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As we venture further into the pool, farmers may achieve increased biodiversity and water quality by incorporating more complicated strategies and Indigenous approaches like diversified croprotations and agroforestry. In the deep end, outcomes are sought to benefit the farmers and stewards of whole landscapes themselves.
In recent years, there has been a growing interest in regenerative agriculture, a holistic approach to farming that seeks to restore and revitalize the land while improving cropyields and overall farm profitability. This means increased cropyields and reduced inputs like fertilizers and pesticides.
Poor soils can cut cropyields by up to 50 percent—which, if we’re not careful, could result in more soil being tilled to grow more crops, which degrades more soil, which pushes us closer to climate catastrophe. And that has direct impacts on our food supply and climate.
Including noncrop vegetation alongside crops may further increase genetic diversity in a geographic area, as with prairie strips or field borders and other conservation buffers within or adjacent to crop fields. And diversity may also include the temporal diversity of croprotations.
In our farming systems, they play a key role in regenerative croprotations: breaking pest and weed cycles, fixing nitrogen in the soil and creating fertile ground for the crops that follow them. So perhaps it’s time to do yourself and the planet a ‘fava’ and eat more beans.
Importantly, many farmers also argue that profitability can be significantly increased due to lowered reliance on expensive chemical inputs, thanks to techniques such as croprotation, holistic grazing, and cover cropping that can add nutrients back to the soil.
Farmers need to have annual inspections to demonstrate delivery against those standards, ranging from controlled pesticide usage to croprotations and natural fertiliser usage. For products to be certified as organic, they must meet a series of standards that are set and audited by certification bodies (CBs).
Currently, CSP only offers SAPs for Resource Conserving CropRotations , Improved Resource Conserving CropRotations , and Advanced Grazing Management. This approach is misguided given the ample evidence that scale-neutral, management-intensive practices likely yield even greater environmental benefits.
xiii] Yields are dropping, with large proportions of the UK’s soils moderately or severely degraded. xvi] Regenerative agriculture is key to flood resilience and prevention of the decimation of cropyields. xxxix] [xl] [xli] Including temporary leys in croprotations across the UK’s arable area could sequester c.2.2
Some firms are already buying a broader range of crops from farmers to incentivize these changes, says Bande at Quantis. Bain & Company recently estimated that average annual farm emissions in Canada could be cut in half or more through croprotations, use of cover crops, reduced tillage and better nutrient management. “We
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