Modern farming has led to significant soil degradation due to excessive tillage by ultra-heavy machinery, compacting the topsoil. Regenerative practices offers a solution to ensure food security, write Emeritus Professor Leon Hugo and post-graduate student Jean Hugo.
Following the initial hunter-gatherer phase of civilization, agriculture emerged as the primary human occupation. With the advent of the agricultural revolution and subsequent industrial revolution, technology became an integral part of agricultural production systems. Modern farming, however, has led to significant soil degradation.
Monocropping has reduced soil fertility and intensive agriculture has contributed to the loss of biodiversity. Expansion of agricultural land leads to the clearance of large tracts of indigenous vegetation, contributing to the loss of habitats.
Dependence on chemical inputs has also led to the development of pesticide-resistant pests and negatively impacted human health through exposure to harmful chemicals. The heavy use of synthetic fertilisers and pesticides has polluted waterways and harmed aquatic ecosystems.
Increased greenhouse gas emissions have led to air pollution and the exacerbation of climate change. As a result of these and other negative impacts, soil loses natural fertility. Poorer production leads to more fertilisers needed.
Impact on food production
To continue to ensure food security, the potential of the soil must be artificially boosted – a downward feedback system. Other socio-economic negative trends that follow on the heels of industrialised farming methods are the reduced need for labour due to mechanisation, leading to loss of jobs and income, rural depopulation, and the decline of rural communities, disrupting social life.
This hugely impacts age-old food production methods that are becoming even more inadequate due to erratic weather patterns like extreme heat, prolonged droughts and flash floods in recent years. These factors collectively threaten long-term agricultural sustainability, social cohesion, and environmental health. Truly an unsustainable situation.
There is a strong movement globally to move away from large-scale intensive techno-farming practices back to local-scale environmentally friendly approaches, based on restoration of the quality of the natural resource base. Several eco-friendly farming endeavours, each having its special characteristics and farming techniques, developed over the past decades.
Terms to describe them include conservation farming, permaculture, organic farming, integrated organic farming, regenerative farming, sustainable farming, holistic farming, deep bed farming, and more. The definition of each differs but all of them have the following in mind: it conserves land, water, plant and animal genetic resources, is environmentally non-degrading, technically appropriate, economically viable, and socially acceptable.
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What is regenerative farming?
Regenerative farming is a system of farming principles and practices that increases biodiversity, enriches soils, improves watersheds, and enhances ecosystem services. Regenerative agriculture aims to capture carbon from the atmosphere, in soil, and above-ground biomass, reversing current global trends of atmospheric accumulation.
It tries to revert to ancient farming methods where animals roamed the land, foraging and depositing manure, thus building up the soil. Retaining all water flow by various means such as ditches, retaining walls, dams, mulching, etc., is ingrained into regenerative agriculture – preventing erosion, increasing groundwater supply, and keeping all (non-crop) vegetation matter for mulching.
Regenerative agriculture is about working with nature’s natural cycles to provide nutritious food with a low environmental footprint. The regenerative concept focuses on replacing nutrients lost to inevitable offtake (such as food, fibre, or fuel) from natural sources. Many desert environments are nowadays being turned into productive land in this way.
There are 10 basic principles involved:
- Retain soil productivity. Soil is the basis of food production. Avoid soil disturbance through heavy machinery tillage and thus keep organic ingredients of the soil in a healthy state of biodiversity.
- Stay organic. Use limited chemicals, fertilisers, and insecticides thus reducing the cost of production. Apply the principle of biodynamics whereby cow dung and other excrement are used as fertiliser.
- Design with nature. Select farming practices according to soil, climatic and topographic conditions thus minimising costly input of added irrigation and contouring.
- Intensive grazing by rotating grazing plots. The current grazing strategy is to take cattle off the land as soon as overgrazing starts to develop. This is a departure from the normal methods of grazing land management by reverting to the ancient ecological way in which nature operated. Herds of game used to graze an area intensively and then moved on, letting the grass recover before the next round of grazing.
- Recycling of all materials and waste. Apply the principles of recycling, reuse, and reduce.
- Diversification. Combining animal grazing, poultry, sheep, pigs, and various types of crops.
- “Keep and use what you have”. Keep vegetation cover, biodiversity, and soil by retaining rainwater downflow.
- Intercropping. The companion planting method of growing one crop alongside another. The purpose is to increase yields by doubling up on available growing space. It also creates biodiversity, which attracts a variety of beneficial and predatory insects.
- Prohibit soil exposure by keeping soil covered with growing crops/grass. Use cover crops (plants grown between the main cash crops) after commercial crops have been harvested; thus, increasing water infiltration. Growing crops extract CO2 emitted into the atmosphere and act as bio-sequestration of CO2 thus minimising pollution.
- Economy of scale. Keep farming at the small local scale, in harmony and assisted by existing traditional knowledge and expertise as well as local available labour, tools and machinery; and markets. “Small is beautiful” instead of “bigger is better”.
Modern crop production and grazing farming have developed into two separate specialised agricultural systems. There is a need to integrate crop production and grazing into an integrated circular open system – the one supplementing the other. Soil is the growing medium for the grass on the land which feeds the cattle whose dung in return feeds the soil, enabling it to continue supplying necessary nutrients for the grass on the land. To include grazing effectively the integration of various smallholdings needs to be made.
Adapting to a new way of farming
An adaptation of traditional subsistence farming referred to as “new-era farming”, is developing. It refers to regenerative agricultural producers who are embracing modern techniques, technologies, and approaches to farming.
It highlights the need to develop from using only traditional farming methods to the inclusion of more innovative practices without damaging the environment. Advanced technologies such as drones, IoT (Internet of Things) devices, and precision agriculture to enhance productivity and efficiency without the negative elements of monocultural practices are used.
Regenerative agriculture will not happen spontaneously by itself. One needs to be aware that:
- Basic training is required.
- More personal time of farmers is required due to excluding of machinery.
- Careful planning. Managing crop rotation, recirculation, etc. takes much organisation.
- The switchover from commercial to regenerative systems can take a lengthy period before producing full results. Interim seed money (capital) is required.
- For crop farming, it is most productive in small-scale enterprises.
- Rotating grazers requires more land to be effective.
A final word
Regenerative small-scale farming is not to suddenly replace large-scale capital-intensive farming. South Africa still needs (and will in the future need) big farms to supply food for the growing urban population.
In Africa, people are moving to urban areas at the fastest pace the world has ever seen, with almost 1 billion people projected to live in cities by 2050. To halt this process, one has to empower rural communities to become self-sufficient. The urgency to incorporate the rural population in the productive farming sector thus requires a new broad-based approach to farming.
There should be a well-balanced gradual shift from “multi-million dollar” farming enterprises, as being the only productive system, to a harmoniously integrated system where rural agricultural self-sufficiency plays an important role in ensuring food security on a sustainable basis.
How to communicate the principles of sustainable farming to the relevant landowners, in a pragmatic way, is of prime importance.
*Prof Leon Hugo is an Emeritus Professor, geography department, University of Pretoria; and Jean Hugo is a post-graduate student in video technology, Tshwane University of Technology.
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