Few topics generate as much heat in regenerative agriculture circles as glyphosate. On one side, prominent voices argue that glyphosate-based no-till is essential for building soil carbon and reducing erosion. On the other, organic advocates point to soil biology impacts, health concerns, and the fundamental contradiction of calling chemical-dependent farming "regenerative."
But this debate, as heated as it is, may be asking the wrong question entirely.
What if the real issue isn't whether glyphosate is acceptable in regenerative agriculture, but rather that the need for glyphosate reveals a failure to redesign agricultural systems at a fundamental level? What if farmers trapped in the "glyphosate or tillage" dilemma are actually trapped in a way of thinking about agriculture that prevents them from seeing the solutions that exist?
This essay argues that the glyphosate controversy is a symptom of what we call Level 1 regenerative agriculture—an approach focused on practice adoption within existing farming paradigms rather than genuine system transformation. To move beyond this impasse, we need farmers trained in higher levels of regenerative thinking: systems design, whole-farm integration, and place-based approaches that make the glyphosate question largely irrelevant.
We don't claim to have all the answers. But we can lay out the issues clearly, explore what the research tells us, and make the case for the conditions we would need to create real change in how British farming approaches this challenge.
Part One: Understanding the Glyphosate Conundrum
The No-Till Promise
The argument for no-till farming is genuinely compelling. Tillage destroys soil structure, breaks up the aggregates that protect organic matter, severs fungal networks, kills earthworms, and accelerates erosion. Every pass with a plough or cultivator releases carbon dioxide as soil organic matter oxidises. The damage is visible: compaction layers, slaking soils, fields that flood in winter and bake hard in summer.
No-till promised to end all this. Stop disturbing the soil and biology recovers. Earthworm populations rebuild. Fungal networks reconnect. Carbon accumulates instead of escaping. Erosion halts. The logic was elegant and the appeal obvious—farmers could improve their soils while reducing fuel costs and labour.
But no-till in continuous cropping systems creates a problem: without tillage, how do you terminate cover crops and control weeds? (I'm setting aside pre-harvest desiccation here - that's another debate.) Glyphosate provided the answer—a "soft" chemical intervention that kills plants without disturbing soil. For many farmers, glyphosate-based no-till seemed like the best of both worlds.
The Carbon Question: Promise vs Reality
The carbon sequestration claims for no-till have become central to its appeal—and to the argument that glyphosate use is justified by climate benefits. But a growing body of research challenges whether no-till actually increases total soil carbon stocks.
A landmark 2014 paper in Nature Climate Change found that apparent carbon gains under no-till often result from altered depth distribution—more carbon near the surface, less below—rather than genuine sequestration. A 47-year French study at Boigneville concluded: "After 47 years, no significant difference in total SOC stocks was detected between conventional tillage and no-till treatments."
Crucially, what gains exist are fragile. Research at Kellogg Biological Station found that a single cultivation event on previously untilled soil "could reduce aggregation to amounts found on fields that had been tilled for more than 50 years." One tillage pass—and years of slow accumulation vanish.
Why Results Vary So Dramatically
Here is the critical insight that the glyphosate debate often obscures: farmers getting genuinely impressive results from reduced-tillage systems aren't just eliminating tillage. They're redesigning their entire farming systems.
The disappointing research results typically come from farms that simply swapped tillage for glyphosate within otherwise unchanged monoculture systems. Same crops, same rotations, same reliance on synthetic fertilisers, same commodity markets. Just less metal in the ground and more chemistry on top.
The success stories look completely different. These farmers have integrated diverse cover crop mixes, removed or drastically reduced synthetic fertilisers, brought livestock back onto arable land, lengthened rotations, and accepted short-term yield variations for long-term system health. When all these pieces come together—adapted to a specific context, refined over years of observation—the results can be remarkable. But this is whole-system redesign, not practice adoption.
The UK-Specific Problem
Approaches that work elsewhere often don't translate to British conditions. Gabe Brown in North Dakota terminates cover crops using harsh winter cold—temperatures the UK rarely experiences. Colin Seis in Australia drills cereals into perennial pastures dominated by warm-season grasses that go dormant in winter—but British grasslands are winter-active and would compete directly with any cereal crop. Brown himself has acknowledged he would likely need glyphosate if farming in the UK.
