Regenerative agriculture is gaining attention as a potential solution to multiple challenges facing modern food production, including declining soil health, biodiversity loss, and the need for more climate-resilient farming systems. The core idea is to move beyond simply ‘sustainable’ practices – maintaining the status quo – to actively improving the environment while still producing food. However, despite growing interest from both advocates and the food industry, robust scientific evidence demonstrating the benefits of regenerative agriculture across varied conditions has been limited.^[2] Many claims about its effectiveness lack comprehensive data, particularly when considering whole farming systems and long-term impacts.
Researchers at the University of Cambridge are addressing this gap through two distinct but complementary projects, focusing on gathering real-world evidence in partnership with farmers in the UK. These projects acknowledge a key problem in regenerative agriculture research: the context-dependent nature of practices and outcomes. What works well on one farm may not work on another due to differences in soil type, climate, and existing farming methods.
The first project employs a replicated large-plot trial. This involves systematically testing combinations of regenerative principles – such as reduced tillage, cover cropping, and crop residue retention – on experimental plots of land. This controlled approach allows researchers to isolate the effects of different practices and identify which combinations are most effective. The second project takes a different tack, working directly with active farm businesses as they transition to regenerative methods. This ‘farmer-led quasi-experiment’ tracks changes in farm performance over time, using a scoring system to assess the adoption of regenerative principles. This approach prioritizes practical feasibility and addresses the knowledge needs of farmers directly.
A key challenge identified by the researchers is the difficulty in defining ‘regenerative agriculture’ itself. The term is broad and can encompass a wide range of practices, some of which are more established and well-understood than others. This lack of a clear definition can lead to confusion and inconsistent application of regenerative principles. To address this, the projects emphasize co-design with farmer stakeholders, ensuring that research is relevant and useful to those on the ground. Maximizing knowledge exchange between researchers and farmers is also crucial, allowing for adaptation of practices to specific farm contexts.
The study highlights the importance of interdisciplinarity. Effectively evaluating regenerative agriculture requires expertise from multiple fields, including agronomy, ecology, economics, and social science. Understanding the socio-economic impacts of regenerative practices – such as changes in input costs and farm profitability – is just as important as measuring environmental outcomes.
Furthermore, the researchers acknowledge the long-term nature of transitions in farming systems. It takes time for changes in soil health and biodiversity to become apparent, and short-term funding cycles can make it difficult to conduct the long-term research needed to fully evaluate the benefits of regenerative agriculture. This is particularly relevant given that insect pest populations and their responses to climate change can also exhibit time lags^[3][4]. For example,^[3] demonstrates that warmer temperatures can lead to increased yield losses due to insect pests, but the full extent of these losses may not be immediately apparent. Understanding how regenerative practices can build resilience to these pressures requires long-term monitoring and evaluation.
The study implicitly builds on earlier work demonstrating the vulnerability of grain crops to insect pests under climate change^[3]. By focusing on improving soil health and biodiversity, regenerative agriculture may offer a way to mitigate these risks, creating more resilient agroecosystems that are less susceptible to pest outbreaks.^[4] suggests that temperature extremes can disrupt trophic interactions within insect communities, potentially leading to population explosions or crashes. Practices that promote diverse and stable ecosystems – such as cover cropping and reduced tillage – could help to buffer against these disruptions.

References

Main Study

1) Measuring the socio-economic and environmental outcomes of regenerative agriculture across spatio-temporal scales

Published 18th September, 2025

https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2024.0157

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