By Caleigh Wells for KCRW.
Broadcast version by Suzanne Potter for California News Service reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

Mollie Engelhardt’s farm looks messy. 

Every inch of Sow a Heart Farm in Fillmore, Calif., is growing one of more than 300 types of plants. In between the rows of fruit trees, Engelhardt has got organic peppers, garlic, broccoli, and cauliflower, all covered with a thin layer of grass or clover. On a recently harvested plot, chickens and sheep are eating the scraps, churning the soil so it’ll be ready to plant again.

“The neighbors' farms are perfect rows of the exact same thing with bare soil underneath. The trees are managed by spraying herbicides,” Engelhardt says. “You can see that every inch of my farm is covered.”

The chaos is all by design.

This farm is an experiment in regenerative agriculture, intended to grow healthier food at the same time as tackling climate change.

This is still far from the norm in farming – less than 1% of American farmland uses regenerative ag techniques. But this year the Farm Bill, a major piece of U.S. agriculture legislation, is up for renewal, and regenerative agriculture practitioners hope that could change.

“Folks in D.C. are already starting to think about what they want to see changed in the Farm Bill,” says regenerative agriculture expert Arohi Sharma with the Natural Resources Defense Council. “The fact that we're talking about soil health, the fact that we're having hearings on regenerative agriculture, is a huge step in the right direction.”

The world’s oldest carbon capture technology

The term regenerative agriculture refers to a handful of practices that create healthy soil. The most visible is the wild mix of plants in Englehardt’s lush, chaotic plots. She carefully picks what grows where so the plants work together to thrive.

“Fennel is actually an insectary. So the fennel is keeping the bugs off of the kale without spraying any pesticides or anything,” she says.

She grew corn next to young avocado trees a few years ago, so the tall stalks could provide shade during a hot autumn. When she harvested the corn, she planted fava beans, since they’re good at restoring nitrogen in the soil 

Englehardt’s also keeping the ground covered and hand-harvesting her crops. All of that makes the soil healthier.

“By diversifying what you grow, you're providing different kinds of nutrients to the soil. It’s like diversifying our human diets,” Sharma says.

Better dirt means more plants photosynthesizing, sucking carbon out of the atmosphere, pulling it into their roots, and shoving it into the ground. That makes it a useful climate change tool. Sharma estimates if every farm in the U.S. operated this way, it would remove as much carbon as shuttering 64 coal plants.

Englehardt says the climate benefits don’t stop with carbon capture.

“Not only are we sequestering carbon, I'm recharging the aquifer far more than the neighbor is,” she says. “And the water filtering through my soil is clean, has no glyphosates, has no Roundup, it has none of that.”

In drought-ridden Southern California, Engelhardt’s soil is better at soaking up whatever water it gets. After the giant storms last month, her dirt roads were flooded but her plots were just soft and damp.

The future of farming?

Making regenerative agriculture a mainstream practice has been an uphill battle.

“It's an overhaul of our food and agricultural system, which is rooted so deeply in our commodities, in our subsidies, in our insurance policies, in our financial system,” says Jesse Smith with the White Buffalo Land Trust just north of Santa Barbara, which does trainings and courses on regenerative agriculture. 

Sharma agrees: “From the 1970s onwards, decades of agricultural policy have prioritized unsustainable farming practices over regenerative ones,” she says.

Take the way crop insurance is structured. Right now, a corn farmer who had a bad year can claim the loss on that crop, and the government helps them out. A farmer growing corn and soy would write two claims. But what if you, like Englehardt, grow 300 different crops?

“It's a lot harder for them to write an insurance policy or claim insurance rewards because of just the number of crops that they have to keep track of,” Sharma says.

Plus, farmers using these techniques need to pay for more labor, because mechanical harvesting harms the soil.

Englehardt says she grows more food per acre than the conventional farms next door, but four years in she still hasn’t turned a profit.

“You can't expect to be making money right away in any business. The guy down the street? The first four years, he had lemons and avocados planted, he certainly wasn't making money either,” she says.

But convincing a farmer who’s currently turning a profit to change their practices even though they won’t make money for a few years is a tough sell. 

Still, Smith says he’s seen an increase in people coming to the farm for their regenerative agriculture trainings and courses.

“We’ve had cowboys from the Midwest, young up-and-coming farmers from the inner cities, to grandparents looking to figure out what to do with their property, to people who don't have land looking to get into agriculture, to people who are in computer programming, figuring out how to put their skills in service of natural ecosystems,” he says. ”It’s such a broad range of people.”

The farms trying it so far are small, Smith says, not like the thousands of acres devoted to Smuckers jam or Cuties mandarin oranges.

While some farmers wait on the government to make regenerative agriculture more profitable, Smith says it’s catching on with people like Englehardt prioritizing their positive impact.

