Introduction

As the term regenerative agriculture caught fire in public discourse around 2019, it was promptly labelled a buzzword. In some cases, this characterization is presented as neutral or positive—i.e. the Guardian’s 2021 article entitled “Sustainable isn’t a thing’: why regenerative agriculture is food’s latest buzzword” (Lewis 2021)—while elsewhere it is used as a criticism (Wozniacka 2021). Buzzwords are terms that materialize within specific contexts and time, representing something trendy or in vogue that different people are talking about (Vincent 2014). Although not a new term, the recent buzz around regenerative agriculture has been largely driven by major private companies who are mainstreaming the term through new pilot projects as part of their corporate climate commitments (Marston 2022a, b).

Regenerative agriculture emerged out of multifaceted discourses and critiques of agriculture and food production, in addition to calls for transforming food systems to meet ecological, economic and social goals. The term was first used in the 1970’s and 1980’s by activists organizing against U.S. agriculture’s use of practices degrading to our soil, water, biodiversity, and social well-being (see review by O’Donoghue et al. 2022). However, the term was not widely used until recent years. It has become particularly important in discussions of mitigating and adapting to climate change; since 2019, multiple private companies have adopted the term in launching initiatives to meet their climate commitments (Marston 2022b). Farmers, researchers, policymakers, and non-government organizations are also increasingly using the term. However, much the same as preceding terms like sustainable agriculture (Duesterhaus 1990; Weil 1990), the term regenerative agriculture is consistently criticized for its lack of definition, which factors into the term being dismissed as a buzzword. While the buzzword accusation tends to be regarded as negative, these widely used terms also reflect an important area of public interest. Exploring a buzzword can thus help us understand our current moment and offer insights to paths forward.

The goal of an interpretivist study like this is to explore how different individuals and groups integrate these words into their lexicon to identify what those strong beliefs are. In this paper, we begin by providing background on the use of buzzwords, why they matter, and why they have been an area of interest in agriculture and particularly around climate change. Following this, we explore how regenerative agriculture nests within the use of buzzwords, drawing from scholarship as well as perspectives from 19 qualitative interviews conducted with farmers, researchers, private company employees, and nongovernment agency employees who are elevating the term in their work. Ultimately, we explore the function of the phrase regenerative agriculture—buzzword or not—and what kind of power it might have to mobilize more resilient food and agricultural systems.

What are buzzwords?

The buzzword characterization holds negative connotations; it denotes that a movement or idea is just a passing trend (Vincent 2014). Buzzwords are context-specific, reflecting something that different people are talking about, yet their meaning is ambiguous. This allows different groups of people to harness the buzzword. A key characteristic of a buzzword is that it is widely used but not commonly, or collectively, understood. They “allow interpretive flexibility while being recognizable enough to enable people to translate and adapt them to their niches (Vincent 2014, p. 246).

Despite the ambiguity, people who use the buzzword often demonstrate a strong belief or conviction in their conceptualization of the term (Cairns and Krzywoszynska 2016). Different individuals or groups of people will use them as if they know something that others do not. In fact, the Webster’s dictionary definition of buzzwords points to this phenomenon: “an important sounding technical word or phrase often of little meaning used chiefly to impress laymen” (Merriam-Webster 2022).

As regenerative agriculture gained momentum in recent years, some directly criticized it for these negative characteristics of a buzzword. A 2021 article published in The Counter disparaged the term for a veiled lack of consensus:

“But the growing, still-incipient movement harbors a secret below its hopeful surface: No one really agrees on what “regenerative agriculture” means, or what it should accomplish, let alone how those benefits should be quantified…Even as “regenerative” gets increasingly hyped as a transformative solution, the fundamentals are still being negotiated” (Fassler 2021).

In turn, social movement actors in agroecology and affiliated movements claim that corporate actors are pushing regenerative agriculture for their own gain (see GRAIN 2023; Cronin 2022). Such concerns echo past and present vexations that companies are just using certain buzzwords for the purpose of “greenwashing”: employing messaging that misleads consumers and company stakeholders by amplifying the positive—and downplaying the negative—environmental impacts of their company or products (Tateishi 2018).

These negative connotations can make some advocates of regenerative agriculture sensitive to it being termed a buzzword. In an article for certified crop consultants (CCAs) the authors write that:

“Regenerative agriculture is more than a buzzword. A growing number of food and fiber companies have regenerative ag initiatives underway, and CCAs may be called on to help clients meet requests to engage with important buyers of crop and livestock products” (Green et al. 2021, p. 37).

