Randall D. Jackson1*
Claudio Gratton2- 1Department of Plant & Agroecosystem Sciences, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, United States
- 2Department of Entomology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, United States
The environmental and social problems that industrial agriculture creates and relies upon, but also suffers from and responds to, are massive compared to, for instance, conservation interventions on the margins of fields. We need to transform food production that create opportunities for current and future farmers to evolve and grow into farming that is genuinely regenerative, that is, that build soil and foster diversity of crops, landscapes, and people. Metrics of success for agriculture should indicate soil accretion, clean water, habitat for biodiversity, and an abundance and diversity of thriving and vital farmers and rural communities. Farming that is profitable to the farmer, regenerates their ability to produce for society, and adds value to society’s overall ecosystem, community, and individual health and wellbeing portfolio. Agrifood system transformation is not possible within the productivist paradigm that incentivizes farmers to produce as much as they possibly can from the land and livestock. We must reward farmers for providing diverse portfolios of outcomes that are profitable to the farm, while providing for us all today, and building capacity for future generations to do the same.
A one-sided argument because decades of evidence is so clear
As the soil, thousands of years old, is picked up by wind and carried into towns and across highways, it wreaks havoc on travelers and incurs untold costs for cleanup while undermining the health and wellbeing of millions. Journalists and commentators will call it a ‘haboob’ or a ‘dust storm’, but it is not simply dust. These airborne soil particles come from industrial farms where topsoil that developed for thousands of years in grasslands have been denuded of vegetation for much of the year (Coppess et al., 2025). Most consider these prairie grasslands a thing of the past, a romantic memory, because the tall grasses, showy flowers, and megafauna that once dominated have been nearly eliminated. But the meters-deep soils that accumulated over the millenia are as much the prairie – in terms of carbon, orders of magnitude more – as the vegetation and animals once manifest at its surface (Bockheim and Hartemink, 2017). Grassland soils are alive with biota whose habitat is a tangled mess of organic matter and mineral particles combining to make soil. This is the prairie, or what remains of it. The ~150 years when we have extracted as much of their energy and matter as possible with agriculture is a mere blip on the millennial timeline of the grassland biome.
Relatively short as this period has been, this agronomic intensification has been massively productive, while taking a heavy toll on other ecosystem services leading to deteriorating human wellbeing (Chaplin-Kramer et al., 2022; Lark et al., 2022; Gerken et al., 2024). For over a century, we managed the grasslands by draining, tilling, planting, and fertilizing mostly shallow-rooted, annual crop plants. Genetic modification of crops via plant breeding and direct genetic manipulation combined with agronomic management that manipulates light, water, nutrients and space has pushed yields higher and higher by selecting and creating plants that shunt more of the carbon they take from the atmosphere to aboveground parts, including the grains that are harvested, and opening up ecological niches that degrade ecosystem functions, especially soil, water, and nutrient retention (Glover et al., 2010; Crews, 2017). This approach combines low plant residue (carbon inputs) with accelerated microbial oxidation of soil organic matter (carbon outputs) making these agroecosystems net sources of carbon to the atmosphere (Dietz et al., 2024). Most of the grains from these crops are sold as commodities for feeding confined livestock or ethanol refineries for gas tanks (Iowa Corn Growers Association, 2021; Wisconsin Corn Growers Association, 2024). However, when these commodities are sold, the price they fetch often fails to exceed the cost of their production, and on average provides little in the way of profit without taxpayer subsidized insurance (USDA Economic Research Service, 2025) (Figure 1). Meanwhile, patented and genetically modified seed is expensive, as are fertilizers and pesticides required to realize yield potential, which generates massive revenue for corporations producing and selling these inputs as well as farming advice via consultation services. To enable and support this corporate profiteering and maintain political power, commodity crops are ‘de-risked’ by the federal government with insurance back-stops for farmers that are just enough to keep them growing the commoditzed products when losses are realized (Imhoff and Badaracco, 2019).
Figure 1. Average farm-level profit (production value minus total costs, does not include government payments or insurance) for US corn and soybeans for the period 1997 through 2024 (USDA Economic Research Service, 2025).
