Regenerative agriculture has advanced—but it is stalling. Not because we lack tools, data, or good intentions, but because we the quickly falling back into a paradigm of control. This blog pinpoints how our language framing quietly reproduces the worldview we claim to replace. Words shape perception; perception shapes action. Once we care for land, this chain matters.
“What we call ‘soil health’—the living capacity of the land (Aki) to sustain life (bimaadiziwin).”
Why language matters more than techniques
Every agricultural reform movement eventually turns to practices: what to do differently in fields, pastures, and forests. Far fewer interrogate the language that frames those practices. Yet language carries something deep: language echoes unspoken assumptions about agency, responsibility, time, and relationship long before decisions are made on the ground.
From our own transition to a regenerative farm, we learned how language is a main barrier to thinking regeneratively and making regenerative decisions. Words and concepts used in the contemporary regenerative discourse—soil health, regenerative practices, outcomes, metrics— make this discourse appear progressive. Maybe even corrective to our human ills. But beneath that surface sits a familiar grammar: the concepts treat land as an object, health as a state, and humans as managers tasked with “doing regeneration to the land” through the right choice of practices. This grammar determines what kinds of action feel reasonable or urgent, and which ones are optional.
The claim of this essay is simple: as long as regenerative agriculture speaks primarily in managerial language of control, it will reproduce the same old managerial outcomes—no matter how ecological the techniques appear.
The Western language frame: nouns, states, and control
Western agricultural language is dominated by nouns and static conditions:
- Soil health
- Regenerative practices
- System outcomes
- Performance indicators
Within this frame, we attempt to define health as a measurable property. Soil becomes a discrete object, and regeneration becomes an intervention applied by external agents – the land managers. The land is something acted upon; humans do the regenerating, by applying a regenerative practice.
This framing assumes that land can be fixed—moved from unhealthy to healthy once the right combination of practices is applied. This is a quieter continuation of industrial thinking: less extractive in intention, but still organized around control, prediction, and correction. We may shed specific words of control, but maintain its grammar.
Such language does not only describe our understanding regeneration. It limits what regeneration is allowed to mean.
A relational counterpoint: how an Ojibwe lens hears this language
As a land caretaker for our own Market Garden, however, my wife and I beginning to understand something about my role on the land, and how most Westerners don’t get it. And I believe it has to do with how we limit our cognition because of our language. After 7 years of successfully farming regeneratively, I cannot describe our role with this language – I find myself using deep system languages, relationships, and lots of verbs. So I see this blog as an exploration, and invitation to deepen our understanding of language, and our relationship with First Nations. Invite them into our land stewardship decisions – and to pay close attention to their problem framing.
To be clear: I am not Ojibwe nor do I speak Anishinaabemowin, their traditional language. I have read some literature, and reviewed more with AI, and am reconstructing what speakers of this verb-based language may contribute to the Regenerative Agriculture debate. I am fascinated how this language reflects an entire world view that centers around living systems, and attributes a clear role to humans within the larger world.
There is no Anishinaabek word for “soil health”. Because soil cannot be treated as an isolated thing, and health is not a box to tick! According to ChatGPT, the closest conceptual framing is a reorientation: Aki (living land) understood through bimaadiziwin (life, vitality). What Western science calls “soil health” is better approximated as land living well through balanced relationships. So an Ojibwe (Anishinaabe) critique of the Regenerative discourse would not suggest better metrics – it would question our very conceptualization of regeneration. In Anishinaabemowin, meaning is carried primarily through verbs rather than nouns. Life is understood as process, motion, and relationship—not as a static condition that can be achieved or lost, owned or sold. Land is not a thing with attributes; it is a living system continuously shaped by the relationships it holds.
From this perspective:
- Land is not healthy or unhealthy; it is living well, suffering, recovering, or being neglected.
- Health is not a target state but an emergent quality of balanced relationships.
- Humans are not external managers but participants whose behavior matters as much as rainfall or soil organisms.
The familiar Western question—Is the soil healthy?—already carries a distancing assumption. A relational framing asks instead: Are we living well with the land?
