Regenerative Agriculture: Five Ways We Can Save Our Soil
Humans are directly linked to the land. For millennia, farmers have kept us healthy by growing food in the soil. Now farmers have another vital role: keeping our soil healthy to not just feed our future but to preserve our planet as a beautiful, benign, and productive habitat for all life on Earth.
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Healthy people need healthy food, and to grow healthy food farmers need healthy soil. A single teaspoon of healthy soil contains more living organisms than there are people on the planet. It’s a dynamic ecosystem that is fundamental to life on Earth—but it’s fragile and fading fast. Over the decades we have intensified agriculture to feed a growing population, and this has inadvertently degraded our soils to a critical point: The topsoil used to grow 95 percent of our food is disappearing ten times faster than it is being replaced. At this rate, we are starting to count how many harvests we may have left.
However, given a chance, this complex combination of minerals, organic matter, air, water, and life can bounce back to health. This is the aim of regenerative agriculture—not merely restoring but positively improving the health of our soil and the wider nature it supports. Since 2018, the Leckford Estate, run by the supermarket chain Waitrose, has actively explored ways to balance the productivity we need now with the sustainability we need for the future through a shift to more sympathetic farming practices that work with nature. Underpinned by a holistic approach that appreciates how every farm is different and that not everything will work everywhere, Leckford is applying these broad principles of regenerative agriculture in ways they hope will inspire everyone to more consciously care about our soil.
Minimize Soil Disturbance
The plow is credited with revolutionizing agriculture, turning the soil to incorporate crop residue and weeds while aerating compacted ground ready for sowing. But we now understand how disturbing the soil damages its health and productivity. Practices of plowing, deep tillage, and powered cultivation breaks up soil’s natural structure, dries it out, and can lead to unhealthy, bacterially dominated soils. The result is an imbalance in the ecosystem, accelerated soil erosion, nutrient loss, and the release of carbon into the atmosphere. It does not have to be this way. A couple of alternative approaches are used at Leckford. The direct drill creates a slit into which the seed is dropped before being pressed closed by a roller with minimal disturbance; the strip-till drill combines precision farming and a shallow till depth to turn only enough soil to allow the crop seeds to bed in—leaving most of the soil structure intact as nature intended.
Maximize Crop Diversity
The post-war move to monoculture saw science supersede nature to intensively grow the same crop in the same field year after year. Synthetic fertilizers and pesticides artificially replace soil nutrients and suppress pests and diseases, but at a cost to soil health and the wider environment—especially river systems. Regenerative agriculture seeks to restore balance through the age-old practice of crop rotation, growing different crops every year to allow a field to recover naturally. Leckford’s fields have a 12-year rotation of diverse cash crops including wheat, oilseed rape, barley, and oats. But it starts with three years of herbal ley, a multispecies pasture of herbs, grasses, and legumes that actively restore soil health. And promoting biodiversity extends across the whole farm to its woods and hedgerows: A decade ago Leckford had about ten sown plant species across its crop rotations but now has more than 30. The “whole farm” approach to biodiversity has a further, important societal value: It maintains the aesthetic of the countryside—a beautiful landscape teeming with life.
Keep Soil Covered
Soil is a living entity, so bare earth exposed to the elements is at risk: It overheats and dries in summer while freezing in winter; and it’s more easily eroded by wind and rain. It can take a thousand years to create an inch of topsoil, but the UK loses two to three million tons per year, much washed away by intense rain events. However, keeping fields covered with plants all year armors the soil, providing shade and deflecting rainfall. At Leckford, the gaps between harvests are planted with a mixed species cover crop, perhaps multiple species of brassicas, legumes, and cereals. This protects the soil, maintains the living root, promotes biodiversity, and provides fodder for grazing animals that all help keep the soil healthy until the next cash crop. Crucially, it also helps Leckford build its soil’s organic matter content by 0.1 percent a year, increasing soil water holding capacity by over 20,000 liters per hectare per year—improving resilience against drought and reducing the risk of flooding.
Integrate Livestock
There has always been a symbiotic relationship between plants and animals, and regenerative agriculture capitalizes on this. Grazing herbivores deposit their nutrient-packed dung pats that help fertilize the soil. Their dung also contains seed heads that support insects and beetles that are then eaten by birds and small mammals like hedgehogs. Leckford’s herbal ley is grazed mostly by cattle, with sheep grazing the cover crops between harvests—all contributing their dung to the farm’s wider ecosystems. Indeed, this year Leckford noted lapwings, an endangered bird, following their sheep and feasting from their dung. With the UK suffering a 19 percent decline in species since 1970, livestock are playing their part in nature’s recovery.
Maintain the Living Root
While not planting a field may seem like giving it a rest, soil actively needs plants to stay healthy. As a living ecosystem, soil is fed and fueled through a constant interaction between the world above and below the ground—facilitated by plants. Powered by the sun’s energy, plants use photosynthesis to convert carbon dioxide and water into sugars for growth. Some of these sugars are actively exuded into the soil to feed the soil microbiome and sustain the crucial partnership between above-ground and below-ground biology. Understanding this, Leckford actively keeps plants in its fields for as much of the year as possible: its cover crops and herbal ley include deep-rooted brassicas that help prevent the soil becoming compacted and legumes whose bacteria-filled nodules fix nitrogen in the soil. All this biomass also builds soil’s organic matter, with just a 0.1 percent increase storing an extra nine tons of CO2 equivalent per hectare.
Regenerative agriculture is not a precise science: It’s a holistic approach that relies on interactions and cumulative actions across the varied landscape of a whole farm. But it’s underpinned by a simple idea—work more closely with nature to put back more than you take out. For Leckford, it’s the start of a shift in consciousness that encourages UK farmers and consumers to place a higher value on the health of our soil and ultimately the quality of the food grown in it. By embracing more sympathetic, natural, and traditional methods of farming with a modern twist, we can keep every teaspoon of soil as healthy as possible.
