Digging into Regenerative Organic Agriculture
Everyone's talking about it. But what does it actually mean?
When I first started taking an interest in wine in the early 1990s, bottles that displayed a certified organic logo on the back were often produced by idealists rather than skilled vignerons. My mum, a staunch advocate for organic farming her whole life, frequently bought a cheap organic Tempranillo which served as our house wine. To me it tasted bitter, thin and disgusting. I did anything I could to persuade her to open something different.
Organic farming is now almost the minimum expected standard for any serious artisanal winemaker or grower. Gone are the days when ‘organic wine’ meant something substandard. The conversation has broadened its scope. Once the initial pain barrier of quitting with synthetic vineyard treatments is surmounted, many growers seek to go deeper into methodologies that help them work in harmony with nature - rather than trying to fight it.
Biodynamic agriculture became the new organic - derided and poo-pooed just like organics was in the 80s and 90s. Biodynamics goes significantly beyond the officially accepted definition of organics. Whereas organic agriculture simply denotes a farming system without any synthetic fertilisers, pesticides or other non-organic inputs, biodynamics implements an over-arching set of techniques and philosophies to actively improve soil health. Some of its more esoteric elements invite scorn, but with more and more of the world’s most iconic wine estates onboard (Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, Domaine Leflaive, Château Palmer, Château Pontet-Canet, Nikolaihof and Tablas Creek to name a few), the days of deriding biodynamics are numbered.
Now there’s a profusion of newer terms and buzzwords. Many have questioned the meaning of the word sustainability. Is organic farming truly sustainable when it comes to wine? It doesn’t tackle the whole picture. Everything from water usage to the welfare of harvest workers and the winery’s position in the market play their part in creating a truly sustainable business. As the radical ideas of Masanobu Fukuoka (The one Straw Revolution) gained ground, so too did permaculture, no-till and no-spray as methodologies to reduce the human impact on land still further. Just as the concept of natural wine taught us that less is more in the cellar, these disciplines address the same paradigm in the vineyard. Rewilding, the return of agricultural or vineyard land to uncultivated nature, is a related idea which helps rebuild biodiversity and tackles wine’s impossible dilemma - that it is invariably a monoculture in the modern age.
I started hearing the term regenerative agriculture about five years ago. I had little idea what it meant, but it clearly had people fired up. The 2020 Netflix documentary Kiss The Ground played a part in building the hype. ‘Regenerative’ is now sprinkled generously over the copy of a thousand winery websites, along with words such as sustainability and community. Some of the world’s largest agribusiness companies have rolled out regenerative agriculture programmes. What does it all mean? Is regenerative just another level of greenwashing or is there some substance to the term?
The picture is becoming clearer, thanks in part to the Regenerative Organic Alliance (ROA), a non-profit organisation founded in 2017 as a spin-off from the Rodale Institute. The ROA introduced the world’s first Regenerative Organic Certification scheme (ROC) in 2019. More about what that entails in a moment, but first back to the Rodale Institute. Founded by JI Rodale in 1947, the institute promotes organic farming and undertakes research, consultancy and educational programmes. For UK readers, it can be compared with the Soil Association which was founded one year earlier.
JI’s son Robert Rodale is widely credited for popularising the phrase regenerative agriculture in the 1980s, although botanist Dr. George Washington Carver coined it much earlier. A video clip of a 1989 interview with Rodale and the USDA gives valuable insight. Rodale sought both environmental and social improvement in farming, but he was frustrated that the organic agriculture discipline was both limited and inflexible. He talks about a broader concept that would open the door to farmers who wanted to try to move forward step by step. He also expresses his dissatisfaction with the term sustainability:
It’s very appealing to policy makers and government, but I don’t think the average person aspires to live in a sustained environment, they want to live in something that’s expanding and becoming better. I think that the idea of regeneration is much more appealing.
Rodale Jnr died a year after that interview, and to some extent the term died with him. But then it began to gain currency more than two decades later. The challenge is that there is no single accepted definition. Daniel Araujo, Standards & Quality Assurance Manager at ROA, summed up the basic concept to me as “the opposite of conventional agriculture’s predatory approach to nature.” He says “Instead of depleting resource we are increasing resources. The idea is to leave the system [nature, the environment] better off than when you started.”
