Aries and his wife purchased her family’s onion operation in 2019, building on decades of experience passed down from the previous generation. Today, Vidalia sweet onions remain the farm’s primary crop, alongside watermelons, cabbage, squash, zucchini, and other specialty crops.

But over the past several years, Aries has increasingly found himself asking one question about the way he farms:

Why?

Why are we applying this nutrient? Why are we managing the soil this way? Is that nutrient actually available to the plant? Is there another way to accomplish the same goal while spending less or improving the soil along the way?

Those questions have led him into soil biology, cover crops, compost, sap analysis, nutrient density, biological inputs, and precision technology.

And they’ve also led him to develop his own practical definition of regenerative agriculture.

Regenerative Agriculture Has to Fit the Farm

Growing onions presents some immediate challenges to many common regenerative practices.

Vidalia onions are transplanted into the field by hand, grown through the winter, and eventually harvested by hand. Soil disturbance is part of the production system, making a strict no-till approach difficult.

Rather than deciding regenerative agriculture can’t work in onions, Aries is asking what principles can work.

For his farm, that means focusing on rebuilding the soil, increasing organic matter, supporting biology, and creating soils that are more resilient when heavy rainfall hits southeast Georgia.

Cover crops have become an important part of that experimentation.

Aries is evaluating whether planting a multispecies cover crop after onions could provide greater value than immediately planting another cash crop. Instead of looking only at the revenue generated by the next crop, he wants to understand what the cover crop might contribute to soil condition, crop quality, size, and potentially nutrient density.

He’s already seeing signs that there may be benefits.

In one field, a heavy cover crop was mowed and incorporated ahead of cabbage. The residue made field operations more difficult, but after roughly an inch and a half of rain, Aries noticed something important: the soil stayed in place.

That matters on fields where heavy rainfall and irrigation can quickly create erosion problems.

Could Mustard Help Manage Nematode Pressure?

One of Aries’ more interesting experiments involves mustard cover crops.

Onion seedbeds have traditionally required an aggressive approach to managing soilborne pests. Aries described the conventional process of preparing a clean seedbed and fumigating the soil—an approach that creates an obvious tension when you’re simultaneously trying to build soil biology.

So he began experimenting with a mix of three mustards.

He grows the mustard heavily, chops the biomass as finely as possible, incorporates it into the soil quickly, and waters it in.

Aries is careful not to claim he has every answer yet. That’s part of his approach: experiment, observe, collect data, and try to quantify the result.

The mustard may have an effect on root-knot nematode pressure, but he also sees another potential benefit that’s much simpler:

There’s a living root in the soil.

In southeast Georgia’s climate, soil biology can remain active for much of the year. Aries believes keeping plants growing and carbon moving into the soil for more of that year may be one of the biggest opportunities available to him.

Asking More From Soil and Plant Testing

The same curiosity shapes Aries’ approach to crop nutrition.

A conventional soil test may tell a grower how much of a nutrient exists in the soil. Aries wants to know how much of that nutrition is actually available to the plant.

That distinction has pushed him toward Haney testing, sap analysis, plant observations, photos, and more detailed recordkeeping.

Once an onion plant is large enough, he begins pulling sap samples and documenting what the crop looks like at that point in the season.

Then he looks for trends.

Is a micronutrient limiting another process in the plant? Did an application change nutrient movement? How much nutrition should be in the onion before bulbing begins?

That last question is especially interesting in onions because the plant stores nutrition in its tops before moving it into the bulb as it enters the bulbing stage.

Understanding that process could help Aries make more precise fertility decisions instead of simply following the same program every year.

The goal isn’t data for data’s sake.

It’s using data to answer the question he keeps coming back to: Why are we doing this?

Building Biology With More Diversity

Aries is taking a similar approach to biological inputs.

Instead of looking for one product or organism to provide the answer, he’s interested in diversity.

He compares it to planting a multispecies cover crop. Different organisms may perform different functions or support one another, so he is experimenting with different biological products alongside compost and extracts made on the farm.

His team is even exploring whether compost could eventually be tailored to particular crops.

Could you build compost differently for corn than you would for onions or watermelons? Could growing a living plant directly in that compost influence the biology developing within it?

Aries doesn’t pretend to have those questions answered.

He’s experimenting to find out.

Can Farmers Eventually Get Paid for Nutrient Density?

That experimentation has led Aries to another emerging question: What if we measured crops by more than yield?

He’s beginning to explore nutrient-density testing, although he acknowledges that the testing can be expensive and difficult to incorporate into an already busy production season. But the potential is significant.

If farmers can eventually demonstrate that particular practices consistently produce food with greater nutritional value, could that create a different value proposition for growers?

Instead of being compensated primarily for tonnage, could farmers eventually receive additional value for the quality of the food they produce?

For Aries, proving that requires data.

It also requires farmers to be willing to test assumptions rather than simply make claims about what regenerative practices might accomplish.

Precision Technology Could Help Farmers Use Less

Regenerative agriculture and advanced technology aren’t opposing ideas on Aries’ farm.

In fact, precision equipment could help him accomplish some of the goals he’s pursuing.

Aries uses precision spraying technology capable of targeting individual plants. With onions planted roughly every four inches, the system can apply a nutritional product directly over the crop instead of broadcasting it across the entire field.

In one example Aries discussed, that targeted approach meant roughly 60% less product was sprayed compared with what would have been required for a broadcast application.

Similar technology can also identify and target weeds, an important capability in onions, where the crop can take weeks to develop enough canopy to compete effectively.

Looking ahead, Aries believes the images and data being collected by these systems could contribute to even greater automation, including robotic and mechanical harvesting.

For him, technology isn’t separate from the effort to farm differently. It can be another tool for becoming more precise with what the crop actually needs.

Leaving the Next Generation Better Data and Better Questions

Near the end of the conversation, we asked Aries what he hopes the next generation of farmers takes from the work he’s doing today.

His answer wasn’t that he wants to figure everything out for them.

He wants to give them a foundation.

He hopes his daughters and the farmers who follow his generation can look back at the experiments, practices, and data being collected today and know what was tried, what worked, and what still needs to be questioned.

Because the future of regenerative agriculture may not be about giving every farmer the same set of practices.

It may be about giving farmers better tools to understand their own farms.

For an onion grower in Georgia, that could mean cover crops alongside tillage, biologicals alongside precision technology, and generations of farming experience alongside new data.

Most importantly, it means continuing to ask:

Why are we doing it this way, and is there a better way?

Hear the full conversation with Aries on The Whole Farm Podcast to learn more about his approach to soil biology, cover crops, crop nutrition, nutrient density, precision technology, and the future of regenerative farming.