Regenerative agriculture entered the mainstream in the heady days of 2019, when environmental activists took to the streets and corporate sustainability discourse reached all-time highs.
Now, a farming paradigm once associated with ardent environmentalism is also magnetising venture capitalists while regeneratively cultivated crops are the gold standard for sustainable feedstock sourcing in the biobased industries.
Regen agriculture has caught on because it aims to address one of the biggest challenges of our time: the environmental impact of agriculture, the fourth biggest carbon emitter by sector.
The premise of regenerative agriculture is simple but could help drastically cut emissions and pollution from our food system.
It is similar to organic agriculture but has a distinctive focus on revitalising soil by maintaining the microbes and fungi that are key to the land’s natural productivity.
Maintaining soil ecosystems is almost impossible if we continue to rely on synthetic, fossil-based inputs. Here, we look at how biobased, circular inputs can help support regenerative agriculture.
What is regenerative agriculture?
Regenerative agriculture requires abandoning the idea that soil is an insert substratum where we insert our crops. Soil is a living ecosystem and can suffer varying degrees of damage.
Just like an ancient woodland has all the elements to support a diverse web of bird species, healthy soils with the right texture, water-holding capacity, microbial diversity, nutrient profile, pH, and organic matter content are key to upholding sustainable food production over the long term.
Conversely, unhealthy soil that has been abused by less ecologically sensitive forms of agriculture will lack the same resilience.
Regenerative agriculture attempts to achieve crop productivity while maintaining a living, breathing soil ecosystem and a healthy wider environment. Ultimately, regenerative farming is about leaving cropland in a state that allows our children and grandchildren to enjoy food security into the future.
How can biobased and circular products help regeneration?
Regenerative agriculture may be about returning to the basics in some respects and considering the fundamental elements of food production. However, it is not necessarily about abandoning all man-made inputs whatsoever.
Our food system right now is a major driver of ecological degradation thanks partly to the modern farming toolkit. The chemicals that protect crops from pests and help them grow are also damaging what keeps soils productive for decades to come.
In their place we need context-appropriate, sustainable inputs that are both biobased and circular.
Biobased materials and circularity are non-negotiable characteristics for regenerative inputs. Biobased products are made of the kinds of molecular compounds you would find in the natural world and are far more likely to be absorbed into the natural environmental cycles, leaving less risk of polluting residues.
Circularity is another must for regenerative farming inputs, meaning products made from side streams produced in the ordinary course of agriculture: hay cuttings, manure or other wastes. Because these never had to be grown or extracted from scratch, it reduces the overall environmental impacts of whatever products are made using them.
Stimulating soil fungi
UK-based Mycoloops’ products tick both the biobased and circular boxes. Founded by Dr Vincent Walsh, the company uses fungi, worms, as well as both closed and outdoor composting techniques, to turn agricultural and food waste into a range of biofertilisers.
Standard chemical fertilisers, such as nitrogen-rich kinds, fill the ground with one or just a few growth-promoting elements. This can unbalance the soil while over-application leads to environmental pollution. By contrast, biofertilisers do much more than dumping a single nutrient into the soil all at once, instead nurturing the ground’s growth-promoting capabilities in a more rounded way.
Mycoloop’s products are focused on delivering soil bacteria and fungi to the soil which are capable of quietly pulling free nitrogen from the atmosphere into the ground. This is a classic of both organic and regenerative agriculture: using living, breathing ecosystems of species to tend to our crops for us.
A huge barrier to the adoption of regenerative agriculture, and in turn the biological inputs of the kind Mycoloops produces, is a lack of farmer knowledge about how to implement these practices. This means that the biobased tech companies working in regenerative agriculture inputs are just as much about customer support, marketing, and education as about the tech. They need to have a consistent client support system as well as ways to whip up wider engagement and awareness of what these practices can bring.
Founder Walsh is a sustainable food and farming consultant, giving Myocloops products an unusually wide reach, especially among large corporate clients unfamiliar with sustainable growing. Walsh’s other company RegenFarmCo is dedicated to introducing farmers and landowners on how to replace monoculture with circular growing.
Kenyan demand for regenerative inputs grows
Regenerative agriculture is not just for the highly intensive farming landscapes of the global North.
In Kenya, Regen Organics is a Nairobi-based company applying a circular biobased product to give more financial security to farmers in the region. The startup is backed by Novastar, among the first and largest global venture capital investors in Africa.
Regen Organics creates organic fertilisers and animal feed inputs from organic wastes thrown away by the densely populated city of Nairobi. The highly energy-efficient, fast-growing black soldier fly larvae are the engine of their product line. The mixed feedstock is fed to the hungry larvae and within two weeks, their bodies can get processed into nutrient-rich soil inputs, upgrading a cheap mixed waste into a high-quality agricultural tool.
Demand for their products has been high. Farmers in Kenya are highly dependent on expensive fertiliser imports and sharp market fluctuations in prices can threaten their revenues. Regen Organic’s local circular solutions offer a reliable flow of essential inputs at a more predictable price.
The company is now constructing its second organic fertiliser plant in Kenya, capable of producing 7000 tonnes a year. The project is a joint venture between the Government of Kakamega and the United States Agency for International Development.
Building value chains for regenerative solutions
New products abound in the regenerative agriculture space and private capital is taking note. Yet the sector faces the same issue that afflicts all innovations – how to generate reliable demand and supply in a niche product with uncertain returns.
FoodValley is solving the problem of building markets for regenerative agriculture by bringing together anyone interested in implementing it, be it farmers, off-takers, and other stakeholders in regions across Europe. Building markets like this for regenerative food and farming means growing reliable markets for regenerative inputs too.
The organisation is a Dutch collaboration between Wageningen University, agrifood companies and the regional government.
Rather than matchmaking between single suppliers and consumers, FoodValley is organising together entire supply chains as well as regulators interested in regenerative agriculture as a policy tool. They then build value chains on top of this. Beginning with networks of partnerships first means there is less of a chance there will later be a yawning gap in supply, demand, or both.
A limited market?
Right now, demand for regenerative agriculture is relatively low. The biggest issue here is that it raises the price of food. Like organic farming, it has a reputation for being out of touch, inaccessible, and certainly not a socially equitable way of tackling environmental issues.
However, the economics of different production systems shift over time, sometimes very rapidly.
In the past, only the very rich could afford to eat a diverse range of meat regularly throughout the year. Today, a combination of technological advances and sustained government support for livestock agribusiness has lowered the cost of meat production so it is now an ordinary consumer commodity – so ordinary, in fact, that the consumer can almost forget the huge environmental costs of its production.
Massive subsidies in the EU and US still go towards large, environmentally damaging agribusiness entities, tilting the playing field the world over towards ecologically destructive practices
For a switch to regenerative agriculture to become worthwhile for both consumers and producers, we would need a fundamental shift in the incentive structures defined by agricultural policies: for example, laws that make measurable biodiversity impacts on the farm compulsory and support smaller, lower-income farms conduct the work necessary in achieving this.
Under this scenario, where compliance will become compulsory, biobased circular inputs will suddenly become part of the essential toolkit for maintaining a competitive edge on the market – much like synthetic fertilisers are today.