What is regenerative agriculture?
- Media Manager
- Oct 10, 2022
- 1 min read
WEF
Published: October 11th, 2022
Photo Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain
Regenerative agriculture focuses on improving the health of soil, which has been degraded by the use of heavy machinery, fertilizers and pesticides in intensive farming.
There may not be enough soil left to grow food to feed the world within 50 years.
Regenerative agriculture and other farming methods that don’t harm the climate can improve farmers’ incomes, as well as cutting emissions and boosting soil health.
More than half of the world’s agricultural land is degraded.
This leads to productivity losses of $400 billion a year and is a risk to food security in the future.
Regenerative farming can restore agricultural land and reduce the industry’s environmental impact, including lowering greenhouse gas emissions.
What is regenerative agriculture?
Regenerative agriculture is a way of farming that focuses on soil health.
When soil is healthy, it produces more food and nutrition, stores more carbon and increases biodiversity – the variety of species.
A teaspoon of soil contains up to 6 billion microorganisms, says Australia’s New South Wales Government. Soil is also a habitat for species including insects and fungi.
Healthy soil supports other water, land and air environments and ecosystems through natural processes including water drainage and pollination – the fertilization of plants.
