Regenerative agriculture's effects on soil

Soil degradation poses a serious threat to sustainable food production and climate resilience and is exacerbated by intensive agricultural practices and climate change.

Regenerative agriculture, a system of farming principles and practices aimed at enhancing the biological functions of soils, has gained attention as a way to minimize further damage and offer potential solutions. However, its effects on soil health at Danish farms remains unknown due to a lack of research on and vague definitions of practices and indicators, which have so far not been translated into standardized measures.

Interdisciplinary field studies

This project aims to better understand, measure and translate the effects of regenerative agriculture on soil, thereby producing and qualifying adequate metrics for regenerative agriculture in Danish real-life settings so that the farming system may find a way into agricultural policies. To do so, we will carry out interdisciplinary field studies at selected self-declared regenerative farms in Denmark, implying soil sampling, qualitative interviews with farmers and advisers, and landscape analysis, and we will relate these materials to policy documents, historical maps, case studies from Denmark and elsewhere, and to corporate ambitions.

Four primary objectives

Exploring both the ecological outcomes of regenerative practices and the knowledge work required to format and translate these practices into metrics that can be adopted at farm level, in value chains, and inform policy, the project has four primary objectives:

1. To investigate the effects of different regenerative practices on soil health and soil carbon storage in a real-world setting, including farms across various scales.
2. To explore opportunities and barriers for translating soil indicators into scientific standards and for operationalizing regenerative practices at farm level, including a qualitative analysis of what might fall out of the picture in the process of translation.
3. To analyse how recent corporate attempts at implementing regenerative agriculture at a large-scale may affect farmers’ decisions, ideas of value chains and advisers’ work.
4. To analyse how regenerative agriculture, with its diverse practices and slowly emerging effects, can be incorporated into policy mechanisms to support a green transition.

Taken together, the four objectives allow the project to suggest qualified metrics for regenerative agricultural practices, across all levels from field, over corporate activity, to policies, and to analyse the manifold implications of such metrics.