References
Regenerative agriculture — the practices involved and its position within modern agricultural systems
Abstract
Agriculture alone produces 10% of UK greenhouse gas emissions, despite constituting less than 1% of gross domestic product (GDP). Climate mitigation targets set by the United Nations Paris Climate Agreement look to land management strategies to limit global warming below 2°C. At present, it is estimated that a minimum of 40% of earth's farmed land is poorer in quality than it was in the 1970s. Simultaneously three quarters of the earth's species are being lost within a short geological time frame described as the sixth, mass extinction event. Unlike the past five mass extinction events, the cause this time is exclusively the result of human activities, of which land use change associated with agriculture is one. Increasingly the argument for changing how we farm is gathering momentum. This article aims to provide a review of regenerative agriculture practices, and a reasoning as to why it should play a part in a sustainable farming future. The green revolution enabled the planet to keep feeding an expanding global population with production of cereal crops often tripling with only a 30% increase in land use; what is now needed is an ability to maintain production while providing part of the solution to the twin global threats of climate change and biodiversity loss.
The National Food Strategy calls on the countryside to be utilised to ‘sequester carbon and restore nature’ (Dimbleby et al, 2021), by encouraging diverse methods of land management. With grasslands or pasture currently occupying 70% of the globe's total agricultural area (Ramankutty et al, 2008; Bengtsson et al, 2019), how this resource is managed in the future will have large impacts on farming's environmental impact. Grassland co-evolved with herbivores over millions of years to create carbon-rich soils (Follett and Reed, 2010), however current estimates suggest over half of their soil carbon has been lost (Sanderman et al, 2017). Consequently, their once net cooling effect on the globe has been superseded by a net warming effect (Chang et al, 2021). This transition from a greenhouse gas sink to source is attributed to land conversion from natural ecosystems to grasslands, grasslands to arable use, and an intensification of pasture for livestock production (Follett and Reed, 2010). The International Plan for Climate Change recognises the need for improved carbon sequestration associated with food production, estimating that 89% of all agricultural greenhouse gas production could be mitigated through changes in farm practices (Smith et al, 2008).
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