We cannot import solutions designed for continental climates. British farmers working toward herbicide elimination will need approaches suited to our specific conditions—and those approaches are still being developed by pioneers working on British soil.
The Organic Alternative: Proof of Concept with Limitations
Meanwhile, organic farmers have been producing food without synthetic herbicides for over 70 years. This matters: it demonstrates conclusively that herbicide-free commercial farming is possible in the UK climate.
But organic farming typically relies on tillage for weed control—and this creates its own limitations. Repeated cultivation does release carbon, does damage soil structure, does harm earthworms and soil biology.
Organic agriculture resolves the herbicide question but not the tillage question. Glyphosate-dependent no-till resolves the tillage question but not the herbicide question. Neither approach, alone, offers a complete answer. The question we should be asking is not "which trade-off is more acceptable?" but "why are we trapped in a system where these are the only choices?"
The Autumn Sowing Trap
Understanding why UK farmers are so dependent on autumn-sown crops is essential to grasping the glyphosate problem.
Winter wheat dominates British arable farming for good reasons. It yields significantly better than spring wheat—so much so that 98% of UK wheat is winter varieties. Spring sowing requires higher seed rates (up to 500 seeds per square metre in high weed-pressure situations versus 300-350 in autumn), produces lower yields, faces greater pest pressure, and—critically—still requires glyphosate for blackgrass control.
This creates what systems thinkers call a "lock-in"—a self-reinforcing pattern where the dominant approach crowds out alternatives. The highest-yielding cereal system (winter wheat) is incompatible with the livestock integration that could reduce herbicide dependency.
Machinery Barriers and Practical Challenges
Even farmers committed to change face formidable practical barriers. Direct drilling into heavy clay soils can be challenging in early transition years, though practitioners demonstrate that as soil biology improves and conditions are matched to timing, the need for cultivation diminishes significantly. Tim Parton, a pioneering regenerative farmer working on clay loams in Staffordshire and advising on heavy clays, is clear that direct drilling without routine cultivation is achievable: "It all comes down to drilling in the right conditions and of course soil will improve year on year."
Then there's cost. As one experienced practitioner noted: "I've lost count of times I've heard someone say they've spent £150,000 on a drill only to claim they're saving money." The capital barrier alone locks out most farmers from the equipment needed to experiment with alternatives.
Part Two: The Case Against Glyphosate
Some argue that glyphosate-based no-till delivers soil health benefits that outweigh herbicide concerns. The emerging science tells a different story.
The Shikimate Pathway: Why "Plant-Specific" Is Misleading
Glyphosate targets the shikimate pathway—a metabolic process for synthesising aromatic amino acids. This pathway exists in plants but not animals, which is why glyphosate was long considered safe for non-target organisms.
But the shikimate pathway isn't only found in plants. It's present in bacteria, fungi, and other microorganisms—the very soil biology that regenerative agriculture claims to support. More than half the bacterial species in the human gut microbiome possess this pathway. You cannot claim to be regenerating soil biology while applying a chemical that disrupts the metabolic pathways of soil microorganisms.
Documented Harms Across Ecosystems
Soil biology: Research demonstrates negative effects on soil fungal communities, including reduced species richness. Earthworm reproduction was reduced by 56% within three months of application; surface casting activity almost ceased within three weeks. Glyphosate application increased soil nitrate concentrations by 1,592% and phosphate by 127%—disrupted nutrient cycling risking waterway contamination.
Pollinators: A landmark 2018 PNAS study showed glyphosate perturbs honeybee gut microbiota at environmental concentrations, decreasing beneficial bacteria and increasing mortality from subsequent pathogen exposure.
Human health: In 2015, IARC classified glyphosate as "probably carcinogenic to humans" based on evidence for non-Hodgkin lymphoma, cancer in animals, and genotoxicity. Multiple studies demonstrate endocrine disruption.
Persistence and Context
Glyphosate is often described as rapidly degrading, but half-life varies from days to over 500 days depending on conditions. Its breakdown product AMPA is often more persistent still and was detected in 45% of European topsoil samples.
On-farm trials demonstrate dramatic variation in breakdown rates. Parton's on-farm monitoring found complete glyphosate breakdown within three weeks in his biologically active soils—compared to the 500+ day half-lives documented in degraded conditions. "Because my soil is biologically active the glyphosate broke down completely in three weeks," he notes. "Other dead soils would take months if not years."
