Exploring the relationship between regenerative grazing and Ranchers’ wellbeing

Regenerative grazing practices have garnered attention from researchers and practitioners as a promising approach for building farms' ecosystem health while also delivering societal benefits. While the ecological benefits of such practices have been extensively studied, their impact on farmers' wellbeing remains relatively unexplored but are as critical – we don't want to advocate for ecologically sustainable methods that decrease social wellbeing. This study contributes to this research gap by presenting and testing a novel framework to evaluate social wellbeing outcomes for farmers. Our framework provides a comprehensive operationalization of wellbeing, incorporating five distinct constructs identified in the literature. We translate the framework into a survey tool and use it to examine differences in wellbeing among beef producers using different grazing management practices in Michigan, USA. The survey was completed by decision-makers from 37 pasture-based beef farms - 16 regenerative, 19 transitioning to regenerative, and 10 not practicing regenerative approaches. Our findings underscore high levels of overall wellbeing across all participants, with particularly high scores for relational wellbeing and eudaimonic aspects. Furthermore, in line with previous research, we observed that regenerative producers exhibit distinctive values and perspectives towards farming, with differences in systems thinking between adopters and non-adopters of regenerative practices, with implications for wellbeing. We conclude that the survey tool successfully operationalizes social wellbeing in an effective way, and that by looking at wellbeing, values, and systems thinking together, the insights hold significant importance for supporting the wider adoption of regenerative grazing.