The Soil

Conventional farming treats soil as a medium to hold roots while synthetic fertilizers do the work. Tillage breaks up the soil structure, kills fungal networks, and exposes organic matter to the air where it oxidizes and releases carbon. Chemical fertilizers deliver nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium — but they do nothing for the microbial life that makes soil actually alive. Over time, the soil degrades. It compacts. It loses its ability to hold water. It erodes.

Regenerative farming takes the opposite approach. Instead of tilling and spraying, it uses managed animal impact — rotational grazing, multi-species integration, and permanent ground cover — to build soil from the top down. The animals graze, trample old growth into the ground, deposit manure, and move on. The pasture rests, regrows deeper and thicker, and soil biology flourishes underground.

Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farm in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley tells a similar story. When his family purchased the land in 1961, the soil organic matter was around 1%. Decades of conventional use had stripped it bare — to the point that they couldn’t push electric fence stakes into the ground because there wasn’t enough soil to hold them. After 40 years of regenerative management — rotational grazing, multi-species stacking, composting, and no chemicals — the soil organic matter has risen to over 8%, and the farm has built roughly 14 inches of new topsoil.

Each 1% increase in soil organic matter allows the soil to hold an additional 20,000 gallons of water per acre. On Polyface Farm, that means the land now retains roughly 140,000 more gallons of water per acre than when the Salatins started — a massive buffer against both drought and flooding, achieved without a single synthetic input.

The Water

Healthy soil acts like a sponge. When rain falls on ground with high organic matter and intact structure, the water infiltrates — soaking deep into the soil profile where roots can access it later and where it filters naturally before reaching the water table. When rain falls on degraded, compacted, conventionally managed ground, it runs off the surface. It takes topsoil with it. It carries synthetic fertilizers and pesticide residue into streams, rivers, and eventually drinking water.

The Rodale Institute’s 40-year trial found that water infiltration rates in organic systems were significantly higher than in conventional systems, and that the organic plots did not contribute toxic chemical runoff to waterways. The Savory Institute, which has now influenced management on over 30 million acres globally through its Holistic Management framework, measures water infiltration rate as a core indicator of land health — and consistently finds that properties managed with adaptive multi-paddock grazing show improved infiltration, reduced erosion, and in some cases the re-perennialization of ephemeral streams.

The Animals

In conventional agriculture, animals are typically viewed as production units. Cattle are finished in confined feedlots on grain-based diets their digestive systems weren’t designed to handle. Chickens are raised in enclosed buildings, often thousands at a time, with no access to sunlight, pasture, or natural behaviors. Pigs are kept on concrete floors in gestation crates. Antibiotics are administered routinely — not to treat illness, but to prevent the diseases that inevitably arise from the stress and confinement.

In a regenerative system, animals aren’t just products — they’re tools of land management. Each species plays a specific ecological role. At Polyface Farm, Joel Salatin runs cattle through a pasture first. They graze, trample, and fertilize. Then the “Eggmobile” — a mobile chicken coop — follows behind. The hens scratch through the cow patties, eating fly larvae (natural pest control), spreading the manure more evenly, and depositing their own nitrogen-rich fertilizer. Pigs root through deep bedding in winter shelters, aerating compost and converting it from anaerobic to aerobic decomposition. Every animal is working with the land.

We follow this same multi-species model at Deer Run Acres. Our cattle graze rotationally on managed paddocks, moved regularly with portable electric fencing. Our laying hens follow behind in their mobile Egg Mobile, scratching through manure, eating parasites and fly larvae, and breaking disease cycles. Our pasture-raised pigs root and aerate. Each animal contributes to the health of the system — and the system produces healthier animals.

The Food on Your Plate

This is where it all comes together for the person eating the food. The Weston A. Price Foundation — a nonprofit dedicated to restoring nutrient-dense foods to the human diet through research, education, and activism — has been making the case for decades that how food is raised determines its nutritional value. Animals raised on pasture, eating the diets they were biologically designed to eat, produce meat, eggs, and fat with fundamentally different nutritional profiles than their confined, grain-fed counterparts.

Pasture-raised eggs have deeper orange yolks — a visible indicator of higher levels of beta-carotene and fat-soluble vitamins. Grass-fed beef contains higher levels of conjugated linoleic acid (CLA), a fatty acid found in the fat of ruminants that eat green grass, which research has linked to anti-cancer properties and improved metabolic health. Pasture-raised pigs, exposed to natural sunlight, store significantly more vitamin D in their fat compared to pigs raised in confinement — because, like humans, pig skin produces vitamin D in response to sunlight.

But it goes deeper than individual nutrients. The declining nutrient density of our food supply is directly tied to the declining health of our soil. Since 1975, USDA handbooks have documented alarming drops in the vitamin and mineral content of common fruits and vegetables — including significant declines in calcium, iron, and vitamin C across staple crops. When soil is depleted of its natural microbial ecosystem, the plants and animals that grow in it are depleted of the nutrients our bodies need.

Regenerative farming reverses this cycle. Healthier soil grows more nutritious grass. More nutritious grass feeds healthier animals. Healthier animals produce more nutrient-dense food. It’s a straightforward chain — and it starts in the dirt.

The Carbon Question

One of the most common arguments against beef production is its carbon footprint. And in the conventional system, that criticism is justified — confined feedlot cattle generate significant methane emissions with no mechanism to offset them. But the regenerative model tells a different story.

White Oak Pastures, a 3,200-acre regenerative farm in Bluffton, Georgia, has been practicing holistic, multi-species rotational grazing for over 25 years. In 2019, Quantis — one of the world’s most respected environmental research firms — conducted a full lifecycle assessment (LCA) of the farm’s beef operation. The results were so unexpected that the research team called in outside academics to confirm their methodology.

The mechanism is straightforward: when cattle graze a paddock and move on, the grass responds by shedding a portion of its root mass. Those dead roots decompose underground, locking carbon into the soil as stable organic matter. The grass regrows, pulling new carbon from the atmosphere through photosynthesis, and the cycle repeats. Each grazing rotation deposits more carbon deeper into the soil profile. Unlike conventional tillage — which breaks open the soil and releases stored carbon into the atmosphere — regenerative pastures continuously accumulate it.