Regenerative agriculture can foster a ‘transformative approach to ecological farming and soil recovery’, a new paper published in the CABI Agriculture and Bioscience journal has claimed.
The paper, Regenerative Agriculture: its Meaning, Rationale, Prospective Benefits and Relation to Policy, authored by Dr Nicholas Bardsley of the University of Reading, notes that as global agriculture faces intensifying soil degradation and climate disruption, there is a ‘need for a deeper re-evaluation of how food is produced and what it means to farm regeneratively’.
As it suggests, while regenerative agriculture is gaining traction around the world, its definition requires further evaluation, not through fixed practices but through outcomes. According to Bardsley, the essence of regenerative agriculture is to strengthen ecological cycles – nutrient, carbon, and water flows – while improving soil function, biological activity, and resilience.
With this in mind, regenerative agriculture should be viewed as a flexible model adaptable to local contexts.
Soil regeneration
Soil science is essential to regenerative agriculture, the paper suggests, with recent evidence indicating that biological processes, such as those driven by plant-microbe interactions, can rebuild soil organic matter and structure far more rapidly than was previously thought, enabling effective soil regeneration.
‘Regenerative farmers are not just conserving what’s left – they’re striving to rebuild what’s been lost,’ as the paper puts it.
Ecological and social effects
The wider ecological and social effects of regenerative agriculture are also explored in the paper, including carbon sequestration, reduced reliance on synthetic fertilisers and pesticides, biodiversity recovery, and improved resilience to drought and economic pressures.
At the same time, the paper highlights what it says are ‘systemic barriers’ to the wider uptake of regenerative agriculture, including ‘the lack of long-term public research funding for systems-level trials, narrow conceptions of evidence-based practice, and policy frameworks – like the UK’s Environmental Land Management scheme – that fall short of incentivising whole-system change.’ Read more here.