Others embrace the idea that buzzwords reflect important new trends, as in the 2021 article from The Guardian entitled “’Sustainable isn’t a thing’: why regenerative agriculture is food’s latest buzzword” (Lewis 2021). This latter sentiment indicates how buzzwords can be used to reflect public discourse. Vincent (2014) further contends that buzzwords have a directing quality; they are meant to draw peoples’ attention (create buzz) to an objective (Vincent 2014). Terms like “climate-smart agriculture” or “zero emissions” are illustrative of this. Each of these phrases are generated to create energy and catalyze work (behaviors, practices, research and innovation) towards an overarching goal. While that goal may not be concrete, and certainly is not commonly understood, there is vague implications of working towards something important. Regenerative agriculture seems to fit squarely into this characterization, as myriad stakeholders embrace it to articulate their visions for food system reform, but those visions—and articulations—differ widely. That said, the proliferation of these diverse discourses on the future of our food systems demonstrates a growing societal engagement with the idea that a paradigm change is critical (Loring 2022).

In summary, buzzwords (1) are context specific, (2) have meaning that is ambiguous across different groups, (3) allow interpretive flexibility, but (4) people using the buzzword fell like they know what it means, (5) demonstrate strong beliefs, (6) reflect public discourse on a topic, and (7) have a directing quality.

Debates on standardizing buzzwords in food and agriculture

A common argument sidling critiques of regenerative agriculture as a buzzword contends that we must determine definitions and standardizations of such terms for them to be meaningful and to increase transparency and authenticity (Fenster et al. 2021). When new terms become prevalent in food systems discourse, they launch an outpouring of debates on how to define and universalize these concepts. Regenerative agriculture joined several other terms that have been used to mobilize transformation of agriculture and food systems (Bless et al. 2023).

When the term sustainability gained prominence, it received similar “semantic wrangling” to what regenerative agriculture receives today (Duesterhaus 1990). In 1987, the United Nations established a definition of sustainability (United Nations Brundtland Commission 1987). While this created what many consider a standardized definition, it did not advance prescriptive or regulatory instructions on how to advance sustainability. In the 1990’s, Weil and Duesterhaus each discussed sustainable agriculture as a buzzword (Duesterhaus 1990; Weil 1990). Weil specifically called for agreement on the definition of sustainable agriculture, arguing that it must be broad enough to encompass “the wide range of agricultural situations in which it will be applied yet specific enough to provide criteria” to judge sustainability in action (Weil 1990, p. 126). This tension between breadth and specificity of the term or label resulted in continual contestation between farmers, agricultural advocates, global agribusinesses, and others. Additionally, Youngberg and DeMuth argue that the lack of definition or the multiple competing definitions of sustainable agriculture “confused and frustrated lawmakers” allowing ‘conventional’ agriculture advocates to stake their claim on sustainability (Youngberg and DeMuth 2013, p. 308).

Unlike the term sustainability, other buzzwords have become both standardized and codified, often in the pursuit of premiums in the marketplace. Following passage of the National Organic Foods Production Act of 1990, USDA engaged with the organic agriculture movement and established the National Organic Program which standardized practices and created price premiums for products officially certified and complying with Organic Certification (Northen 2021). In the last four decades, products labeled Organic went from “counter-cultural” to mainstream (Kuepper 2010). Much has been debated on what the Organic Certification has done to move the needle on advancing sustainable agriculture and the impact it has on consumers purchasing habits (Northen 2021). But the push to standardize Organic through federal labeling laws, and the compromises made in standardizing practices, ended up separating Organic advocates into “Big Organic” (industrialized and market-driven) and “Little Organic” (community-oriented) with prominent Organic farmer Eliot Coleman leading a push for “Beyond Organic” (Youngberg and DeMuth 2013). These battles left consumers confused on how to support agriculture and food transformation through their purchasing and eating habits (Howard and Allen 2006).

On a global level, the term “fair trade” advanced a vision of agriculture that would allow smallholder farmers to participate in global markets on socially just terms. Jaffee and Howard (2016) highlight power struggles over its definition and the standards to which a fair trade label would be certified. While the fight highlighted struggles between those seeking to reward smallholder farmers versus protecting plantation workers against labor abuses, it could also be considered a contested discussion of what the term “fair trade” should mean and who should benefit from it.

Current terms like sustainable intensification, agroecology, or climate-smart agriculture are also used to signal the need for transforming food systems, or, in some cases, to help actors gain some sort of premium either through government programs, or carbon and consumer markets.Footnote 1 Like regenerative agriculture, these terms have also not escaped contested narratives (Lipper and Zilberman 2018). Sustainable intensification has been adopted by many international organizations working on agricultural development in the Global South, but at the same time it has been criticized by smallholders and other advocates focused on using terms like agroecology and “food sovereignty” to achieve food system transformation (Levidow 2018).

