What Does Regenerative Agriculture Actually Mean?
Updated: Sep 1
At City Farm we use the word "regenerative" repeatedly - to describe our farm, our food, and our methods. But how do we define regenerative? The word 'regenerate' itself means to grow, create, or bring something back to life, health, or an original state -- in other words, leaving something better than we found it.
Ask most people what organic means and you will get a list of things that are not there. No synthetic pesticides. No synthetic fertilizers. That matters, it is a real standard, and it was hard won.
Regenerative farming starts from a different question. Not what did we keep out, but what did we put back. Not just how do we avoid harming this land, but how do we pass it on healthier than we found it?
Is this land healthier than it was last year? Will it still be feeding people in a hundred years? A lot of modern agriculture treats soil as a container, a resource to extract from continuously. Inputs go in, food comes out, and the container slowly wears down, and falls out of balance. Regenerative farming treats soil as something alive, something that gets richer the longer you tend it well.
Here is what it looks like on twenty and a half acres at 1221 Calle Joaquin.
Soil Health: We Don't Till, We Broadfork
Under our feet and our crops is a highly developed "city" of beneficial microorganisms, earthworms, nematodes, protozoa, isopods and mycelial systems that can run for miles that feed and tend the soil. A single teaspoon holds billions of living things. Tilling turns that entire system on its head, destroying the important work this natural ecosystem takes years to establish.
To start or reset a growing bed at City Farm, we use what is called a broadfork. Instead of churning and flipping soil upside down with a tractor or roto-tiller, a broadfork more gently breaks up and aerates the soil with minimal disturbance.
We make our own compost three different ways: hot thermophilic piles, a vermicompost operation run by worms, and a Johnson-Su bioreactor that grows an unusually fungal-rich compost over the better part of a year. Each one produces something a little different. All of them are plant matter and animal manure going back into the ground they came from. We also benefit from the City of San Luis Obispo's Compogas (tm) green waste compost facility that offers compost to residents as well.
Another method we use is cover cropping. Between market crops, or in a window where a bed might otherwise sit empty, we plant it anyway. Not to harvest, but to feed the soil. Bare ground is a wasted season underground, because the soil city we just described runs on living roots, and growing vegetation traps moisture bare soil would let dry out in the top inches of earth. Roots leak sugars that microbes eat, and fed microbes go to work cycling nutrients into forms plants can use.
This year we cover cropped five rows for the first time, with a mix of oats, peas, vetch, and pollinator plants. The oats grow tall and produce a lot of organic matter. The peas and vetch climb the oats and pull nitrogen straight out of the air, fixing it into the soil with the help of bacteria living on their root nodules. The pollinator plants add diversity, which means habitat for insects and everything that eats insects. Every cover crop mix has a legume in it, because legumes are the family that can do the nitrogen trick.
We terminate the crop when the seeds start to form, before they mature, because a farmer who lets oat seed drop has just planted next season's weeds. We crimp the plants, cracking the stems with a sharp blade to break their circulatory systems and kill them in place. Then we tarp the bed for two to four weeks to block out light and make sure nothing regrows. When the tarp comes off, all that plant matter has become mulch on its way to becoming soil, and we plant straight into it.
Undisturbed soil with living roots in it holds carbon underground instead of releasing it to the air, it also retains moisture better allowing us to conserve water.
Animal Integration: Closing The Loop
Our Navajo-Churro sheep are some of the farms hardest workers. They provide fertilizer, mow grasses, and and enhance soil biology. The trick is knowing when to move them. There is a rule of thumb for this, and it is a good one: take half, leave half.
Think of a blade of grass as a solar panel. It uses leaf area to capture sunlight and convert it into growth, above ground and below. Research from the Noble Research Institute found that when more than half of a grass plant's top growth gets removed, root growth stops within a day or two and stays stopped for about eleven days. Come back and graze it again before it recovers and you slowly kill the plant. Leave enough leaf standing and the roots never stop growing at all.
So we move the flock before they take it to the dirt. Grazed to the ground, a pasture dies, and in turn that soil city underneath does too. Grazed to half and then rested, it comes back thicker than it was.
Our meat birds work a different job. They live in chicken tractors, floorless pens that get moved onto fresh pasture twice a day. New grass and new bugs every morning for the birds. A shot of fertility and then a long rest for the ground. Nobody stands in one place long enough to wear it out.
