The Key to Scaling Regenerative Farming: New Science
How Mighty Partner Ecdysis Foundation Is Helping Turn the Tide
Stories are what make us human—and they’re certainly critical for affecting positive change. Take success stories about regenerative agriculture, for example. They can inspire conventional farmers to consider more sustainable practices. But sometimes, stories are just that: anecdotes, says Jonathan Lundgren, founder and director of Mighty Partner Ecdysis Foundation. For farmers resistant to change, oftentimes it’s actually science—not stories—that’s necessary. And that’s where Lundgren and the Ecdysis Foundation come in.
Lundgren founded the Ecdysis Foundation, as well as Blue Dasher Farm in South Dakota, in 2016 as a research foundation and training ground for future scientists and farmers. Previously, as a well-respected researcher for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Lundgren had witnessed how the system was failing farmers. He realized he’d need to leave USDA to make the difference he wanted to, and now, he’s focusing on how science can better support farmers transitioning to regenerative practices.
“The climate continues to degrade, the environment degrades, the rural communities are disappearing, farmers' bottom lines—they're not getting better,” says Lundgren. “So I decided we needed to change how science was being done if we were to get ourselves out of this mess.”
Lundgren continued, “And I took a leap. The first thing I said was that scientists have to be farmers. We have to connect with the problem we're trying to solve. And that changed everything.”
Bigger and simpler isn’t working anymore
Shifting gears to becoming a farmer himself, Lundgren put himself at ground zero of where change needs to happen. For some time, he explains, it seemed to make sense for farms to get bigger and simpler—the monocrop system appeared to be working.
“But it turns out it wasn't farming, it was mining,” says Lundgren.
A transformational change is really needed immediately, he says, pointing out that the planet only has about 50 years’ worth of topsoil left. Right now it’s the farmers themselves who are leading the way, Lundgren explains, developing successful systems to farm with nature instead of against it, and becoming more resilient and more profitable as a result. However, to make their practices scalable and repeatable, they need supporting science.
“Those observations are so important in helping us to know what's possible, but they're also easily dismissed,” says Lundgren. “And so farmers who are resistant to change can say, ‘That may work on that farm, but it'll never work on my farm.’ And that's where science needs to step in.”
The power of science to affect change
As farmers do the work of experimenting and figuring out how to have success with regenerative farming, Ecdysis comes in to assess and validate the work—taking what’s working anecdotally and figuring out how to make the systems scalable, transferable, more predictable, Lundgren explains. He shares a success story from California’s Central Valley:
Speaking with a conventional producer, he was showing the farmer results of his pest management system. They’d measured all the elements of the system, and the farmer was in disbelief of the turnout.
“He looked at it and he said, ‘I don't believe it. I don't believe it—I did everything I was supposed to do. I followed the best management practices of the universities and of the almond board, and I sprayed insecticide five times last year on my trees. My orchard cost me tens of thousands of dollars. And what you're telling me is that the person right across the road who didn't spray at all had the same number of pests that I did, and I just can't believe that.’”
Lundgren explained that, no, it wasn’t only the people across the road—it was all of the regenerative farms. It was predictable and consistent.
“And for that farmer, he couldn't sweep it aside,” says Lundgren. “That's where science stepped in and helped to validate it. That farmer changed 110 acres the first year to regenerative and now has this whole 1,000-acre almond operation, farming it regeneratively.”
Aiming for the whole system
While the small-scale, regional studies the Ecdysis team have been working on are promising, Lundgren points out that it’s not enough. The solutions need to be systemic—not focused just on one particular problem or symptom in one specific food system.
“We needed bold action,” says Lundgren. “That's what prompted the 1,000 Farms Initiative, a continental-scale research project at the systems level that's relationship-intensive, that crosses borders—food system borders, geographic borders. The impact that we've had already is beyond anything that we could have imagined.”
By the end of its first year, in 2022, the initiative saw the Ecdysis team visit 389 farms around North America, gathering crucial data on regenerative systems. And aside from recording increases in organic matter in the soil and observing life returning to farms that were previously dying, the team shared their excitement and high spirits with the farmers doing the work.
“The farmer interactions and the hope that our team inspires right now is so desperately needed,” says Lundgren. “So those things are really positive outcomes from year one.”
Lundgren says the impact of the 1,000 Farms initiative has already been felt around the world—in fact, he was stopped by a random farmer in Italy who recognized him for his work and appreciated it. The avalanche-like influence of the initiative is what Lundgren hopes will help encourage other farmers to consider regenerative practices. As the team visits more and more farms, gathering data, Lundgren says he sees the farmers get inspired by the team’s passion.
“Our generation, my generation, has been throwing technology against these problems for our whole lives, and it's not working,” says Lundgren. “We're bleeding on a battlefield and we're squinting at the horizon just hoping that there's something waiting for us—and what those farmers saw in the staff of Ecdysis Foundation was that the cavalry is starting to assemble, and that gives us so much hope.”
Mighty Arrow is inspired too
The first time I sat down to a conversation with Jonathan about his work, he spoke about the statistics within social movements, and how if you had a certain percent of individuals within a community get behind it, the movement had enough legs to stand on its own and grow from there. This philosophical application to transitioning regenerative agriculture really resonated with me. I could so clearly see the vision within the 1,000 Farm Initiative and its potential for ripple effects through the agricultural regions in the US. Ecdysis is showing up with their science, but their ability to inspire change on the industrial agricultural landscape is something we should all get behind.