These preceding efforts—and discourses—contribute to the debates around whether regenerative agriculture needs a set definition and standards (Bless et al. 2023). While some believe it essential to define, standardize, and create mechanisms to regulate these concepts (Giller et al. 2021; Schreefel et al. 2020), others argue that they are inherently “emergent in nature, and only take shape as people take them up and put them into practice in ways that work for their local social and ecological contexts” (Loring 2022, p. 702). Others offer a further critique that standardizing concepts displace where the term came from in the first place (Wozniacka 2021).

Following their literature review of regenerative agriculture in academic journals and on practitioner websites, Newton and colleagues conclude that at the very least, individual users should provide “contextual clarity and precision when using this term” or, if deciding not to define it, provide transparency for their audience as to why they are “embracing ambiguity and flexibility” (Newton et al. 2020, p. 6). Several scholars have conducted reviews of regenerative agriculture definitions in academic scholarship, practitioner websites, and news articles and reported on key differences and patterns in how the term is defined in previous literature (Newton et al. 2020; Tittonell et al. 2022; Wilson et al. 2022). For instance, in their analysis of 229 journal articles and 25 practitioner websites using the term “regenerative agriculture”, Newton and colleagues find that definitions fall into three general categories: process-based, outcome-based, or combined process- and outcome-based (Newton et al. 2020). Process-based definitions contain or exclude specific principles or farming practices (e.g. no-till or cover cropping) that define what it means to be regenerative. Outcome-based definitions say that regenerative agriculture means meeting specific agricultural outcomes, such as carbon sequestration or increased biodiversity. Combined process- and outcome-based definitions offer both farming practices and agricultural outcomes. Despite the emergence of scholarship exploring the definitions of regenerative agriculture—and some scholars arriving at their own definitions (Schreefel et al. 2020)—we have yet to assess regenerative agriculture as a buzzword in the context of buzzwords in food and agriculture.

Methods

In this study, we explored how and why different individuals and groups adopt certain key terms or buzzwords, in this case the term “regenerative agriculture”. We used an interpretivist approach to understand how ideas are constructed, interpreted, understood, and employed (Fischer 2003; Fischer and Hajer 1999). Drawing from 19 semi-structured interviews conducted with farmers, researchers, private companies, and NGO/nonprofits, we critically analyze the discourse surrounding “regenerative agriculture” to explore how the term is being conceptualized and mobilized by different people.

Participants

We conducted interviews with 19 individuals in food and agriculture, including farmers, agricultural researchers, individuals from private food companies, and individuals from NGOs/nonprofits that work in food and agriculture. We interviewed between four and five interviewees representing each participant type (some were both farmers and worked for an NGO/nonprofit group). We confined the scope of participants to the US, but included individuals from each region of the country. Table 1 provides descriptions of participants.

Table 1 Demographics of participants
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We used purposive sampling to recruit participants that have specific expertise and/or experience relevant to alternative agriculture and are using the term “regenerative agriculture” publicly. Purposive sampling is used to solicit “representativeness or typicality” of a situation, activity, or individuals of interest while also capturing the plurality of the population (Maxwell 2013, p. 89). We worked with a panel of experts including agricultural researchers, Cooperative Extension, and individuals who work in agricultural policy in the US to develop a list of potential interviewees relevant to this study. In addition, we did online searches of the term “regenerative agriculture” and “regenerative farming” to identify groups or individuals using the term publicly. Our list comprised individuals from private companies that have launched regenerative agriculture programs in the last few years, NGOs/nonprofit groups that work in the agricultural sector, researchers focused on sustainability and agriculture, and prominent farmers who are described as “regenerative farmers”. We were intentional to recruit Black, Brown, and Indigenous individuals to try to avoid reproducing exclusionary narratives. Over half of participants identified as women and/or Black or Hispanic.

Data collection

We collected data between September 2021 and March 2022. We followed a semi-structured interview protocol developed from a literature review on regenerative agriculture in academic and news articles. Protocols followed the same general outline, but were slightly modified based on the participant type (farmer, researcher, NGO/nonprofit, private company). Interviews started by asking participants to describe their background in agriculture, then moved into explanations on their conceptualizations and perceptions of regenerative agriculture.

Interviews were conducted over Zoom and was audio-recorded and later transcribed. Each interview lasted between 45 min to one hour. We continued to collect data until we ascertained that no new themes or information was coming up and thus had reached data saturation (Guest et al. 2017).

