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Through hands-on training from the world’s leading experts, Soil Health Academy participants learn how to increase profitability, build resiliency into the land, decrease input costs and improve nutrient density of food and agricultural products.

10/29/2026

Seventeen hundred mother cows. One herd.

Robert and Stacy Nantz ranched conventionally for over 15 years on leased country across several Texas counties. In 2023 they went regenerative, and they did not ease into it. They merged a 600-head spring-calving herd with a 600-head fall-calving herd, threw in every bull, and called it the Mega-Herd. It started at 1,200 cows and has grown to 1,700, all moving together at the kind of stock density that mimics how herds grazed before fences.

Last year they hosted a Soil Health Academy school on their own place. Stacy’s reaction: they had always wanted to attend one, and this was even better, because they got to attend their own.

What changed, in their words: plant health, animal health, and profit margin health. Robert says that as a business model it is one of the best returns on investment he has found.

If you are on the fence, listen to the people who were standing there three years ago.

Nantz Land and Cattle

10/28/2026

Regenerative agriculture isn't just for farmers.

It's for consumers, healthcare practitioners, regulators, and anyone who wants to make more informed choices.

And with a strong community to turn to for guidance, the learning doesn't stop when the course ends.

The goal is bigger than education.

It's empowering more people to be part of the change.

10/27/2026

Regenerative products move about $2 billion a year at US retail. No federal standard defines the word.

The Congressional Research Service laid this out last year: regenerative hasn't been written into any federal or state statute or regulation. General truth-in-advertising rules still apply, so you can't lie outright. But there's no USDA organic equivalent – no single standard a product has to meet before the word goes on the package.

Private certifications have stepped into the gap, and a Friends of the Earth review of ten of them in May found they ask for very different things. Some set a bar you have to clear and keep clearing. Others certify a direction of travel. A few of the toughest programs out there never print the word at all.

None of that is an argument against the label. It's an argument about where meaning actually lives. A word gets its definition from what people do in the field, and it loses it the same way.

10/21/2026

Before you price fall nitrogen, price the nitrogen you already own.

Every percent of soil organic matter holds 20 to 40 pounds of N per acre, and it holds about an inch more water while it's at it. NDSU's Dave Franzen has documented that continuous no-till in North Dakota runs on 50 fewer pounds of nitrogen per acre. That's not a rounding error on a fertilizer bill.

The catch is how slowly that account fills. NDSU's long-term trial at Carrington started in 1987 at 3.2% organic matter. It took 35 years of annual cropping, high-residue crops, reduced tillage and composted manure working together to add 1.1 points.

Thirty-five years to build. One aggressive tillage season to spend.

Nobody is saying skip the nitrogen. Know what the ground is supplying before you set the rate, and think hard before you do anything that draws down the balance.

10/16/2026

“Grazing can be almost a solution for everything if you do it properly.”

That’s the thing they came away with. Not a practice to add, a lever to pull. Different grazing styles at different times of year, hitting outcomes they'd otherwise be chasing with equipment or prescribed burns.

Same for cattle type. There’s no universal right answer, there’s what fits your context, and that took sitting with people who’ve actually done it.

10/14/2026

The cattle market just handed ranchers a test.

USDA's July inventory showed the first increase in total cattle numbers since 2018. Beef replacement heifers were up 3% to 3.8 million head. Retention is starting.

It's starting into a falling market. Fed steers averaged $228 in August and slipped to $219 in the first week of September, about $44 off the mid-May record. USDA still has 2026 averaging a record $237 per hundredweight, but the fourth quarter is projected at $225.

Underneath all of it, beef cows are at 28.45 million head, the smallest July inventory on record, and the 2026 calf crop is the smallest ever at 32.5 million, down for a ninth straight year. Supply is tight and will stay tight.

So the question isn't whether to keep heifers. It's what they'll cost you to carry. Rebuilding a herd is a forage decision before it's a cattle decision, and forage is a management outcome, not a weather report.

10/11/2026

Fences that held all summer start failing in November, and it's usually not the cattle.

It's the ground. Virginia Tech points out that a grounding system you installed and approved in wet weather can quietly stop working once the soil dries out or freezes – the rods are still there, the circuit isn't.

Most energizers need three rods driven six feet deep, and VT says keep adding until the rod farthest from the energizer reads 500 volts or less.

Target voltage is 3,000 to 5,000 for cattle, 7,000 for sheep.

Work the problem in VT's order. Walk for the obvious stuff first – downed limbs, wire off an insulator. Then bench-test the energizer: unplug it, pull both terminals, power it back up and probe it. A healthy one pulses 7,000 to 9,000 volts. Then check your grounding and connections. Only then start walking the line.

And carry a fault finder, not a light-up tester. Normal amperage is 1 or 2 milliamps. When you see voltage drop and amps jump to 10, 20, 30, you're standing near the fault.

10/08/2026

Marcos Baez came from a corporate background with no agricultural experience, never expecting to find his calling in regenerative agriculture.

After discovering the movement, he became completely immersed and eventually diving deeper into grazing management and cattle production.

His journey has taken him from learning under a mentor on a 75,000-acre cattle operation to growing his own herd and working toward managing land of his own.

For Marcos, regenerative agriculture is more than a way of farming. It’s a shift from extracting from the land to creating more of what we all depend on: health, fertility, diversity, and abundance.

And that’s what has turned it into his life’s purpose.

10/06/2026

Soil health has to pencil or it doesn't happen. So here's what happened when somebody actually opened the books.

The Soil Health Institute sat down with 100 farmers across nine states and 194,003 acres and ran a partial budget on every operation. Net income rose an average of $51.60 an acre on corn and $44.89 on soybeans. It rose for 85 percent of corn growers and 88 percent of soybean growers. A 2023 study of 29 farms in 20 states put the average gain at $65 an acre.

Two things worth saying out loud. Those farmers had years behind them, so you're looking at a mature system, not a first-year number. And the costs were real – about $48 an acre on corn against $99.60 in benefits.

None of the practices in those budgets are a mystery to you. The difference was running them together and staying with it. Swipe for the numbers.

10/05/2026

Free tool. Your county. Your cash crop. Your goals.

The Midwest Cover Crops Council decision tool returns cover crop species matched to your real planting window – seeding rates and termination options on every one. 10 states plus Ontario.

It'll narrow 40 options down to a handful. What it won't do is tell you whether you can get seed in the ground inside the window it just gave you. It doesn't know your combine is three weeks out. It doesn't know you're grazing this field in November, or that last year's rye got ahead of you.

That's the part that decides whether the stand makes it. The tool narrows the list. You still have to pick like a farmer and not a spreadsheet.

midwestcovercrops.org

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https://soilhealthacademy.org/

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