Just launched!

We have just launched our Agro-ecology & Regenerative Agriculture Knowledge Commons – an open source, peer-reviewed literature review of regenerative agriculture.

Our regenerative agriculture work

At Open Food Network we are actively working to support wide-scale uptake of regenerative agriculture. In our Sustainable Food Systems briefing paper for the Australian Environmental Grant-makers Network we concluded:

“The solutions are at hand for agriculture to become a driving force in the regeneration of landscapes, waterways and biodiversity, while sequestering carbon and actively reversing climate change”.

Why work on regenerative agriculture?

There are many good reasons to support regenerative agriculture but the most significant is as a response to the climate emergency. The food system contributes up to 37% of TOTAL greenhouse emissions.

The major land-use levers to mitigate climate change are carbon sequestration in soil and vegetation, reducing life-cycle emissions through a significant reduction of grain crops fed to animals, and reduction in use of synthetic fertilisers. The other major levers are reducing food waste and change of diet (which is obviously directly related to land use). Regenerative agriculture aims to sequester large amounts of carbon in soils and vegetation and significantly reduce / eliminate both use of grain crops harvested for feed to animals and use of nitrogenous fertilisers.

How does regenerative agriculture connect to our other work?

Values-based supply networks are a key enabler of regenerative agriculture. When farmers receive a fair price for food, they have more opportunity to shift practices and undertake regenerative methods. 

These resources provide a mix of research about regenerative agriculture and the systems that enable it, stories from regenerative farmers, and more.

Regenerative working

In our work around regenerative agriculture we acknowledge that agro-ecological practice is rooted in place based Indigenous knowledges everywhere. Practices restoring ecological function must be embedded in a renewal of culture for everyone, everywhere. Agro-ecological transformation cannot happen outside struggles for food sovereignty, which in turn cannot happen outside of struggles for Indigenous sovereignty. We have deep gratitude for the Indigenous knowledge holders and we seek to learn and support the expansion of agro-ecological being and doing in this context