This is a huge topic, so large I don't really know where to start and I also don't know how to make it short; so I'll just touch on the topic.
Our farming methods in the 1870's were much different than today; however, the big, big change came shortly after WWII with the massive use in synthetic chemicals. In the beginning these synthetic chemicals really helped in producing tons of food and the negative environmental effects were not too noticeable.
Yet as the years went by we've seen the negative effects, but the counter argument is always that we can NOT produce the amount of food without these industrial methods, which I say is debatable.
However, even if we can not produce at the same level, do we need to? Look at how much food we use for biofuels, which is being proven to be more environmentally damaging than not using them. Look at all the grains we feed to feed industrial produced beef and all the negative effects of that, not only on the environment, but also our health...And then we got the obesity problem virtually all countries are experiencing.
Check out the book:
What Your Food Ate
Regenerative ag is NOT just a repackaging of Organic Ag, which in my opinion is only slightly better than conventional farming. Regenerative Ag is mimicking nature, which doesn't need man-made fertilizers/X-icides to grow plants and they have millions more years of experience than us. No one fertilizes the Redwood forest, yet they seem to get plenty of N2 to grow to monstrous sizes.
I'm going to cut it off here, but this 4-minute video is very good at showing cattle farmers that have switched to Regenerative Ranching. And there are just as good videos out there where people like
Gabe Brown talk about his experience with Regenerative Farming, much of which are traditional crops, such as corn.
A good quick 4-minute introduction by the Carbon Cowboys project.