Diversify crops in time and space

Planting the same crops on the same fields, year after year, strips soil of nutrients and allows pests and weeds to flourish. In regenerative agriculture, farmers rotate different types of crops over time. This helps limit pest infestations and nourishes beneficial microbes in the soil with a more diverse diet. Rotating between nitrogen-fixing crops like soybeans and nitrogen-hungry crops like corn can reduce the need for fertilizers.

• Principle: Diversifying crops in space and time supports resilience, productivity, and diversity
• Practices: Crop rotation, interseeding, relay planting and biodiversity strips or agroforestry

Can regenerative agriculture reverse climate change?

Around 22% of anthropogenic greenhouse gases come from agriculture, forestry, and other land uses, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). One model also estimates that agricultural land use has contributed significantly to the loss of carbon from the soil over 12,000 years – 133 Pg C from the top 2 meters of soil, or 8% of total global carbon soil stocks.

Yet soils are one of the Earth’s most important carbon sinks, holding more carbon than all of the world’s vegetation plus our atmosphere combined. When practices that maximize carbon inputs to soils, such as planting cover crops, are combined with practices that minimize carbon losses, like no-till, soils can sequester significant amounts of carbon each year. Regenerative agriculture has the potential to transform agriculture from a source of greenhouse gases towards net carbon drawdown.