Andrew McGuire
Viewpoint: What do organic, agroecology and regenerative agriculture have in common? They don’t work and aren’t sustainable
A farmer drastically reduces fertilizer applications, trusting soil biology to provide the needed nutrients. A crop consultant recommends a 10-species ...
Viewpoint: Agroecology and other variations on organic farming that seek to mimic nature are doomed to fail
Organic farming, regenerative agriculture, and agroecology all aim to mimic nature under the assumption that natural systems offer the best ...
Agricultural science and organic farming: Time to change our trajectory
When the term organic farming was first used (ca. 1941; Paull, 2014), it was as a response to the introduction ...
Viewpoint: Regenerative agriculture has many different definitions. Here are 5 main principles — and whether they stand up to scrutiny
What is regenerative agriculture? Why is it different from sustainable agriculture? And how do I reconcile what practitioners of this system ...
Why monocultures might be the most sustainable option when choosing cover crops
It's long been believed, without much empirical evidence, that biodiversity in crop cover mixtures increases crop productivity, improves soil ecosystems ...
Scientists are skeptical of regenerative agriculture’s ‘extraordinary claims’
What is regenerative agriculture? Why is it different from sustainable agriculture? And how do I reconcile what practitioners of this system ...
Video: Has organic farming ‘ideology’ spread through the scientific community?
[Editor's note: Andrew McGuire is an agronomist at Washington State University’s Center for Sustaining Agriculture and Natural Resources.] At the core ...
Farms are not like Eden: The case for aggressive human intervention in agriculture
Farming is controlling nature for our own purposes. There is no utopian state. We should stop trying to restore, recover, ...
To make farming more sustainable, don’t mimic nature — do it better
Behind many efforts to make agriculture more sustainable is the idea that our farming systems need to be more like ...
What’s the most sustainable cover crop? It’s not mixture but monoculture
Research thus far has consistently found that cover crop polycultures are not necessarily better than cover crop monocultures. This is now ...
How do polyculture cover crops in agriculture compare to monocultures?
Planting cover crop mixtures is very popular right now. The practice has a feel-good aspect about it and, buoyed by ...