This variation highlights a crucial point: healthy soils process disturbance differently than damaged ones. But this isn't an argument for continued glyphosate use—it's an argument for building the soil health that ultimately makes glyphosate unnecessary.
Natural Disturbance vs Novel Chemistry
Critics of organic approaches point out that tillage also disrupts soil biology. They're not wrong. But soil disturbance is something nature knows; novel synthetic chemicals that disrupt biological function at the molecular level are not.
Throughout evolutionary history, soil ecosystems have experienced floods, fires, drought, animal hooves, falling trees. Soil organisms evolved resilience to these disturbances. What they have never encountered is a synthetic molecule blocking a fundamental metabolic pathway across bacteria, fungi, and plants. The shikimate pathway has existed for billions of years. Glyphosate has existed for fifty. There is no evolutionary preparation for this intervention.
Systems depending on glyphosate have not completed the transition to regenerative agriculture. They remain in transition—and completing it requires moving beyond herbicide dependency.
Part Three: The Road Not Taken
What Glyphosate Has Let Us Avoid
Here is an uncomfortable truth: glyphosate hasn't just allowed farmers to control weeds without tillage. It has allowed our entire agricultural system to avoid confronting fundamental questions about how and what we grow.
The availability of cheap, effective herbicides has permitted the perpetuation of the annual monoculture system—a system that requires killing everything and starting again each year. Without herbicides, this system would have become unmanageable decades ago. Weed pressure would have forced us to find different solutions: longer rotations, livestock integration, perennial systems, diversified cropping.
Glyphosate has been a technological fix that allowed us to avoid systemic change. And in doing so, it may have set back by decades the development of genuinely sustainable alternatives.
The Perennial Revolution We Never Had
Consider what might have happened if glyphosate had been banned in the 1970s. Almost certainly, far more resources would have flowed into perennial grain development—plants that don't need to be replanted each year, that maintain living root systems year-round, that build soil rather than depleting it.
The Land Institute's flagship crop, Kernza, is now commercially available—but barely. It was grown on just over 1,000 acres globally in 2022, and its yields remain one-third to one-tenth of annual wheat. Why such slow progress? Because perennial crops would be "disruptive to the current business model." Their key benefits—requiring fewer inputs, less seed purchase, less fertiliser, fewer herbicides—are precisely what makes them unattractive to the agribusiness industry that shapes research priorities.
The environmental benefits of perennial grains are substantial: a nine-year Danish study found perennial systems increased topsoil carbon by 1.4 tonnes per hectare while annual systems decreased it by 3.4 tonnes. Kernza's roots extend over three metres into the soil. Perennial systems reduce nitrate leaching by over 80% compared to annual wheat.
Had glyphosate been unavailable, the economic pressure to develop perennial alternatives would have been overwhelming. Instead, the perennial revolution was postponed by a generation.
UK Alternatives Emerging Now
While perennial grains remain decades from commercial viability in the UK, practical alternatives are already taking root.
At NIAB near Cambridge, Dr Phil Howell has been trialling Kernza, seeing potential not for yield but for ecosystem services: "It has a fantastic deep vigorous root system, which has the potential to stabilise soil structure and capture carbon. It's going to be grown for the other things it can do, rather than for yield."
More immediately promising is evolutionary plant breeding. The ORC Wakelyns Population crossed 20 different parent varieties and let them evolve together through natural field selection. The result is genetic diversity that translates into practical benefits: more efficient use of soil nutrients, lower disease levels, greater yield stability—and reduced dependence on inputs.
Some farmers are going further, developing their own blends adapted to their specific conditions through years of patient selection. Parton has taken this further, developing a four-way wheat blend through years of patient selection that now delivers strong yield and natural disease resistance—demonstrating how place-based adaptation builds on these foundations.
The infrastructure to support these alternatives is emerging. UK Grain Lab has catalysed regional grain alliances across the country—Yorkshire, South West, East Anglia, Wales—bringing together farmers, millers, bakers, and eaters to build what they call "a prosperous non-commodity grain economy." They're trialling heritage varieties investigating which might be "more suitable for organic and low-input production and better adapted to marginal environments than 'modern' high-yielding varieties."