Farmers are trapped on the treadmill of production
So why do farmers continue to participate in this system? Many do not. The pressure to ‘get big or get out’ drives consolidation and vertical integration resulting in fewer farms, even while yields increase (Bruckner, 2016). Those who remain, carefully cultivate narratives about ‘What it means to be a good farmer’ (generally big investment and continual growth) coupled with romantic notions about ‘Who knows what’s best for the land?’ (farmers know best) (Leitschuh et al., 2022; Strauser et al., 2022) and ‘We feed the world!’ (Hall, 2024). This insular and circular story-telling and place-making (Strauser and Stewart, 2024) are key to maintaining an amazingly resilient,1 if poorly performing, system that ‘repairs itself’ irrespective of market conditions (Houser et al., 2020). Ironically, critical analysis shows that when we increase grain yields globally, human health and wellbeing metrics actually decline because increasing grain abundance reduces its value making it more prone to being discarded, used in processed foods with low nutrient density, or for non-food products such as ethanol (Benton and Bailey, 2019). Most hunger is driven by poverty and inequality (UN FAO, 2025), which are driven by policies and norms re-inforcing power and wealth (Konefal and Mascarenhas, 2005; Simmons, 2025).
Meanwhile, ‘getting big’ for the farmer typically entails increasing land and/or animals to increase volume, which tends to require loans to purchase more inputs and develop infrastructure like bigger tractors. When increased debt loads cause distress, the proposed solution often is more debt to increase yields. As Winsten (2024) indicates, this vicious cycle incentivizes a farm-level focus on cash-flow (volume to service debt) over profitability, which makes farming transitions to more profitable alternatives such as grass-based dairy seem unreasonable. Hence, farmers often find themselves trapped on the treadmill of production (Levins and Cochrane, 1996; Buttel, 2004).
Costs of agricultural production borne by society are real
Productive as it is, this resilient agricultural system comes with tremendous costs that are borne by society now and in the future (Sandhu et al., 2021). Dust storms and the havoc they sow are but one such cost. Traffic fatalities, respiratory irritation, and cleaning bills are the immediate and highly visible costs. Less visible are the long-term productivity declines as farmers wear away productive topsoil (Jacobs et al., 2022). Recent work estimated that over one-third of topsoil has been lost from upper Midwest farms in the past 150 years (Thaler et al., 2021), a combination of physical erosion to waterways and biogeochemical oxidation of soil organic carbon (SOC) to the atmosphere. Soil sediment carries nutrients that foul surface waters and carbon loss to the atmosphere exacerbates combustion of fossil fuels driving directional change in climate. Moreover, airborne particulate matter (PM2.5 or particles <2.5 um) driven by corn production in the US has been estimated to contribute to >4,000 premature human fatalities each year (Hill et al., 2019).
As topsoil erodes it takes with it fertility, nutrients critical to crop growth, driving farmers to add massive amounts of synthetic nutrients produced with massive amounts of fossil-fuel energy. These nutrients also are critical for biota in rivers, lakes, and oceans. These nutrients drive algal blooms that make people sick, kill wildlife, and impair use of water bodies. For instance, almost half of surface waters in Wisconsin are considered impaired or in need of complete restoration because of nutrient inputs mostly from agriculture (Carpenter et al., 2015; Glibert, 2020; Asplund et al., 2022). At the continental scale, a hypoxic zone the size of New Jersey forms in the Gulf of Mexico each year that throttles the shrimping and fishing industry (Porter et al., 2015; Rabalais and Turner, 2019). Nutrients also leach into groundwaters used for drinking. Nitrate in drinking water has been linked to cancer and premature deaths in Wisconsin with healthcare costs estimated between $23 M and $80 M per year (Mathewson et al., 2020). A recent study in southwest Wisconsin found the strongest predictor of drinking-water nitrate contamination within an acre of the monitored well was the proportion of that acre in row-crop agriculture. If ~75% of the acre was row-crops, the well had a ~ 40% chance of nitrate-N greater than the 10-ppm US EPA standard for drinking water (Stokdyk et al., 2022). Similar well-water results have been found for microbial contaminants from livestock manure in northeastern Wisconsin (Borchardt et al., 2021; Burch et al., 2021).
Meantime, the intense focus on maximizing yield of a few commodity crops pushes farmers, and typically requires them, to rely on pesticides to reduce populations of weeds, pathogens, and insects competing for the crop plants’ energy. Reliance on these chemicals is a massive selection pressure on crop pests that increases populations of human-selected variants of pests that do not respond to these chemicals (Neve et al., 2018; MacLaren et al., 2020; von Redwitz et al., 2025). These chemicals are now found in ~40% of Wisconsin’s groundwater wells (Romano et al., 2024). A recent study show a correlational relationship between county-level human cancer rates and pesticide use on farms in those counties that is similar to the signal observed when relating cigarette smoking to lung cancer (Gerken et al., 2024).
Reliance on these chemicals has been linked to biodiversity loss in the form of pollinator declines (Hemberger et al., 2021; Edwards et al., 2025). The enormous landscape modification of the North American prairie – mostly agricultural simplification – has driven a mind-boggling loss of ~700 million grassland birds, and 3 billion birds overall, since 1970 (Rosenberg et al., 2019). Recent grassland bird surveys estimate ~4% fewer individual grassland birds each year in the upper Midwest (Johnston et al., 2025).
