Introduction A Regenerative Journey Like a bushel of corn, my roots are in rural America. Dad learned to farm while working on Grandpa''s fields. I played in those fields. I made worlds in the corn, letting my imagination take me to faraway realms beyond the small part of the planet I knew. I was a warrior with a wooden sword fighting trolls and goblins, a superhero thwarting supervillains with my superstrength, and a kid exploring alien worlds carrying a walkie-talkie and a BB gun. But, as a member of the first generation of Timmermans not to grow up in a family that made a living off the land, I never dreamed of being a farmer. I never pretended to farm, because farming meant staying. Instead, as soon as I was old enough, I left.

I worked as a scuba instructor in Key West and Baja, Mexico. I hitchhiked from trailhead to trailhead in New Zealand. I immersed myself in lands and cultures beyond the monocultures of my childhood. For almost two decades working as a journalist, I''ve traveled from Australia to Zambia to meet people and write about how they live. I''ve especially focused on the farmers struggling to feed their families. Travel confirmed I belonged in rural areas. Whether in Africa or Central America, I found a familiar neighborliness. When I visited villages in Colombia or Nepal, I''d meet my new friends'' grandmas and grandpas, aunts and uncles, and everyone else in the villages seemed to be cousins.

I could relate. My teachers taught my parents. My wife''s grandmother knew my grandparents. My distant cousin was the school superintendent who signed my wife''s grandfather''s elementary diploma. Around the world I was taken in and treated like family. I''m never comfortable if I can''t see the stars clearly. In 2007, my wife and I moved to Muncie, Indiana, onto a quarter acre at the end of a cul-de-sac in a housing development. I suppose it was a quiet piece of suburbia to most people, but it was the big city to me.

My first snowfall there was unsettling. The city lights reflected off the white ground, casting our neighborhood in frozen sepia, neither night nor day. Quiet didn''t exist. There was always traffic, always alarms. I want the chirps of frogs in the spring and crickets at the end of summer, space enough for my kids to hit home runs into fields, wild berries, cherry tomatoes from the garden, catching toads and lightning bugs. I like the old stories of friends and family coming together for the harvest or to raise a barn. I prefer sycamores as tall as buildings. Trees with stories.

Keep the corporate ladder; give me branches to climb. As much as I felt the connections with the land and the people in rural areas, there was no avoiding that so many of those connections have been broken. Farming once connected neighbors and communities, but as machines, oil, and chemicals have replaced people, as agriculture has become more industrialized, centralized, and commoditized, we''ve become separated from one another and from the natural world. Rural lands and rivers and people are mined, poisoned, and exploited for profit at a great loss. Corporations farm farmers. Rural Americans lack access to sufficient health care and suffer higher rates of addiction, poor mental health, and a higher suicide rate than those who live in cities. Despite this, after a few years my wife and I left the city behind and moved with our two kids onto 20 acres on an Indiana country road that never earned a name. Once again, my neighbors were farmers and monocultures of corn.

As I started to plant roots in a new rural community, I grew more entangled in the stakes of farming. There are times, after chicken manure has been spread on the fields, when it''s hard--and unwise--to breathe outside. My mom has a nodule in her lung to show for the time she inhaled deeply after the field near her home was treated. I worry about my kids. And then of course there are the other substances. Weed killer from a nearby farm drifted onto a friend who is an organic farmer. He''s had stomach issues ever since. My son and I had to cut short a walk around our pond and hustle home when a neighbor began spraying his adjacent field.

Another friend who farms corn and soybeans believes his dad and his uncle, both of whom died of a rare type of cancer, were killed by the chemicals they applied to their fields. Modern industrial agriculture, practiced by my friends and family and neighbors to feed us, exposes them and all of us to cancer-causing chemicals and antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Agriculture contributes 31 percent of human-made global greenhouse gas emissions. It depletes our soil and uses more than 70 percent of our freshwater. American agriculture uses three pounds of toxic chemicals per person each year to produce vegetables and fruits that are significantly less nutritious than the food my parents ate growing up. Industrial agriculture treats earth like dirt. Recent research is introducing us to a deeper understanding of soil, which is so much more than a collection of minerals. Soil is alive, and healthy soil serves a critical role as earth''s digestive system.