This matters for the glyphosate debate because regenerative agriculture cannot succeed purely as a production method—it requires transformation of the markets into which farms sell. If the only buyers want standardised commodity grain at the lowest possible price, farmers will produce it using whatever methods minimise costs, including glyphosate.
Should We Be Growing So Much Wheat?
But here is the deeper question that practice-focused regenerative agriculture never asks: should we be trying to produce so much wheat in the first place?
Wheat provides approximately 20% of global calories. In Europe, average consumption reaches 109 kg per person per year. These figures reflect not nutritional necessity but agricultural policy, food system design, and economic incentives that have made refined carbohydrates artificially cheap.
Most wheat-based foods are made from refined white flour, and "the overconsumption of these products may contribute to the increasing global prevalence of chronic diseases, particularly type 2 diabetes and obesity." Modern wheat varieties were bred for yield under high-input chemical systems, not for nutrition or flavour. Research shows that "selection for high yield has caused a decrease in protein and mineral content"—with an 18-29% decline in zinc, iron, copper, magnesium, and other minerals compared to heritage varieties.
Have we confused agricultural success (high yields of commodity crops) with food system success (nourishing people and landscapes)?
Glyphosate: a low toxicity herbicide is the target of a highly toxic disinformation campaign
The "Feed the World" Lie
The predictable response to any critique of industrial agriculture is: "But we can't feed the world without it." The evidence points in precisely the opposite direction.
The ETC Group's analysis found that the "Peasant Food Web"—small-scale farmers, artisanal fishers, pastoralists, and urban food producers—already feeds approximately 70% of the world's population using less than 25% of agricultural resources. Meanwhile, industrial agriculture "gets most of the land" yet "actually produces only about 30% of the world's food." The industrial food chain wastes 44% of crop calories converting plants to animal feed, loses another 15% in transport and processing, and diverts 9% to biofuels. Only 24% reaches human mouths.
We already produce enough calories to feed 10 billion people—yet 800 million remain hungry while 2 billion are overweight or obese. This is not a production problem. It is a distribution, access, and nutrition problem that industrial agriculture makes worse, not better.
Industrial agriculture offers volume. What humanity needs is nutrition security—access to sufficient, safe, nutritious food for all people at all times. These are not the same thing.
Towards Bioregional Food Systems
People working at the whole-system level ask different questions entirely:
What should this landscape produce? Not "how do we maximise wheat yields?" but "what mix of food, fibre, timber, and ecosystem services would this particular place best provide?" The answer in the Cotswolds will differ from Cornwall, which will differ from Cumbria.
Who are we feeding? The logic of global commodity markets is to produce standardised products for anonymous distant consumers. A bioregional food system asks: what do the people who live here need to eat? What can we grow well in this climate and these soils?
What varieties serve nutrition and sustainability together? Heritage wheats offer "deep-rooted, drought-tolerant, disease-resistant" genetics adapted to specific places—along with superior flavour and nutritional profiles.
The glyphosate problem will not be solved by finding a better termination method or a safer herbicide. It will be solved by transitioning to food systems where the annual monoculture paradigm—and its attendant dependencies—no longer dominates.
Part Four: Creating the Conditions for Change
Why a Ban Alone Would Backfire
A glyphosate ban without accompanying support would cause harm rather than transformation. Farmers facing the loss of their primary weed control tool would revert to tillage rather than innovate alternatives—trading one environmental harm for another while destroying livelihoods.
Saskatchewan farmers surveyed about glyphosate alternatives said they would "have to increase tillage" or "couldn't continue farming." This reveals the depth of the lock-in, not farmer stubbornness. Banning substances operates at what systems theorist Donella Meadows called the shallowest leverage points—adjusting parameters without changing underlying structures.
What Transformation Requires
Research on regenerative transitions reveals consistent patterns. The transition typically takes three years, with mindset being the critical barrier: "Changing the mindset of the farmers is very difficult. They do not believe that nature can take care of feeding the world." This is a developmental capacity issue, not an information deficit.
The economics can work, though not in the linear way conventional accounting expects. Farmers deep into transition report fertiliser bills dropping to near zero as nutrient cycling takes over, disease pressure falling as variety diversity builds natural resistance, and water infiltration improving enough that crops survive both drought and flood years that devastate neighbours. The returns compound in ways a cost-benefit spreadsheet struggles to capture—but they're real.
