Led by Dr. Jason Rowntree, Michigan State University (MSU) researchers are working with farmers to quantify how regenerative grazing systems can strengthen land, livelihoods and long-term resilience.
“We’re standing on the solution in Michigan to protect our state for decades ahead when it comes to economics, when it comes to food security and when it comes to our environment and biodiversity.”
What’s the solution Rowntree is referring to? Agriculture.
It’s a belief the C.S. Mott Professor of Sustainable Agriculture in MSU’s Department of Animal Science has held since he first built his research program 16 years ago. Examining how beef cattle grazing systems can positively impact the land and farm profitability, he’s turned this belief into a principle for what has grown to be the MSU Center for Regenerative Agriculture.
Along with Rowntree and his research on regenerative grazing systems, the center, which is supported by MSU AgBioResearch, has expanded to include MSU experts who can address regenerative agriculture from a variety of backgrounds. This group includes Rowntree serving as the grasslands and animal science advisor, Dr. Bruno Basso serving as the row crop and modeling advisor, Dr. Emily Silver serving as the natural resources and social sciences advisor, and Ian Olson serving as the supply chain advisor.
This multifaceted approach is what makes it stand out compared to other forms of sustainable agriculture, Rowntree said.
“Regenerative ag, to me, is outcome-driven,” he said. “It’s about quantifying outcomes. Today, there are so many check-the-box labels and programs for food. And in some cases, we really don’t know if the intended outcome of increasing sustainability was achieved.”
In regenerative agriculture, it doesn’t matter how farmers get to their desired outcomes.
What matters is that they do.
The MSU Center for Regenerative Agriculture was created to help farmers understand what practices work best for their farms and which ones need to be put in place to achieve goals around building agricultural resilience, increasing production and profitability, and restoring the land and the environment around it.
“Here are the tools in the toolbox,” Dr. Rowntree said. “Your farm is different from every other farm. ‘Farmer A’ may go about it completely different than ‘Farmer B,’ and neither of them are wrong. It’s about enhancing soil health, resilience and water cycling while improving profitability and productivity.”
For regenerative agriculture to be an outcome-driven approach, it’s important for farmers to have the capacity and knowledge to know what their outcomes are. This point has been another foundational component to Rowntree’s research.
Working with farmers across the state, his team now monitors over 50 Michigan farms to assess the management practices of their grazing systems and offer strategies for how to improve them from environmental, productivity and profitability standpoints.
Beyond Michigan, he began co-leading a $19 million project at the end of 2021 quantifying the outcomes of regenerative grazing systems across the nation’s pastures and rangelands. The project, entitled, “Metrics, Management, and Monitoring (3M): An Investigation of Pasture and Rangeland Soil Health and its Drivers,” is now in its fifth year.
Funded by the Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research and the Noble Research Institute, as well as the Jones Family Foundation, Greenacres Foundation and ButcherBox, this is a collaborative effort bringing together researchers from 11 nonprofit organizations, private research organizations and public universities in the U.S. and United Kingdom.
It’s projects like this one, Rowntree said, that show the power of partnerships and land-grant university research in the context of regenerative agriculture.
At the MSU Lake City Research Center in Lake City, MI, where Rowntree is the faculty coordinator, he said his team has been measuring enteric methane in grazing systems for as long as anyone in the country. He said his team’s work spanning over 10 years suggests that cattle are emitting 17-25% less methane year per year than what national formulas are computing.
“If you think about that and you think about a beef cattle pledge to lower emissions by 30%, we might already be doing that if we use better math,” he said. “That’s where we in academia and we as researchers can bring that knowledge to the table, because very few entities have this longitudinal data that spans well over a decade to be able to have these conversations and say, ‘Hey, it isn’t the cow. It’s the how.’”
As many businesses continue aligning their operations to meet environmentally sustainable goals, incorporating regenerative ag techniques can open market opportunities for farmers as well, Rowntree said. While acknowledging that many of the decisions farmers make come down to if they make sense financially, he added that regenerative agriculture offers ways to reduce input costs that benefit farmers’ bottom lines.
Abby Bowser can attest to that. She and her husband, Brooks, own Bowser Family Farms in Homer, MI, where they currently run about 75 head of cattle and finish about 30 pigs each year. They started farming together over a decade ago using conventional techniques, but they eventually switched to regenerative practices and connected with Rowntree along the way. Findings from research he’s involved in, such as from the 3M project, are helping them understand what needs to be done to advance their operation.
Dr. Isabella Maciel, a systems researcher at the Noble Research Institute, is the co-director of the 3M project. She first came to know Rowntree as a postdoctoral researcher at MSU studying grazing management systems. Max Jones of the Jones Family Foundation also got to know Rowntree by way of the 3M project when they carved out its initial framework. — MSU Extension