As mentioned above, most of the harvest from the dominant grain systems goes to livestock in industrial feedlots and barns, where they are concentrated in ways that nutrients cannot be contained fueling downstream pollution (Glibert, 2020) that results in fish kills, invasion of aquatic weeds, and significant reduction in private property values (Raff and Meyer, 2021; Meyer and Raff, 2024). This bunching of animals in confined spaces drives massive reliance on anti-biotics (Anonymous, 2024; Acosta et al., 2025), which are used topically and added to feeds to improve protein yields, but drive anti-microbial resistance with devastating ramifications for human and ecosystem health (Alyokhin et al., 2025; Li et al., 2025). Meanwhile, farm industry consolidation eliminates individual farms and degrades farmer mental health (Kohlbeck et al., 2022) and perhaps rural community wellbeing, but the evidence here is mixed with some metrics improving and some declining with farm consolidation (Park and Deller, 2021).
Perennial grassland agriculture restores much of the ecosystem function of the original prairie
Our agrifood system is broken and cannot be fixed with incremental interventions on the margins. We need to transform food production with a combination of top-down and bottom-up forces that create opportunities for current and future farmers to evolve and grow into farming that is genuinely regenerative (Prokopy et al., 2020; Gratton et al., 2024). Genuinely regenerative agriculture actually builds soil, cleans water, enhances biodiversity, and supports thriving farmers and vital rural communities. It is not simply practices applied to extant farming systems to help reduce their harm. Farming that is profitable to the farmer, regenerates their ability to produce for society, and adds value to society’s overall ecosystem, community, and individual health and wellbeing portfolio (Anderson and Rivera-Ferre, 2021; Reynolds et al., 2021).
A dominant livestock production system based on perennial grassland offers a huge step toward this portfolio, it is Grassland 2.0 – a restoration of much, but not all, of the ecosystem function of the tallgrass prairie with agroecological principles (UN FAO, 2019; DeLonge et al., 2020; Franzluebbers et al., 2020). Managed well, rotational grazing of perennial grassland cleans waters (Vadas et al., 2015; Jackson, 2020; Campbell et al., 2022; Wepking et al., 2022; Young et al., 2023), reduces flooding (Jackson and Keeney, 2010; Basche and DeLonge, 2019), and enhances biodiversity (Temple et al., 1999; Lyons et al., 2000a; Lyons et al., 2000b; Weigel et al., 2000; Renfrew and Ribic, 2001) among many other environmental improvements.
The Grassland 2.0 vision is not a landscape devoid of annual row crops, but those crops must be grown on parts of the landscape where growing them is more benign ecologically and within a matrix of dominant perennial grassland and savanna agriculture. Technology allows this sort of precision agriculture where farms and watersheds can be managed as landscape mosaics, adjusting and adapting to tradeoffs, but looking for synergies in ecological outcomes (Hodbod et al. 2016, Tayyebi et al. 2016).
Well-managed grazing of animals on perennial grasslands restores many of the ecological functions of the prairie-savanna biome of North America because it restores much of this biome’s ecosystem structure: intact soil; dense, fibrous roots; dense plant canopy; and thriving soil biotic communities (Sala and Paruelo, 1997; van Eekeren et al., 2022). In addition to these field-level attributes, grassland agriculture can restore and enhance regional biodiversity by configuring and managing farms and landscapes for pollinators, birds, and plants (Temple et al., 1999; Lyons et al., 2000a; Lyons et al., 2000b; Weigel et al., 2000; Rook and Tallowin, 2003; Rook et al., 2004; Tallowin et al., 2005; Lyons et al., 2017). As well, landscapes dominated by well-managed grazed grasslands provide cultural services including view sheds, angling, birding, spirituality, education, and healing (Bengtsson et al., 2019; Sollenberger et al., 2019; Gosnell, 2021).
Meantime, the relatively low capital costs (Dartt et al., 1999; Kriegl and McNair, 2005), diverse entry points (e.g., poultry, pork, sheep, cattle), and relatively stable profitability (Paine, 2012; Wiedenfeld et al., 2022; Winsten, 2024) of grassland agriculture positions it well for expanding and diversifying farmer and rural community demographics and opportunities (e.g., agritourism, shorter supply chains, enterprise innovation, and new and beginning farmers).
