How Farmers Are Finding Greener Ways To Produce Food, From East Anglia To Andhra Pradesh In India

(MENAFN- The Conversation) An innovative sustainable farming method which avoids fertilisers and pesticides in favour of natural soil regeneration has helped farmers in India increase profits while also benefiting wild birds. Our new research shows how“zero budget natural farming” has more than doubled farmer profits.

Ecologists like us evaluate low-tech agroecological approaches that harness the power of nature and people to produce food with skilled labour, knowledge and active management of ecological functions like pollination and soil nutrient cycling.

We've been studying two promising agroecological systems, both devised by farming communities to address the soil degradation that threatens the long-term future of food.

Zero budget natural farming is a sustainable farming system that is being heavily incentivised by the government of Andhra Pradesh, a state on the east coast of southern India. Zero budget natural farming is generating considerable interest from other countries, including Brazil, Mexico, Zambia and Indonesia.

The other farming system we've been examining is“regenerative farming”, increasingly popular in the UK, US and Europe. While similar, these two farming systems have very different cultural framings.

Regenerative farming is a set of principles that aims to regenerate rather than degrade soil. Farmers are encouraged to monitor their own outcomes and adaptively manage their soils.

Zero budget natural farming aims to boost crop yields and reduce costs by ending the use of synthetics (fertilisers and pesticides) and regenerating natural ecological functions. Farmers are encouraged to work together and share resources such as straw, manures and soil treatments at village level.

To understand whether these two systems could really be scalable, we measured their outcomes for nature, food production and profitability on real working farms. We focused on these key aspects because there is often a direct trade-off between them. Having more nature locally can mean that less food is produced on farmed land.

Nature-friendly farming can lower overall food production or profits, especially at scales larger than individual fields and farms, because land is taken out of production for wildlife-friendly strips around fields, for example .

If there is no change in overall food demand, this creates a risk of driving even greater nature loss and greenhouse gas emissions elsewhere, as agriculture continues to expand into natural habitats.

For agroecological systems to be a solution, they must be highly productive, minimising the footprint (total area) of agriculture on Earth, while supporting enough wild nature to maintain ecological functions such as soil nutrient cycling and pollination.

Some native birds such as the Malabar pied hornbill rely on natural forests to thrive. Chris Barber71/Shutterstock

Our research shows that the shift to zero budget natural farming more than doubles farmer profits and does not reduce food production relative to chemical farming. These farms also support more wild birds , especially those that help control pests by eating insects and other invertebrates, such as drongos, pipits and warblers. For the rice-dominated small farms we studied in south India, zero budget natural farming avoids the direct trade-off between nature and food production.

But this agroecological farmland is no substitute for natural forest in terms of bird conservation. Forests are vital for birds threatened with extinction, many of which cannot thrive on farmland of any kind, such as the Malabar pied hornbill.

Read more: Regeneratively farmed is the new buzz label on supermarket shelves – but what does it actually mean?

The situation is different for the arable farmers we're working with in eastern and southern England, who are farming regeneratively. This approach is challenging to define so we calculated a“regenerative score” for each farm based on the consistency with which farmers adhered to the five principles of regenerative farming . Those principles include keeping the soil covered to reduce erosion and increase its organic content, and increasing crop diversity.

Becoming more regenerative on this scale has clear benefits for some indicators of healthy soils such as earthworm numbers. But our initial data indicated some declines in yield at field scale. This is likely to be larger when scaled up to landscapes, because of crop choices. The regenerative system in these arable farms is more sustainable by many measures, but not quite as productive, in terms of food output, as intensive chemical farms.

The future of farming

Things might look different in the future, as accelerating climate change makes the soil's abilities to absorb and retain water much more important. Regenerative farming potentially offers resilience to climate change, through better soils and higher diversity, but this is challenging to demonstrate empirically. For now, regenerative farming in the English farms where we work is not a straightforward solution that delivers high food production and better nature, like zero budget natural farming in India.

One reason for the difference might be that UK arable farms are largely constrained to working with crop varieties engineered to thrive in very intensive systems with high chemical inputs. These varieties have weaker roots and potentially lower disease resistance than more traditional crop varieties. Part of the solution here is to breed crop varieties that thrive in agroecological systems without heavy chemical fertiliser use (so-called“lower input systems”). For industrial agriculture systems, this will involve the plant breeding industry.

Zero budget natural farmers are encouraged to use traditional crop varieties, and are more likely to re-use their own seeds, rather than buying them in every year. Perhaps this means their crops are better adapted to lower input conditions, with stronger roots or better positive associations with soil microbes. To cement its future, those who live and work in the region are calling for zero budget natural farming to be recognised by buyers, so farmers can access new markets for sustainable produce and take advantage of higher retail prices .

In both cases, the key to long term success may be economic, rather than purely scientific, with changes in the crop breeding industry, markets and value chains as important as how farms themselves are managed.

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