32   SEEDWORLD.COM/CANADA   NOVEMBER 2026
COVER CROP CORNER
NO WONDER PRODUCERS today are confused about 
regenerative agriculture. There is so much noise in 
the marketplace of companies overusing the term 
“regenerative agriculture” to describe the products 
they are attempting to sell. 
There are multi-generation producers that 
are used to feeling they need to buy inputs to be 
successful in farming. Retails have three main 
options for making a living servicing the regener­
ative agriculture market: sell service, sell product, 
or sell management. The first two will attempt to 
fix a problem, but some solutions are longer term 
fixes than others. The idea of the regenerative 
mindset is to use these products when you have 
to. Knowledge building is continuous, finding the 
cause of problems so “symptom fixes” are less of 
an issue. 
Proper regenerative systems will ask the ques­
tion, “Are my soils and plants moving forward in 
succession toward the place the plants actually 
want to grow in? If not, where is the bottleneck? 
How do I address it?”
The questions that need to be addressed when 
considering a “regenerative” product are “does 
it increase the amount of liquid carbon in my 
system that will create more soil aggregation, 
feed soil microbes, and does it support fungi in 
my soils?” In too many cases, they will not check 
enough of the boxes and will create a dependence. 
Liquid carbon, or root exudates, is what drives 
the bus when it comes to soil health. The mineral 
component needs to be balanced to allow proper 
plant growth, but once that occurs then input 
requirements should be used only when required. 
Healthy plants will have natural disease resist­
ance developed by a healthy rhizosheath and 
soil microbiome. Weeds will appear when we 
have nutrient imbalances, which we can address 
through plant diversity.
If we have a friend that needs regular hospital 
stays, medical clinic visits, requires medicines 
and nutrient supplements, would we regard that 
person healthy? A healthy person should not need 
to routinely visit our medical system, would have 
a healthy diet, exercise regularly, and be in a good 
mental state. In our current agricultural system 
right now, weeds seem to be the plants that are 
thriving. Our cash crops are in constant need of 
IS REGENERATIVE AGRICULTURE GETTING 
GREENWASHED?
By: Kevin Elmy
Elmy is founder of Cover 
Crops Canada. His books 
Not Just Dirt and Cover 
Cropping in Western 
Canada are available 
through Friesen Press, 
Amazon, and digitally 
through Apple Books, 
Kindle, and Google Play. 
For more info on Cover 
Crops Canada visit 
covercrops.ca
nutrition, insect protection, and disease sup­
pression. That should indicate our management 
systems are failing us. 
Nature is a system, and microbes work in 
teams. Being “regenerative” is not about doing 
one thing in particular; it is about building soil 
resilience and restoring soil function. Zero till 
does not make a farm regenerative. It helps mini­
mize damage. But it is one tool to include in the 
regenerative mindset. What else are you doing to 
build soil function? Does it reduce the reliance on 
synthetic inputs to attempt to keep our cash crop 
“healthy”? There may be times were our agronomy 
and the weather may induce conditions that limit 
our biological function and we may need to apply 
patches to get the crop through stress. 
Regenerative agriculture is not about not using 
any inputs at all, but looking at the soil first. 
What does the soil need to support microbial life? 
Plant nutrition is driven by rhizophagy, a process 
of the plants consuming microbes to get their 
nutrition. That changes how we look at soil fertil­
ity and plant nutrition. Doing a mineralogical test 
on our soils will show what is in our soils, total 
numbers, and not what is estimated to be released. 
The question should be, “How do I get more out 
of the soil without depleting our resource?” 
One way is to grow our A horizon, the area 
of where most of our roots are growing. This 
increases our nutrient availability pool. Once we 
have plant roots with good rhizosheaths filled 
with microbe diversity, nutrient availability for the 
plant is less of an issue. Soil moisture still is the 
driver of all of this. But increasing soil aggregate 
stability, fixing our micro water cycles, reducing 
evaporation, and increasing soil organic matter 
will help store more of the water that does fall as 
rain or snow.
The speed of being able to replace inputs with 
biological processes will be governed by your soil 
conditions, crop rotation, soil microbial popula­
tions and activity, climate and economics. Each 
management change we do make with a regenera­
tive goal in mind helps, but there are no shortcuts.
Most of our modern agronomic practices are 
chemical based with not much regard for bio­
logical function. Once the biology has its proper 
function restored, our soils will work for us. 

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