Regenerative agriculture is a holistic farm management approach that, among other goals, actively promotes healthy soils.
Pioneering farmers and scientists have shown that a regenerative approach can result in more resilient and cost-effective agriculture, and thus represents an effective approach to help climate-proof farms. At the same time, regenerative agriculture can contribute to significantly lowering farm emission: decreasing use of high-emission inputs, and increasing carbon stored in agricultural soils to provide a stable and natural carbon sink.
Despite the large potential benefits to society and the environment, there are many barriers for farmers to adopt sustainable or regenerative farming. For example, they must learn about and implement new practices, and likely require additional investments.
To reward regenerative practices and incentivise more widespread adoption, there are a number of financial schemes that can benefit current regenerative farmers and incentivise future regenerative farmers: issuing and selling carbon credits, certification schemes to increase sale prices of their products, government agri-environmental schemes, lower farm insurance and loan rates, etc.
All of these financial schemes require precise and reliable estimates of soil carbon content and other properties overtime. However, this is currently unavailable on a large scale. Measuring soil properties is difficult, expensive, and has low precision. Similarly, farmers require support to assess the effect of farm management choices on their resources, and new tailored tools to help them with tactical and strategic decision-making.
The EU-funded AgriCapture project responds to this fundamental need for simple, precise and low-cost tools to support adoption and scaling of regenerative agriculture.
The project will develop a systematic, robust and flexible platform for quantifying, verifying and supporting regenerative practices that result in soil carbon capture. We strongly leverage satellite data as well as farmer participation to ensure accuracy, cost-effectiveness and value to end-users. The results will benefit farmers and food companies, as well as allow certifying of organisations to scale up and automatise their processes.
AgriCapture will co-develop the platform together with key stakeholders (farmers, cooperative, agri-processors, agri-food companies, public bodies, certification agencies, etc.) in five use-cases from across Europe. We will also engage the larger farming ecosystem to facilitate knowledge exchange and to promote our results. Dedicated business planning activities will result in the launch of operational services by the end of the project.
