Dinesh Panday*, Saurav Das, Said Hamido
*Email: dinesh.panday@rodaleinstitute.org
Abstract
Weather has always shaped farming, but today’s droughts, floods, and unpredictable seasons are becoming more extreme, and a farm’s ability to withstand these conditions depends largely on the health of its soil. This position paper draws on more than 40 years of evidence from Rodale Institute’s Farming Systems Trial, which shows that organic soils can hold more water, store more carbon, and produce stronger yields during droughts and floods than conventionally farmed soils. Two additional Rodale Institute research efforts: regenerative farming trials across the Southeast and a program testing which soil amendments are most effectively reinforce these findings. Together, these studies point to the same conclusion: healthy soil is one of a farmer’s strongest defenses against a changing climate, especially when weather conditions become most challenging.
Introduction
Agriculture has always been shaped by the weather. What is changing is the magnitude, frequency, and economic consequences of weather-related risks. Rising temperatures, prolonged droughts, extreme rainfall, and increasingly erratic growing seasons are exposing vulnerabilities in agricultural systems worldwide. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) reported that 2015 – 2026 were the warmest years on record, with global mean temperature approximately 1.43oC above the 1850 -1900 average (WMO, 2026).
Water is the center of this challenge. The OECD’s 2025 Global Drought Outlook estimates that 40% of the world’s land area is experiencing increasingly frequent and severe droughts and that 37% of global land has experienced significant soil-moisture loss since 1980 (OECD, 2025). During severe years, crop yields can decline by as much as 22%. But climate risk does not reach a farm as a global statistic. It reaches the farm through the soil.
Farmers cannot control when rain falls, how long drought persists, or when extreme heat arrives. They can influence what happens when those stresses reach the field: whether rainfall infiltrates or runs off, whether water remains available to roots, whether soil structure withstands intense precipitation, whether nutrients continue to cycle, and how rapidly the system recovers after stress. This makes soil function as one of agriculture’s most important defenses against climate instability.
Regenerative organic agriculture addresses this challenge by rebuilding the biological, physical, and chemical processes that allow soil to function as a resilient system. Diverse rotations, cover crops, continuous living roots, organic amendments, reduced disturbance, biological nutrient cycling, and integrated livestock do more than conserve soil. Over time, they can change how soil captures water, stores carbon (C), cycles nutrients, supports biological activity, and responds to environmental stress. The central question, therefore, is not whether these practices deserve the label regenerative. It is whether they measurably reduce agricultural vulnerability when the weather becomes extreme.
Long-Term Evidence: What Happens When Weather Becomes Stressful?
The Farming Systems Trial (FST) at Rodale Institute offers a rare long-term platform for evaluating climate resilience in cropping systems. Since 1981, it has compared conventional and organic grain systems under the same local climate, allowing system performance to be assessed across a wide range of weather conditions, including, over more than four decades, several episodes of substantial drought. This duration matters because resilience-related differences are often invisible in an average year and only become legible when conditions turn adverse.
The clearest evidence comes from Lotter, Seidel, and Liebhardt’s (2002) analysis of the trial’s first two decades. Across five moderate-drought seasons between 1988 and 1998, the organic manure- and legume-based systems significantly out-yielded the conventional system in four of the five years. The fifth year showed no significant difference. The most severe test came in 1999, when a spring-to-summer drought cut the region’s rainfall to a fraction of normal before Hurricane Floyd reversed it into the wettest September on record. Under that whiplash, conventional maize collapsed to a fifth of its long-term average yield; the organic manure system still produced 37% more grain than conventional, and the two organic systems’ soybean yields ran 53–96% ahead of it. A more recent synthesis of the trial’s data, focused on the drought year 2016, reports organic maize yields averaging 31% higher than conventional.
