This summer has seemed like a relentless onslaught of natural calamities, ranging from the terrible wildfires sending people from Hawaii to Greece fleeing their homes, to former hurricane Hilary bringing Southern California its first-ever tropical storm watch.
As the extreme weather events have taken the world by alarm, many scientists have cautioned that we are only seeing the tip of the iceberg. “Twenty years from now”, UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain recently warned, “a summer like this is going to feel like a mild summer. In terms of incredibly frenetic pace of global extremes we are seeing this summer, in terms of temperature and precipitation, that’s only going to get worse as the climate continues to warm.”
Amidst this worrying crescendo of extreme climate events, it’s clear that entire sectors may need to be overhauled—perhaps most importantly, the agricultural sector, which is coming under severe strain. As the deputy president of the UK National Farmers’ Union recently underscored, “weather used to be 50 per cent of what we do on the farms. Now it’s 80 per cent. When you look at all the extreme weather we’ve had, that is climate change in action”.
In particular, practices such as widespread intensive agriculture will need to be re-examined.
While the European Union has identified this challenge and responded by way of the European Green Deal and its farm-to-fork strategy, other heritage policies, like the bloc’s Common Agricultural Policy, are continuing to incentivize quantity rather than quality.
Unfortunately, aggressive agriculture contributes to biodiversity loss, water overconsumption, and greenhouse gas emissions. Furthermore, the European Environmental Agency (EEA) found that paradoxically, many strategies to improve agriculture sustainability may hinder overall sustainability goals from being met.
For example, efficiency gains are effective for lowering nutrient and crop losses – but by only focusing on the optimization of the system, it may lock European agriculture into a cycle that is not sustainable, rather simply optimized.
On the other hand, encouragingly, there seems to be increasing interest in alternative ways of feeding the world, which are less intensive and more sustainable. Regenerative farming presents a viable solution in the face of the climate challenges the world is currently facing. It is also experiencing a revival amongst innovative farmers and companies, the early re-adopters of an old practice in the name of sustainability.
Moving away from intensive farming—and moving back to traditional practices
Regenerative farming aims to honour sustainable farming practices—a holistic approach to farming that promotes carbon sequestration, soil improvement, watershed health, and biodiversity, with the aim of building long-term sustainability.
Regenerative agriculture contributes to enhancing the livelihoods of farmers and producers of global commodities. The net benefit of regenerative practices is that at its core, it is simply nature-friendly farming, which, of course, also means that the environment reaps long-term benefits from these sorts of practices.
Young farmers are increasingly drawn to these more holistic, nature-friendly ways of farming.
Hollie Fallick and Francesca Cooper farm together 50 hectares on the Isle of Wight, their core belief is that the health of soil, animals, and humans are all interlinked.
In their virtuous system, they produce meat and eggs for their direct-to-consumer business while chickens co-graze in the company of cows, next to free-range pigs that graze not only on grass but also on kale and bean “cover crops” sown to enrich the soil and maximize its nutrients.
While the environmental aspect might be what attracts farmers to the concept of regenerative agriculture in the first place, what causes them to maintain the practice is the tangible effect regenerative agriculture has on their bottom line.
A third-generation farmer in Cambridgeshire, Martin Lines, said his farm has reduced fuel by 65% and its herbicide and fungicide bill by 70% and 60% respectively. At a time when everything is more expensive, these economies are more than welcome.
Quite a bit further south from the Isle of Wight, Italian entrepreneur Gaetano Buglisi has developed a number of innovative projects in the south of Italy, marrying regenerative agriculture with Agriculture 4.0 techniques to reclaim land which would have ordinarily been unsuitable for agricultural activities due to the high salt content.
Today, Buglisi cultivates more than 1,000 hectares of fruit despite difficult soil conditions. The land’s salinity made it incompatible with most crops and conventional farming techniques, the entrepreneur decided to think outside the box, finding particular varieties of exotic fruits like mangoes that do well with the high salinity.
An aspect of regenerative agriculture is also meeting the land where it is, and adapting to its conditions. As summers become ever hotter and soil conditions ever more hostile, projects like those of Gaetano Buglisi, which combine traditional wisdom—choosing the right varietal for the soil conditions—with modern technology, will become more and more necessary.
It’s not just farmers and innovative entrepreneurs who have recognized the advantages of regenerative agriculture, large multinationals are also waking up to its benefits. At the beginning of July, Nestlé announced that it had launched an initiative to bring regenerative agriculture practices to the wheat farms within its DiGiorno pizza supply chain.
The initiative aims to bring regenerative agriculture practices to over 100,000 acres of farmland. Within its roadmap towards net zero by 2050, the company aims to continuously increase its ingredients sourced from these practices.
Necessity breeds innovation
As the world picks up the pieces of a shockingly destructive summer that has brought home the brutal reality of climate change, agriculture will need to continue to evolve and adapt.
The examples of Hollie Fallick and Francesca Cooper, Gaetano Buglisi, and Nestlé show that innovative individuals and private companies show that regenerative agriculture should be a part of the vocabulary being used when discussing how to move forward and how to maximize our agricultural yield while minimizing our environmental impact.
Future generations will thank us, and the planet will too.
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