Report- Regenerative Ranching vs. Rewilding (Institute for Future Food Systems)

Key Findings

Animal agriculture already occupies more land than all of North and South America combined, while providing only ~12% of global calories.
Offsetting methane and nitrous oxide from global cattle and sheep would take about 135 Gt of carbon, nearly twice the carbon stored in all managed grasslands, showing how limited grazing land is as a carbon sink.
Across a meta-analysis of 109 studies, removing livestock consistently increased plant and animal diversity, while grazing reduced native species richness.
Rewilding land freed from animal agriculture could remove around 8 billion tonnes of CO₂ each year, roughly one-fifth of current global direct GHG emissions, or about the same as eliminating all emissions from the U.S. and EU combined.
Many complementary solutions are shared, from improving plant-based farming with intercropping, cover crops, and higher yields, to the co-benefits of agrivoltaics, new technologies, and cultural shifts in how we produce and consume food. Together, these can restore ecosystems, stabilize the climate, and build a resilient, thriving food system.
Based on over 100 peer-reviewed studies, this analysis finds that dietary change plant-based with rewilding provides far greater environmental benefits than any grazing-based approach. They restore land, draw down carbon, rebuild soil health, improve water and air quality, and revive biodiversity. Collectively this makes plant-based and rewilding one of the most powerful solutions to the climate and ecological crises.

Summary

The livestock industry is the single largest human use of land on Earth, occupying at least 37% of the planet’s ice-free surface (United Nations Climate Change and Land Report, 2019).

This land footprint comes at a cost: widespread wildlife habitat loss, declining biodiversity, and significant greenhouse gas emissions and carbon drawdown loss. In the context of accelerating ecological degradation, livestock systems (especially ruminant grazing-based ones) play a central role in driving land-use change and environmental pressures.

Yet instead of scaling back, the industry is rebranding. Enter regenerative agriculture and regenerative grazing, buzzword-heavy concepts marketed as a win-win for meat, soil, biodiversity, and the climate. It is being sold as the answer to our environmental crisis.

But does it actually hold up under scientific scrutiny? Or is this just another well-funded detour delaying real solutions?

This report explores the best available science on the topic. It defines what regenerative agriculture actually is, lays out the peer-reviewed studies, debunks the myths, and shows some industry’s tactics. It also explores truly transformative solutions, from rewilding and plant-based conservation agriculture, to agrivoltaics and food system shifts that regenerate nature without livestock at all.

With no regulated definition, the term regenerative agriculture is now widely misused to promote farming methods that are neither regenerative nor sustainable.

While not all regenerative grazing is “Grass-finished” or “100% grass-fed”, the land and climate context of those methods are important precursors to shifting types of grazing. Grass-finished beef refers to cattle eating grass or hay their entire lives. Many believe this type of beef is better for the environment partly because they are eating what ruminants naturally eat. In reality, “grass-finished” beef uses more land and generates more planet warming pollution than conventional beef, worsening other environmental issues (Garnett et al., 2017).

“emissions per kg protein of even the most efficient grass-fed beef are 10 to 25% higher than those of industrial US beef and 3- to over 40-fold higher than a wide range of plant and animal alternatives” (Eshel et al., 2025)

Grass-finished ranching, in many cases, negatively impacts the climate more than feedlots (grain). Including the broader ecological costs, such as displaced trees, vegetation, and wildlife, the impact is significantly worse.

Grass-finished requires more emissions (~19%), uses more land (~25%), and is far from scalable (27% of current US beef could be met) (Clark & Tilman, 2017; Hayek & Garrett, 2018).

The ability to shift our current food system’s demand for meat to grass-finished, let alone so-called regenerative grazed meat that uses more land, is not biophysically possible. If the US wanted to match the current factory farmed beef to grass-fed – and not alter their beef consumption – existing pastureland could support just 27\u202f% of current production (Hayek & Garrett, 2018). Another finding of the study was that methane emissions would rise by 43% due to longer lives (from about 20 to 30 months) and a more fibrous diet.

Whether grass-finished or not, new niche methods of grazing cattle are being called regenerative (ie. holistic, adaptive multi-paddock, mob grazing, etc.). Yet an abundance of farm-scale and meta-analyses show:

there is no long term storage of carbon,
these practices still don’t offset the cattle’s own methane emissions and often even increase them, and
analyses of these methods rarely ever compare to native wild ecosystems that they are risking further displacing (Hawkins, Venter & Cramer, 2022; Reinhart et al., 2021; Hawkins, 2017; Garnett et al., 2017, Monbiot, 2023)

“sadly, regenerative grazing doesn’t always live up to the hype. The climate benefits are often smaller than claimed and only work under limited circumstances. Moreover, the more outlandish claims about regenerative grazing can act as greenwashing for the beef industry. Left unchallenged, this could distract us from pursuing more effective solutions and delay the changes we need to make in the livestock industry.” (Foley, 2024)

Instead, greenwashing grazing is more likely to trick consumers into believing beef is eco-friendly when far superior diverse plant proteins exist with substantial ecological benefits (Ritchie, Rosado, & Roser, 2022; Carter, 2024).

Plant protein production can be a part of conservation agriculture that has historically used practices like intercropping, avoiding monoculture, limiting synthetic inputs and manure, maintaining crop residues, using cover crops, and reducing tillage (Kassam & Kassam, Chapter 21, 2024; Kassam, Friedrich, & Derpsch, 2015; McGuire, 2015). These methods are plant-based by default and boost environmental benefits, can enhance farm profitability, and potentially sequester soil carbon.

Critically, shifting to more plant protein production for direct consumption frees up land. And what we do with that land matters, whether it’s rewilding forests, restoring grasslands, equity land-back programs, or integrating agrivoltaics. The path forward isn’t better cattle grazing. It’s a shift toward regenerative food systems that don’t rely on livestock at all.

Behind the exaggerated grazing claims lies a tangled web of selective science, industry influence, and trade-offs. This report dives into the hard evidence, what works, what’s misleading, and what’s getting in the way of real climate and biodiversity solutions.

If you care about the future of food, ecosystems, or thriving communities, the details matter. Let’s get into them.