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Regenerative agriculture and its potential to improve farmscape function.

1. Introduction

1.1. international impetus to improve ecosystem function, 1.2. conventional agriculture and its alternatives, 1.3. comparing performance, 1.4. article outline, 3.1. early intentions, 3.2. current popular intentions, 3.3. current academic intentions.

An approach to farming that uses soil conservation as the entry point to regenerate and contribute to multiple provisioning, regulating, and supporting services, with the objective that this will enhance not only the environmental, but also the social and economic dimensions of sustainable food production.

3.4. Public, Corporate, and Farming Following

3.5. unconfirmed definition, 3.6. an intent to and history of innovation, 3.7. consumer markets and existing certification schemes, 3.8. ecosystem service markets, 4. discussion, 4.1. current and early alignment on the intentions of regenerative agriculture.

• Repair the damage its supporters perceived had been done to natural resources and regional communities through conventional agriculture.
• Rodale identified that progress towards regenerative practice would be iterative and be achieved through increased natural complexity.
• Sampson highlighted a role for financial motivators in this process.
• The target resources for regeneration were identified—soil, biota, water, human endeavor, and energy [ 2 , 3 ], with the availability of all but energy to be increased. Energy, in nonrenewable and synthetic forms, was to be reduced and the capture of natural sources maximized.
• Soil fertility, integrated pest management, advances in plant breeding, and integrated crop-animal systems were flagged as pathways to achieving regenerative and, ideally, a sustainable agriculture [ 51 ].
• Practices were perceived to be so successful that many have used them to define the movement [ 34 , 37 ].
• An intention to maintain iterative practice based on function principles that reflect the early resources, e.g., soil, water, biota, human, and energy, permeates the movement.
• Current academic work is growing to accept regenerative agriculture. Acceptance has focused on bringing the work of successful farmers to light [ 38 , 48 , 49 ]. Critical work continues to call for greater consideration of context and a validation of claims from successful practitioners [ 37 , 76 ].

4.2. Sources of Potential

• How do we ensure performance?
• How do we define regenerative agriculture?

4.3. Other Agricultural Movements

4.4. assessing agricultural system performance, 4.5. quantifying, refining, and iterating towards higher levels of farmscape function—the ippi mechanism, 4.6. a definition for regenerative agriculture.

Any system of crop and/or livestock production that, through natural complexity and with respect to its contextual capacity, increases the quality of the product and the availability of the resources agriculture depends upon; soil, water, biota, renewable energy and human endeavor.

5. Conclusions

• As a movement, regenerative agriculture has, since the 1980s, consistently focused on rebuilding or increasing the availability of the resources agriculture depends upon in the attempt to achieve a sustainable agriculture.
• The movement has substantial support, consumer markets, interested corporate parties, and most importantly, farmers who claim to have provided the missing link between early conceptualization and current regenerative performance (claims which have been critiqued academically). However, an increased appreciation of system interaction is beginning to shift academic opinion.
• Ensuring that regeneratively focused systems perform is essential in maintaining and building movement momentum. Herein, the authors have proposed a new Farmscape Function framework that will monitor change in agricultural resources over time and track relationships with system expenses, certainty, and land condition.
• A new Intention, Principle, Practice, and Indicator (IPPI) mechanism will enable further data driven innovation within farms and across communities of practice.
• Monitoring for the above framework and mechanism will be best undertaken by farmers and agronomist-extension workers and contribute towards establishing a systems agronomy.
• These tools will quantify system performance and facilitate iteration to higher levels of function, enabling a situation where a regenerative agriculture can be confirmed as any system of crop and/or livestock production that, through natural complexity and with respect to its contextual capacity, increases the quality of the product and the availability of the resources agriculture depends upon, soil, water, biota, renewable energy, and human endeavor.
• Future work will seek to identify regenerative systems by implementing the Farmscape Function framework and IPPI mechanism. Addressing limitations of communication, context determination, and cost-effective measurement of indicators will be major focus points. It is expected that digital agriculture will play a major role in overcoming these limitations. Collaborations will be sought with farming groups and academics within the fields encompassed by the dimensions of regenerative agriculture to assist in identifying and refining indicators.

Author Contributions

Institutional review board statement, informed consent statement, data availability statement, acknowledgments, conflicts of interest.

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O’Donoghue, T.; Minasny, B.; McBratney, A. Regenerative Agriculture and Its Potential to Improve Farmscape Function. Sustainability 2022 , 14 , 5815. https://doi.org/10.3390/su14105815

O’Donoghue T, Minasny B, McBratney A. Regenerative Agriculture and Its Potential to Improve Farmscape Function. Sustainability . 2022; 14(10):5815. https://doi.org/10.3390/su14105815

O’Donoghue, Tom, Budiman Minasny, and Alex McBratney. 2022. "Regenerative Agriculture and Its Potential to Improve Farmscape Function" Sustainability 14, no. 10: 5815. https://doi.org/10.3390/su14105815

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