Regenerative agriculture seeks to create a more sustainable and resilient farming system by embracing techniques like reducing soil disturbance, integrating livestock and using crop rotation to reduce the broader environmental impacts of food production.
In part it’s a reaction the post-war development of agriculture which focused on producing as much food as possible and making it very affordable. While those aims have largely been achieved, they’ve brought with them a new set of problems.
“We’ve currently developed our food system to make food as affordable as possible, so we have gone to scale and specialised our food systems, very often removing crop production from livestock production on individual farms,” explains Professor Louise Manning, an agri-food policy and management specialist.
“We are seeing bio-diversity loss across many areas where food is being produced as we’ve had more monocultures. As we’ve produced more food we’ve had issues around soil and plant health, so regenerative agriculture is a way of looking at how we can produce foods in a slightly different way, where we reduce the number of inputs, and we don’t pressurise the soil as much as we have done in the past,” explains Manning, who is giving a SCItalks online seminar on regenerative agriculture in September.
“Farms are going to have to be climate smart. Many of the principles of regenerative agriculture also align with climate-smart agriculture so there is a reason to adopt many of those principles”, she says. “There is a societal imperative to implement many of these principles if we are going to meet some of our pledges around biodiversity and net zero,” she adds.
However, shifting from the existing model of agriculture to a more regenerative framework is not without challenges, particularly for farm incomes. Even if regenerative means some lower costs for farmers in terms of less fertiliser or pesticides and fuel it may also lead to lower yields - which means lower income for farmers.
Funding for regenerative agriculture is currently being pieced together in a number of ways. Some farmers are trying to address the revenue challenge by developing novel business models and finding local markets for their produce, which may help offset the decline in yield. And some food brands are trying differentiate themselves by promoting their use of ingredients developed through regenerative agriculture which can help create a premium market for these ingredients. Government funding to encourage more sustainable farming is one option because of the broader environment benefits, but right now this support remains limited.
“In a situation where you are going to have a drop in yield while you transition to new practices and the government in not prepared to support agriculture in that way, then financially it’s difficult to drive a return,” Manning says. “If the market won’t pay then farmers have a problem.”
As such, finding a way to bring regenerative farming to the mainstream may involve a bigger effort to change thinking across the entire food system.
Smarter ways of managing the food produced – and cutting the huge amounts of food waste – may mean that it’s easier to absorb the small declines in farm outputs as a result of the shift to regenerative agriculture.
“There is going to have to be a very clear balance between improving the environment condition of our farms, doing all these things that regenerative agriculture can provide, but also making sure that food is affordable. That doesn’t mean that we can’t do it, but we are going to have to have some clever thinking around it,” Manning says.
SCItalks: Regenerative agriculture - what does it mean for farmers, policy makers and citizens?
This online talk takes place on Wednesday 24 September at 4pm.
The talk is free but you should register in advance at the link above. This is the first event of the three-part SCItalks series on sustainability.
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