If modern agriculture were a person, it would be a sociopath: can regenerative agriculture save us from ourselves?

Support CleanTechnica’s work through a Substack subscription, on Patreon, or on Stripe. Help us produce all the original, high-quality content we publish week after week despite the challenges of AI deleting content, anti-social media, inflation and other obstacles.

Naming the problem: a sociopathic farming system

There is a great paradox in modern agriculture. The agribusiness sector feeds people while harming society and starving the planet. In 1962, one farmer fed 25.8 people; today it is 155.[1] But according to the UN, global agri-food systems generate approximately $12 trillion a year in hidden social and environmental costs.[2] The Rockefeller Foundation found that in the United States alone, the real costs of the food system are $3.2 trillion a year, three times what Americans actually pay for their food.[3]

This agricultural sociopathy (or ecopathy, as some have begun to call it, since many of the greatest impacts occur on nature) is the end result of almost two centuries of optimizing the efficiency of agriculture, using a combination of mechanized labor, seed engineering and chemical fertilizers. In the process, we have created a food system that offers high productivity, but at the cost of the environment.

Let’s focus on one part of the system: chemical fertilizers. In my village of Norfolk in England, along the river, there is an old bone mill that used to grind bones (including those of humans) for use as agricultural fertilizer. The benefits of bone meal and nitrogen for plant growth were discovered by German chemist Justus von Liebig. In 1841, British industrialist John Bennet Lawes turned this knowledge into the world’s first artificial fertilizer factory in Rothamsted. 70 years later, BASF began commercial production of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers and the modern agricultural system was born.

You might ask, what is sociopathic about the chemical fertilizers that help food grow and have possibly prevented mass starvation? The answer is threefold. First, chemical fertilizers are turning living soil into lifeless soil by starving and dehydrating microbes and organisms and acidifying the soil. In addition to the ecological impacts of dying soils, we are also paying health costs. The nutrients in our foods have decreased by up to 80 percent since 1940.[4] Nowadays you have to eat eight oranges to get the same amount of vitamin A that our grandparents got by eating one.

The second problem with chemical fertilizers is that they support the dominance of single plant species (through monocultures), leaving no ecological space for wildflowers and other plants to flourish, which in turn impacts insects, birds and mammals. This helps explain why more than 40% of all insect species are in decline and a third are threatened with extinction.[5] and also why we have lost 73% of wildlife populations since 1970, according to WWF’s Living Planet Report.[6]

Perversely, we have known the impacts of synthetic agriculture on biodiversity from the beginning. In 1856, Liebig conducted his famous Park Grass experiment at the Rothamsted Experiment Station in England, in which he tested organic and chemical fertilizers on 24 strips of land and found that fields treated with chemical fertilizers retained 2 or 3 species of wild plants, while untreated fields supported 50 species.[7]

The third unintended consequence of artificial fertilizers is that they end up overloading our water systems, causing algal blooms (eutrophication) that decrease oxygen in rivers and oceans (hypoxia), leading to aquatic dead zones. This disruption of global nitrogen and phosphorus cycles is the reason why biochemical fluxes are one of nine planetary boundaries that have been crossed and are in the high-risk zone, according to scientific work from the Stockholm Resilience Center led by Johan Rockström and Will Steffen.[8]

Testing a solution: organic regenerative agriculture

So much for the problems. What about the solutions? It took a while for a countermovement to find its footing, with the first organic food labels emerging in Germany in 1928 (Demeter Biodynamic Agriculture certification), the United Kingdom in 1967 (Soil Association certification), and the United States in 1973 (California Certified Organic Farmers certification). Today, 98.9 million hectares of agricultural land are managed organically, still only 2.1% of all cultivated land, although a higher figure in regions such as Australia (13%) and Europe (11%).[9]

The latest evolution of this movement is regenerative agriculture, which goes beyond banning or reducing chemicals and focuses on restoring the living health of soils. It is a technology in the sense that economist John Kenneth Galbraith understood the term, that is, “the systematic application of scientific or other organized knowledge to practical tasks.”[10]

Regenerative agriculture includes various techniques, such as planting perennial crops and cover crops, using compost as a natural fertilizer, increasing crop diversity and rotation, introducing animals to the land in ways that mimic nature, practicing minimum tillage, and converting agricultural waste into biochar that is reintroduced into the soil.