Four dimensions must shift simultaneously: how farmers think (mindset), who they see themselves as (identity), what they can do (skills), and what surrounds them (infrastructure). Without local abattoirs, diverse grain mills, and markets that value quality over standardisation, individual farm transformation hits insurmountable barriers.
Peer networks accelerate change because farmers learn best from other farmers facing similar conditions. Abstract advice fails; demonstration and mentorship work. Economics usually triggers change—farmers shift when the current system stops working for them. But what they need isn't abstract science: they want demonstration sites, equipment to hire, field-scale testing, and connection with others who've made the journey.
Solving the glyphosate problem requires coordinated investment: equipment sharing for alternatives like crimper-rollers; transition payments to buffer experimentation; training programmes that develop systems thinking (our Roots to Regeneration methodology allocates 50% to mindset transformation, 40% to systems design, and only 10% to specific practices); local processing infrastructure; and policy frameworks that reward ecosystem outcomes rather than practice compliance.
This is the work of a generation, not a policy cycle.
Why "We Need Glyphosate" Guarantees We'll Never Get There
Here is the uncomfortable truth at the heart of this debate. If we accept the argument that glyphosate is essential—that there's no alternative within existing systems—then we guarantee those systems will never change.
The farmers who have achieved herbicide-free regenerative production didn't get there by tweaking conventional no-till. They got there by fundamentally reimagining what their farms could be. What none of them did was optimise around the assumption that herbicides were essential. The moment you accept that premise, you've foreclosed the possibility of system redesign.
The "we need glyphosate" argument doesn't just describe the current situation—it actively prevents the emergence of alternatives by removing the pressure to develop them.
A Call to UK Farmers
This is where we need Britain's innovative regenerative farmers to step up.
Parton has demonstrated that cover crop termination without glyphosate is achievable using "a Cambridge roll on a hard frost or crimper rolling." His biologically active soils break down glyphosate in three weeks rather than months. His own wheat blend outperforms commodity varieties for yield and disease resistance. He represents a growing cohort of UK farmers doing the hard work of adapting regenerative principles to British conditions—experimenting, observing, refining, and sharing what they learn.
We cannot import solutions wholesale from North Dakota or New South Wales. Our maritime climate, our soils, our farming traditions—these are ours, and the solutions must be ours too. But the principles that work everywhere can be adapted here, if enough farmers commit to the experiment.
Nature doesn't wait for perfect conditions or complete knowledge. It tries things. It adapts. What works, spreads. Evolution happens through countless small experiments running simultaneously, sharing information through interconnected systems.
That's the model for developing UK regenerative agriculture that doesn't depend on glyphosate. Not a single breakthrough technique handed down from researchers, but a distributed network of farmer-innovators each trying approaches suited to their specific context—and sharing what they learn.
The glyphosate-free future won't be invented in a laboratory or mandated by policy. It will emerge from fields across Britain where farmers are doing the hard, slow work of discovering what actually functions in their place.
Conclusion
We don't claim to have solved the glyphosate problem. No one has, because it's not a problem that can be solved at the level it's typically framed.
What we've tried to show is that the glyphosate debate is a symptom of something deeper: an agricultural system locked into patterns that make genuine regeneration impossible, and a regenerative agriculture movement too often trapped in practice-focused thinking that can't break free.
The solutions exist. Organic farmers have grown crops without glyphosate for generations. UK pioneers are demonstrating that cover crop termination without glyphosate is achievable in British conditions. Population wheats and heritage varieties are reducing input dependency. Regional grain networks are rebuilding local food infrastructure.
But the deepest solution lies in asking different questions altogether. Not "how do we control weeds in continuous wheat?" but "should we be growing so much wheat?" Not "how do we make commodity agriculture sustainable?" but "what would bioregional food systems look like that nourish both people and landscapes?"
The path forward isn't finding the right answer to practice-focused questions. It's developing the capacity to ask whole-system questions—and training enough farmers to find answers that work for their unique places, soils, climates, and communities.
That's the work we're committed to. If you're a farmer or land manager ready to develop the capacity for genuine system redesign—not just practice adoption—our Roots to Regeneration programme offers a two-year journey built around exactly this challenge. You won't just receive answers. You'll become part of evolving the conversation and cultivating the capacity to contribute to solutions we haven't yet imagined.