Data analysis

We employed a grounded theory approach for data analysis, using inductive analysis which allows patterns to emerge from the interviewees’ own words (Charmaz 2014). We used NVivo 12 Pro by QSR International as a tool to analyze interview transcripts (with identifying information removed). We first analyzed each transcript individually, writing annotations to mark emergent themes. Once we had analyzed each transcript, we reviewed all annotations and compiled a list of codes based on identified themes. In NVivo, we created nodes for each of these codes. We then re-analyzed each transcript and coded excerpts that reflected different nodes to confirm repeatability of the analysis.

Following an interpretivist approach, the first set of codes focused on how the term emerged in our current ether. Next, we coded for discussions around buzzword characteristics including:

  • Definitions of regenerative agriculture and the context in which it is used (beliefs, context, directing quality);

  • When and where they first started using the term regenerative agriculture (context);

  • Expressions of ambiguity about what the term regenerative agriculture means to different actors (public discourse, interpretative flexibility).

Findings

Emergence of the term regenerative agriculture in the US

Participants had different recollections of where “regenerative agriculture” emerged from. Eight participants emphasized that the ideas surrounding regenerative agriculture are rooted in long-held knowledge systems of women, Indigenous, Brown, and Black peoples. One participant connected regenerative agriculture to the wisdom of enslaved peoples in the US “working the ground”. They also brought up the Three Sisters, an Indigenous story exemplifying the idea of companion planting. Another participant furthered this point:

I think regenerative agriculture absolutely has to acknowledge the fact that it is has been significantly white-washed. When you look at its lineage globally, as well as within the United States, credit is due largely to Indigenous and other communities of color around some of the practices and principles that really underpin regenerative agriculture.

In another case, the term “regenerative” in relation to agriculture and farming was attributed to the English botanist, Sir Albert Howard. Howard was said to have written about “ecological regenerative agriculture” in a few statements and then in letters written between Howard and American J.I. Rodale, prompting Rodale to establish an experimental farm testing organic farming methods in eastern Pennsylvania. One participant elucidated how Rodale’s son, Robert Rodale, inherited not only his father’s publishing company but his passion for a more progressive form of agriculture, leading him to establish the non-profit Rodale Institute that built on the organic farming experiments of his father and disseminated organic agriculture information widely through magazines, books, and other outreach. Elsewise, participants assessed that the term had recently gained momentum due in large part to private companies employing it in new sourcing programs.

In describing the emergence of regenerative agriculture, all participants placed regenerative agriculture along the arc of food and agriculture buzzwords that preceded its recent emergence in public discourse. The 19 interviewees described regenerative agriculture in relationship to terms like sustainable agriculture (19 interviewees), soil health (13 interviewees), organic agriculture—both the USDA certificate and the concept more generally—(18 interviewees), agroecology (4 interviewees), and climate-smart agriculture (2 interviewees).

Regenerative agriculture: a buzzword

Interviews revealed how regenerative agriculture fit several key characteristics of buzzwords. First, participants offered a range of regenerative agriculture definitions (see Table 2), demonstrating the on-going ambiguity and plurality of the concept. Like other buzzwords, these definitions illustrate how different actors are harnessing the term regenerative agriculture, but can have differing conceptualizations of what it means. When asked to elucidate what they meant when they said that a farmer had “gone regenerative”, one participant wavered over a definition, going on to say “it’s different than most other certifications, like Organic, or something like that. Regenerative is not a goal line; it’s not, ‘do these three things and you’re regenerative’”.

Table 2 Participants definitions of regenerative agriculture that reflect ambiguity and plurality of the concept
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Greenwashing

Considering it a buzzword, six participants explicitly felt that regenerative agriculture was an example of “greenwashing”. Some expressed disdain that private companies are adopting the term regenerative agriculture just for “marketing purposes”. Others felt resentment for the pattern of people attaching buzzwords to what they are doing as farmers. This sentiment was particularly salient among farmers. Reflecting on their transition from conventional agriculture to regenerative agriculture, one farmer described this issue:

I don’t think I called it anything when I started changing (my farming practices), I just started doing it differently. And then people would come up with the words, and I would use them. But it’s, you know, greenwashing. I mean I don’t think a lot about things being good and evil, but I think about (greenwashing) as being evil. And it is preventing many, many, many farmers from moving in that direction. It devalues what we do…it devalues what we’re doing differently.

Others agreed that the pattern of buzzwords devalued and even appropriated ideas and knowledge. As noted above, a few participants—each of whom worked predominantly with farmers of color—described how there is a feeling of cooption on behalf of many Black, Brown, and Indigenous groups. Participants also felt that greenwashing could lead to a “dilution of the meaning” of regenerative agriculture. In this vein, participants expressed concern that people using the term are making claims that cannot be backed up.

