Regenerative agriculture · Nutrient density · Metabolic health

1. Regenerative agriculture and grass-based ruminant livestock

The starting point is a sober one: agroecology has failed to scale in France. The reasons are well known. It carried strong political connotations, and part of the farming world distrusted it, sometimes for good reasons. It also struggled to reconcile environmental requirements, the economic viability of farms and supply chains, and the reorganisation of work on farms.

Regenerative agriculture brings assets that agroecology lacked. Its vocabulary is less politically divisive. It projects an image of prosperity rather than sacrifice. Above all, it treats soil as productive capital and as insurance, a language that speaks directly to many farmers, without moral injunction or environmental guilt.

This advantage does not exempt us from a strategic diagnosis. Regenerative agriculture faces the same structural risks as agroecology. It can be absorbed into standardised industrial systems through science-based targets and the carbon tunnel. It can drift into techno-solutionism that reduces the ecosystem to a machine with adjustable variables. And it can be instrumentalised by actors whose interest is to preserve the dominant model painted green.

The distinction that structures my work is therefore the following:

• Standardising regenerative agriculture: certified protocols, rigid metrics, top-down compliance, the farmer as executor. It extends the industrial model under another name. Industry has shaped our societies, not without excess. Saying this is neither to disparage industry nor to romantically ignore agriculture’s absolute duty to produce in volume. It is simply to say that there is a structural tension in trying to standardise living systems.
• Agronomic and systemic regenerative agriculture: a change of perspective on what one works with (the ecosystem in its complexity, not an assembly of inputs) and on how one works (learning by doing, situated experimentation, technology and science as tools serving an autonomous, robust farmer, not as top-down prescriptions).

It is this second configuration that deserves to be defended, and the whole challenge is to scale it, which agroecology did not manage to do.

Scaling it requires a condition that mainstream regenerative communication often overlooks: putting work at the centre. That means farmers with real autonomy in steering and decision-making, and robust systems on the management, tax, legal and land sides. It also means effective learning capacity, a rebuilt and settled professional identity, a stable and liveable organisation of work, attractive salaried employment and a strong training system. Without a deep transformation of these concrete conditions of the farming profession, no paradigm shift in agriculture is possible. This is the subject of my second proposal, Farm work at the centre. The two are inseparable.

This orientation leads me to take a clear position: the defence of livestock farming, and specifically of grass-based ruminant livestock. Mixed crop-livestock farming is an ecologically efficient integrated model, long rooted in France. It deserves to be preserved for reasons that are not merely nostalgic.

Livestock is indispensable to the ecological transition of agriculture, for several reasons:

• restoration of permanent grasslands and their ecosystem services;
• organic fertilisation of cropland;
• use of land unsuitable for crops;
• diversity of farming landscapes;
• the social and economic fabric of rural areas.

From this standpoint, the current campaign against livestock as a whole, regardless of how animals are raised, is deeply problematic, including when it is carried by institutions. It harms public debate and public health, and it does nothing to help the livestock sector evolve towards sustainability.

That campaign relies on questionable metrics. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and the 100-year Global Warming Potential (GWP100) applied to enteric methane are the most visible examples. They are scientifically weak, because they flatten the diversity of livestock systems into a single indicator that claims universality. They are politically dangerous, because they serve as levers for strategies and public policies that threaten social, territorial, food and ecological balances, in the name of a climate benefit that is marginal at best.

To the prevailing slogan of “less but better livestock”, I oppose a more demanding view: better, certainly, but also more — in particular more grass-based ruminant livestock, and grass-based systems that are ecologically intensified, without excluding positive change within industrial livestock. This position is not a provocation. It follows from the agronomic, ecological, health and social diagnosis that underpins this proposal. Herd “decapitalisation” is not inevitable.

In defending ecological intensification and regenerative livestock farming, I share the view expressed by Jason Rowntree: the answer is not fewer cows, but more cows properly and biologically matched to their environment. The aim is to escape the false choice between grass-based farming that must be extensive and intensive farming that must be industrial.