What makes the 1999 season particularly informative is not just that the organic systems yielded more; it is how the systems failed or succeeded. The conventional system underperformed both the drought and the subsequent flood, while the organic manure system managed both stresses well. The organic legume system’s maize crop, notably, did fail that year; but the cause was weed competition, not a lack of water-holding capacity. Resilience, in other words, does not mean one system always wins. It means the underlying mechanism is real enough to show up clearly even in the one case where a system underperformed.
That mechanism is traceable to soil. Drinkwater, Wagoner, and Sarrantonio (1998), working with the trial’s first 15 years of data, showed that soil C rose significantly in both organic systems; by roughly a third in the manure-based system and 15% in the legume-based system, while the conventional system showed no significant change. Lotter et al. (2002) later linked this directly to drought performance: soils under organic management captured roughly 16–25% more water over a five-year period, held 7–13% higher water content in the crop root zone, and captured more than twice as much water as the conventional system during the September 1999 deluge.
A recent 40-year synthesis of the trial demonstrates that these effects are not merely remnants of the trial in early decades but remain evident after four decades of continuous management (Das et al., 2026 Under Review; Das, Hamido, & Panday, 2026). Measurements collected between 2019 and 2021 showed that water infiltration rates in the organic systems were two to three times greater than those in conventionally tilled plots, accompanied by significantly higher soil microbial biomass and soil organic matter. Thus, the mechanisms first documented in 1998 remain clearly detectable in the same soils more than a quarter-century later, demonstrating the persistence and long-term resilience of soil improvements associated with organic management.
FST is the main trial in a larger body of Rodale Institute evidence. On its own, it answers the resilience question for one system, in one place, under one region’s weather. The next question is whether the same mechanisms, i.e., soil C accumulation, water capture, and biological cycling hold up in different soils, climates, crops, and management systems. Two more Rodale Institute trials take up that question directly.
Extending the Pattern Across other Trials
1. Climate-Smart Research in the Southeast
Where FST tests one rotation, in one place, across four decades, this next body of research asks whether the same soil mechanisms hold up somewhere else entirely: different soils, hotter and more humid summers, and systems that combine crops with livestock rather than grain alone. Climate-smart agriculture is an integrated production system that enhances agricultural productivity, strengthens resilience to climate change, and mitigates environmental impacts by restoring the biological, chemical, and physical processes that sustain healthy soils. To comprehensively assess the impacts of regenerative agricultural systems, the Rodale Institute conducted multi-year field investigations (2022–2025) at Ancient Nutrition and Beyond Organics farms located in Tennessee and Missouri. These studies quantified the individual and integrated effects of cover cropping, adaptive rotational grazing, perennial vegetation, and livestock diversification on soil C sequestration, nutrient cycling, microbial community dynamics, greenhouse gas (GHG) fluxes, and ecosystem resilience (Hamido et al., 2025; Hamido et al., 2026).
The results demonstrated that integrating multiple regenerative practices generated greater ecological and agronomic benefits than implementing individual practices. Soil organic C increased by approximately 28% in perennial orchard systems, 13% under rotational grazing integrated with cover crops, 7% under cover crops alone, and only 4% under grazing without cover crops, achieving annual C sequestration rates of 4.88 Mg C ha⁻¹ yr⁻¹. Increased soil C stimulated microbial biomass, accelerated nutrient cycling, enhanced aggregate stability, and improved long-term soil fertility while reducing dependence on synthetic fertilizer inputs.
Regenerative management also improved soil physical properties by increasing aggregation, infiltration, water-holding capacity, and erosion resistance, thereby enhancing resilience to drought and extreme precipitation; the same water-related mechanisms measured directly in FST’s soil (Figure 4).
Collectively, these findings demonstrate that regenerative climate-smart agriculture is a scientifically validated, systems-based strategy that simultaneously improves soil health, agricultural productivity, climate resilience, and environmental quality. By integrating adaptive grazing, diversified cover crops, perennial vegetation, and livestock diversity, regenerative systems strengthen ecosystem services, increase long-term farm profitability, and provide a scalable pathway toward climate-resilient and sustainable agricultural development.