Marking societal shifts in thinking

Interviews also uncovered how regenerative agriculture aligns with the buzzword characteristic of being on one hand tied to this present time while also demonstrating a growing societal engagement with a concept. This is illustrated by the following excerpt from an NGO/nonprofit interviewee:

I think regenerative is really of a context of this particular time. I think while it’s obviously rooted in practices that have been used by people for thousands of years, I think the term regenerative has really taken off right now because people are so interested in every aspect of how agriculture impacts the planet…I think across supply chains—across industries—people are interested in learning more about what their impact is as an eater, as a shopper, as someone involved in making decisions that impact the world, the future of the planet!

This excerpt reflects the view that the recent surge of momentum in regenerative agriculture marks an important shift in societal thinking. Two themes emerged related to what that shift was: increased attention on social factors and responding to climate change.

Just over half of participants felt that regenerative agriculture was uniquely inciting a societal shift in thinking towards social factors. Under this umbrella, eight participants articulated ideas surrounding social justice, as demonstrated here by a private company participant, a nonprofit participant, and researcher participant:

Regenerative agriculture is actively dismantling systems of oppression in agriculture.

I think within the concept of regenerative agriculture, there are things that you can tie to social justice and social equality that really doesn’t even get talked about in the organic movement.

Regenerative agriculture really is about trying to put parity back into the production system.

In terms of social factors, 11 participants asserted that regenerative agriculture is about regenerating communities. One nonprofit participant explained:

The biggest value (with regenerative agriculture) is community. It is a lifting up and demanding improvement for all communities, I think it’s pretty central to at least the founders of regenerative agriculture and certainly is something that drives our work.

Another respondent explained why their nonprofit had adopted the term regenerative agriculture, despite seeing it as a buzzword:

Regenerative agriculture is a buzzword. But we use regenerative as a term to respond to the needs of the communities and their crises or the urgency that we feel today. So sometimes it’s a term of convenience, as a means to start a conversation, to engage people in the process of building solutions.

The second shift in societal thinking related to climate change. This discourse was prominent among several participants, eight of whom framed regenerative agriculture as a critical and timely response to climate change. As one farmer explained: “I’m a huge believer in climate change, and a big part of the reason I am doing what I’m doing is because I want to sequester carbon”. Describing what led to creating a regenerative agriculture program, one participant from a major food company explained:

It all started with our climate commitment…We set a science-based target that covers our full value chain from farm to fork to landfill to be in line with 1.5 °C warming targets, so that’s a 30% reduction by 2030. And we also have a net zero commitment by 2050. As part of that work, we basically mapped our entire value chain and found that agriculture was 60% of our overall company’s footprint…so we’re going to advance regenerative ag on a million acres by 2030 because we see this as being just a really big paradigm shift for what sustainability action looks like in the food industry.

Some placed the need to address climate change above any other cause. Responding to a question about the social indicators some tie to regenerative agriculture, one researcher responded:

I care deeply about those other issues, but I can’t deal with those issues if we don’t fix the planet now.

This respondent went on to frame this issue as particularly important for the world’s most vulnerable populations:

We have such a short time-frame to fix climate change and if we get distracted by all these multitude of questions and concerns and other values, I can only think of the villagers we worked with in Africa dying faster, because their climate remains disrupted…So I can talk about women’s education and empowerment and equality, and I can go through all, but if they’re not alive, if we’re going to starve them to death, and we’re going to disrupt and cause them to mass migrate, all of those questions go out the window.

Mobilizing “win-wins”

A business-centric framing was woven through many discussions, with interviewees emphasizing that regenerative agriculture could be a “win-win” solution to a range of challenges. As previously illustrated, private companies described their regenerative agriculture programs as key to achieving their “net zero” goals and “climate commitments”. Another “win-win” proclamation asserted that by switching to regenerative systems, farmers will in fact save money by reducing input costs as exemplified by this researcher’s comment:

We recognize that farmers are driven by the economics and so much of the regenerative paradigm really focuses in on reducing inputs because we’ve reignited, you know, that biological system in the soil and that enhances the ecological cycling and just by the nature of activating that biological engine you’re going to reduce your input costs because the biology is making a lot of that happen.

Farmer interviewees, each of which had transitioned conventional farmland to a regenerative system, all mentioned experiencing a significant reduced need for any inputs. These efficiency and economic “win-wins” present regenerative agriculture as a business opportunity: a smart decision.

Along these lines, in explaining how regenerative agriculture is taking on social systems, it became clear that interviewees were mainly talking about farmers’ economic success. One researcher explained:

I think that the biggest driver is going to be money, finances…I think ultimately for these principles to be adopted its gotta pay, period.