2. Metabolic health

Mainstream nutrition science is fragile. For more than a century it was built first on the calorie model. Since the 1960s it has followed the paradigm of nutritional epidemiology: observational cohort studies that establish statistical associations, often very weak ones, between self-reported diets and disease outcomes, without interventional designs able to establish robust causality.

This discipline is now the scientific basis for recommendations to make diets more “plant-based”. Those recommendations rest on the claim that meat and saturated fat cause the diseases of civilisation: obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancers, neurodegenerative disease. The methodological problems of this approach are numerous and well documented:

• confusion between correlation and causation;
• weak associations presented as consensus;
• the healthy user bias;
• conflicts of interest;
• the absence of solid interventional evidence;
• the ideological overdetermination of the hypotheses being tested.

Over recent decades, however, biology and medicine have developed a different paradigm for understanding the links between diet and health. This metabolic and hormonal perspective explains the same diseases of civilisation through another mechanism. Repeated insulin spikes driven by excess dietary carbohydrate lead over time to chronic hyperinsulinaemia and metabolic syndrome, which in turn underlie these diseases.

Within this framework, diets low in carbohydrate and high in fat, with substantial animal protein, could significantly improve public health and reduce the considerable cost of chronic disease. Animal protein supplies the best amino-acid profiles and highly bioavailable vitamins and minerals. This matters all the more for societies whose economic and demographic balances are deteriorating.

This notion of metabolic health, which also involves physical activity and sleep, seems to me fundamental. It connects to integrative health. Health is not reduced to metabolic regulation. It also includes the quality of relationships at work and in life generally, contact with nature, mindfulness practice, and a satisfying sexual life. These dimensions are as constitutive of health as biological parameters, and they are supported by a now well-established scientific and clinical literature.

People’s autonomy is a central issue. Medical guidelines, public policy and market organisation obviously matter. But so does people’s capacity to understand their psycho-biological organism differently, to observe themselves, and to build beneficial ways of living on their own. In the same way, a regenerative farmer must observe their own agroecosystem, and cannot delegate everything to scientists or advisers.

3. Nutrient density

To understand the agricultural question, and to have any chance of transforming it, we must connect regenerative agriculture to metabolic health, above all through food. In my fieldwork with farmers, advisers, livestock producers and institutions, one observation has struck me: the farming world is largely unaware of diet-and-health issues.

This is not a lack of intelligence or curiosity. Farmers are very fine observers of their environment. It reflects a structural asymmetry. Production has been thought of separately from consumption. The reference frameworks for “eating well” have been delegated to other actors (health institutions, media, nutrition NGOs) without the farming world discussing their content.

Several other factors play a part:

• the dominance of grain farming in Western agricultural systems;
• the drift of environmental NGOs towards the slogan of “plant-based” diets;
• in France, the intense debates over pesticides. They have valid grounds, but they also mask many other issues, starting with the health harms of carbohydrate-heavy diets.

The consequence is serious. Highly contestable ideas about food and health — outdated nutritional dogmas presented as consensus — are received by parts of the farming world as self-evident frameworks. They then shape the strategic choices of supply chains and agricultural policy. Getting out of this trap requires treating diet and health as a dimension in its own right, neither dissolved into agronomic discussion nor left to health discourse alone.

This is where nutrient density becomes strategic. The notion refers to the quality of the nutrients in a food and of the food matrices that determine their bioavailability. It is gradually replacing the poor, moralising idea of “healthy” or “unhealthy” foods. That idea says nothing about the nutrients actually supplied. It is usually built by excluding whole classes of foods (fats, meat, animal products) on ideological rather than scientific grounds. Nutrient density is gaining international visibility through new classifications such as the Nourishment Table. It is the reference framework that guides my work.

A related issue is the false dichotomy between plant-source and animal-source foods. It was culturally constructed in the English-speaking world from the nineteenth century onwards (see Leroy & Hite, 2020), and it is now instrumentalised by several environmental and nutritional scoring systems. This dichotomy is scientifically fragile, and socially, culturally, biologically and anthropologically impoverishing. It nevertheless shapes a considerable share of current food strategies and policies.