2. Soil Nutrient Management Program
Likewise, FST and the Southeast trials, the Soil Nutrient Management Program, based at Rodale Institute’s Main Campus, asks the question at the input level: which specific amendments build these same soil functions fastest, and at what rate? Extends this research by evaluating locally available nutrient sources and waste-derived amendments including poultry litter, mushroom compost, biochar, and biostimulants, to improve nutrient-use efficiency, soil structure, and soil organic matter under changing climate conditions. The program also works to refine the best management practices and weed management strategies for organic no-till systems, helping translate long-term soil-health research into practical approaches that farmers can implement.
A recent study from this program illustrates why that rate of question matters. Panday et al. (2026) found that biochar’s benefits to sweet pepper productivity and soil microbial activity depend heavily on soil type and application rate: sandy loam soil nearly doubled yield compared with loam soil, and a moderate biochar rate (11.2 Mg ha-1) delivered the optimum balance of yield and microbial health, while the highest rate tested reduced microbial biomass and beneficial fungal colonization even as soil C increased. The finding is a caution against a one-size-fits-all approach to soil amendments: what builds soil function on one farm’s soil can overload it on another’s.
Together, these three trials (FST, the Southeast climate-smart research, and the Soil Nutrient Management Program) point to the same underlying soil mechanisms operating across systems, regions, and scales. Beyond Rodale Institute’s research campuses, partnerships such as the collaboration with Ancient Nutrition further extend this research-to-farm continuum. Through farmer transition support and on-farm measurement of carbon sequestration, water infiltration, and microbial biodiversity, these efforts evaluate regenerative and organic practices within farms supplying a commercial supply chain (Fern, 2022). In doing so, they provide an important test of whether climate and soil-health benefits demonstrated in controlled research plots can be replicated and sustained across thousands of acres under real-world production conditions.
For Farmers: What This Means
Across grain, vegetables, hemp, and regional research, the evidence is consistent: biologically alive soils built through cover crops, compost, biostimulants, and reduced disturbance sequester more carbon, manage water more effectively, and sustain productivity under climatic extremes. Decades of field-scale research show that these benefits extend beyond experimental plots and are increasingly being evaluated across crops, regions, and working farms.
For farmers, the message is clear: investing in soil health is an investment in climate resilience. That value is greatest exactly when conditions are hardest: during droughts, floods, and increasingly unpredictable growing seasons.
References
Das, S., Hamido, S., & Panday, D. (2026). Soil Health in Practice: Principles, Proof, and the Path Forward. Rodale Institute. rodaleinstitute.org/science/articles/soil-health-in-practice-principles-proof-and-the-path-forward/
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Fern, M. (2022). New Partnership with Ancient Nutrition Focuses on Regenerating Human Health. https://rodaleinstitute.org/blog/new-partnership-with-ancient-nutrition-focuses-on-regenerating-human-health/
Hamido, S. A., Ghalehgolabbehbahani, A., & Smith, A. (2025). Soil carbon dynamics, sequestration potential, and physical characteristics under grazing management in regenerative organic agroecosystems. Agronomy, 15(10), 2426.
Hamido, S. A., Ghalehgolabbehbahani, A., & Smith, A. (2026). The role of grazing management in shaping soil organic matter and carbon pools in regenerative organic agriculture. Agronomy Journal, 118, e70338.
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Panday, D., Das, S., Acharya, B. S., Heller, W. P., McKeever, L., & Ghalehgolabbehbahani, A. (2026). Effects of soil type and biochar rate on sweet pepper productivity and microbial dynamics in regenerative organic soils. Discover Soil, 3(1), 136.
Rodale Institute. (2022). Farming Systems Trial. https://rodaleinstitute.org/science/farming-systems-trial/
World Meteorological Organization (WMO). (2026). State of the Global Climate 2025. World Meteorological Organization. The report was released March 23, 2026.