By Dale Hogg, Kansas Reflector
TIMKEN — On a hilltop field in Rush County, Kevin Wiltse stabbed his spade into plant residue-encrusted earth and turned over a shovelful of dark soil. He knelt, scooped up a fistful of moist, porous dirt and crumbled it in his fingers. He was not alone; earthworms poked out from the clods, and there were signs of dung beetles and other tiny creatures as well.
“This is a good thing,” said Wiltse, a Timken-area farmer. “It means the soil is healthy.”
Wiltse is a staunch advocate of a growing farming trend: regenerative agriculture. The science-heavy method minimizes soil disruptions and man-made chemical use while restoring farmlands to a more natural state. He has drawn heavily on microbiology classes he took while earning an agronomy degree from Kansas State University.
To explain his passion, Wiltse highlighted rainforests, where no fertilizers or other synthetic inputs are added.
“Those systems just function,” he said. “That’s what we are trying to do — mimic those natural ecosystems.”
Recalling the network of lines installed to provide water for livestock across all his fields, Wiltse noted that such an approach requires significant investment.
“It’s hard,” he said.
“But it’s worth it. It’s a challenge,” he added. “However, if I couldn’t farm like this, I don’t think I would want to farm.”
After the Dust Bowl, when a devastating drought triggered massive clouds of blowing dirt that engulfed Kansas, farmers made sweeping changes to their practices.
Nearly a century later, regenerative agriculture proponents say the industry stands at the threshold of the next revolution — creating a sustainable future and reestablishing the ties between the soil and the consumers. Critics say the changes are overhyped and hard to quantify.
“This could transform agriculture,” said Charles Rice, a soil scientist with the Regenerative Agriculture Initiative in the KSU Agronomy Department. “This is a new way of looking at the full food supply chain.”
But Rice said that it is a “slow go.” He has spent decades studying these practices. While farmers are increasingly turning toward holistic management systems to restore soil health, skepticism persists.
“We are talking about change; it is not an easy sell,” he said.
Regenerative agriculture functions as a framework that prioritizes ecosystem function by working with natural processes rather than against them, Rice said. By focusing on biodiversity, its methods create resilient systems capable of withstanding climate extremes while potentially increasing the nutritional quality of food.
Regenerative agriculture depends on six fundamental principles, Rice said.
“First, minimal tillage and no-till practices serve as a primary defense against erosion, preserving the soil and retaining moisture, while decreasing soil and wind erosion,” Rice said. This lack of disturbance helps sequester atmospheric carbon by protecting organic matter within the ground.
“Kansas is further along than most states,” he said.
While the state leads the nation in no-till farming, with it being used on 40-50% of its cropped area, researchers note that only 3.2% of the state’s agricultural land currently employs winter cover crops, a significant area for potential growth.
Reducing soil disturbance cuts labor and fuel expenses by decreasing the number of tractor trips, he said. It also reduces fertilizer and other input costs.
Second and third, Rice said the maintenance of soil residue through cover crops shields the land from the elements and suppresses weeds, while the presence of living roots year-round provides essential nutrients for the microbial “engine” that powers fertile land.
Next, diversification further strengthens these ecosystems, as moving toward varied crop rotations, including perennials, can increase total carbon storage in the soil and reduce reliance on synthetic chemical inputs, he said.
Fifth, integrating livestock into crop systems where possible offers additional benefits, such as natural fertilization from manure and enhanced carbon storage through managed grazing, which also provides feed for the cattle.
Carbon sequestration captures carbon dioxide and stores it in the soil. By using conservation methods such as regenerative ag, growers increase organic matter to turn fields into “carbon sinks.” Biological storage reduces greenhouse gases while improving soil health and water retention.
“We are making that soil better,” Rice said.
Barriers to acceptance linger, he said. He identified a lack of technical resources, perceived financial risks and overall awareness as primary hurdles.
“It takes an investment of time to learn these practices,” he said. There are also other up-front costs, and it may be three to five years before farmers see any return.
