Looking after the land
From stewardship to regeneration
Introduction
At the University of Leeds Research Farm we are studying approaches to agriculture that move beyond simple minimisation of the impact of farming towards seeing farming as something that regenerates the land and provides valuable ecosystem services to society at large.
The world population is predicted to be 9.7 billion by 2050. The market for agricultural commodities should be booming but global food prices have been flat or declining for the last decade. Prices are low with grain production at an all-time high, even when one-third of crops end up lost as waste. Despite this, more and more land is being used to grow our food, leading to environmental degradation, loss of native forest cover and grassland. Understanding that stewardship of the land, from water to soil to plant to air, is central to the future sustainability of our food system offers an alternative vision of how what we eat could be produced in the coming decades.
The University of Leeds Research Farm is embedded in a 317 hectare commercial farming operation
Environment, soil and sustenance
Regenerative agriculture is a system of farming and grazing practices such as limiting soil disturbances and keeping soil covered. Among other benefits, such practices help rebuild soil organic matter and restore degraded soil biodiversity, which help strengthen the many beneficial functions that soil carries out. Soil functions include storing carbon to help reduce the impacts of climate change, improving water infiltration and storage, storing nutrients and supplying these to plants, filtering out chemical pollution in drainage water and maintaining habitat to support farm biodiversity.
Livelihoods & Economics
With the prevailing trends in global production and grain prices, profit margins for arable farming are tight. This squeeze on margins is just one of many pressures on the UK rural economy where average farm incomes have been stagnant for the past 15 years. In the face of the global market conditions for agricultural commodities and the downward pressure on incomes from production, farm livelihoods aren’t sustainable. We are exploring which novel agricultural practices can offer an alternative.
Regenerative approaches offer business value through reduced overheads on fuel for tillage and fertiliser use, while carbon market schemes are exploring the potential to pay farmers to lock more carbon into soils by building up soil organic matter.
Technology & Precision
There’s still a lot we don’t understand about how regenerative agricultural models could and should work - in terms of their potential contribution to climate change, the extent to which farm businesses can benefit from reduced input costs or new revenue streams via the carbon market, and the local benefit to water quality, biodiversity and soil fertility. That’s why we are using the latest, real-time sensing technology to understand the dynamics of the soil-water-plant-atmosphere system.
At the University of Leeds research farm we are at the forefront of efforts to deploy the latest technology to understand the whole system. Our critical zone observatory is installing soil moisture sensors, which allow us to observe plant-soil-water interactions, imaging techniques to monitor vegetation, boreholes to monitor groundwater movement and potential pollution from fertilisers and pig farm runoff, and systems for real-time monitoring of farming activities. The observatory hosts a cluster of lysimeters that allow controlled measurements of material and energy flows through vegetation, water and soil at the scale of the soil profile. All of these help us understand the challenges and opportunities presented by regenerative future farming models.
Soil health, human health, locally and globally
Healthy soils are important to human health not only because soil is where our food comes from, or because of the hazardous chemicals, heavy metals and pathogens that unhealthy soils harbour, but also because of the central role they play in the carbon impact of farming practices and the attendant positive or negative impact on climate change. Soil plays a key role in keeping our water clean, in feeding us, and in storing carbon, so the central importance of regenerating soils in a sustainable future can’t be overstated.
A regenerative future for agriculture
Regenerative agriculture offers a vision of farming beyond 2050 with practices that will continue to thrive and develop. It will continue to offer lessons to agriculture, including more sustainable intensive farming, that contribute to improving planetary health into the 22nd century. Regenerative agriculture starts with soil but it has the potential to do so much more. The opportunity as it becomes more mainstream is to improve farm livelihoods, feed communities, mitigate climate change, reduce flood risk, enhance biodiversity and offer cities within a region a connection to the land that feeds them. At the University of Leeds research farm we are uniquely placed to shape the future of regenerative agricultural approaches as they move into the mainstream.
Research on the Farm
Regenerative agriculture offers a vision of farming beyond 2050 with practices that will continue to thrive and develop. It will continue to offer lessons to agriculture, including more sustainable intensive farming, that contribute to improving planetary health into the 22nd century. Regenerative agriculture starts with soil but it has the potential to do so much more. The opportunity as it becomes more mainstream is to improve farm livelihoods, feed communities, mitigate climate change, reduce flood risk, enhance biodiversity and offer cities within a region a connection to the land that feeds them. At the University of Leeds research farm we are uniquely placed to shape the future of regenerative agricultural approaches as they move into the mainstream.
Research Instrumentation for Vegetation and Biological Diversity
This set of instrumentation supports the study of crop phenotyping, crop development, disease dynamics, yield, pollination, and providing of co-benefits (ecosystem services). The instrumentation will allow systematically monitoring vegetation from leaf to field to landscape scales.
Field-level hyperspectral imaging with a drone will allow linking up point measured spectra to satellite imagery. A handheld spectroradiometer will measure point spectra of crops and non-cropped areas at different growth stages. A farmers-oriented eBee Plus fixed wing autonomous drone will test how methods developed with high-end UAV can be adapted by farmers and how monitoring approaches may be potentially commercialized as data services.
A precision crop harvester will map harvest yields at meter-resolutions and link those to remote sensed time series observations. This is particularly important for testing precision agriculture approaches to crop production, as it enables checking of the uniformity of the final products. Additional investment in basic farm tractor and implements is included in this capability and required for all agriculture research operations. A portable instrument will measure leaf-level photosynthesis and chlorophyll fluorescence. The monitoring capability will utilise state-of-art workstations to performed complex GIS, airborne and satellite remote sensing analysis.
The harvester is fitted with an integrated Zeiss Corona Extreme Near-Infrared (NIR) spectrophotometer system that measures the intensity of light relative to its wavelength which along with the InProcess software allows real time measurements of dry matter content, protein and other harvest quality indicators.