The New Shiny Penny? Regenerative Agriculture Beliefs and Practices Among Portland's Urban Agriculturalists

Abstract

Regenerative agriculture (RA) is a set of farming and land management practices intended to support or enhance soil health and carbon sequestration potential of soils while producing food, fiber, or other agricultural products. It has received broad acclaim from scholars, corporations, and governmental bodies as a potential means of sequestering carbon and mitigating climate change impacts. It has also received critique and pushback for its vague definition, shifting metrics, and lack of acknowledgement of the Indigenous practices underlying the modern suite of regenerative practices. The purpose of this research is to investigate the beliefs Portland, Oregon urban agricultural practitioners hold on the topic of regenerative agriculture, as well as to determine whether members of this group are employing any specific regenerative agricultural practices or means of measuring the regenerative impact(s) of their projects. Drawing on a set of interviews with 13 urban agricultural practitioners, this research finds that those working in the field of urban agriculture in Portland have their own critiques of and alternative approaches to regenerative agriculture, offering major critiques around 1) the limited acknowledgement of the deeper history of common RA practices, 2) the uncertain efficacy of measuring regenerative impacts through soil carbon testing, 3) the rise of RA as an institutional buzzword, and 4) the compatibility between stated RA soil carbon sequestration goals and urban agricultural practices.