Our laying hens have shrubs and small trees in their coop, and there is a reason for that beyond looking nice. Chickens descend from red junglefowl, forest birds from Southeast Asia that lived in the understory and roosted in branches. A hen standing in a bare open pen is more vulnerable and she can feel it; give her cover overhead and she relaxes, lays more readily, forages more. Every day, produce that would otherwise go straight to the compost pile goes to the flock first: outer cabbage leaves, split tomatoes, the beet greens that did not make it to the stand. The hens turn it into eggs. What they do not turn into eggs they turn into manure, which goes to the compost after all.
Nothing leaves the loop, it simply changes form.
Ecosystem Diversity: The Food Forest
There is a story most of us learned in school. Before European settlement, the people of this continent were hunter-gatherers, moving across a wild landscape and taking whatever it happened to offer.
It is not true. Or at least it is nowhere near the whole truth.
When John Muir stood in Yosemite Valley and described untouched wilderness, he was looking at a garden. The open meadows and black oak groves he admired had been shaped over generations by Sierra Miwok and Valley Yokuts people through deliberate burning, pruning, sowing and selective harvest. Across California, Indigenous communities practiced coppicing, thinning, weeding and tending on a scale that colonists simply could not see, partly because the results looked so much like nature. That was the point. The ecologist M. Kat Anderson spent a career documenting this in Tending the Wild, and her conclusion is blunt: California's Indigenous people were active stewards of an engineered abundance, not passive foragers in an empty landscape.
A row-crop field is usually one species, one root depth, one harvest window and one pest's paradise. (although we do interplant many of our rows at City Farm too!) A food forest, is dozens of species stacked in layers, mostly perennials, with roots reaching different depths and harvests arriving in different months. Mix the plants up strategically, called guild planting, and a pest that loves one of them has to work considerably harder to find the next one. Diversity above ground means diversity below ground too, and soil biology responds to variety the same way we do, as strength.
Which brings us to the owl box.
We put one up because barn owls are the finest rodent control anyone has ever designed. UC research puts a family of five barn owls at roughly a thousand rodents in a single nesting season, and diet studies find that nearly everything they catch is an agricultural pest. Recent work out of Cal Poly Humboldt found something even better: owls do not only eat rodents, they scare them. Rodents living under owl patrol behave more cautiously and eat less. The red-tailed hawks riding thermals over the fields handle the day shift.
Between them we have a rodent program that costs nothing, never needs restocking, and puts no poison anywhere near the food we sell you or the animals that eat it.
Water Stewardship
Every drop of rain that falls on a farm does one of three things. It soaks in, it runs off, or it evaporates. Water stewardship is mostly the work of tilting those odds toward the first one.
Catchment is the straightforward version: capture rain where it lands, before it becomes runoff. Roofs, swales, ponds and tanks all do the same basic job, which is to slow water down and give it time to sink in rather than rushing toward a storm drain. Slow it, spread it, sink it, as the practice usually gets summarized.
Erosion control is the other half. Bare soil is soil that leaves. When rain hits exposed dirt it knocks particles loose and carries them downhill, and what leaves first is always topsoil, the richest and most biologically alive layer, the part that took longest to build. Keep the ground covered with living plants, cover crops or mulch and raindrops hit leaves instead of dirt. Roots hold soil in place. Organic matter holds water in the root zone instead of letting it run off.
The two halves reinforce each other, which is the pattern you start noticing everywhere in this work. Undisturbed soil full of organic matter and old root channels absorbs rain far better than compacted, tilled ground. Build soil and you have built a reservoir.
Context and Community
Here is the part some definitions of regenerative agriculture leave out. Regenerating land without regenerating the people who tend it and call it home is an incomplete loop.
City Farm exists because in 1994, people in San Luis Obispo looked at prime farmland at the southern gateway to their city and decided it should be preserved as farmland. That decision became General Plan Policy 8.8, then the Calle Joaquin Agricultural Reserve, and eventually the ground you stand on when you visit us. Three decades later City Farm holds a 40-year lease on it. This land is civic infrastructure. The people of San Luis Obispo chose that and protected it.
Thirteen City Farm acres are stewarded by the City Farmer Collaborative: small- scale independent farmers who are provided with affordable long-term land leases, shared water, technical support, and each other. Land access is now the number one barrier facing beginning farmers in California. We cannot fix that statewide. We can fix it on thirteen acres.
Our Pay-What-You-Can Farm Stand makes the food grown here available to everyone in this community, at whatever they can pay, with no paperwork and no questions asked. Farmers are paid the prices they set regardless.
And more than a thousand young people a year come through our education programs and put their hands in this soil as they get curious about where their food comes from. Students and volunteers able to participate and take pride in being a part of the process.
On this farm, nothing works alone, because we know regenerative requires cooperation and interdependence.
Come see regenerative principles in action:
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