Can humus rescue the future? Regenerative agriculture offers openings for the organic sector
When the talk turns to agriculture these days, a regenerative approach is something that comes up especially often. What’s that movement all about? And is regenerative agriculture a real opportunity to revolutionise the food business? Benedikt Bösel and Julius Palm, two pioneers of the regenerative economy, explain.
Benedikt Bösel, founder and managing director of Gut und BöselOrganic farmer Benedikt Bösel, with his Gut und Bösel farm in Brandenburg, offers a model business when it comes to regenerative farming. He was one of the first farmers in Germany to convert his farm – which now covers 3,000 hectares – to regenerative agriculture and forestry. In the spring of 2018, two years after he took over the farm from his parents, he encountered a straightforward trigger for changing his approach. “The spring drought was so extreme. Everything in the fields was yellow and brown. No bugs in the air, even though spring is actually the most important growing phase. That made it clear I needed to invest not just in equipment and innovation, but in the soil and the ecosystem,” he says.
Back then, this agrarian economist was still essentially a lone wolf. When he planted trees in his cropland and added more plants and animals to boot, people wondered what was supposed to be so innovative about all that. But today the concept has shown its worth. Two hundred head of cattle graze in the fields all year round, fertilising the soil, regenerating it sustainably, and encouraging biodiversity. Bösel combines agroforestry with arable farming and animal husbandry to reap multiple harvests from the same ground each year. Fields are broken up with rows of trees and surrounded by strips of wildflowers. Successive fruit crops and intercropping also play an important role in regenerative agriculture, so the ground stays covered all year round and the soil’s nutrient content stays as balanced as possible.
By now, regenerative agriculture has become a promising approach for getting nature and farming back into harmony. And that’s exactly where it ties in with the organic concept, which treats protecting resources and the environment as essential. Biodiversity, protecting the soil, and protecting water are principles for an organic, sustainable way of doing business. But another important factor is to remedy the damage that has already been done to nature. The regenerative agriculture movement is drawing even more attention to that aspect.
Julius Palm, Vice-Managing Director at followfoodAmong the supporters for Bösel’s work is the food company followfood. Both want to show that regenerative agriculture is scalable. In 2019 followfood founded a soil rescue fund that supports farmers who want to invest for regenerative agriculture. “We channel off one percent of our revenue and invest it in agriculture operations that think beyond just going organic and want to operate regeneratively as well,” explains Julius Palm, followfood’s Vice-Managing Director. In 2023 that made it possible to put the first products from regenerative systems onto the market.
Unlike organic farming, regenerative farming doesn’t forbid chemical, synthetic pesticides and chemical fertilisers. So it’s an approach that’s also generally possible for conventional farms. Yet regenerative methods can be an incentive for conventional farms to operate more sustainably, and in the best case, can even lead them to convert to organic methods with regenerative goals.
Bösel also sees this as an opportunity for the organic sector to do a better job of foregrounding the principles of organic farming. “The regenerative approach offers a different, additional pathway into sustainable farming. We can rouse more people’s enthusiasm for natural, organic ways of working, and thus expand their awareness and the market as well. I think it’s less about what terminology we use than about facing up to the underlying challenge and finding the common ground between organic and regenerative approaches, and working out how we can do the most with the best possible areas of potential,” Bösel explains. Palm adds, “For me, organic is the minimum standard. But often organic approaches still think in terms of the same old structures – after all, we haven’t been able yet to prevent enough soil erosion, retain water in fields, and build the soil’s fertility. That’s where regenerative agriculture helps, by trying to imitate natural ecosystems as far as it can.”
The prevalence of the topic shows that there’s a great need to better understand the connection between soil and the entire system of agriculture and the food industry.
It’s all about making environmental damage visible. The global food system is responsible for something more than a third of all greenhouse gases, and thus one of the biggest engines driving climate change.2 And here regenerative agriculture is a significant lever for transformation, as a complement to organic farming.
“In any case our goal has to be to look at the whole. It’s not enough to compensate somehow for carbon dioxide emissions – in other words, if a company calls itself climate-neutral but is still harming biodiversity. Because the only reliable insurance for the future is healthy soil and an intact ecosystem,”states Bösel.
Sources:
[1] Steffens, G. & Göring, M. (2023). Eat it! Die Menschheit ernähren und dabei die Welt retten (1st ed.). Penguin Verlag.
[2] IPCC. (2019). Climate Change and Land: an IPCC special report on climate change, desertification, land degradation, sustainable land management, food security, and greenhouse gas fluxes in terrestrial ecosystems. [P.R. Shukla, J. Skea, E. Calvo Buendia, V. Masson-Delmotte, H.-O. Pörtner, D. C. Roberts, P. Zhai, R. Slade, S. Connors, R. van Diemen, M. Ferrat, E. Haughey, S. Luz, S. Neogi, M. Pathak, J. Petzold, J. Portugal Pereira, P. Vyas, E. Huntley, K. Kissick, M. Belkacemi, J. Malley, (eds.)]. www.ipcc.ch/srccl/
3 questions for …
Benedikt Bösel
Agrarian economist, founder and managing director of Gut und Bösel
“The only reliable insurance for the future is healthy soil and a healthy, intact ecosystem.”
