REGENERATIVE/CONSERVATION AGRICULTURE
Description: Regenerative, or also called conservation agriculture, takes a holistic approach to the land it cultivates, applying principles that ensure increased productivity and biodiversity. It is based on the good condition of the soil, which depends on the organic matter in it, which includes all living matter – plant roots, worms, microbes. Regenerative agriculture includes practices such as: Conservation agriculture encouraging minimal soil disturbance and disturbance (i.e. no tillage or also known as: No Till), use of cover crops, crop rotation, composting and reducing chemical inputs.
Benefits: Improves organic matter in the soil, which leads to a reduction or even cessation of erosion, ensuring balanced water infiltration, nutrient cycling, production of healthy and sustainable crops, biodiversity.
As a result of degenerative land management practices, much of today’s farmland has much lower levels of organic matter than years ago.
Why regenerative agriculture?
Regenerative agriculture has a number of advantages:
– it provides an answer to the challenges faced by the agricultural sector in the context of climate change, which increases extreme weather events such as droughts and storms, soil erosion, and pollinator decline. introduces sustainable farming methods;
– ensures balanced ecosystems;
– produces healthy products.
Regenerative agriculture responds to all these problems because it conserves and restores agricultural systems: it restores topsoil, increases biodiversity, improves the water cycle, makes them more resilient to climate change, and improves soil fertility.
The rules for transitioning to regenerative agriculture are not universal – approaches and techniques vary by region and even between individual producers.
