Measuring the transition to regenerative agriculture in the UK with a co-designed experiment: design, methods and expected outcomes

Abstract

Abstract

Regenerative agriculture is promoted as a farming system that can improve agricultural sustainability, address soil degradation, and provide ecosystem service benefits. However, there remains limited evidence for the quantifiable benefits of a widespread transition to regenerative agriculture on soil, biodiversity, and crop quality, particularly at the landscape scale, and poor integration of findings across disciplines. Social and cultural aspects of the transition, such as the positioning of regenerative agriculture as a grassroots movement, farmers' perspectives on defining regenerative practices, and social or political barriers to implementation, are harder to quantify and often overlooked in evidence-based approaches. 
Here, we present the detailed methodology for our interdisciplinary, co-designed landscape-scale experiment measuring changes in soil health, biodiversity, yield, and grain quality, as well as social and political dimensions of the implementation of regenerative practices. Our unique approach, through the co-production process, the landscape-scale, and the focus on a systemic transition instead of individual practices, will bring strong evidence of the benefits of regenerative agriculture for sustained agricultural productivity, the mitigation of climate change and biodiversity depletion in agroecosystems. Our research aims to guide future studies transforming theoretical ecology into testable hypotheses in real-world systems and provide actionable evidence to inform agricultural policies in the UK and beyond.