Getting Certified
The ROA’s certification scheme ROC has three pillars: Soil health, animal welfare and social fairness. Regeneration means the use of farming methods such as crop rotation (there is an exception for vines, fruit trees, tea cultivation and so forth), cover crops, no synthetic inputs and no GMOs. Carbon sequestration is key, and the Rodale Institute has ample evidence from trials and studies that organic farming achieves it much more effectively than any synthetics-driven system. Cover crops are key because they consume carbon rather than emitting it back into the atmosphere. Generally the less that the soil is touched, ploughed or opened, the more carbon is absorbed. Water retention also tends to be improved. The use of animals for grazing and manure increases the benefits.
ROC differs markedly from existing organic and biodynamic certification schemes, partly because organic certification is required as a precursor. Rodale and the ROA specifically use the phrase Regenerative Organic Agriculture, because they maintain that the concept of regenerative agriculture is ethically and practically impossible in the context of conventional synthetics and fossil-fuel driven agriculture.
It’s relevant that ROC originated in the US, a country where the concept and definition of ‘organic’ is arguably far more contaminated by the needs of big business than in Europe. For example, organic certification in the USA allows non-soil based systems such as hydroponics and does not enforce strict standards when it comes to animal welfare, nor does it have anything to say about ethical practice in the workplace. That’s not to say that ROC is irrelevant in Europe, but just that it was more acutely needed in the US. It functions partly, says Daniel Araujo, “to allow farms that are organic to communicate that ‘actually we are way more than just that’.”
ROC has two slightly different programmes. It certifies farms (‘producers’), but also grants licenses to retailers or resellers who source from regenative organic certified producers. Certification for farms, including wineries, is completed with an audit by one of the ROA’s partners. Ecocert, a well-known French organic certification body is a key partner in Europe. I asked Araujo if wineries can theoretically save money by combining their audit for organic certification with the ROC audit. This is possible, and thus quite attractive. The costs payable to ROA are modest, totalling only a few hundred Euros for a small property, but the costs of the audit vary depending on the partner and can be higher.
Regenerative Organic Certified Wineries
ROA rolled out their certification scheme in 20201, after piloting it with 12 farms the year before - these included Tablas Creek winery in Paso Robles. Currently around 300 producers are certified worldwide, although as Araujo notes some of these bodies are farmer collectives representing hundreds of individual growers. In total, just over 15 million acres are ROA certified globally.
Most of the certified wineries, thus far, are major players in either California or South America, but there are four Austrians and one Italian. Alexander Zahel, who farms 35 hectares in Vienna, was the first European winery to gain ROC. I met Zahel in spring 2024, and asked him why he wanted to have ROC in addition to his organic and Demeter certification. He replied that he missed the social/fair trade part of the equation, which was what attracted him to ROC. Zahel could also see that everyone was playing fast and loose with the term ‘regenerative’. “I’m worried that it will become meaningless in Austria” he said.
Zahel did the legwork of identifying an auditing partner, Bioagricert S.R.L. based in Italy. Jurtschitsch, a renowned and sizeable Kamptal-based winery came onboard at the same time. Alwin Jurtschistch has organic certification and works with many biodynamic techniques, although he is not a Steiner fan per se. Jurtschitsch’s interest in the ROA was initially piqued when he saw that Patagonia was a partner. “It’s one of my favourite clothing brands” he laughs, “so it got my attention.” He feels that the ROA’s certification “brings so many aspects together” and echoes Rodale, saying “We all talk about sustainability, but in the world we are living in it’s not enough to keep the status quo, we have fucked things up so badly that we have to move towards regenerative thinking.”
Jurtschitsch had long felt that organic certification didn’t go far enough. “It’s just certification for the production method” he says, “But the certificate doesn’t include monitoring of how you rebuilt your soil quality. They don’t check the humus content, they don’t ask if what you are doing is good or bad.” With a keen interest in permaculture, he could see many parallels between his own thinking and the ROA’s.
Alwin also sees the ROA’s certification programme as a trigger for continuous improvement. “I’m the biggest critic on my own farm to become better. And with Regenerative Organic now we have some tools to do this.” he says. Jurtschitsch’s audit took place in January 2024, and he was impressed with its stringency. The auditor interviewed a number of Alwin’s staff in private, asking them about everything from sexual harassment to whether they had anyone they could register a complaint with - should they need to. Discovering that one of his staff lives onsite at the winery, she then asked to see their apartment. She also presented a list of three of Jurtschitsch’s vineyard parcels, which were visited to take soil samples.