Addressing greenhouse gas emissions—a commonly cited problem with managed grazing
While managed grazing of perennial grasslands can build, or at least maintain, soil carbon (Stanley et al., 2018; Becker et al., 2022; Rui et al., 2022; Dietz et al., 2024; Mehre et al., 2024), enteric methane emissions from livestock are a problem (Wattiaux et al., 2019; Soder and Brito, 2023). Jackson (2022a) addressed the issue for grassland beef production in previous work, eliciting an important critique about incorporating the entire cow-calf production system (Hayek, 2022), which was addressed in reply (Jackson, 2022b). Here, we compare how one hectare of land in southern Wisconsin supporting either grass-fed (~1.6 AU/ha) or confined (~2.4 AU/ha) dairy production generally affect greenhouse gas emissions. Estimates of appropriate stocking rates for each system come from past work that both include home-farm rearing of replacement heifers (Jackson, 2024). This is not a comprehensive life cycle analysis, but we looked to the literature for best estimates for southern Wisconsin. Also, we compare the two systems, not just farm-gate components of the systems. For instance, we include here the carbon cost of producing inorganic N fertilizer for a corn system that essentially requires its use.
While both systems are net carbon sources to the atmosphere, the grass-fed system emits > 3x less CO2eq than the confined dairy system on a per hectare basis (Figure 2). Using the US EPA greenhouse gas emissions calculator (US Environmental Protection Agency, 2021), two average sized (121 ha) southern Wisconsin farms in these alternative dairy production systems would contribute the equivalent of ~278 cars driven 12,000 miles per year for the grass-fed dairy and ~920 for the confinement dairy.
Figure 2. Estimated mean greenhouse gas emissions, mean production and profit (farm outcomes), and qualitative societal outcomes from one hectare of land in southern Wisconsin supporting either grass-fed or confinement dairy (West and Marland, 2002; Grant et al., 2015; Oates et al., 2015; Fargione et al., 2018; Wecking et al., 2020; Dietz et al., 2024; Jackson, 2024; Winsten, 2024; Dida et al., 2025).
While the net greenhouse gas emissions from grazed dairy agroecosystems are troubling, they dramatically reduce the carbon footprint of a dairy enterprise in absolute terms. Recent work illustrates how pastures can be integrated into a dairy farm enterprise carbon-accounting framework that considers non-crop habitat (e.g., forests and wetlands) to help achieve net zero emissions (Wiesner et al., 2022). Meanwhile, similar approaches to agroecological landscape composition have been developed for the entire state of Wisconsin showing the critical importance of significant perennial grassland agriculture as part of the landscape mosaic (Young et al. 2025).
In addition to these environmental benefits, recent work has demonstrated the superior profitability of grass-based dairy production in Wisconsin (Winsten, 2024) (see ‘Farm outcomes’ in Figure 2), which has been shown in past work too (Dartt et al., 1999; Rojas-Downing et al., 2017; Wiedenfeld et al., 2022). But, grass-fed approaches generally slow livestock weight gain and reduce milk yields on a per-cow basis (Jackson, 2022a; Jackson, 2024), even while improving profitability, which undermines them when the reward system for farming, and the dominant narrative about what it means to be a ‘good farmer’, is maximizing production, not profit (Zilverberg et al., 2014).
Sustainability transitions to Grassland 2.0
Agri-food system transformation is not possible within the productivist paradigm that incentivizes farmers to produce as much as they possibly can from the land and livestock (Jackson et al., 2018). We must reward farmers for providing diverse portfolios of outcomes that are profitable to the farm, while providing for us all today, and building capacity for future generations to do the same (Streit Krug and Tesdell, 2020; Reynolds et al., 2021). This cannot happen without massive collective action by consumers demanding products from genuinely regenerative agriculture (Provenza et al., 2021) and it cannot happen without courageous policies and programs run by local, state, and federal governments that reward genuinely regenerative farming (Rissman et al., 2023) rather than attempting to patch leaky and failing agroecosystems with so-called ‘regenerative practices’ (Prokopy et al., 2020; Day and Cramer, 2021; Secchi, 2024).
We need social innovations that address the governance of the food system to overcome the social-technical-political impediments to transformative change (Gratton et al., 2024). We believe these obstacles can be relieved by a novel social innovation process of place-making we call Collaborative Landscape Design (CLD) (Strauser et al., 2025), which brings communities together in a deliberative, intentional, and iterative framework to interrogate the question: What do we, as individuals and as a community, want and need from our agricultural system? Perspectives are solicited and catalogued, then community partners come together to explore shared goals, co-create and evaluate visions for the socioecological landscape using social science theory, field level data, and models that are implemented and expanded through a growing corps of professional technical service providers and researchers to help communities chart and navigate pathways toward Grassland 2.0.
