The mainstream media might not be highlighting it, but U.S. cattle inventory has plummeted to its lowest level in 73 years. This historic decline represents a devastating blow to our food and soil sovereignty and reveals the fundamental flaws in industrial animal husbandry.

While conventional agriculture points to drought and rising interest rates as the culprits, regenerative ranchers across the country are demonstrating a different reality: properly managed cattle operations can thrive even in challenging conditions.

The key difference? Soil health.

Regenerative ranching pioneer Mickey Steward explains, "If you take even the slightest step towards managing your grazing, you greatly improve the quality and quantity of your forage." This insight transforms our understanding of cattle's role in the ecosystem: they aren't depleting resources—they're essential partners in rebuilding them.

Each percentage point increase in soil organic matter allows the land to hold an additional 20,000 gallons of water per acre, creating drought resilience that conventional operations simply can't match. As a result, while industrial ranches are liquidating their herds, regenerative operations continue to maintain or even expand their numbers.

The recent bird flu outbreaks have exposed another vulnerability in our industrial food system. While Americans pay nearly $5 per dozen for eggs—a staggering 237% increase since 2021—the USDA has unveiled a $1 billion plan that doubles down on the very system that created the problem.

Joel Salatin, a pioneering voice in regenerative agriculture, offers a different perspective. He challenges conventional outbreak management strategies, particularly questioning the PCR testing protocols that lead to mass culling orders. These policies disproportionately impact small-scale, pasture-based operations while eliminating flocks that might demonstrate natural resilience to viral exposure.

Salatin's approach to "letting chickens express their chickenness" through rotational grazing, multi-species integration, and deep-bedding systems creates environments where poultry develop robust natural immunity. Studies support this method, showing that pasture-raised birds exhibit 58% higher natural killer cell activity compared to confined flocks.

The contrast is stark: while industrial operations crowd birds into warehouse-like conditions that facilitate disease spread, regenerative farms create diverse, low-stress environments that naturally reduce viral transmission.

Against the backdrop of industrial domination, some encouraging signs of change are emerging in the mainstream food system. Restaurants like Steak n' Shake and Sweetgreen are returning to traditional cooking methods, replacing inflammatory seed oils with ancestral fats like beef tallow.

This shift isn't just about flavor—although foods cooked in tallow do develop superior texture with a crispier exterior while maintaining internal moisture. It's about reclaiming our food sovereignty from industrial processes that create inflammatory compounds linked to numerous modern diseases.

The return to traditional fats represents a rejection of decades of misguided nutritional advice that demonized saturated fat while promoting highly processed seed oils. Modern research increasingly validates what our grandparents knew all along: traditional animal fats contain beneficial fatty acid profiles and lack the harmful oxidative compounds found in repeatedly heated vegetable oils.

While Americans focus on culture wars, control over our agricultural land—the foundation of national food sovereignty—continues to shift into foreign hands. Chinese entities now own approximately 384,000 acres of U.S. agricultural land, with acquisitions strategically concentrated in states with vital agricultural production or proximity to military installations.

This trend is occurring as America's agricultural demographics undergo dramatic transformation. According to USDA data, the number of American farms has plummeted from 6.8 million in 1935 to about 2 million today, with less than 2% of Americans directly engaged in farming compared to over 40% in 1900.

The loss of agricultural knowledge as older farmers retire without successors represents a critical loss of practical expertise accumulated over generations—expertise that cannot be replaced by corporate farming models.

As traditional agriculture struggles, the techno-food complex pushes forward with increasingly bizarre alternatives. Billionaire tech mogul Bill Gates continues his aggressive campaign against animal agriculture, suggesting that "all rich countries should move to 100% synthetic beef" to fight what he claims is livestock's contribution to climate change.

Meanwhile, companies are developing products like "cockroach milk"—made from the secretions of Pacific beetle cockroaches—and marketing it as a "sustainable, nature-friendly, nutritious, lactose-free, delicious, guilt-free dairy alternative of the future."

These developments represent a disturbing trend where food technologists pursue increasingly unnatural alternatives rather than addressing the fundamental flaws in our food system. Instead of engineering milk from insects, we should be supporting regenerative grazing practices that allow ruminants to build soil health while producing nutrient-dense, traditional foods that humans have thrived on for millennia.

Despite these challenges, regenerative agriculture is gaining ground. White Oak Pastures, a fifth-generation regenerative farm, recently secured distribution in Publix supermarkets across Florida, bringing truly regenerative meat to mainstream shoppers. Alexandre Family Farm launched organic A2/A2 chocolate milk nationwide—the first regenerative dairy combining easier digestibility with grass-fed nutrition.

These successes demonstrate that regenerative agriculture isn't just ecologically sound—it's economically viable when given the chance to compete on a level playing field.

The regenerative approach represents a radical shift from industrial models that have dominated for decades. Instead of viewing farming as a battle against nature, regenerative practitioners work with natural processes through adaptive management. This isn't some New Age theory—it's ecological science backed by observable results across millions of acres.

From our perspective at The Regenaissance, the raw milk debate isn't really about milk at all—it's about whether Americans have the right to access traditional, minimally processed foods directly from the farmers who produce them.

It's about rebuilding local food systems that connect producers and consumers in relationships of trust rather than anonymous industrial supply chains.

It's about allowing farmers to earn a living wage for producing quality food instead of being trapped in commodity systems that reward only scale and uniformity.

And ultimately, it's about challenging the fundamental premise that distant bureaucrats and corporate interests should determine what foods we're allowed to feed our families.

Delaware's action is one more crack in the foundation of the industrial food system that has failed us so spectacularly. Each state that recognizes raw milk access chips away at the myth that we need industrial processing to be safe, and reasserts the ancestral wisdom that humans thrived on unprocessed foods for thousands of years before industrial agriculture.

The cattle inventory crisis, bird flu outbreaks, and other agricultural challenges present both danger and opportunity. The danger is that industrial agriculture will use these moments to push for even more consolidation, synthetic alternatives, and government bailouts that perpetuate a broken system. The opportunity is for a grassroots regenerative revolution that rebuilds American agriculture from the soil up—creating a more resilient, distributed, and ecologically sound food system.

The Regenaissance movement isn't just about maintaining agricultural production—it's about rebuilding the relationship between humans, animals, and landscapes that sustained us for thousands of years before industrial agriculture's disastrous experiment.

By supporting regenerative farmers and ranchers, demanding transparency in our food system, and reconnecting with ancestral food wisdom, we can all participate in this vital transformation. Our health—and the health of our planet—depends on it.