What may appear like a pedantic detail, or a more romantic alternative vocabulary, actually carries a different theory of causation, and a different management paradigm, and a different Theory of Change. And this matters!
Who is doing the regenerating?
The word regenerative appears to signal humility by acknowledging the need for repair. Grammatically and culturally, however, it still centers around human agency and control. Regenerative agriculture implies that humans regenerate land. Regenerative practices imply that these practices ensure regeneration of the land. Regenerative farmers are people who made a decision to regenerate their land. From my own observation, I think that none of that is possible. It’s not how the land works, and it’s not reflecting our human role or our relationship with the land.
From a relational worldview, we make fundamental category errors. Land regenerates itself when harm stops, disturbance is reduced, and time is allowed to do its work. Human action matters—but primarily through restraint, not acceleration. We learned on our farm: Our most important step of regeneration was to stop using degenerative practices – tillage AND chemicals.
When regeneration is framed as something humans do, predictable distortions follow:
- Ecological timelines are compressed to fit funding cycles
- Interventions are over-designed
- Success is demanded on schedule
- Frustration emerges when land does not respond as expected
We are not missing innovation, though. We miss humility—expressed linguistically as allowing (and fostering) regeneration, rather than delivering it.
Practices without responsibility
The phrase regenerative practices sounds neutral and transferable. That portability is precisely the problem.
Practice-based language abstracts land use from history, responsibility, and duration. It allows techniques to be adopted without addressing deeper questions:
- Who damaged this land, and over how long?
- Who benefits from its repair?
- Who bears risk during transition?
- Who remains when incentives disappear?
Relational land ethics begin elsewhere. They ask not what practices are you using? but how are you living here? That question implicitly includes commitment, accountability, and continuity across generations.
Practices detached from responsibility may simplify indicators but fundamentally leaves our control-oriented relationships intact.Yet, almost all soil health advocacy groups have adopted the notion of regenerative practices, rather than regenerative management, or outcome indicators for system health.
The isolation implied by “soil health”
“Soil health” is a useful technical shorthand. Conceptually, it is deeply misleading.
By isolating soil from its context, the term:
- Separates soil from water and watershed processes
- Separates soil from plants, animals, and microbes as co-constitutive agents
- Separates soil from human settlement, labor, and decision-making
From a relational perspective, such separations are sources of fundamental errors. Soil cannot be healthy in a degraded watershed. It cannot be healthy in fragmented ecosystems or unstable communities.
Health is not divisible. On our own farm, we learned that sometimes the best pest intervention may be indirect – for example, we fight snails by planting water lilies into our pond. Because these lilies protect the tadpoles that grow into toads and eat the snails! We cannot heal our soil without balancing the entire ecosystem.
Language that isolates soil enables partial success stories while broader systems continue to unravel.
The central omission: reciprocity
Regenerative discourse is rich in talk of resilience, productivity, and ecosystem services. A term that is largely avoided is reciprocity.
Reciprocity asks uncomfortable questions:
- What are you giving up?
- What limits are you accepting?
- What growth claims are you refusing?
Relational land ethics treat limits not as failures but as expressions of respect. Care is not conditional on profitability. Without reciprocity, regeneration becomes contingent: we regenerate as long as it pays.
That is not regeneration. It is deferred extraction.
How language misdirects action
These linguistic assumptions translate directly into our behavior and actions. As a result, regenerative efforts can:
- Improve soil indicators while degrading watersheds — for example, by increasing soil carbon and aggregate stability on cropped fields through cover crops and reduced tillage, while continuing tile drainage, stream channelization, or nutrient export that intensifies downstream flooding, algal blooms, or drinking-water contamination.
- Restore fields while eroding community stability — for example, when regenerative transitions raise land values and attract outside capital, pricing out local farmers, concentrating ownership, or replacing long-term farm families with short-term operators who meet practice checklists but lack durable ties to place.
- Increase biodiversity while increasing social precarity — for example, when habitat strips, pollinator plantings, or diversified rotations are implemented through short-term grants that rely on unpaid labor, financial risk-taking, or income volatility borne almost entirely by farmers and farmworkers.
Functions recover; relationships erode. This is not resilience. It is fragility with improved optics.
