Greg Thoren approaches farming with care – for the soil, water, animals, and people.  

Over the course of 50 growing seasons, he has demonstrated that agriculture and ecological stewardship are not competing goals, but mutually reinforcing ones. His willingness to demonstrate soil care practices and emerging technologies has lowered barriers for others and accelerated adoption across Illinois. Simply put, his influence is multiplying through others. 

Greg’s land ethic formed after his parents bought a severely degraded farm. He watched his father Donald bring their farm’s soil back from near exhaustion to productivity. Preventing erosion through no-till and contour strips earned Donald the Conservation Farm Family of the Year Award in 1973. 

As a life-long learner, Greg runs Thoren Farms as a living experiment in continuous improvement. He and wife Janis strive to profitably grow 2,200 acres of crops and graze beef cattle by experimenting with modern agronomic advances and bringing new life to old practices. 

Greg integrates crops and cattle in a way that strengthens both, while protecting water. He grows cover crops as a soil building tool and as forage. His use of virtual fencing technology has made adaptive grazing easier during busy and muddy seasons, while protecting sensitive areas from erosion. 

He credits continuous cover cropping, diverse rotations and no-till with restoring soil function, reducing runoff, and lowering his reliance on synthetic inputs. In response to changing markets and consumer expectations, Thoren Farms successfully pursued the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s only certification for regenerative products. “Regenified” tests a variety of factors to measure a farm’s commitment to ecological integrity. 

Through his involvement with Fields of Sinsinawa, Jo Daviess County Soil & Water Health Coalition, and Illinois Grazing Lands Coalition, Greg is an emerging leader within the Upper Midwest’s growing farmer-led conservation movement. Such groups coordinate events to promote farmer-education on soil health principles, and incentives to adopt conservation practices that improve water quality. He credits attending two such events in 2019, where he met soil health advocate Ray Archulta, with giving him the confidence to embrace regenerative farming. 

Now Greg is the one doing the talking at field days, where he candidly and humbly speaks about his successes and setbacks. He’s a trusted source of information to farmers, government agency staff, researchers, and students because he is transparent and his results are visible. 

Off the farm, Greg is involved in the development of Fields of Sinsinawa, a farmer-led learning center in southwest Wisconsin. The property is owned and operated as the Motherhouse for Dominican Sisters, where he helps guide the implementation of regenerative practices on its fields and pastures and informs its broader mission to educate.

Through his dedication to mentorship, Greg is developing a new generation of regenerative farmers by offering guidance and modeling what long-term stewardship looks like. The ripple effect of his leadership is he’s normalizing the regenerative label to skeptics, and others are changing how they farm because they’ve seen the results at Thoren Farms. 

Greg has constructed his personal and professional life around the values of love and respect for the land and all those dependent upon it: from the tiniest soil microbes to the migratory birds that enjoy layovers in his ponds, from the cattle he lovingly cares for to the countless people whose lives he touches with the food he grows and the lessons he teaches.