“There is a misconception that this is a fringe niche movement. And it's not. People are transitioning large, large swaths of land,” Smith says. “It may not be a windfall, but in the hearts and minds of people who are watching, what is being demonstrated is greatly impactful and will set the stage for the coming decades of agricultural production in this country.”

Minnesota will soon hold public hearings on proposed water permit changes as it seeks to get control of nitrate pollution from industrial farms.

This week, the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency released its plan to overhaul standards for a pair of water permits issued to the largest animal feedlots in the state. The main focus is livestock operations in areas vulnerable to groundwater pollution. The farms would have to adopt certain practices related to manure application in the fields.

Joy Anderson, supervising attorney at the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy, calls the plan a commonsense approach to a pervasive problem. She hopes the public takes notice of what is happening.

"People who care about Minnesota's drinking water, people who care about the swimability and fishability of our water," Anderson explained.

Organizations like hers urged residents to speak up during public hearings scheduled for July. Comments can also be submitted to the agency until Aug. 9. The proposed changes are expected to face strong pushback from those representing so-called factory farms. Despite the hope from plan supporters, the changes would only apply to about 5% of livestock feedlots in Minnesota.

Past efforts to enact modest permit changes resulted in outcry from industrial ag interests. Anderson admitted the proposed changes cover a limited number of farms but added they send a signal regulators realize the scope of the contaminated water crisis linked to nitrate pollution.

"This is sort of a first step," Anderson asserted. "It tells us the MPCA is at least a little serious about making some changes."

Her group hopes what is unfolding now leads to rule changes covering all the state's 17,000 feedlots, also known as concentrated animal feeding operations. This week's move follows a recent order from the federal Environmental Protection Agency for Minnesota to clean up contaminated drinking water in the southeastern part of the state, caused by farm runoff.


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The U.S. House of Representatives will likely vote this summer on a version of the Farm Bill, which passed through the committee process last month.

Some farmers and ranchers are concerned about cuts to climate-smart programs, including the Environmental Quality Incentive Program, which distributed more than $31 million to South Dakotans last year. The program and three others have been funded by Inflation Reduction Act dollars since 2022, when President Joe Biden approved nearly $12 billion for the national programs over four years.

It could change under the House version of the Farm Bill, which instead proposes increased subsidies for large-scale operations.

Tanya Svec, a member of Dakota Rural Action who helps run her in-laws' small cattle farm in Deuel County, which received a grant this year, said it is appropriate the program provides opportunities for small-scale farms to get grants, rather than just the large-scale operations policy tends to favor.

"That's really helpful for those small economies and keeping things local and building some resiliency into the farming communities," Svec explained.

Svec pointed out the business is currently finalizing a grant to fund a water system to help the operation with rotational grazing, a practice benefiting landscapes by letting some pastures rest while others are in use. It allows native plants to grow and protects watersheds. Demand for the program exceeded supply in 2023. Of the nearly 1,500 South Dakota applicants, only 27% were accepted, according to a report from the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy.

Svec observed more people sought out her farm's beef during and since the pandemic, which exposed supply-chain issues. She sidesteps big industrial distribution by marketing directly to customers.

"We like to raise cattle in a particular way," Svec stressed. "It's hard to be rewarded for going the extra mile for not using antibiotics, for grass-fed grass-finished beef if you remain in the standard agricultural system."


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When Minnesota farmers watch their crops grow this summer, some will monitor land that has better soil health. It's because of a fairly popular conservation tool, and supporters are calling for more "real-time" data to measure progress.

Cover crops are plants grown between commodity crops to prevent soil erosion and nitrates from flowing into nearby waterways, harming water quality and natural resources. In recent years, Minnesota has emerged as one of the better-performing states for participation.

Jon Stevens has adopted the practice for his farm operation north of the Twin Cities.

"There's been years that we've just phenomenal corn yields while you're standing in 10 to 12 inches of beautiful oat grass," he said, "and we did it with reduced fertilizer inputs."

Stevens said that's good news for local creeks that connect with the St. Croix River.

The latest Census of Agriculture, released this year, showed a 17% increase in cover-crop acreage compared with 2017. The growth rate has slowed, however, and the report only comes out every five years. The National Wildlife Federation and other groups want to see a more consistent national effort to track participation, making it easier to guide assistance.

Federal programs administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture help cover expenses for farmers who agree to plant cover crops. Stevens said they have become more flexible, but he suggested certain types of messaging to convince those still on the fence.

"Sign up a five- or ten-acre parcel [of land] and get your cover crops perfected on that five or 10 acres," he said, "and then you can just step into full-scale."

Stevens indicated that approach might help avoid turning off farmers who run into obstacles after making big cover-crop investments. There's also research indicating this practice doesn't always translate to higher yields, but Stevens said that way of thinking needs some fine-tuning.

"We've been taught decades of 'maximize your yield,'" he said, "and it's like, 'Nope, that system doesn't work that way.' You're going to reduce tillage costs."