Like Climate change threatens farmers’ ability to produce the world‘foodResearchers and environmental advocates think they’ve found a solution: playing in the dirt.

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They say empirical evidence is accumulating that crops can be made more resilient to drought and extreme weather by improving soil health, and they want governments to offer financial incentives to farmers using ‘regenerative’ practices for climate-resilient farmland. Among these agricultural practices soil microbiome – that is, the microbial community – by rotating crops between fields and adding ‘cover crops’ to fields, rather than planting the same crop in the same field over and over again. These include plants that do not necessarily need to be harvested but that prevent soil erosion and increase soil nutrients.

“There are many ripple effects of a changing climate that create challenges for our food system,” says Rob Myers, director of the Center for Regenerative Agriculture at the University of Missouri in Columbia. “The ways to combat this are biodiversity, more organic matter in the soil and more integrated approaches.”

However, switching to such applications requires upfront investment. Researchers and farmers talking Nature They say regenerative agriculture works, but it may take a few years for farms to start seeing profits. In the United States, advocates are calling on the U.S. Congress to add more subsidies for regenerative agriculture to the Farm Bill, a massive piece of legislation that is updated about every five years and provides funding for disaster relief and farmer training. The latest version expired on September 30. Meanwhile, the latest version of the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy came into force last year and included funding for farmers using such sustainable practices.

nourish the soil

Industrial agriculture often relies on fertilizers, pesticides, and mechanical equipment to produce high-yield monocultures such as single crops such as maize (maize) or wheat. The overuse of chemicals in these products disrupts ecological processes in soil and is a leading cause of water pollution in the United States. Unhealthy soil has difficulty absorbing water or retaining nutrients.

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Between 2013 and 2017, an estimated 8,505 million tons of topsoil on U.S. farmland were lost to erosion. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations warns that more than 90% of the Earth’s soil is at risk of degradation by 2050; This could lead to increased famine.

There is no official definition of regenerative agriculture, but scientists who speak on the subject Nature He says his overall goal is to rebuild healthy soil. This starts with increasing the proportion of organic matter, including living roots and compost, to nourish the soil microbiome and recycle nutrients for plants.

Although the term is modern, the regenerative principles are ancient. Putting them into practice would mean “going back to some of the practices that we, as a human species, have relied on for thousands of years,” says Rich Smith, an agricultural ecologist at the University of New Hampshire in Durham.

keep cover

One practice thought to be regenerative is cover cropping: planting species that usually cannot be harvested, such as red clover, when commercial crops are out of season, rather than leaving the soil bare. The roots of the cover crop prevent erosion and take up excess nitrate from fertilizers that would otherwise enter streams and groundwater. When a farmer cuts a cover crop to prepare for the next crop planting, he works it into the soil, where it feeds underground bacteria and invertebrates, increasing the soil’s fertility. Only 5% of cropland in the United States was cover crop in 2022, but that figure is rising: By 2022, it was 17% higher than in 2017.

During a major drought in 2012 that wiped out corn and soybean crops in the U.S. Midwest, Myers heard farmers say that covered fields were not hit as hard as fields without extra plants. So he worked with the Conservation Technology Information Center, a nonprofit organization in West Lafayette, Indiana that promotes conservation in agriculture, and a sustainable agriculture program funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to launch the National Cover Crop Survey. researchers A survey was conducted to approximately 700 farmersand found an average of 9.6% higher corn yields and 11.6% higher soybean yields in fields where cover crops were grown during drought.

This was surprising because, says Myers, “Many people at the time thought cover crops would take away moisture and not release moisture to cash crops.”

USDA offered subsidies to farmers using cover crops. 90% of farmers who responded to the 2022-23 National Cover Crop Survey and were paid to plant cover crops said they were likely to continue the practice after funding was stopped.

valuing diversity

There is also evidence that crop rotation can improve the health and resilience of soil. Rotating crops rather than growing the same monoculture in the same field for years can improve soil health without sacrificing productivity, Smith says.

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This can be done by rotating different crops, including cover crops, in the same field over time, or by planting several crops in the same field simultaneously; this includes the ‘three sisters’ trio of corn, beans and squash. It has been grown by some Native American tribes for centuries.

A review of 20 studies analyzing the effects of crop rotation on soil longevity found that rotation of diverse species increased the abundance of microorganisms in soil by approximately 15% compared to monoculture fields and increased microbial diversity by more than 3%.¹. Rotating two or more different crops produces more nutrients, carbon and nitrogen, in the soil than monoculture.². A review of 33 papers evaluating fields where legumes and grains were grown together found an increase in yield stability from year to year compared to monoculture fields³suggests that biodiverse farms can improve food security.

“Such systems can often be more resilient to changes in weather conditions and increase disease resistance,” says Smith. “The evidence that they maintain, if not increase, yields is relatively strong.”

Seeding incentives

But farmers and researchers say the shift to regenerative agriculture could take about three years to pay off. Nature.

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Brandon Kaufman, a fourth-generation farmer in Moundridge, Kansas, rotates crops and also grazes cattle on fields in the fall and winter to fertilize the soil. When he started regenerative agriculture on the industrial business he inherited, “he didn’t have a safety net to fall back on,” he says. Government subsidies “encouraged me to try things and I gained a tremendous amount of knowledge from that.”

Federal, state and commercial programs promoting cover crops often stop after farmers switch. To support producers who provide the nation’s food by introducing these practices over the long term, Kaufman and others say the U.S. Farm Bill should include a measure to reduce farmers’ federal crop insurance premiums. USDA tested this idea during the COVID-19 pandemic by offering a $5.00 per acre insurance rebate to farmers planting cover crops. The federal program has now ended, but states such as Iowa, Wisconsin and Illinois have implemented their own versions.

Kaufman says farms can move away from industrial farming practices and towards healthier soil. He says “it just takes time” and financial incentives to get manufacturers to change. But it’s important, he adds, because “if you think about your children and your grandchildren… where will their food come from in 100 years?”