As a former farmer myself, I know that an often overlooked climate solution lies beneath our feet; soil. Soil remains one of the largest carbon sinks, and stores more carbon than the world’s vegetation and atmosphere combined.
Regenerative farming breathes life back into our soils. Removing chemical fertilisers and pesticides from our soil’s diet allows it to retain more water, absorb more carbon, and grow healthy food.
Making the transition to regenerative practices needs careful hand holding for the farmers in the initial one to two years. Without this, the risk of a crop loss due to pest or disease attack is a eminent threat before the harvest.
Carcinogenic
One single failed harvest can derail the livelihood of these people who are already on the edge of collapse. These are the same farmers who already suffer at the sharp end of increasingly erratic weather patterns.
Today, smallholder farmers constitute 84 per cent of the farmers across the globe and produce 30 per cent of the world’s food but receive less than one per cent of the world’s climate finance. Farmers need access to climate finance. A simple financial buffer is all farmers need to protect the world’s soil and secure our future food supply.
That’s why this World Soil Day, I’m at the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification COP16 in Riyadh, arguing that farmers cannot be sidelined in the ongoing debate about climate finance.
I’ve seen first-hand what this change could look like. My story started when I was just 15. A school project on food adulteration looked at the ways food quality can be degraded by adding or replacing food substances with undeclared adulterants.
I learned that the staples of our dinner table and our desserts, rice and sugar could be laced with silica and sulphur. Even the fruit and vegetables on the market stands weren’t safe: carcinogenic pesticides and chemically manufactured ripening agents clung to them.
Pioneers
This realisation turned my world upside down. The food that was supposed to nourish us was actually poisoning us.
That’s when my father and I decided to create our own chemical-free food garden. Without formal training, we threw ourselves into traditional farming methods, rejecting synthetic fertilisers and embracing natural, organic processes instead.
After three years, we had a thriving farm producing everything from rice to spices. What started as a personal quest became a community resource. We shared surplus produce with others, using a "pay-as-you-like" system for the food we left on my doorstep.
Regenerative farming restored degraded soils and increased biodiversity. It can also boost farmers’ financially, encouraging diverse cropping and saving input costs for farmers.
This simple ‘honesty box’ system revealed a reassuring truth. People value organic food, and they’re prepared to pay for it. The locals often overpaid for the produce they took.
Inspired, I travelled across India, learning from pioneers in regenerative farming. Under the mentorship of Dr. G. Nammalvar, a leader in organic agriculture in South India, I began helping other farmers adopt sustainable practices.
Root
In 2004, I joined Save Soil Movement as a full-time voluteer to scale up my learnings and be part of a larger movement. Under the leadership of Sadhguru, I am proud to have played a vital role in transitioning 250,000 farmers to tree-based farming and regenerative agriculture.
The net income of these farmers has gone up anywhere between 300 to 800 per cent in a matter of seven to eight years.
The benefits were clear.
Regenerative farming restored degraded soils and increased biodiversity. It can also boost farmers’ financially, encouraging diverse cropping and saving input costs for farmers.
An example study showed that long-term profits improved along with the soil health: one farm saw a 78% increase in profitability despite a 29% decrease in yield.
With healthier soil, farms could withstand erratic weather patterns—holding moisture during droughts and absorbing excess water during rainy seasons due to higher levels of organic content in it. These practices also enable soils to capture significant amounts of carbon, addressing one of the root causes of climate instability.
Squeezing
There’s no doubt that globally, farmers are suffering. The weather, which has always been the farmer's constant companion and toughest opponent, has become far more extreme.
This July (2024) saw an unprecedented milestone in global temperatures: at an average of 17.16°C, it broke historical records for the wrong reasons. Across the world, the heat caused soil moisture to evaporate, leaving vegetation and biodiversity in many regions increasingly fragile and under significant stress. The effect on small farmers is a microcosm of this global change.
Added to this, flooding and other severe weather events have become more frequent. In Autumn this year Storm Boris unleashed a month’s worth of rain in just 24 hours.
Flooding ravaged Europe, affecting countries from Spain and Austria, to the Czech Republic, and Croatia. Floods can destroy harvests, impact global food supply and devastate farming communities in a way which takes years to recover from.
Money for farmers is already tight. Sluggish global markets and rising costs in every area from energy to equipment supply are squeezing farmers to the limit. How can we expect them to foot the bill for change?
Healthy
The twin crises of climate and soil are undoubtedly exacerbated by intensive farming practices, normalised and encouraged by decades of demand. However, transitioning to regenerative farming can be risky.
Even though regenerative agriculture practices can produce the same yields as chemical farming, It often involves initial drops in yield as farmers have their own learning curve to adapt to working without synthetic chemicals, which they’ve relied on for decades.
With pressure mounting, the fact that small-scale farmers, who make up 84 per cent of the world’s farming population, still are neglected in the climate conversation is a shocking oversight.
That’s why Save Soil and 4per1000 have put together policy recommendations, endorsed by 60 leading NGOs, to ensure farmers' voices are heard. They need better access to climate finance, they need more supportive policies for adopting sustainable land management practices, and they need more investment into soil regeneration.
As someone who has experienced this transformation firsthand, I know it’s possible. Farmers are ready to lead the way, but we can’t do it alone.
This World Soil day, decision-makers at COP16 could learn a lot from farmers, and invest in a future where healthy soils support a healthy planet.
This Author
Anand Ethirajalu is a former regenerative farmer, and is currently the project director at the Save Soil and Rally for Rivers movement.