“Thank
you for being a regenerative farmer. We would like to introduce you to the Regenerative Farm
Map we’ve created — you’re
on it!”

The
email finally arrived from Regeneration International, notifying my wife and I
that we had officially made it onto the map with our small regenerative dairy
founded on the land in rural Wisconsin she inherited from her grandfather
called Happy Köe Farm — a place that doesn’t exist.

Of
course, the location was once a real farm and the backstory was true about my
wife’s grandfather, who immigrated to a Dutch dairy community in Wisconsin
after enduring the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. The part about us moving
out there and buying eleven cows to start our own dairy ranch… in this economy?
That was a lie. But that didn’t tip off the staff at Regeneration
International, whose job isn’t exactly to ask hard questions when landowners
tell them that their ranching operations are fighting climate change.
 
I was inspired to “found” Happy Köe when I tuned into a video presentation for
the launch of a Boycott Big Meat campaign by the anti-vaccine Organic Consumers’ Association. With
Regeneration International and several other partners, they were launching an
interactive map of regenerative farms. Regeneration International defines
regenerative farms as those that use “farming and grazing practices that, among
other benefits, reverse climate change by rebuilding soil organic matter and
restoring degraded soil biodiversity.”

Following
the link revealed that thousands of such farms were already listed across the
country. Considering that scientists were reporting global habitat destruction and soil deterioration crises, a regenerative agricultural
movement seemed like what would be a good sign, but some of the farms resembled
feedlots in satellite imagery and the moderator dismissed my question about the
criteria for being listed.
 
Although regenerative agriculture is a broad concept, the vast majority of
businesses on the map farm animals, particularly cows. The regenerative
ranching doctrine is known by many names — including rotational or mob foraging,
multi-paddock adaptive grazing, and holistic rangeland management — but
their essence is the same: using cattle farming to stimulate ecological
restoration. While the regenerative potential of many agricultural techniques
is widely accepted among ecologists, the inclusion of ranching is disputed. The
organizations who listed my fake farm, however, contend that the critics are
wrong.
 
The presentation proceeded in classic Zoom form — the
nonprofit staff handed off a slide deck, reciting their pedigrees and
introducing their speakers. The star guest was Georgia rancher Will Harris,
owner of White Oak Pastures. Harris has a big name in the world of regenerative
ranching and a huge media footprint, appearing everywhere from the New York
Times to the BBC and partnering with everyone from the Sunrise Movement to Shell Solar. His affect is individualistic and his
marketing evokes the imagery of a modest family farm, but it’s actually quite an operation, with nearly 3,000 ruminants and 100,000
birds.
 
In a thick southern drawl, he told us how his ranch operates carbon-negative,
citing a white paper he commissioned by a consulting firm
called Quantis. Six months later, a peer-reviewed study would follow. Like the Quantis paper, it
was financed entirely by General Mills, listing several conflicts of interests
among its authors, who were employees or had received agribusiness funding. Unlike
the Quantis paper, the peer-reviewed study found the ranch to be a net emitter
of greenhouse gases, despite charitable modeling assumptions regarding the ability of the soil system
to indefinitely sequester atmospheric carbon.

Despite
this finding, at the time of publication, Harris’ website still claims the
ranch is drawing down carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The land at its
margins is shadowed by great forests of pine trees, each holding hundreds of
pounds of carbon, which once stretched unbroken across the landscape. Bald
eagles who attempt to nest in them are hazed and harassed into leaving. The
nearby highway is paved over an ancient First Nations footpath. Harris
inherited the land from his great grandfather, who settled it in 1866 after the
Muscogee Creek tribe was forcibly displaced along the Trail of Tears. 

While Harris hasn’t exactly faced the music for false advertising, other
regenerative ranching evangelists have come under scrutiny of late. Joel
Salatin, a bestselling author with glowing profiles in Food Inc. and The Omnivore’s Dilemma, has
traveled the world teaching panels on “how to quit your job
and start farming.” But
in September 2020, he saw his column in Mother Earth News canceled after
posting a series of objectionable comments in retaliation to criticisms from Black Indigenous farmer Chris
Newman, once an admirer who bought Salatin’s books and sought to emulate his
methods. Salatin’s posts boldly advanced racist tropes and metaphors, which
were detailed by fellow rancher and writer Tom Philpott in a reflective profile distancing himself from the man whose
reputation he had helped to build.