With just five European wineries on the roster right now, it’s clearly early days for ROC and wine. But with well-known names like Jurtschitsch, Tablas Creek, Grgich Hills, Fetzer (Bonterra) and Emiliana in Chile certified, there is bound to be a substantial amount of interest. ROC does seem to plug some important gaps in existing organic and biodynamic certification schemes, whilst also providing an important signal to consumers that the wine they buy has been produced ethically and fairly, above and beyond the farming methods used in the vineyard.
Controversy
When I spoke to Araujo, he mentioned that the term regenerative is controversial, which initially surprised me. But this unveiled one of the key reasons why the ROA and its certification scheme was created. As with any term that has not been well defined at government level, there is disagreement about the exact meaning - and plenty of misuse of the term, as it was originally conceived by Rodale.
Araujo told me that Bayer, one of the world’s agribusiness giants and now owner of Montsanto, has a page on their website about their regenerative programme. I didn’t believe him, but it’s true. So do Cargill, Pepsi, General Mills and many of the world’s other food processing giants. But the definition that these corporations offer is very different to that of the Rodale Institute or ROA. Bayer envisages a version of regenerative agriculture that includes the use of synthetic fertilisers, GMOs and other non-organic inputs. Their claim to be regenerative centres around what is sometimes called carbon farming - using cover crops and crop rotation to try to maximise carbon sequestration. But, according to ROA and Rodale, this is nonsensical without organic practices.
Agribusiness has been able to fudge the definition to suit its commercial needs, precisely because there is no legal framework to contest it. This is a hot enough potato that the California Department of Food and Agriculture has set up a working group to discuss and arrive at a firm decision. ROA has a seat at the table, but agribusiness will doubtless try to influence the result via corporate lobbies. The outcome from this working group could be very significant as it would likely influence future federal policy.
Another controversy surrounding regenerative agriculture, and specifically the ROA is that it fails to recognise the extent to which indigenous people always farmed according to regenerative practices. The Netflix documentary was heavily criticised as promoted an almost entirely white vision of regenerative agriculture, as if it were a brand new idea. ROA isn’t the only campaigning body for many of these concepts. La Via Campesina is an international farming organisation of 182 organisations in 81 countries that represents millions of “peasant farmers” (their words), mostly in poorer farming regions in the southern hemisphere. La Via Campesian focuses around the concept of Agroecology, an academic discipline that joins the dots between environmental, agricultural and societal problems. As wikipedia puts it “Agroecology is a holistic approach that seeks to reconcile agriculture and local communities with natural processes for the common benefit of nature and livelihoods.”
Critics of the term regenerative organic agriculture fear that the ROA and its certification programme might obscure the work that La Via Campesina has been doing to promote awareness of agroecology - and thus, that the focus will remain on rich western nations, ignoring some of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable farmers.
Whether the criticism is justified, the fact remains that ROC is the only certification scheme of its kind, and thus currently the only effective tool to counter agribusiness’s rampant greenwashing. ROA is a young organisation which can hopefully react quickly to the concerns of indigenous populations and others who don’t yet feel represented by its work.
There is much more to say about this developing plank of conscious agriculture. For the moment, customers in the US can look out for the ROC logo on products sold in Wholefoods or by ROA’s many licensees, and Austrian wine fans can expect to see that same logo on bottles of Zahel, Jurtschitsch, Winkler-Hermaden and Georg Toifl’s wines in the very near future. I guarantee that all of them will taste considerably better than my mum’s Tempranillo.
Further reading
Two exhaustive articles that take a critical and balanced look at the Regenerative Organic landscape as it stands:
Update, June 15 2024
Since writing this article, I discovered the existence of a second regenerative agriculture certification scheme, which is much more permissive than ROC, allowing the (theoretically limited) use of pesticides and just about everything else. Currently it only has 19 certified producers and is even more US-focused than ROA.
In the days that everyone is obsessed about AI and shortcuts to critical thinking, this and other of your articles are always a delight to read. Particularly enjoy you sharing your intimates stories with winemakers. Keep it up!
I love this vision. I do wonder how this certification overlaps or might dilute focus from other social impact schemes such as FairTrade. The relationship with organic cert seems natural with no obvious crossovers or dilution. Thanks for the informative article!!