Exploring Regenerative Agriculture

FB09

Individuals looking to explore the principles of Regenerative Agriculture and receive guidance on delivering positive outcomes from agricultural practices focused on soil health, water and air quality, carbon capture and biodiversity. The course can be taken as a standalone course or as the first step of a three part programme to becoming a Regenerative Agriculture Practitioner in arable systems.

Able to demonstrate practical experience

8 February 2024, Online

£215 + VAT

One day virtual course

5 BASIS, 5 NRoSO

Dr Elizabeth Stockdale, Head of Farming Systems Research, NIAB & Richard Harding, Groundswell Agronomy

Session 1: Welcome and overview

• Grasping the vision … understanding thescope and ambition of Regenerative Agriculture and how it can help you further deliver positive outcomes in terms ofimproving soil health, increasing biodiversity,improving water quality and climateresilience, capturing carbon and restoringand regenerating the land.
• Practical implementation … case studies showing the application of Regenerative Agriculture. Exploring potential challenges to crop production with sufficient yield and nutritional quality to meet existing and future needs, while keeping resource inputs as low as possible.

Session 2:  Applying Regenerative Agriculture principles

Moving towards the development of a regenerative agriculture strategy, taking into consideration how the region, climate and crops grown will influence the decision making process.

• Outline of strategies available for consideration and how the approaches interact to deliver positive outcomes in terms of improving soil health, increasing biodiversity, improving water quality and climate resilience.

• Keeping living roots in the ground
• Applying conservation tillage practices
• Using long and diverse crop rotations and adopting cover cropping
• Composting, mulching, crop residues and soil amendments
• Protecting waterways from runoff and erosion
• Optimising use of nitrogen fertilisers selecting the right product, rate and timing to protect waterways from nutrient leaching
• Optimising water use efficiency in accordance with water availability and crop demand
• Long term carbon storage
• Planting trees, developing riparian and buffer zones, and establishing wildlife corridors to improve biodiversity and help long term carbon storage

Session 3: Putting monitoring into practice

Establishing baselines and using key performance indicators (KPIs) to monitor the impacts of regenerative agriculture and to deliver further positive outcome

• Using soil assessments and healthy soil KPIs
• The watershed baseline and tracking changes in water quality
• Determining the GHG emissions of a farming system and developing a climate resilient, zero carbon farming system
• Using monitoring to create a biodiversity action plan (BAP) and establishing KPIs to assess continued improvement in biodiversity