What
Philpott left out were the shocking testimonies of abuse from Salatin’s former farm
hands. Like White Oak Pastures, who settled a class action lawsuit for wage theft, Salatin’s Polyface Farm
relies on a steady stream of unpaid or underpaid labor. Each year, bright-eyed
young interns seeking to change the word of farming show up to work for a
chance to gain experience and learn skills for their own careers and ventures.
Salatin’s program, according to one person who went through it, sounds more
like a labor camp than a learning opportunity: five months on property, working
on days off is expected, trips to visit family are discouraged, and curfews are
enforced. Three interns corroborated that in the summer of 2019, an entire
cohort of eleven was poisoned, causing intestinal hemorrhaging in one woman,
who was hospitalized three times. She alleges that Joel and his brother Daniel
discouraged her from seeking emergency care or telling medical staff where she
came from. Her coworker testified that they later learned that the Salatins
were aware all summer that interns’ water supply had been contaminated with
campylobacter, a bacterial pathogen associated with intensive bird farming, and
had it tested and chemically treated without notifying the interns.

Despite
preaching a self-made “Christian libertarian” ethic, labor isn’t the only thing
Salatin gets for free. He also inherited his land from his father, an
accountant for Texas Oil who was kicked out of Venezuela during land reforms
instituted in the 1960s by Rómulo Betancourt. “We fled the back door as the
machine guns came in the front door,” Salatin tells interviewers, although sometimes he says
they left through the front door. Conversely, papers at the time described
the transition as “orderly”, despite the inequity of 1.7 percent of
landholders owning 74 percent of the country by area. It is reasonable,
however, to imagine the neighborhood may not have been fond of the Salatins,
who Joel describes in his book You
Can Farm as being involved in “wildcat oil drilling,” “clearing…
the jungle,” and “corner[ing] the poultry market.”
 
The godfather of regenerative ranching, however, is a man named Allan Savory.
While Harris and Salatin were just kids, Savory was killing
revolutionaries to uphold
colonial rule in the British Royal Rhodesian Regiment. His memoirs describe
training Selous Scouts-style “pseudo-gangs” who retaliated
against African resistance fighters, wearing blackface and guerilla garb to
blend in behind enemy lines in the bush. Before that, he worked as a ranger for
the British Colonial Service, tracking and shooting wildlife like elephants,
hippos, and lions that were causing problems for settlers. He claims to be
responsible for the killing of 40,000 elephants as a colonial wildlife manager. As the
Zimbabwe African National Union overtook the white minority government, Savory
was exiled and came to the United States, a
grievance he would bear for the rest of his life. In a 2015 blog for Regeneration International, Savory
called the expulsion of Cliven Bundy for illegal grazing on Gold Butte National
Monument an example of a “western ranching cultural genocide”, echoing reactions to agricultural land reforms in
post-apartheid South Africa.

Savory
rose to prominence in the United States after a breakout TED talk, a media
venture by CNN founder and ranching tycoon Ted Turner. Savory now has a consulting firm, an online school, and a farm certification. The consensus among ecologists — and
even many ranching scientists — regards
him as a crank, but he compares himself to Galileo, claiming that it’s impossible for peers to review his methods of
holistic range management. Regardless, his theories are flattering to business
and convenient to consumers, which means they still find plenty of advocates in
media.
 
Agribusiness not only funds an increasingly significant
proportion of
agricultural research in the United States, but a number of state-mandated
marketing programs. In 1985, during the Reagan administration’s campaign to fleece federal lands for privatized
grazing, congress passed the Beef Promotion and
Research Act, placing a
small tax on cattle sales to fund industry advertising in public spaces, which
has grown over the years with the expansion of the industry. The Beef Board has
kept up with the times, recently taking interest in climate messaging.
“Improving grazing management techniques [can] enhance carbon sequestration
particularly on land that has been degraded,” Sara Place wrote in one of many articles sponsored by the
federal Beef Checkoff program during her tenure as Senior Director of
Sustainable Beef Production at the National Beef Cattleman’s Association. 

Place
is now a consultant at a former Eli Lilly subsidiary called Elanco, currently
embroiled in a class action lawsuit over thousands of pet deaths linked to its pesticide flea collars. The Beef Board has also propelled the
prolific media career of Frank Mitloehner, the self-styled
greenhouse gas guru, who has also received millions of dollars in research financing from livestock industries. Similarly,
Jason Rowntree, principal investigator in General Mills White Oak Pastures
study, declared no conflicts of interest, unlike some of his coauthors. He
declined, however, to mention that he sits on the board of the American
Grassfed Association and has received research grants from corporations such as
McDonald’s. While these are just a few of the more
public-facing personalities, the ranching industry infiltration into the
academy is vast, including on-campus
slaughterhouses built
with industry funding and parallel institutions such as range ecology and
animal sciences, which help to avoid peer scrutiny of industry scientists’
business-related priorities in conventional ecology and zoology departments.

