Regenerative farming strengthens drought resilience, according to a ‘first of its kind’ field study carried out on French farms.
Soil Capital found yields on farms using the most regenerative practices were less impacted by drought than those using fewer regenerative practices, declining 8% compared to 22%.
Across cereal crops in drought-affected regions of France, regenerative practices reduced yield losses by at least 10% in around 85% of cases analysed.
The data came from 1,262 commercial farms, comprising over 331,000 hectares of land, participating in Soil Capital’s regenerative farming transition programmes between 2021 and 2024.
“For the first time, we are moving beyond anecdote or modelling to show, through large-scale independently verified field data, how regenerative agriculture can help protect production,” said Soil Capital chief impact officer Andrew Voysey. “That begins to move resilience from a high-level concept towards something that can be understood and managed as a financial risk factor.”
He added: “We are now deepening this analysis with industry and academic partners to help convert these insights into more informed, risk-adjusted decision-making.”
The study focused on crops including winter barley, winter rapeseed, spring barley, grain corn and potato and winter wheat, and assessed regenerative practices including cover cropping, reduced tillage intensity, residue retention and organic matter application.
Soil Capital estimated that enough wheat to produce 130 million baguettes could be saved if regenerative practices were adopted by farmers across France.
Professor Erik Mathijs, head of agricultural, food and resource economics at Belgian university KU Leuven, which partnered with Soil Capital, called the findings “unusually strong”, and added they created an “important opportunity to combine our economic and statistical expertise with their agronomic and data science capabilities”.
“There has long been academic interest in how different farming practices can moderate the damaging effects of climate stress on farm output, but what has held us all back is the lack of robust field-level data across large geographies and multiple successive years,” he said.
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