This brought Rice to the final principle — context. This requires producers to tailor techniques to their specific soil types and local climates to maximize both social and environmental sustainability.
In November 2025, the Kevin Wiltse family (Kevin, his wife Amanda and their three children) received the 2025 Kansas Leopold Conservation Award. The $10,000 honor recognizes landowners who demonstrate outstanding commitment to soil health, water quality and wildlife habitat.
For the Wiltses, their path to regenerative ag started with no-till farming in the 1990s. This alone didn’t yield the results they were hoping for. In the decades since, they’ve incorporated cover crops, more crop rotation and have added livestock integration on about 2,500 acres in the rolling hills of Rush County.
At risk of oversimplifying it, the basic goal of regenerative agriculture is to improve soil health, Wiltse said. By keeping more organic matter in the dirt, moisture is retained, nutrients are added and weed woes are reduced.
“Now we’re seeing the benefits. It’s more profitable per acre,” he said. They are using about half as much fertilizer and herbicides as they were before.
“It’s been really successful,” he said. “The variety gives us more options.”
But “there are a lot of hurdles that keep this from being widely adopted,” he said.
Federal farm programs don’t encourage regenerative practices. Also, if a farmer is leasing ground, adopting such practices may depend on an agreement with the landowner.
Finally, “It’s hard for people to change,” Wiltse said. It takes more planning, “and there are a lot of factors that go into it. Everyone must evaluate it for themselves.”
However, as water and other resources become scarcer, the current heavy reliance on irrigation and chemical applications is unsustainable, he said.
“This is reconnecting the consumer with agriculture,” Rice said.
There is evidence that these practices can improve the nutritional quality of the food grown, he added. But the “food is medicine” concept needs more research.
“There are indications it has a positive effect on human health,” Wiltse said. “There are lots of interesting studies being done now that are confirming that healthy soil gives us healthy plants and animals, which gives us healthier food. We have done nutrient density testing on our beef. I think this is going to be a big deal going forward.”
He is taking part in a national survey that tests crops and soils to quantify the effects of regenerative agriculture.
The Trump administration has directed more funding toward RA efforts. Food companies such as General Mills, King Arthur and McDonald’s are funneling money into such efforts, seeing them as a way of cutting production costs by making farming more efficient, shoring up supply chains by expanding crop diversity, and providing a new way to market their products.
The bottom line, Rice said, is that everyone stands to win.
Not just humans, either. Pointing to a cluster of pheasants scattering through a field of crop residue, Wiltse said these efforts create vast swaths of wildlife habitat.
There are skeptics.
“I don’t think there are particularly downsides. I don’t have a problem with regenerative agriculture,” said Andrew McGuire, extension agronomist for the Washington State University Extension, WSU Center for Sustaining Agriculture and Natural Resources.
The roots of the practice – reducing tillage, crop diversity, livestock integration and promoting soil health – are all sound.
“But I just think the claims go way too far,” he said. He compared it to the earlier trend of sustainable agriculture.
“There is a new focus on soil health,” he said. “They really stress the biology aspect of regenerative ag, and that is where a lot of these claims come from.”
While sustainable ag focused on similar practices, the goal was soil maintenance. Regenerative advocates say they want to restore the soil to pre-agriculture days, and that is just not possible, McGuire said.
Over the long term, “crop production just removes too much biomass,” he said. Eventually, outside inputs such as fertilizer will be needed. McGuire said these techniques may be more easily applicable and successful in livestock, where there is less soil disturbance.
Skeptics also note that a lack of standardized definitions allows for corporate greenwashing and marketing ploys that do not require actual ecological changes. Some emphasize the difficulty of verifying environmental benefits, noting that inconsistent soil carbon measurements make climate claims hard to validate.
But Wiltse stands firm. Sure, it’s a long process and it takes time, he said.
“I see all the efforts paying off,” he said. “There are more opportunities to get more out of fewer acres.”
