Regenerative Agriculture Practices: What Do These Look Like On The Farm?

In an earlier blog post, we talked about how regenerative agriculture is not just about this 'list' or that 'list' of farming practices.

At Materra, we take a more holistic look at regeneration as a broader process of enhancing the vitality and health of any system, whether a farm or a watershed or a community. Crucially, it is grounded in a particular mindset or worldview – an understanding that whole-system well-being involves, to quote Bill Reed, “maximum diversity of species and maximum diversity of relationships.” A regenerative approach seeks to replenish and recycle resources instead of depleting them, to encourage diversity instead of monoculture, to identify mutually beneficial relationships and dynamics and encourage them, and to care for the people involved.

While no “checklist of practices” can quite do justice to this deeper understanding of regeneration, practices ARE important. Materra’s robust agronomic and field support team works with farmers every single day and has identified the practices that are conducive to regeneration in the context of cotton farming in India. 

In this post, we share a little about what regenerative farming practices looks like on the ground on Materra’s farmer partners’ farms.

But first, let's quickly go through Materra’s approach to regenerative agriculture, based on three pillars:

Reducing Resource Use: This includes reducing carbon impact, improving water stewardship, reducing reliance on chemical inputs and implementing IPM practices.

Restoring biodiversity: This includes helping living ecosystems flourish with better soil management, crop diversity and the use of beneficial insects.

Raising farmer livelihoods: This includes co-designing with farmers, increasing farmer profits, incorporating local knowledge and building resilience in the field.

The Regenerative Agriculture Practices we follow

What this translates to practically, on a farm level, is adopting regenerative agricultural practices that

• Keep nutrients, water and other resources circulating within the farm system as long as possible. This includes using fertilisers made with organic farmyard ingredients instead of chemical inputs, using on-farm plant residue as mulch, or implementing water catchment systems in fields.

• Increase biodiversity – the diversity of plants, animals, fungi and microorganisms in the landscape – and maximise mutually beneficial relationships to keep the whole system in balance (for example, planting companion plants that attract the natural predators of cotton pests so that chemical pesticides are not needed).

• In general, foster diversity rather than monocultures consisting of a single crop: intercropping, cover cropping, green manuring, farm border tree planting etc. A diverse landscape is, by definition, more resilient than a monocrop or monoculture landscape: the interactions and synergies between different species create dynamic flows of resources, nutrients and energy that, in turn, activate new biological processes. A diverse system is also by nature resilient and adaptable to shocks and changes: a single pest invasion, disease, or adverse weather event can wipe out a monocrop field, whereas, in a diverse system, different species are adapted to different conditions, and also support each other. For example, one crop may tolerate drought or flooding better than another, so the farmer can count on at least one crop; or one plant species can attract insects that would be a pest for another plant species.

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• Eliminate or drastically reduce the amount of synthetic chemicals to protect soil, ecosystem and farmer health (for example, by using bio-inputs as fertilisers or pesticides, or using physical traps or trap crops to reduce pests). Many synthetic agrochemicals are harmful to soil life, wildlife, and humans.

• Build soil organic matter to increase fertility, soil water-holding capacity, and overall soil health (for example, through reducing tillage, using organic mulches, and cover cropping and green manuring). Soil health is the foundation of a healthy farm. For example, a diversity of microorganisms in the soil in fact helps plants to access nutrients better. Having earthworms, insects, and a good amount of organic matter in the soil also creates good soil structure: well-aerated, porous soil can absorb and retain more water, whereas, in the case of depleted, compacted soil, rainwater does not percolate and instead washes away, eroding precious topsoil and creating a vicious cycle of soil degradation.

• Increase farm climate resilience and adaptive capacity, for example by improving soil water holding capacity so that it can act as a buffer in case of either drought or flooding or by reducing erosion through practices such as mulching, cover cropping or planting trees or shrubs on farm borders.

All of these regen practices benefit farmers as well. Replacing synthetic chemicals with bio-inputs reduces the toxicity load farmers are exposed to, protecting their health. When less money is spent on external inputs, farmers get to keep more of their profit. Incorporating a diversity of plants and crops, including food crops, into the farm fields increases farmers' financial and food security. Building healthy soil and more diverse farming systems is an asset for the future, ensuring productivity, better adaptability, and a viable farming livelihood in a changing climate.

To sum up: it’s not that practices are not important — they are how we create farm-level regeneration. It’s just that regenerative agriculture should not be reduced to a checklist of practices alone, completely ignoring what the outcomes intended are. The starting point should really be — what are we trying to achieve and change in the landscape or system, and why? What makes sense to this particualr farmer and his farm and why? Once you’re clear with that, it’s easy to start identifying the appropriate practices for a given context.