For potato growers, regenerative agriculture may be less about abandoning established production systems than about rebuilding soil health across the entire rotation.
By Lukie Pieterse, Editor/Publisher of Potato News Today
Regenerative agriculture has become one of the most widely discussed ideas in modern farming, but beneath the terminology lies a relatively straightforward proposition: agricultural land should become healthier and more resilient as it is farmed, rather than progressively depleted.
That is the central message of an educational guide published by the US nonprofit Kiss the Ground, which describes regenerative agriculture as a systems-based approach aimed particularly at improving soil function, organic matter and biodiversity over time.
For potato growers, however, the discussion deserves some nuance.
Potatoes are inherently demanding on soil. Seedbed preparation, planting, hilling and particularly harvesting can require substantial soil disturbance. The crop also leaves relatively little residue behind compared with crops such as cereals. Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada consequently stresses the importance of rotations, organic matter management, erosion control and cover crops in maintaining the long-term productivity of potato soils.
The principles rather than the label
Kiss the Ground identifies several central regenerative principles: understanding the local farming context, minimising disturbance, maintaining living roots, keeping soil covered, integrating animals where appropriate, and increasing biological diversity. It also makes an important point sometimes lost in the regenerative agriculture debate: there are no universal rules, and practices must vary according to the grower, climate and region.
That may be particularly relevant to potatoes.
A potato producer cannot simply eliminate soil disturbance. But regenerative thinking can potentially influence what happens before and after the potato crop.
Longer and more diverse rotations, cover crops, reduced cultivation elsewhere in the rotation and maintaining living roots for more of the year can all contribute towards protecting soil structure and biological activity.
Recent research supports that direction. European work examining whether potato production can become more regenerative found that cover crops and organic mulch can support soil microbial activity, although researchers also underline the difficulties created by the intensive tillage traditionally associated with potato production.
A 2026 Nuffield Farming Scholarships report reached a similarly pragmatic conclusion. It argued that high-yielding maincrop potatoes and improving soil health need not be mutually exclusive, provided regenerative principles are considered across the cropping system rather than applied dogmatically to the potato crop in isolation.
Resilience may be the bigger prize
The significance goes beyond environmental terminology.
Kiss the Ground points to improved water infiltration and retention, nutrient cycling, aggregate stability and erosion resistance as potential consequences of increasing soil organic matter. Those characteristics are becoming increasingly important as growers confront heavier rainfall events, longer dry periods and rising production costs.
For potato producers, this may ultimately be the strongest argument for paying attention to regenerative agriculture.
It is not necessarily about becoming a “regenerative farmer”, adopting every proposed practice, or abandoning the agronomy required to produce a commercially viable potato crop.
It is about asking a more practical question:
Can the soil entering the next potato crop be left in better condition than it was before?
For an industry whose productivity ultimately depends upon a few centimetres of living soil, that question is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.
Sources consulted
Kiss the Ground — Guide to Regenerative Agriculture
Read the guide
Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada — Crop profile for potato in Canada, 2023
Read the AAFC crop profile
Finckh et al. — Can potato cropping be made regenerative? Cover crops and dead organic mulch support soil microbial activity
Read the research paper
Nuffield Farming Scholarships — Can Maincrop potatoes be grown in a regenerative system?
Read the 2026 report overview
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