A substantial share of animal-source foods (meat, offal and animal fats) remains indispensable for a healthy, nourishing diet. Many plant foods raise issues of their own: carbohydrates above all, but also various antinutrients. Finally, valuing nutrient density necessarily excludes ultra-processed foods, which also work against metabolic health because of their heavy carbohydrate load.

Work completed and under way on this axis

Sociological and epistemological analysis of food-system controversies, and critique of the “plant-based” slogan (2025).

Ongoing study of adaptive multi-paddock (AMP) grazing (pâturage tournant dynamique): in-depth interviews with grass-based livestock farmers and advisers in France and abroad. The study covers technical situations (grass management, fencing, water, herd management), economics, the organisation of work and professional identity. It will be published as a book, and it ties directly into the second proposal.

Further possibilities: patient experience and trajectories of people adopting low-carbohydrate diets; barriers and levers for better training of health professionals in metabolic health.

Selected bibliography

Regenerative agriculture and grass-based ruminant livestock

• Bessière, M. & Bessière, A. (2020). Le pâturage tournant dynamique (in French).
• Dublin Declaration of Scientists on the Societal Role of Livestock.
• Grindrod, C. (2025–2026). The Re-Rooting of Regenerative Agriculture — Why the Next Five Years Will See a Renaissance. The Emergence of Second-Tier Agriculture: Ancient Wisdom, Emerging Science, and the Reclaiming of Integrity.
• Manzano, P., Rowntree, J. et al. (2023). Challenges for the balanced attribution of livestock’s environmental impacts: the art of conveying simple messages around complex realities. Animal Frontiers, 13(2), 35–44. https://doi.org/10.1093/af/vfac096
• Moinet, G. Y. K., Hijbeek, R., van Vuuren, D. P. & Giller, K. E. (2023). Carbon for soils, not soils for carbon. Global Change Biology, 29(9), 2384–2398.
• Peyraud, J.-L. & Hocquette, J.-F. (2025). Towards a balanced view of livestock: benefits of grazing farming systems to produce meat. Livestock Science, 302, 105829.
• Roumegous, S. (2026). L’agriculture qui régénère la nature (in French).
• Voisin, A. (1957). Productivité de l’herbe; (1960) Dynamique des herbages (in French).

Metabolic and integrative health

• Bikman, B. (2020). Why We Get Sick: The Hidden Epidemic at the Root of Most Chronic Disease — and How to Fight It. BenBella Books.
• Coalition for Metabolic Health.
• Ede, G. (2024). Change Your Diet, Change Your Mind. Balance.
• Ennezat, P.-V., Sarre, G. & Maréchaux, S. (2018). Régime low carb ou low fat : que conseiller à nos patients à risque cardiovasculaire ? Médecine thérapeutique, 24(3) (in French).
• Phinney, S. D. & Volek, J. S. (2011). The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Living. Beyond Obesity LLC.
• Spinosa, J. P., Lee, D. C., Duraj, T. et al. (2025). The planetary diet: a nutritional utopia in conflict with human evolution. Nutrition & Metabolism, 22, 123. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12986-025-01019-7
• Teicholz, N. (2014). The Big Fat Surprise.

Whole foods and nutrient density

• Beal, T. & Ortenzi, F. (2022). Priority micronutrient density in foods. Frontiers in Nutrition, 9, 806566. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnut.2022.806566
• Buxton, J. (2022). The Great Plant-Based Con.
• Leroy, F. & Hite, A. H. (2020). The place of meat in dietary policy: an exploration of the animal/plant divide. Meat and Muscle Biology, 4(2), 1–11. https://doi.org/10.22175/mmb.9456
• Leroy, F., Beal, T., de Mûelenaere, N. et al. (2025). A framework for adequate nourishment: balancing nutrient density and food processing levels within the context of culturally and regionally appropriate diets. Animal Frontiers, 15(1), 10–23.
• Leroy, F., Ederer, P., Lee, M. & Pulina, G. (2025). The systemantics of meat in dietary policy making, or how to professionally fail at understanding the complexities of nourishment. Meat and Muscle Biology.