Phytonutrients Part Two: How Regenerative Agriculture Builds Phytonutrient-Rich Food

Regenerative agriculture is farming and ranching in synchrony with nature to repair, rebuild, restore, and revitalize ecosystem function — starting with life beneath the soil and expanding to life above. The working framework is the 6-3-4™ model: Six Principles of Soil Health, Three Rules of Adaptive Stewardship, Four Ecosystem Processes. Phytonutrient-rich food is one of the downstream outcomes — because the microbial life in living soil is what makes plant phytonutrients possible in the first place. This is the second of a three-part series on phytonutrients and regenerative agriculture.

The working definition

To understand regenerative agriculture, you must have a working definition. Regenerative Agriculture is defined as:

Farming and ranching in synchrony with nature and the four ecosystem processes to repair, rebuild, restore, and revitalize ecosystem function, starting with life beneath the soil and expanding to life above.

The 6-3-4™ framework

This is most effectively accomplished by farmers and ranchers properly and intentionally implementing what Understanding Ag calls the 6-3-4™, which is comprised of the Six Principles of Soil Health, the Three Rules of Adaptive Stewardship, and the Four Ecosystem Processes.

• Six Principles of Soil Health — the working rules for restoring soil function: armor on the surface, minimal disturbance, biodiversity in plants, living roots year-round, animal integration, and context-appropriate management.
• Three Rules of Adaptive Stewardship — the operational logic for managing for outcomes rather than recipes: respond to context, compound diversity, and observe disruption-rest-disruption cycles.
• Four Ecosystem Processes — the systems all farms operate within whether they realize it or not: the water cycle, the mineral cycle, the energy flow, and community dynamics.

Together they’re the working framework Allen and the Understanding Ag team developed to make regenerative practice teachable, repeatable, and measurable.

From soil microbe to plate

When we purposefully implement the basic principles of regenerative agriculture we build a thriving, vibrant world of living, breathing microbes underneath the soil surface that play a definitive role in the phytonutrient richness of all our foods.

Regenerative agriculture allows us to take degraded pieces of land and revitalize them so they can once again become highly productive; grow phytonutrient-rich food; support thriving beneficial insect, pollinator, bird and wildlife populations; sequester carbon; and mitigate greenhouse gas emissions (GHG). These goals are the principal outcomes of our vision and mission.