One nonprofit participant had an alternative explanation for the importance of economic viability as essential to re-empower farmers:

It’s also a challenge of making sure that it’s economically viable for farmers. It seems like there’s always a drive for solving the world’s problems on the backs of farmers and farm laborers. And asking agriculture to absorb larger societal failings and policy failings.

A few participants broadened the view of what farmers see as success, pointing to their interest in regenerating the land for future generations. A value-based sentiment came out of conversations around farmer success from the majority of participants: farmers want to steward the land for future generations. One private company participant expressed this point:

Farmers are very interested in their future success, you know, leaving good land for future generations. That has been a constant topic of conversations between farmers that are part of our program….They are saying: ‘hey I want to make sure my kids inherit a land that is good’.

Debates over standardizing regenerative agriculture

A few participants appreciated the ethereal nature of regenerative agriculture, rejecting the notion that it must be strictly defined or standardized. One participant described it “as a continuum” that should progressively evolve; “I feel like the definition is that it’s a form of continuous improvement”. Another NGO/nonprofit interviewee also felt that the term need not be standardized:

We also just sit with the fact that it’s super hard to define…it means different things to different people and what’s important to us is that we welcome people in the process of building towards a better, more just farming and food system that has to be really rooted in community. Regenerative is getting the solutions as close as possible to the subsidiarity. It’s getting decision-making as close to the people affected as possible.

About half of participants took another view, asserting that there is a need to “define”, “audit”, “standardize”, or “set science-based targets” for regenerative agriculture. One NGO/nonprofit respondent articulated:

With all the buzz around regenerative we’re already seeing a lot of claiming regenerative practices without verifying those practices, without even being very clear what they mean. And that’s not going to deliver any real benefit. That’s not going to help your neighbor’s water quality, it’s not going to improve the lives. It’s not going to, you know, make sure that someone has a living wage… From our perspective, you really shouldn’t be labeling a food product with claims that aren’t verified.

For some, discussions around standardization merged with whether regenerative agriculture should have a certification, similar to USDA’s Organic certification. Participants had vastly mixed feelings on whether a regenerative agriculture certification would be beneficial. Some felt that certifications are important to consumers, although others contended that the multiple certifications for food products have already become overwhelming to consumers. Others expressed uncertainty, reflecting on past examples, as illustrated by the following quote:

You know, the (USDA) Organic certification went all the way through, and they developed the national Organic program and that’s been sort of successful. Although it’s less than 1% of all farmland, and I think that there’s something innately there that we need to look at us to understand why do we not see that program really growing at the rate that we need it to? Or would like it to. And I’m not sure that regenerative necessarily needs to go down that path.

Another participant also expressed uncertainty on whether regenerative agriculture should have a certification due to possible inequities they perceived:

I’m torn in a lot of ways (about certification). Because certifications are…they create exclusion, and I’m mindful of what that means: it is something that ties a certain value or a certain quality to a process that not everybody may have access to financially or administratively…The ideal would be to create (a certification) alongside a system that ultimately tries to create more transparency.

This sentiment was particularly salient among participants who saw the recent attention on regenerative agriculture as a critical shift in societal thinking on climate change.

All participant types except farmers asserted that there is an immense need for “science and technology” to help us understand how regenerative agriculture can advance climate change mitigation. In contrast, when asked about the role of research, farmer participants were ambivalent at best. They particularly conveyed conte for the traditional “top-down”, “reductionist” approach to research they saw as typical in agricultural and natural sciences. Each farmer was in constant experimentation on their own land as they navigated transitioning away from conventional agriculture. One researcher interviewee remarked on this, describing how regenerative agriculture is

“…a producer-driven initiative. This is not something that we came up with. It was something the producers were already engaged in. Oftentimes the universities come along well-behind trying to figure out what happened.”

Other participants maintained that researchers should have a prominent role but emphasized the need for more “systems-based” and “interdisciplinary” research. Underlying these discussions was the notion that today’s global challenges—like climate change—are too nuanced and complex to be addressed by independent disciplines.

Discussion

From this exploration of how the term regenerative agriculture is being interpreted, understood, and employed by farmers, agricultural researchers, and individuals from relevant private companies and nonprofits/NGOs, we found that in many ways, the term “regenerative agriculture” fits both negative and positive characteristics of a buzzword. As noted in the introduction, buzzwords (1) are context specific, (2) have meaning that is ambiguous across different groups, (3) allow interpretive flexibility but (4) people using the buzzword feel like they know what it means, (5) demonstrate strong beliefs, (6) reflect public discourse on a topic, and (7) have a directing quality.