Place-making is constantly occurring, intentional or otherwise, in many forms and at different levels of social and geographical organization: individuals cultivate identities, communities and organizations shape narratives, policies and markets signal values and incentives in larger societal contexts (Strauser et al., 2022). For decades most research, extension, and education has focused on convincing and incentivizing individuals to adopt conservation agriculture, which has not produced the transformative change necessary to meet today’s ecological, economic, and social challenges (Reimer and Prokopy, 2014; Prokopy et al., 2020). At broader scales–what we call the meta-context (others might call it The System) – change is impeded by socio-technological lock-in (Geels, 2002, 2019) of an agricultural system that maximizes extraction and profit for corporations cultivated by narratives about what it means to be a ‘good farmer’, namely, squeezing as much as possible from land and livestock (Roesch-McNally et al., 2017; Houser et al., 2020) with devastating consequences for ecosystems, communities, and individual health and wellbeing.
We hypothesize that situating and supporting the relational place-making process of CLD at regional-community levels has the potential to spur collective action that attracts individuals to action in ways that actors in the meta-context cannot ignore (Green et al., 2024), eventually ‘unlocking’ of the potential of regionally appropriate, climate-smart, regenerative agriculture. Our Grassland 2.0 project is documenting evidence for this traction in many ways, but the most tangible indicator is the emergence of community-driven agroecological transformation plans focused on long-term visions for their agroecological futures, with emerging pathways toward realizing these visions.
It is evident that to maximize the ecological and social benefits of grassland agriculture, it is necessary to engage in processes that “scale up” its adoption to become the fundamental basis of our milk and meat production systems (Mier y Terán Giménez Cacho et al. 2018; Ewert et al. 2023). Widespread adoption of Grassland 2.0 is important for achieving the outcomes needed to meet national goals for greenhouse gas emission reductions from agriculture. But merely creating technical or agronomic innovations is not sufficient to ensure their adoption or widespread use (Loorbach et al., 2017). Novel social innovations allow us to experiment, discover, engage, and educate in ways that grow grassland agriculture broadly (Gratton et al., 2024).
In many cases, producing healthy, nutritious foods will be more costly to farmers, processors, and retailers, who will pass those costs on to consumers. Therefore, policies must be shaped and implemented and fine-tuned over time that transfer dollars now ear-marked for treating symptoms of the agrifood system (e.g., human health and environmental clean-up) toward subsidizing costs of healthier products for those with less purchasing power to drive and support regenerative grassland agriculture. None of this can happen until we re-center our societal narrative about what it means to be successful in this world. We must center caring for each other by caring for the farmers who provide for us, the communities that support us, and the environment that sustains our health and wellbeing (Streit Krug, 2020). Grassland 2.0 means managing this grassland biome we are part of to build soil, retain nutrients and water, enhance biodiversity, and help stabilize the climate while providing for people so that all can thrive now and in the future.
Data availability statement
The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/supplementary material, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author.
Author contributions
RJ: Conceptualization, Funding acquisition. Writing – original draft. CG: Conceptualization, Funding acquisition, Writing – review & editing.
Funding
The author(s) declared that financial support was received for this work and/or its publication. This work supported by the Sustainable Agriculture Systems Coordinated Agricultural Program grant no. 2019-68012-29852 from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture and generous gifts from Kikkoman Foods, Inc. and an anonymous donor.
Acknowledgments
This manuscript was improved by comments from two reviewers.
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that this study received funding from Kikkoman Foods, Inc. The funder was not involved in the study design, collection, analysis, interpretation of data, the writing of this article, or the decision to submit it for publication.
Generative AI statement
The author(s) declared that Generative AI was not used in the creation of this manuscript.
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Footnotes
1. ^Resilience in the systems sense that it rebounds to a relatively stable equilibrium after perturbations, not the more recently popular sense of resilience meaning a good or fair system, i.e., poorly performing systems can be resilient.
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Keywords: agroecology, ecosystem services, transdisciplinarity, socioecological change, sustainability transitions
Citation: Jackson RD and Gratton C (2026) Grassland 2.0—agroecosystems that care for us today while building capacity for future generations to do the same. Front. Sustain. Food Syst. 9:1696429. doi: 10.3389/fsufs.2025.1696429
Edited by:
Vijay Singh Meena, ICAR - Mahatma Gandhi Integrated Farming Research Institute, IndiaReviewed by:
Kassa Tarekegn Erekalo, University of Copenhagen, DenmarkJulie Snorek, American Association for the Advancement of Science, United States
Copyright © 2026 Jackson and Gratton. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
*Correspondence: Randall D. Jackson, cmRqYWNrc29uQHdpc2MuZWR1