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Regenerative Agriculture Literature Review
  • Agro-ecology & Regenerative Agriculture Knowledge Commons (with a focus on Climate Change)
  • Introduction
    • Purpose of this document and how to contribute
    • Why regenerative agriculture?
    • What is Regenerative Agriculture?
  • Part 1: Physical Science Underpinning Regenerative Agriculture
  • Physical cycles and interactions
    • Carbon sequestration
      • Soil carbon
      • Vegetation and carbon
    • Water cycle
    • Other nutrient cycles
      • Role of Fungi
      • Mineral nitrogen use and impacts
  • Biodiversity
  • Production Systems
  • Grazing
  • Cropping
  • Trees
  • Pigs and poultry
  • Measurement of impacts relative to industrial agriculture
  • Land degradation and productivity
  • Human health
  • Challenges of measuring complexity
  • Part 2: Social sciences and regenerative agriculture
    • Identifying, mapping and accounting regenerative agriculture
    • Barriers to adoption of regenerative agriculture
    • Enablers for adoption of regenerative agriculture
    • Pathways to Regenerative Agriculture
  • References
    • Introduction
    • Soil carbon
    • Vegetation and carbon
    • Water Cycle
    • Role of Fungi
    • Mineral nitrogen use and impacts
    • Grazing
    • Cropping
    • Trees
    • Pigs and poultry
    • Land degradation and productivity
    • Human health
    • Measuring complexity
    • Identifying, mapping and accounting
    • Barriers and Enablers and Pathways
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  1. Introduction

Why regenerative agriculture?

PreviousPurpose of this document and how to contributeNextWhat is Regenerative Agriculture?

Last updated 4 years ago

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At Open Food Network we are actively working to support wide-scale uptake of . In our for the Australian Environmental Grant-makers Network we concluded:

“The solutions are at hand for agriculture to become a driving force in the regeneration of landscapes, waterways and biodiversity, while sequestering carbon and actively reversing climate change”.

There are many good reasons to support regenerative agriculture but the most significant is as a response to the climate emergency. The food system contributes up to 37% of TOTAL greenhouse emissions ().

The major land-use levers to mitigate climate change are carbon sequestration in soil () and vegetation () and reducing life-cycle emissions through a significant reduction of grain crops fed to animals (; ) and reduction in use of synthetic fertilisers (; ). The other major levers are reducing food waste and change of diet (which is obviously directly related to land use). Regenerative agriculture aims to sequester large amounts of carbon in soils and vegetation and significantly reduce / eliminate both use of grain crops harvested for feed to animals and use of nitrogenous fertilisers.

These significant opportunities are often obfuscated by the way emissions data is presented (e.g emissions associated with the manufacture of fertiliser are not counted as agricultural emissions) including methane or by the lag between new understanding of carbon cycles and inclusion in climate models used for decision making.

“When a system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence have the capacity to shift the entire system” Ilya Prigogine

regenerative agriculture
Sustainable Food Systems briefing paper
IPCC Special Report on Climate Change and Land, 2019
Bossio et al, 2020
IPCC Special Report on Climate Change and Land, 2019
UNCCD, 2017
Harchaoui & Chatzimpiros, 2018
Le Noë, et al 2019
Dorin and Joly, 2019