Source: Reed, B. 2007. Shifting from ‘sustainability’ to regeneration. Building Research and Information, 35(6):674-680.

Available: https://doi.org/10.1080/09613210701475753

Regenerative Agricultural practices summarised:

There are six core principles of regenerative agriculture, highlighted below

Conservation vs Regenerative agriculture

Although CA and RA use slightly different definitions and place emphasis on different words, they are essentially the same. Both approaches share the same principles and can achieve the same environmental, and socio-economic outcomes if all the principles and practices are applied correctly. The principle of ‘context’ and a greater emphasis on living roots and livestock by RA help to create a bigger awareness among farmers and other practitioners about their role and function, specifically on soil health. Both approaches can regenerate (restore or improve) and protect natural resources with the potential of a drastic reduction in external inputs, even to the level of an organic standard, although there is a strong perception that RA lean much more towards the latter, while CA has the association of being using high amounts of agro-chemicals. Integra Trust’s view is to be inclusive and to accommodate both approaches and supporters (including other relevant approaches), since they have both a wealth of resources and supporters passionate about the same end-goals. However, whichever definition is used, it would be important to highlight the principles and practices, which are really having the desired impact after all. For that purpose, we will adopt the use of the all-inclusive six principles of RA illustrated by the figure above. Hence, from all practical purposes, Integra Trust sees the term “Regenerative agriculture” as inclusive and accommodating of CA and will be used from here on in this document.

Regenerative agriculture: adaptation within the context of each farmer

Extensive global and local experiences and research findings informed the Integra Trust concept development (Kassam et al., 2015; Smith, 2006; Smith et al., 2017). Central to this concept is that the introduction of complicated, multi-component technologies such as Regenerative agriculture (RA), into complex socio-economic environments create ‘wicked’ (extremely difficult) challenges and require the development of innovation systems (IS) to adapt technologies to local conditions, which critically place the farmer in the central role. Indeed, the only way this radical transformation could have happened in many countries (in most cases without appropriate research, education, training and support services in place) was the leading role of farmers themselves and the opportunities they have created to act, observe, share, learn, reflect and adapt (through constructive communication, interaction and dialogue) with other key interested farmers and stakeholders. In these cases, RA has in fact been ‘constructed’ on farms and by farmers for decades (Coughenour and Chamla, 2000).

The IS model recognises that each farmer is already on a RA development journey and has a significant level of innovation capacity. It implies that each farmer will develop and adapt a RA system in his/her own biophysical, social and economic context or reality, on his/her own pace. The Integra Trust model’s function is to create an environment and facilitate the involvement of technical, financial and infrastructure support to further enhance the farmer innovation process (for both commercial and smallholder farmers) by applying a family of initiatives and mechanisms to facilitate financing, awareness, learning, research and adaptation, all together in one holistic model.

Underlying the Integra Trust model is autopoiesis, which refers to a system capable of reproducing and maintaining itself (Maturana and Varela, 1980), such as any living system, including healthy soil or even a plant cell. It is a self-regenerative system made-up by the components and processes in its structure or network. RA’s principles per se are in effect and largely intended to protect the system as unaltered as possible thereby leaving and restoring, where necessary, as many as possible of the existing, extensive matrix of autopoietic processes that manage the particular system in place and in control (Tonie Putter, personal communication). In summary, autopoiesis is what is needed to have (information, resources, components and processes) in order to keep (sustain and regenerate) that what is required to have (healthy soil and food) alive and in good condition (with integrity) to ensure both our survival and that of our descendants. Indeed, the property of emergence (e.g. of innovation and regeneration) is important in complex autopoietic systems, as well as synergy, by which the action of the whole is more than the sum of the actions of the parts.