David Montgomery is a geomorphologist who had already written a bleak book about soil — Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, which traced how societies exhaust their topsoil and then decline. Growing a Revolution is the optimistic sequel. He travelled to farms in Ohio, the Dakotas, Pennsylvania, Ghana, Costa Rica and elsewhere to answer a narrower question: can degraded agricultural soil actually be rebuilt on a human timescale, profitably, by ordinary farmers? His answer is yes, and the mechanism turns out to be strikingly consistent across wildly different climates and farm sizes.
The core argument
Montgomery’s claim is that conventional agriculture has been treating a biological system as a chemical one. Soil fertility was reframed in the twentieth century as a matter of supplying nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, which worked well enough to obscure what was happening underneath: organic matter falling, soil life collapsing, structure degrading, and erosion running far ahead of soil formation. Fertiliser masked the decline rather than reversing it.
The alternative he documents restores fertility by restoring biology. Where farmers stop disturbing the soil, keep it covered and fed with living roots, and grow diverse crops, soil organic matter climbs measurably within years rather than centuries. Yields hold or rise; input costs fall sharply; and because profit is the difference between the two, the economics work even where yields are merely equal. Soil formation, he argues, is not inherently glacial — it is slow under the plough and fast under biology.
Key ideas
- The three-part recipe. Minimal disturbance (no-till), permanent soil cover through cover crops and residue, and diverse rotations. Montgomery’s central finding is that the three only work properly together; adopting one alone routinely disappoints.
- Ditching the plough. Tillage oxidises organic matter, destroys fungal networks and aggregate structure, and exposes soil to erosion. He treats the plough as agriculture’s foundational and most persistent mistake.
- Feeding the soil biology, not the plant. Living roots exude carbon that supports microbes and mycorrhizal fungi, which in turn make minerals and nitrogen available. Fertility becomes something the system generates rather than something purchased.
- Profitability drives adoption. The farmers he profiles converted for economic reasons — cutting fertiliser, fuel and pesticide bills — not environmental ones. He argues this is the only realistic path to scale.
- Carbon as a co-benefit. Rebuilding organic matter pulls atmospheric carbon into soil. He is measured about the size of the climate contribution while treating it as a substantial bonus on top of the agronomic case.
- Scale-independence. The same principles work on smallholdings in Ghana and on thousands of acres in the American Midwest, which distinguishes his case from arguments that only small farms can farm well.
Who it’s for
Anyone interested in soil, food systems, or climate mitigation through land management will find this the most readable single account of regenerative agriculture. Gardeners will recognise the logic immediately — it is the same case made for no-dig beds, mulching and rotation, scaled up to commodity farming and backed with field data. Montgomery writes as a scientist rather than an advocate, which gives the argument more weight than the genre usually carries.
Two fair criticisms. The structure is farm-visit-plus-explanation repeated many times, and the profiles blur together by the middle third. More substantively, it is a book built from success stories: the farmers who tried this and failed, or who found the transition years financially brutal, are largely absent, and the agronomic literature on no-till is more contested than the narrative implies — particularly around herbicide dependence, which he acknowledges but does not fully resolve. The core case for the three principles together holds up well; the ease of getting there is somewhat understated.