Context specific

Interviewees offered multiple views of where regenerative agriculture emerged from, which then affects the context in which it is used and developed. As a few participants suggested, Robert Rodale and the Rodale Institute has been credited with coining the phrase. However, several participants felt that wherever the term itself came from, there is a crucial need to give credit to Black, Brown, and Indigenous peoples for their contributions to the ideas of regenerative agriculture. This has likewise been argued in news and academic articles and books (Carlisle 2022; Sands et al. 2023; Sutton 2021; Wozniacka 2021). This critique argues for increasing acknowledgement of marginalized farmers role in the use of regenerative practices, but also underscores a fundamental gap that happens when knowledge is dismembered from its context and resituated in another world (Angara et al. 2020).

Ambiguity across groups allows for interpretive flexibility

Despite attempts from a variety of authors to standardize a definition, in the case of regenerative agriculture, there remain ambiguous and plural definitions of the term among stakeholders. In this sense, regenerative agriculture has not escaped similar contested narratives of other terms trying to motivate food systems change. As previous scholars have illustrated, many of these debates over “buzzwords” or “semantics” reflect particular power relationships within the agricultural landscape and thus are embedded in ongoing debates about what the agriculture and food system should look like (Constance 2010; Bless et al. 2023; Jaffee and Howard 2016; Levidow 2018; Youngberg and DeMuth 2013). With so many endeavors in regenerative agriculture being spearheaded by private companies, there is need to stay attentive to how these initiatives affect other stakeholders, particularly farmers. That said, we see some positive potential in allowing for differing and evolving understandings of regenerative agriculture, which can, as Gordon and colleagues argued in their 2022 paper, enable farmers to develop—and benefit from—an appreciation for “constant discovery” to be persistently open to transformation (Gordon et al. 2022).

Demonstrate strong—though differing—beliefs and a directing quality

Like other buzzwords, participants saw regenerative agriculture as positively signaling an important paradigm shift in societal thinking and representing a directing quality. Some participants emphasized that regenerative agriculture is uniquely catalyzing a reckoning with social factors related to food and agriculture, indicating a directive shift in what factors to consider. This included addressing parity and oppression of our systems, in addition to regenerating farming communities. For others, regenerative agriculture marked a critical and central shift to reckoning with climate change, as other scholars have articulated (Brazeau 2021; Giller et al. 2021; Lal 2020; Rhodes 2017). This framing reflects myriad buzzwords that attach themselves to climate change, such as “climate-smart agriculture” which has been in the ether since 2009 (Lipper and Zilberman 2018), but lately received more attention in the US due to recent USDA initiatives (Davies 2022; USDA 2021).

While many of the respondents asserted that the incorporation of social factors into agricultural movements is unique to regenerative agriculture, a few remarked how long-time sustainable agriculture advocates argue that social sustainability, including farmers’ quality of life and community development, have long been a pillar for their movement. Weil’s (1990) contemporaneous scholarship illustrated how the term “sustainable agriculture” was hoped to be broad enough to include many types of agriculture by being “ends-oriented” towards specific environmental, economic, and “public welfare” outcomes that could be generated through multiple “means” (e.g. he lists a variety of means– like low-inputs, crop rotations, biological diversity, animal integration, soil as a biological system, knowledge-based farming, humans scale farming, minimal dependence on nonrenewable resources). Importantly, Weil (1990) thought that the term “sustainable agriculture” could provide a way of recognizing and integrating the interconnected aspects of a diverse agriculture and food system. Past programmatic endeavors at the federal level also sought to integrate social factors into sustainable agriculture programming. For example, the USDA Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE) program convened working groups of social scientists several times to more systematically address social sustainability in their programs and developed specific resources around community food systems and social sustainability.Footnote 2

Not to be ignored is the question of what scientific research and technology development is appropriate and necessary to better understand and operationalize the suggested benefits of regenerative agriculture, and who is involved in the research process. In our study, farmer interviewees in particular expressed clear disdain for “traditional”, top-down scientific research approaches. The directive call for interdisciplinary and/or systems-based research is not new and has indeed been voiced by scholars and advocates in other food and agricultural systems movements in addition to regenerative agriculture (Cairns and Krzywoszynska 2016; Lipper and Zilberman 2018; Wilson et al. 2022). Participatory research, where stakeholders are involved in all or multiple stages of the research process, has likewise been emphasized as critical. However, catalyzing effective and productive interdisciplinary and cross-stakeholder collaborations requires (1) contending with the power imbalances that underset what scientific research is considered most valuable and (2) building researchers’ and collaborators’ capacities to develop and maintain productive cross-expertise relationships (Cullen et al. 2023; Janssen and Goldsworthy 1996; Kelly et al. 2019; MacMynowski 2007). To take on this directive, researchers across disciplines must develop capacity for these productive relationships.

