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Regenerative Agriculture: Opportunities and Challenges to Catalyze Profitable and Resilient Agriculture in the Context of Climate Change. W/ Case Studies from the Iberian Peninsula
Abstract
What is Regenerative Agriculture? Why is it important? What kinds of benefits does it bring? How is it different from normal/conventional agriculture? Can it be financially productive? What kinds of changes need to take place? Where can I start?
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This report examines sustainable land management (SLM) and its potential as an integrative strategy to address multiple environmental and sustainable development objectives. It highlights the linkages between SLM and soil health, land degradation, food security, climate changes mitigation and adaptation. The report is intended to provide information and guidance on fostering SLM, to a wide range of stakeholders involved in agriculture, environmental management and sustainable development. It aims to support investment in SLM by the Global Environment Facility (GEF), particularly investments in pursuit of Land Degradation Neutrality. The report explores the anthropogenic and natural drivers of land degradation, and the potential environmental and socioeconomic benefits of SLM; examines the role of SLM in addressing the critical challenge of global food security; describes the key processes of land degradation and their impacts, as the basis for developing good practice guidance on SLM that is scientifically sound and robust;
proposes principles for SLM that promote soil health, productivity and ecosystem services; presents a framework for identifying SLM practices suited to the context and objectives; provides guidance on identifying indicators for evaluation of a site in terms of land potential and soil condition, and indicators for monitoring outcomes of SLM investments; discusses the barriers to adoption of good practice for SLM; and provides recommendations for developing and implementing SLM programs in ways that optimise global environmental benefits.
Recommendations are provided to guide investment in support of SLM, and planning of SLM programs.
Also available at http://www.stapgef.org/sustainable-land-management-environmental-benefits-and-food-security-synthesis-report-gef
Agroforestry is increasingly being recognized as a holistic food production system that can have numerous significant environmental, economic, and social benefits. This growing recognition is paralleled in the USA by the budding interest in regenerative agriculture and motivation to certify regenerative practices. Current efforts to develop a regenerative agriculture certification offer an opportunity to consider agroforestry’s role in furthering regenerative goals. To understand this opportunity, we first examine how agroforestry practices can advance regenerative agriculture’s five core environmental concerns: soil fertility and health, water quality, biodiversity, ecosystem health, and carbon sequestration. Next, we review a subset of certification programs, standards, guidelines, and associated scientific literature to understand existing efforts to standardize agroforestry. We determine that development of an agroforestry standard alongside current efforts to certify regenerative agriculture offers an opportunity to leverage common goals and strengths of each. Additionally, we determine that there is a lack of standards with measurable criteria available for agroforestry, particularly in temperate locations. Lastly, we propose a framework and general, measurable criteria for an agroforestry standard that could potentially be implemented as a standalone standard or built into existing agriculture, forestry, or resource conservation certification programs.
The ultimate impact of climate change on human systems will depend on the natural resilience of ecosystems on which societies rely as well as on adaptation measures taken by agents, individually and collectively. No sector of the economy is more reliant on climate than agriculture. Evidence from the American settlement process suggests that societies can successfully adapt to new climatic environments. Whether and how much agriculture will manage to adapt to a changing climate remains an open question in the empirical economics literature, however. This article reviews the existing evidence on weather and/or climate impacts on agricultural outcomes from the economics literature, with a focus on methodological questions. Some key econometric issues associated with climate impact measurement are discussed. We also outline important questions that have not been adequately addressed and suggest directions for future research.
https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-resource-100517-022938
Open Access Link: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/50t4t5j9
Most cropland in the United States is characterized by large monocultures, whose productivity is maintained through a strong reliance on costly tillage, external fertilizers, and pesticides (Schipanski et al., 2016). Despite this, farmers have developed a regenerative model of farm production that promotes soil health and biodiversity, while producing nutrient-dense farm products profitably. Little work has focused on the relative costs and benefits of novel regenerative farming operations, which necessitates studying in situ , farmer-defined best management practices. Here, we evaluate the relative effects of regenerative and conventional corn production systems on pest management services, soil conservation, and farmer profitability and productivity throughout the Northern Plains of the United States. Regenerative farming systems provided greater ecosystem services and profitability for farmers than an input-intensive model of corn production. Pests were 10-fold more abundant in insecticide-treated corn fields than on insecticide-free regenerative farms, indicating that farmers who proactively design pest-resilient food systems outperform farmers that react to pests chemically. Regenerative fields had 29% lower grain production but 78% higher profits over traditional corn production systems. Profit was positively correlated with the particulate organic matter of the soil, not yield. These results provide the basis for dialogue on ecologically based farming systems that could be used to simultaneously produce food while conserving our natural resource base: two factors that are pitted against one another in simplified food production systems. To attain this requires a systems-level shift on the farm; simply applying individual regenerative practices within the current production model will not likely produce the documented results.
