Inspiring Regenerative Agriculture Projects Around the World

—

by

Erin Alladin
in

Humanity has the knowledge and experience to restore landscapes on a massive scale, creating regions where the needs of humans and the needs of ecosystems are met simultaneously and sustainably. Learning about these projects is a powerful way to arm ourselves against feelings of powerlessness, despair, and paralysis. When we know what change is possible, we know what to fight for.

This is a growing post that will be updated with new projects over time. 

Quick Links:

Africa’s Great Green Wall

The concept, announced by the African Union in 2007, was to combat desertification across the continent of Africa by planting a multi-country belt of trees 10 miles wide and more than 8,000 km long. At first, the scheme appeared both impractical (who would nurse the seedlings planted on swathes of uninhabitable land?) and ineffective (tree-planting in the Sahel had a history of failure). However, after a slow start, the idea of the Great Green Wall has blossomed into a patchwork of effective locally-led initiatives that are grounded in what actually works to combat desertification in each particular place.

The eureka moment for land management specialists came when they realized that farmers, driven by necessity, were finding ways to adapt traditional practices to be resilient to drought and make their land more productive instead of less. Rather than create new wilderness, as with the original plan for the wall, it was more effective to adopt land management strategies from the farmers. In 2021, an additional $14 billion US was pledged to see the Great Green Wall become a reality. 

Regional initiatives include:

  • In Niger, nurturing trees that sprout naturally and growing crops around them. By 2011, 12 million acres in Niger were restored. The method is now called “farmer-managed natural regeneration.” 
  • In Burkina Faso, revolutionizing a traditional pit-planting technology called zai to add organic matter, capture more rain, and integrate the tunneling services of termites to improve soil.

Learn More About Africa’s Great Green Wall

Articles

Web Pages

Films

  • Dodd, Mark, Director. The Man Who Stopped the Desert. 1080 Film and Television, 2010. 1 hr., 4 min. 

Reports

Holistic Planned Grazing

Developed to heal brittle grassland environments, holistic planned grazing is a method of raising livestock that improves the health of the landscape instead of depleting it. 

The central tenet of holistic grazing is that soil depletion and desertification are caused not by the number of animals that graze a landscape, but by the amount of time the animals spend in one place. Ecologist Allan Savory pioneered the system after studying desertification in his home region of southern Africa and observing the differences in the behaviours of wild and domestic herd animals. By causing their animals to mimick the behaviour of wild herds, farmers can heal the soil instead of degrading it.

Savory encourages farmers to revise the way they think about agriculture to one simple aim: “creating a landscape and harvesting sunlight.” Harvesting sunlight means growing grass, which converts the sun to calories, which are consumed by livestock. The production of sunlight-consuming plants is paramount, so decision-making focuses on the long-term health of the landscape. Every other goal of generating products for market becomes a side-effect of that central aim.

Learn More about Holistic Planned Grazing

Videos

Websites

Web Pages

Scholarly Articles

The Loess Plateau Restoration

The Loess Plateau has been inhabited for a million and a half years, and has supported agriculture for more than 10,000, making it one of the oldest sites of settled agriculture in the world. It was once the political centre of China, and the people it supported became the world’s largest ethnic group. 

Loess itself is a sedimentary soil that is blown down from the grinding glaciers of the Himalayas. It sometimes forms layers that are hundreds of metres thick. Loess can be wonderfully fertile, but just like with other soil types, productivity depends on having enough organic matter mixed in. Over millennia of farming, the plateau became less and less productive. Deforestation of the level areas was problematic enough; when people began clearing the hillsides as well, erosion increased dramatically. Unable to grow enough produce, people turned to herding sheep and goats, which stripped the landscape even further. By 1,000 years ago, the cradle of Chinese civilization was dominated by poverty and cyclical famines. 

I995, the Loess Plateau was the most eroded place on earth with just ten-percent vegetable cover. Dust storms from the region now reached as far as Beijing, and they contributed to climate change by trapping the sun’s heat close to the earth. Ninety-five percent of the plateau’s fertility had run off into the Yellow River, which had become famous for being choked with silt. 

That is the point at which China assembled a team of experts from within the country and around the world. They spent three and a half years consulting with local communities to find out which existing practices were already effective and which ones were destructive. Overcoming initial suspicion, they collaborated on a plan that would make the plateau’s residents the co-architects, executors, and beneficiaries of a plan that would halt erosion, restore the important Yellow River watershed, sequester carbon, rebuild natural fertility, improve air quality, and establish a resilient balance of forests and farmland. Today the Loess Plateau is green again and millions of people have lifted themselves out of poverty.

Learn More About the Loess Plateau Restoration

Videos

Case Studies

Scholarly Articles