One way that interdisciplinary research and participatory research can be incentivized is through funding programs and donor requirements, and what they require in their Request for Proposals (RFPs). Public and private research funding programs are consistently modified with the goal of maintaining emphases on areas of public concerns and interests. In the last decade, private and public funding programs for food and agricultural systems and natural resource management programs, and others have increasingly emphasized the importance of interdisciplinary research and, in some cases, engaging relevant stakeholders during the research process. With increased public discourse on issues in agriculture and food systems and climate-change through the mainstreaming of “regenerative agriculture”, there is opportunity to increase capacity to reflect what farmers (and other key stakeholder) express as critical for the direction of research in these areas. But seizing these opportunities to develop and implement truly interdisciplinary and stakeholder-engaged research must be complemented with capacity building and training of researchers from all relevant fields—including natural sciences and social sciences—to carry out this work effectively.

Buzzwords and power

While our research did not focus on exploring power relationships within regenerative agriculture, it seemed an important subtext of the interviews that we conducted and echoes past discussions of contested narratives (Constance 2010; Levidow 2018; Bless et al. 2023). For instance, a few participants projected that climate change is the most critical issue that should be addressed before all else. Often, this sentiment weaves in an idea that “we” must come together as a united global community to address our shared problem of climate change. But framing issues like climate change as a shared, interconnected issue for all humanity, can disguise the political and economic motivations that contributed to our current climate crises and remain inextricable from the actions of many industrial governments and major corporations (Cairns and Krzywoszynska 2016; Stirling 2015). These actors thus maintain the power they have over global supply chains while positioning themselves as moral leaders for the global good. Moreover, this approach seeks to depoliticize motivations of different agencies, who instead highlight their progress in being a part of the solution to a global challenge.

Another example is when individuals or groups make the “business case” for regenerative agriculture by framing it as “win-win” for all. This tactic furthers attempts to depoliticalize the term. As Cairns and Kryzwosynska point out, “the seemingly apolitical nature of a focus on business efficiency and win-wins allows the debates to sidestep more fundamental political economy questions about the role of industrial development in environmental degradation and social inequality” (Cairns and Krzywoszynska 2016, p. 7).

Another “win-win” proclamation is that by switching to regenerative systems, farmers will in fact save money by reducing input costs (LaCanne and Lundgren 2018). Farmer interviewees, each of whom had transitioned conventional farmland to a regenerative system, all mentioned a significant reduced need for any inputs. These anecdotes are valuable, as articulated from the lived experiences of farmers. Still, this messaging makes it seem like a straight-forward “practical” solution, free of ulterior agendas or motivations. This rediscovery of “low-input” farming, or substituting on-farm inputs for purchased inputs, reflects earlier movements toward input reduction and substitution (Constance 2010; Weil 1990). But it also reflects subtle shifts in power relationships in agriculture, particularly a rejection of the agriculture that has often been promoted by chemical and seed companies and other agribusinesses.

We argue that understanding underlying power relationships that surround food and agriculture buzzwords—both current and past—is an important matter for shaping the agrifood future. Every way of organizing food and agriculture is political: there are competing interests, claims and values across the agrifood system, and politics is often where and how those are contested. Buzzwords reflect the public discourse on a topic, which itself is rooted in the existing power relationships that shape the material relations of food and agriculture. As earlier terms for transformation in agriculture became subjected to unequal power relationships, their ability to direct transformation suffered. Without recognition that the political is important to affect change, regenerative agriculture will likely not achieve the outcomes so ardently desired by our interviewees.

Conclusion

This study reveals how the term regenerative agriculture carries both negative and positive characteristics of a buzzword. Although there have been attempts to standardize its definition, there remain multiple and ambiguous definitions, as well as contested narratives. While it is seen positively as signaling an important paradigm shift in societal thinking, it is also critiqued for its disconnection from marginalized farmers contributions to the concepts of regenerative agriculture. In food and agriculture, buzzwords often arise within a contested discourse that reflects real struggles on the part of farmers, eaters and communities over the future of food systems. Furthermore, the tendency to make a “business case” for regenerative agriculture should be regarded cautiously, as this approach can veil the motivations of different actors and sidestep more fundamental questions about the role of industrial development in environmental degradation and social inequities. This study underscores the need for ongoing critical evaluation of the use of buzzwords in food and agricultural systems and the importance of acknowledging power relationship embedded in the discourse and in the actions taken. For regenerative agriculture to stay relevant as an important concept and message in agrifood systems, farmers and others investing in the concept to describe how they are navigating complex challenges, we must recognize and understand the implications of contested discourses in thinking how to shape the future.