Introducing cover crops in irrigated areas may play a relevant role in providing ecosystem services such as erosion control, clean water and mitigation of soil degradation. Our objective was to determine the effect of replacing the traditional winter fallow in crop rotations of irrigated semi-arid areas by a cover crop on organic C and N sequestration, aggregate stability, water infiltration, and nitrate leaching. The study was conducted comparing barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) and vetch (Vicia sp. L.) cover crops to the fallow over the course of 10 years, with most variables measured every other year. Compared to the fallow, cover crops promoted C sequestration at a rate of 180 kg C ha −1 year −1 and N retention at a rate of 13 kg N ha −1 year −1. By the end of the experiment, the barley cover crop had enhanced the soil structural stability, the water holding capacity, the infiltration rate and the saturated hydraulic conductivity with respect to those characteristics in the fallow, with the vetch treatment having an intermediate effect. Compared to the fallow, barley mitigated the nitrate leaching risk by reducing inorganic N content in the top 4 m of the soil profile. Improvements in C and N stocks and soil and water quality may be attained by using cover crops in degraded soils.
Agroforestry systems and tree cover on agricultural land make an important contribution to climate change mitigation, but are not systematically accounted for in either global carbon budgets or national carbon accounting. This paper assesses the role of trees on agricultural land and their significance for carbon sequestration at a global level, along with recent change trends. Remote sensing data show that in 2010, 43% of all agricultural land globally had at least 10% tree cover and that this has increased by 2% over the previous ten years. Combining geographically and bioclimatically stratified Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Tier 1 default estimates of carbon storage with this tree cover analysis, we estimated 45.3 PgC on agricultural land globally, with trees contributing >75%. Between 2000 and 2010 tree cover increased by 3.7%, resulting in an increase of >2 PgC (or 4.6%) of biomass carbon. On average, globally, biomass carbon increased from 20.4 to 21.4 tC ha−1. Regional and country-level variation in stocks and trends were mapped and tabulated globally, and for all countries. Brazil, Indonesia, China and India had the largest increases in biomass carbon stored on agricultural land, while Argentina, Myanmar, and Sierra Leone had the largest decreases.
This article highlights the need for collaborative research on ecological conflicts within a global perspective. As the social metabolism of our industrial economy increases, intensifying extractive activities and the production of waste, the related social and environmental impacts generate conflicts and resistance across the world. This expansion of global capitalism leads to greater disconnection between the diverse geographies of injustice along commodity chains. Yet, at the same time, through the globalization of governance processes and Environmental Justice (EJ) movements, local political ecologies are becoming increasingly transnational and interconnected. We first make the case for the need for new approaches to understanding such interlinked conflicts through collaborative and engaged research between academia and civil society. We then present a large-scale research project aimed at understanding the determinants of resource extraction and waste disposal conflicts globally through a collaborative mapping initiative: The EJAtlas, the Global Atlas of Environmental Justice. This article introduces the EJAtlas mapping process and its methodology, describes the process of co-design and development of the atlas, and assesses the initial outcomes and contribution of the tool for activism, advocacy and scientific knowledge. We explain how the atlas can enrich EJ studies by going beyond the isolated case study approach to offer a wider systematic evidence-based enquiry into the politics, power relations and socio-metabolic processes surrounding environmental justice struggles locally and globally.
Key words: environmental justice, maps, ecological distribution conflicts, activist knowledge, political ecology
The possibility of reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by ruminants using improved grazing is investigated by estimating GHG emissions for cow-calf farms under light continuous (LC), heavy continuous (HC) and rotational grazing, also known as multi-paddock (MP), management strategies in Southern Great Plain (SGP) using life cycle assessment (LCA). Our results indicated a GHG emission with these grazing treatments of 8034.90 kg·CO2e·calf-1·year-1 for cow-calf farms in SGP region, which is high, compared to that for other regions, due to the high percentage (79.6%) of enteric CH4 emissions caused by relatively lower feed quality on the unfertilized rangeland. Sensitivity analyses on MP grazing strategy showed that an increase in grass quality and digestibility could potentially reduce GHG emission by 30%. Despite higher GHG emissions on a per calf basis, net GHG emissions in SGP region are potentially negative when carbon (C) sequestration is taken into account. With net C emission rates of -2002.8, -1731.6 and -89.5 kg C ha-1·year-1 after converting from HC to MP, HC to LC and from LC to MP, our analysis indicated cow-calf farms converting from continuous to MP grazing in SGP region are likely net carbon sinks for decades.
Healthy soil is one of the most critical resources for the health and sustainability of ecosystems, including agroecosystems. Although the agroforestry community has long been convinced of the soil health benefits of agroforestry practices, many of such practices remain to be fully accepted by the mainstream agriculture community. Agroforestry, as a sustainable land management practice, has shown solid evidence of its role in improving soil quality and health based on at least four decades of data gathered from the world over. This thematic issue presents 28 papers that add further to the body of knowledge to reaffirm that agroforestry can improve the major measurable soil metrics that define soil health. Collectively, these papers show that agroforestry has the ability to (1) enrich soil organic carbon better than monocropping systems, (2) improve soil nutrient availability and soil fertility due to the presence of trees in the system, and (3) enhance soil microbial dynamics, which would positively influence soil health. It is imperative that agroforestry, as part of a multifunctional land-use strategy, should receive increased attention in our policy discussion for the future of soil and soil health.
