Healthy Soil, Healthy Food, Healthy People (H3): Co-designing a regenerative agriculture trial with farmers

Assessing the impacts of regenerative agriculture farming practices
A green farming tractor seeding a field

Overview

This research aims to understand the beneficial impacts of regenerative agriculture* farming practices on soil health, biodiversity, wider environmental outcomes, crop yields and food quality, through the co-design of an experimental trial with farmers. Listening to farmer voices, acknowledging farmer expertise and the 'practical wisdom of those who are closest to the ground' (Beacham et al., 2023), may enhance the applicability of findings and implementation of new farming practices, and identify approaches that are responsive to local conditions (Jackson et al., 2021). This research project is part of WP3 of the H3 programme.
* Despite lacking a consistent definition, regenerative agriculture is described as "a farmer-led approach to land management innovation aimed at restoring soil health" (Jaworski et al., 2023: 2), with practices adapted to local farming contexts. See also (H3, 2022, 2021).

People involved

A multidisciplinary team of academics from social and natural sciences are working in partnership with farmers from two farm cluster groups. The clusters are existing networks of farmers that have formed voluntary peer support networks. The two farm clusters regularly organise farmer-led meetings and guest lectures to discuss farming innovations and share knowledge with peers. These clusters cover 25 farming sites, including mixed and arable farms using a range of farming systems, from conventional to regenerative agriculture practices. 

This research stream is thoroughly a co-production stream, in that from the outset it has been designed as a project that works 'with' rather than 'on' farmers.

(Researcher, H3)

Key project activities

Initial online conversations with farm cluster leads
The farm cluster leads are also part of a project working group that meets regularly.
Farmer-led cluster meetings
The research team attended farmer-led cluster meetings in-person to introduce project aims, learn about farmer interests and concerns, and co-design trial methods.
Co-designing trial methods
Researchers engaged in in-depth discussions as well as participative mapping with farmers regarding the methods and locations of the trial, and the choice of practices to be monitored. Joint decisions were made about data to be collected and how and when it should be sampled, using farmers’ local knowledge about appropriate times for monitoring key bird or insect species, as well as identifying measures (e.g., soil carbon) of interest to farmers.
Meetings with individual farmers
A member of the research team met with individual farmers to clarify questions, learn more about the land within the clusters and negotiate details of the trial methodology. 

Co-production principles

Knowledge

Researchers highlighted the value of farmer expertise and local knowledge in this project:
"I always consider them to be the source of knowledge… they do know a lot, and some of them, they’ve been farming for more than 50 years." (Researcher, H3)

Relationships

The research team noted the importance of taking time to build relationships with farmers involved in the project:
"We needed farmers on board, so I needed to build that personal contact with them, to make sure they were really interested, that they were happy to be part. So, this was very important. It meant being able to take time to visit them one by one. This takes time." (Researcher, H3)

Inclusivity

A variety of approaches were used in meetings to discuss and negotiate the design of the trial with farmers:
"In these meetings we brought, you could say, props… understanding that people don't engage in the same way, so this working around this big printout of the landscape was extremely useful because it was very easy for the farmers to just grab a pen or a marker and start finding their own fields and having a conversation around this object." (Researcher, H3)
 

Find out more about this project

Related references

Beacham, J. D., Jackson, P., Jaworski, C. C., Krzywoszynska, A., & Dicks, L. V. (2023). Contextualising farmer perspectives on regenerative agriculture: A post-productivist future? Journal of Rural Studies, 102, 103100. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2023.103100 
H3 (2021). H3 Research consortium respond to the National Food Strategy. Prospects for more sustainable food production. https://h3.ac.uk/h3-research-consortium-respond-to-the-national-food-strategy-prospects-for-more-sustainable-food-production/
H3 (2022). H3 landscape-scale regenerative agriculture: introduction and update. Retrieved 22 August 2023 from https://h3.ac.uk/h3-landscape-scale-regenerative-agriculture-introduction-and-update/
Jackson, P., Cameron, D., Rolfe, S., Dicks, L. V., Leake, J., Caton, S., Dye, L., Young, W., Choudhary, S., Evans, D., Adolphus, K., & Boyle, N. (2021). Healthy soil, healthy food, healthy people: An outline of the H3 project. Nutrition Bulletin, 46(4), 497-505. https://doi.org/10.1111/nbu.12531