Soil scientist David Montgomery writes that soil is the "ultimate strategic resource. For there is no substitute [for soil] as there is for oil, and it cannot be distilled, as fresh water can be from seawater, nor cleaned by filters as air can." The USDA estimates that it takes 500 years to build an inch of soil, and yet the most common type of agriculture flushes it down our rivers into the ocean at such a rate--a dump truck load per second--that one United Nations report expressed the fear that we have less than 55 years of growing seasons left. That''s a pretty terrifying prospect, considering that 95 percent of the food we eat comes from the soil. Industrial agriculture is changing our lives, communities, and planet, and my family had moved right back into the heart of it. As I wrestled with the risks of living near conventional farms, and climate change had me staying up at night worrying about the world we''re leaving our kids, I began to hear about regenerative agriculture. I was learning that if farmers and ranchers followed certain practices, plants and soil could absorb enough carbon to mitigate and even reverse climate change. Maybe we weren''t doomed? Maybe, during a time in which the climate news grows bleaker by the day, there was something more we--I--could do than hold a sign protesting climate change.

Maybe there is hope? But there''s so much more. Like many when they first learn of regenerative agriculture, I was so distracted by the hope of carbon sequestration I had a sort of carbon tunnel vision and couldn''t see all of its other social and environmental benefits. I became obsessed. I''m a guy who asks a question about something I don''t know much about and then travels around the world looking for answers. "Who made my underwear?" took me to Bangladesh. "Who grew the cacao in my chocolate?" took me to West Africa. I''ve pursued my curiosity for thousands of miles--leading me to stand on glaciers and volcanoes, swim in the Amazon, and protect cows from lions on the Kenyan savanna--but no question has changed my daily life more than the one that inspired this book: "What is regenerative agriculture?" On the home front, it''s meant that I inherited chickens, started a no-till garden, and built and rebuilt and rebuilt again a beaver dam by hand. I even became a shepherd.

My four sheep graze our yard, only sometimes escaping to eat my wife''s flowers. Occasionally the county sheriff knocks on the door at 10:30 p.m. to inform me the sheep are across the road. Each morning after letting the chickens out, I evaluate the grass to decide where I will rotate the sheep next. Outside my front door, the world looks and feels completely different. I feel different. Because of my regenerative journey and the farmers I met, the world is bigger and I''m more connected to it.

So what is this thing that I''ve been obsessing about? Regenerative agriculture is much more than chickens and sheep and no-till gardening, but it''s incredibly hard to pin down. Its spectrum of definitions reflects the unique qualities of the wildly diverse people who practice it in many different ways all over the world. Indigenous cultures, individual farmers, communities, and nonprofits have their own understandings and definitions of regenerative agriculture, from a few loose principles to certifications with nearly a hundred specific standards to age-old practices that value giving more than taking. The giant agrochemical conglomerates--arguably the drivers and profiteers of the degeneration that spurred this movement--even promote their own very narrow definition, which serves their own purposes. One of the most useful definitions came from a Stetson-wearing farmer in Georgia who told me that regenerative agriculture "restarts the cycles of nature." This was echoed by a spiritual leader of the Arhuaco people in the mountains of Colombia, who wore a hand-sewn white cap that resembled a snowy peak and told me that humans "have broken the rules of the earth, and its perfect cycle." Different continents, different cultures, different hats, but the same message. My friend Michael O''Donnell, an organic farmer, told me, "I know regenerative agriculture when I see it.

When I feel it." That wasn''t exactly helpful to me as I struggled to understand, but it did encourage me to look and feel (and smell and taste) as I explored. This is a book of experiences, stories of meeting farmers across the United States and around the globe who are working with nature and restarting its cycles. Many of them reject the destruction of industrial agriculture while embracing nature''s abundance. But destruction and abundance appear side.