversity-based ecological agriculture. Six Inches of Soil does not make explicit claims that projects associated with clear human rights violations are regenerative, but neither does it consistently and unambiguously clarify that they are not.
[5] Tittonell, P et al. Regenerative agriculture—agroecology without politics? (2022). For another review on the contestation of these terms, see Giraldo, F and Rosset P, Agroecology as a territory in dispute: between institutionality and social movements (2017).
Find more
Six Inches of Soil: How to heal our soils, ourselves and our communities through regenerative farming ed. Molly Foster, Priya Kalia & Jeremy Toynbee (2024) is published by 5m books. Contributors: Mike Berners-Lee, Matt Chatfield, Henry Dimbleby, Adrienne Gordon, Vicki Hird, Anna Jackson, Andrew Jackson, Hannah Jones, Satish Kumar, Tim Lang, Claire Mackenzie, Nicole Masters, Josiah Meldrum, Lucy Michaels, Emma Mills, James Murray-White, Marina O’Connell , John Pawsey, Tom Pearson, Colin Ramsay, Nic Renison, Lizzie Sagoo, Ben Thomas, Ian Wilkinson & Dee Woods. The book consists of seven chapters and six ‘interludes’:
Chapter 1: It’s a miracle, but that miracle has created a disaster
Chapter 2: Regenerative farming, what is it?
Interlude I: Are we using our farmed land wisely?
Chapter 3: The science of soil
Interlude II: Regulation, greenwashing and co-option
Chapter 4: Regenerative mixed farm: Pig Pink Farm, Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire
Interlude III: Subsidies, Brexit and trade
Chapter 5: Organic market garden: Sweetpea, Caxton, Cambridgeshire
Interlude IV: Food security and UK self-sufficiency
Chapter 6: Pasture-fed beef: Treveddoe, Bodmin, Cornwall
Interlude V: Applying agroforestry in mixed regenerative farming
Chapter 7: Soil as soul
Interlude VI: Enterprise stacking
Chapter CHAPTER 8: How do we build a sustainable future for food and farming?
Epilogue – Act now
In parallel to the book, the documentary film Six Inches of Soil, directed by Colin Ramsay, tells the story of British farmers standing up against the industrial food system and transforming the way they produce food. The film website includes additional reading and resources, including an impact campaign.
In his previous ClimateCultures post, Dystopian Farming: an Inquiry, Paul introduces ‘dystopian farming’ as resistance as well as sustenance and a search for joy and meaning that makes our dire times tolerable: the potential for liberation. And in Super Wicked Problem – or, the Crisis Formerly Known as Climate, he seeks the meaning of our planetary crisis in local spaces of resistance that serve as the wombs from which deeper understanding will be born.
Paul Feather
