Measuring the transition to regenerative agriculture in the UK with a co-designed experiment: design, methods and expected outcomes

Summary

Regenerative agriculture is promoted as a farming system that can improve agricultural sustainability, address soil degradation, and provide ecosystem service benefits. However, there remains limited evidence for the quantifiable benefits of a widespread transition to regenerative agriculture on soil, biodiversity, and crop quality, particularly at the landscape scale, and poor integration of findings across disciplines. Social and cultural aspects of the transition, such as the positioning of regenerative agriculture as a grassroots movement, farmers’ perspectives on defining regenerative practices, and social or political barriers to implementation, are harder to quantify and often overlooked in evidence-based approaches. Here, we present the detailed methodology for our interdisciplin