The world need not choose between feeding a larger population and restoring its soils, a new book argues — and the farmers who can do both work just 12 per cent of the world's arable land. In Whole Earth Farming: Smallholders and the Great Regenerative Transformation, development expert Hugh Locke makes the case that helping half of the world's smallholders, about 240 million farming families, switch to regenerative agriculture and agroforestry could produce all the additional food that population growth demands by 2050 while improving the land rather than depleting it.

The Global South has roughly 475 million smallholder farms, most on plots under two hectares, and together they already grow about 30 per cent of the world's food. Yet credit, markets and technical training remain thin or absent for most of them, while research funding, infrastructure, extension and finance have for decades flowed to large-scale agriculture. Locke reads that gap as an opportunity: if farms producing a third of humanity's food do so without institutional backing, closing even part of the gap could yield outsized gains in output, soil health, water quality and biodiversity.

"The world's smallholder farmers are too often treated as beneficiaries of development assistance when they should be recognized as architects of the next agricultural transformation," said Locke, who co-founded the Smallholder Farmers Alliance in Haiti in 2010. Farmers in that programme who receive basic support see yields rise about 40 per cent on average and household incomes climb 50 to 100 per cent.

The extra food, in his account, does not come from conventional intensification — more chemicals, more irrigation, more land — but from regenerative techniques fitted to local conditions: cover cropping, composting, rotation, agroforestry, reduced tillage and integrated livestock. Locke resists reducing regeneration to a fixed menu; the test, he says, is outcomes — healthier soils, recovering biodiversity, better-conserved water, more food and better-off farming families. The book draws on 21 stories from 18 countries, from Colombia and Thailand to Canada and the Netherlands.

Drawing on peer-reviewed research, the book estimates that if some 240 million smallholder farms shifted to regenerative practice across about 480 million hectares, their soils and vegetation could remove as much as 0.72 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide a year while soil carbon is accumulating, and that reduced synthetic fertiliser use could lift the combined climate benefit to 0.6–0.85 gigatonnes of CO2-equivalent a year at mature adoption.

Locke sets limits on that claim: soils do not absorb carbon indefinitely, sequestration slows after one to three decades as a new equilibrium is reached, and results vary with climate, soil, practice and starting point. Regenerative agriculture, he stresses, cannot be treated as an offset for emissions elsewhere. Shagun reported for Down To Earth.

Source: Down To Earth