Soil nutrients

Vital to the success of regenerative agriculture will be the ability of farmers to charge a premium for their produce, as they often can for organic food. Organic producers can use various certification schemes that confirm to consumers that the producer followed agreed rules and procedures, but other than the as-yet small-scale Regenerative Organic Certified scheme, there is nothing comparable for regenerative food producers.

Remember that organic was a bottom-up movement, with consumers creating the demand as they found out more about food. Technology now allows us to have more traceability and visibility of how much energy is used to produce food, and how much waste has been involved, for example. I would hope the sort of consumers who pushed for organic would care about such issues.

Climate Change

In the 21st-century conventional agriculture incurs other indirect costs that cannot be ignored. The long-term threat of climate change is well established, and agriculture bears much of the responsibility for this. In its latest report on climate change,  23% of the total global greenhouse gas emissions are directly related to agriculture, forestry and other types of land use. Regenerative agriculture seeks to increase the organic matter in soil, which makes it better able to sequester carbon from the atmosphere, meaning it has the potential to reduce climate change rather than contributing to it.

The soil scientist Dr Rattan Lal, the winner of the 2020 World Food Prize claims that increasing the carbon content of the world’s soil by just 2% would entirely return greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to safe levels.

Infiltration and biodiversity

Regenerative farming has other benefits besides improving soil health and helping to fight climate change. Improving the soil not only increases fertility sustainably, but also tends to improve water infiltration. Better infiltration means less runoff, and also less erosion and pollution from the soil being carried away into our water systems. In some areas, water springs that dried up several years ago have begun to flow again due to new regenerative farming approaches and methods.

An increase in biodiversity tends to make ecosystems more sustainable and resilient. Dan Kittredge, the US-based organic farmer and executive director of the Bionutrient Food Association, has observed that regenerative agriculture focuses more attention on the quality of life and growth on a farm, contrasting this with organic farming which, he says, can focus on policing inputs.

Is regenerative farming the solution?

For farmers, a regenerative approach can offer new profitable and nature-friendly economic models. For policymakers, it offers alternative ways of thinking about sustainability and climate change. Crucially, regenerative agriculture implies a general approach that allows for different farms to develop new, adaptive cycles and systems. These, in turn, can support and develop a unique and resilient ecosystems.

Nature isn’t fixed; it’s something that humans can work within what writer, Raymond Cole, has called eco-evolutionary, partnered relationships between human and natural systems.

This flexibility will be important as we continue to search for new, innovative ways of producing more and/or different foods to feed the ever growing global population.

If we plan to meet targets for climate change, improve food security, protect farmland and build a healthier food system, it is likely that regenerative agriculture will have an important role to play.

https://www.eitfood.eu/blog/can-regenerative-agriculture-replace-conventional-farming