Many of these practices are not new. When my grandparents farmed in Africa, rotating crops and livestock was common practice. Now science backs up this time-tested wisdom. An experiment in Iowa, USA, with multi-year combinations of corn, soybeans, oats and alfalfa crops found that four-year rotations can reduce fossil energy by 64% and carbon and particulate emissions by 42% and 57% respectively, while increasing corn and soybean yields and significantly improving overall economic returns.[11]

This shows that regenerative agriculture is a systemic solution in the sense that it has multiple solutions in our nature, climate and health systems. Years ago I interviewed James Lovelock, the creator of the Gaia theory, which hypothesizes that the Earth behaves like a living organism. When I asked him about the climate crisis, he said the only way to achieve the required scale of carbon sequestration is to work with nature. The solution he proposed was biochar, one of the regenerative agricultural practices.

Today, international climate scientists (represented by the IPCC) estimate that regenerating our soils could reliably offset 10% to 15% of total global emissions (4 to 5 gigatonnes of CO₂ per year),[12] and more optimistic studies suggest that soil could sequester 15 billion tonnes of carbon a year, thereby reducing atmospheric carbon to pre-industrial levels within 20 years.[13] Regenerative agriculture is not a panacea, but it may contain the seeds of our own salvation.

Fountain

This article is adapted and updated from the content of Wayne Visser’s book “Prosper: the innovative movement to regenerate nature, society and the economy (New York: Fast Company Press). For more information, see waynevisser.com.

Quotes

[1] Molinero, T., 2012. Fifty years bring significant changes to agriculture. Agricultural progress. Available in: [Accessed 14 October 2026].

[2] FAO, 2023. The State of Food and Agriculture 2023: Revealing the true cost of food to transform agri-food systems. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Available in: fao.org [Accessed 14 October 2026].

[3] The Rockefeller Foundation, 2021. Real Cost of Food: Measuring What Matters to Transform the U.S. Food System. New York: Rockefeller Foundation. Available in: [Accessed 14 October 2026].

[4] Davis, DR, Epp, MD and Riordan, HD, 2004. Changes in USDA food composition data for 43 horticultural crops, 1950 to 1999. Journal of the American College of Nutrition23(6), pp.669-682. doi.org

[5] Sánchez-Bayo, F. and Wyckhuys, KA, 2019. Global entomofauna decline: a review of its drivers. Biological conservation232, pp.8-27. doi.org

[6] WWF, 2026. Living Planet Report 2026: A system in danger. Gland, Switzerland: WWF International. Available in: [Accessed 14 October 2026]

[7] Visser, W., 2022. Prosper: the revolutionary movement to regenerate nature, society and the economy. New York: Fast Company Press.

[8] Caesar, L. et al., 2026. Planetary Health Check 2026: A scientific assessment of the state of our planet. Potsdam: Planetary Boundary Science Laboratory, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). Available in: [Accessed 14 October 2026].

[9] Willer, H., Schlatter, B. and Trávníček, J. eds., 2026. The world of organic farming: statistics and emerging trends for 2026. Frick: FiBL Organic Agriculture Research Institute; Bonn: IFOAM – Organics International. Available in: [Accessed 14 October 2026]

[10] Galbraith, J. K. (1967). The new industrial state. Houghton Mifflin

[11] Hunt, N.D., Jordan, N.A., Liebman, M., Landis, D.A., Gardiner, M.M., Gratton, C., MacGuidwin, A.E., Cullen, M., Tank, J.L., and Anex, R.P., 2020. Fossil energy use, climate change impacts, and air quality metrics of conventional and diversified cropping systems in the US Midwest. Environmental science and technology54(18), pp.11002–11012. Available at: acs.org [Accessed 14 October 2026]

[12] IPCC, 2022. Climate Change 2022: Climate Change Mitigation. Contribution of Working Group III to the Sixth Assessment Report. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

[13] Marcario, R., 2021. Regenerative organics: drawing a line in the ground. Underground carbon. Available at: thecarbonunderground.org [Accessed 14 October 2026].