Re-centering relationship in language and action
Taking a relational critique seriously would shift emphasis:
- Practices → relationships
- Health → living well
- Outcomes → continuity
- Regeneration → allowing recovery
- Metrics → long-term observation
Action would follow language: slower timelines, fewer inputs, more listening, clearer limits, and deeper commitment to place.
And deep regenerative decision frameworks already reflect this shift in language from metrics to relationships:
- Allan Savory calls his decision to plan toward a “holistic goal” one of the two big mistakes of his life: By naming a goal, people immediately define measurable metrics, and focus on optimizing these metrics. At the expense of contextual awareness, holism, and relationships. Savory corrected himself and now plans for a “holistic context” that is mainly defined by the quality of relationships.
- The use of cover crops, and especially rest periods in regenerative grazing, are two ways of “doing nothing” to the soil microbes – giving it time to regenerate itself. Rest, as a regenerative practice, acknowledges this inert ability of ecosystems to recover.
- Gabe Brown’s “less disturbance” regenerative principle recognizes that the first step toward regeneration is to stop destroying the soil microbiome. Until then, all other practices are in vain.
- Gabe Brown often stresses that the most important impact he has when teaching a farmer is that the farmer sees/perceives/observes differently.
Our awareness is biased by our language, and language nudges our thinking – either toward a mechanistic paradigm of care, or a living systems paradigm of care. Language is thus a lubricant for paradigm, for regenerative decision making, for a holistic way of being with the land.
Conclusion: from words to worlds
Regenerative agriculture is not misguided—but it falls short. As long as its language remains rooted in control, abstraction, and managerial certainty, its outcomes will remain constrained. We are an outlier as we can grow vegetables without irrigation, because we allowed our land to heal as a living system. Many farmers claim to ‘farm regeneratively’, and even more ‘use regenerative practices’ or ‘farm pro-soil-health’. But who can actually say: My soil is so healthy that it retains enough water for my plants?
Language shapes worldview. Worldview shapes action. If regeneration is to move beyond technical correction, branding, and green washing toward durable repair of the land, then it must learn to speak about land not as an object to be fixed, but as a living system with which we are entangled.
The central question is no longer how do we regenerate the land? It is:
How do we stop breaking the relationships that already sustain life?
Why this matters
Regenerative agriculture is increasingly influential in policy, funding, and land-use planning. If its language continues to frame land as an object and health as a state, it will deliver technical gains without systemic stability. Shifting language is not symbolic—it is a prerequisite for actions that can endure ecological, social, and economic pressure.
References & Further Reading
- Kimmerer, R. W. Braiding Sweetgrass. Milkweed Editions.
- Coulthard, G. S. Red Skin, White Masks. University of Minnesota Press.
- Simpson, L. B. As We Have Always Done. University of Minnesota Press.
- Altieri, M. A., & Nicholls, C. I. “Agroecology and the reconstruction of a post-COVID-19 agriculture.” Journal of Peasant Studies.
- Lehmann, J., & Kleber, M. “The contentious nature of soil organic matter.” Nature.
- Montgomery, D. R. Growing a Revolution. W. W. Norton.
- Holling, C. S. “Resilience and stability of ecological systems.” Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics.
- Ostrom, E. Governing the Commons. Cambridge University Press.
- Maturana, H., & Varela, F. The Tree of Knowledge. Shambhala.
- Wynter, S. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being.” CR: The New Centennial Review.
This essay is a valuable contribution. Or perhaps… contributes positively with the idea of increasingly healthy people living with and loving increasingly healthy land. I enjoy your references to Anishnabemowin, specifically Aki (living land) understood through bimaadiziwin (life, vitality)!
I also feel like the more actions I participate in on this land that I steward–many without major offsite financial or physical inputs–brings me into a more complete and educated relationship with this land. We might even argue that not only nouns, but definite pronouns (“the land”) can lead us astray. Demonstrative pronouns (used to refer to a person, thing, or idea that is present or near in place, time, or thought) such as “this” may float the land boat better. Or “our”–a possessive adjective–need not be seen exclusively as domineering but also as an expression of love and care.