Although
generally associated with reactionary politics, the ranching industry’s extensive public
relations strategies also help to promote ranching pseudoscience in the more
progressive corners of popular culture. Ranching has been promoted as a means
of combating climate change in media outlets such as The Nation, The Guardian, Scientific American, and CNN. Environmental NGOs with financial ties
to the ranching industry, such as The Nature
Conservancy and Audubon Society have advanced similar narratives. The
2020 Netflix Documentary Kiss
the Ground, narrated by vegan Hollywood actor Woody Harrelson,
heavily features regenerative ranching. Political spheres have also been swept
up in the hype. Regeneration International has partnered with climate activist
groups such as the Sunrise Movement and food justice advocates like Vandana
Shiva, who sits on their board. California House Representative Ro Khanna
called in and spoke for the launch event of the regenerative farm map. Even
Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders cited the meat industry-adjacent Rodale Institute and alluded to regenerative ranching in
his Green New Deal platform.

Credit: Regeneration International

The
proliferation of industry messaging has been less successful in altering the
scientific consensus, but has provided an orchard of alternative narratives,
ripe for cherry-picking. Crudely extrapolating from a favorable study and
ignoring concepts such as soil types and carbon saturation, Regeneration International calculates
that “If… regenerative grazing practices were implemented on the world’s
grazing lands they would sequester 98.5 gigatons CO2
per year,” meaning that
“Just transitioning ten percent of agricultural production to best-practice
regenerative systems will sequester enough CO2 to reverse climate change and restore the global
climate.”

The
international scientific community strongly disagrees. The IPCC, for instance,
estimates that all regenerative agricultural techniques — for
plant and animal agriculture — have the capacity to annually draw down 2.3–5.3 gigatons of atmospheric carbon into the soils
beneath all the world’s croplands and pastures. In 2018, a team of eleven
scientists from seven countries led by the Food Climate Research Network came
together specifically to investigate this question. Conducting a metastudy drawing from over 300 articles in the literature,
they concluded that

[B]etter
management of grass-fed livestock, while worthwhile in and of itself, does not offer
a significant solution to climate change as only under very specific conditions
can they help sequester carbon. This sequestering of carbon is even then small,
time-limited, reversible and substantially outweighed by the greenhouse gas
emissions these grazing animals generate.

Furthermore,
emitting greenhouse gases is far from the only damaging environmental
side-effect of ranching. In the United States alone, studies have shown that it
vectors the spread of invasive plants,
endangering endemic flora. It accelerates the erosion of stream banks, clouding waterways and
propagating harmful algal and bacterial growth. It desiccates streams, groundwater, and aquifers,
diverting them into pastures, stock tanks, and feed crops. It encloses vast expanses of land within fencing,
entangling wildlife and inhibiting migration of native grazers like elk,
pronghorn, and bison. It entails the trapping, hunting, and poisoning of predators and “pests”, such as prairie
dogs, coyotes, and wolves. It promotes the wholesale destruction of ecosystems
such as sagebrush and pinyon-juniper forests by methods such as bulldozing,
chaining, and even napalm air strikes to create more range land.

It
produces vast quantities of effluent waste, polluting waterways and washing into
river deltas, begetting hypoxic marine dead zones. It incubates zoonoses such as mad cow disease. It expropriates immense quantities of crop yields that could be used more efficiently to
feed humans directly. It occupies an estimated 60 percent of global agricultural land while
providing only two percent of calories consumed worldwide. And although the
regenerative ranching movement posits itself as an alternative to the
industrial feedlot system associated with many of these repercussions, virtually all grass-fed cattle in the United States
spend the final quarter or more of their life in a concentrated animal feeding
operation.

Despite
deep investments, broad networks, and a widespread will to believe, science
continues to erode the theoretical basis of ranching as a mechanism of
ecological regeneration and a solution to climate change. In truth, cattle
ranching is not only by far the most land, water, and emissions-intensive way
to feed humans, but a leading cause of habitat destruction, a consolidator of
land and natural resources, and a pillar of settler-colonialism. While
regenerative crop farming practices such as cover crops and wildlife corridors
have considerable and proven potential to aid in regenerating habitat and
sequestering atmospheric carbon, the cynical corporate crusade to claim
ranching among regenerative agricultural techniques is co-opting grassroots
support for such ideas and damaging their credibility. The reality is that the
concept of sustainable carbon-negative ranching is little more than meat
marketing mythology. There is, however, one ranch that generates so few
emissions, it’s as if there are no cows at all. It’s out in the Wisconsin
countryside and it’s called Happy Köe Farm.