A revolution is sweeping Europe’s farms: can it save agriculture?

At first glance, Ruben Jorge’s farm near the village of Penha Garcia in eastern Portugal doesn’t seem all that unusual. But look closer, and signs emerge that Jorge is shedding tradition in the hope of future-proofing his farm.

Between the rows of chestnut and pistachio saplings, a mix of grasses covers the ground where a stretch of bare dirt would typically be — a deliberate attempt to prevent erosion. To retain water, Jorge has wrapped a blanket of wood chips around the base of each sapling. And among the young trees grow yellow lupin flowers, known as tremocilha in Portuguese, that have a special power: they capture nitrogen and store it underground.

“It’s a natural fertilizer,” Jorge says, looking out over the field of chest-high saplings under an intense springtime Sun. The flowers, mowing and mulch are part of Jorge’s transition to regenerative agriculture, a method of farming that prioritizes soil health, boosts biodiversity, minimizes tilling and uses pesticides sparingly. “Anything that we can do that adds resilience to the land, that preserves this land for the future, is always a better option,” Jorge says, “as long as it’s economically viable, of course.”

The future is coming hard at Europe — the fastest-warming continent on the planet since the 1980s¹. In just the past few years, farmers on the Iberian Peninsula have struggled with shrivelled crops, shrinking water supplies and more-frequent wildfires. Going forwards, the economic hit to the European Union and the United Kingdom from drought alone could reach more than €65 billion (US$76 billion) each year by 2100, in part because of crop damage and lost water supplies².

With an estimated 4 °C of warming expected over the next 75 years if no action is taken to curb or adapt to climate change, southern and western Europe could lose 10% of its agricultural economic output². Meanwhile, widespread erosion continues to sweep away soil, taking with it crucial nutrients and increasing the risk of flooding and landslides. Between 60% and 70% of soils in the EU are degraded, according to the European Commission.

These mounting risks are leading farmers such as Jorge to bet on regenerative agriculture. Together with climate advocates and scientists, they increasingly see these practices as key to withstanding changing climatic conditions — and to helping farmers stay in business. And Europe is showing how it can be done, they say.

“We believe right now we’re at a point where the grassroots are spreading,” says Simon Krämer, executive director at the European Alliance for Regenerative Agriculture (EARA), a farmer-led advocacy group in Berlin that was founded in 2023. According to Krämer, about 2% of farms in Europe are fully regenerative, and another 5–10% are on the regenerative path.

This budding regenerative revolution now faces some headwinds, however. After farmer protests across Europe in 2023 and 2024, the EU has backed away from some environmental requirements for the agricultural sector, and farmers say that incentives fall short of what’s needed to help them make the transition.

But many advocates expect that the momentum behind regenerative agriculture will continue to build, particularly given Europe’s need to meet its commitments to restore ecosystems and reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. And farmers and researchers around the world are carefully watching Europe’s attempts to pull off one of the biggest transitions in agriculture in generations. Regenerative agriculture, Krämer says, “is the most important farmer and science movement in the world”.

Saving the soil

In Portugal and many other parts of the globe, farmers are coming to realize that what worked for their parents and grandparents is no longer viable. To survive increasingly harsh conditions, they need to rethink how they farm – from the soil up.

About 180 kilometres south of Jorge’s farm, just outside the tiny cobblestoned hamlet of Assumar, Herberto Brunk is undertaking his own regenerative experiment. As he manoeuvres his black Peugeot truck up his long dirt driveway, he stops between two of his fields. On the left, Brunk has planted mixed grasses as ground cover. On the right is a thriving field dominated by buckwheat (Fagopyrum esculentum) with some millet, pumpkin and sunflowers mixed in. A few months later, after a dry summer, he decided not to harvest the buckwheat and to leave it as a cover crop instead. Kept intact, it has helped to prevent nitrogen from leaching out of the soil.

Much of the work Brunk is doing is aimed at improving the soil — the foundation for a healthy bottom line. “Our main goal is to actually recover the soil, get our organic matter up, get our nutrients recycled and reduce as much as possible the erosion,” Brunk says. He’s already beginning to see some positive results: “At the moment, we don’t have any erosion at all due to water.”

And Brunk says his farm is likely to be more resilient during wildfires. In August, as fires burnt across Portugal, he helped his neighbour, a cattle grower, to put out a fire. If it had reached Brunk’s property, he says, it probably wouldn’t have done much damage because the fields are green and well hydrated.

This is year three of Brunk’s five-year plan, and he doesn’t expect to see a profit for a while. But both Jorge and Brunk are hopeful that the eventual pay-off will be worth the wait. For them, the regenerative approach is not only a way to restore the soil — it’s also good for business in the long run.

Improving the soil will help to retain water, protecting it from drought, says Brunk. He has also seen the amount of carbon in his soils increase from 1.9% in 2019 to 3.5% in 2024 — more than halfway to his goal of 6%. Under a new partnership with Terra Madre, a company based in Porto, Portugal, that helps farmers transition to regenerative agriculture, he will receive payments for increasing the amount of carbon stored in plants and the soil; companies buy carbon credits based on this sequestered carbon to offset their pollution.

The practices that Brunk and Jorge are deploying — planting cover crops, rotating crops, reducing tilling, integrating trees — can help to protect their farms against the vagaries of a changing climate, says Thomas Elmqvist, a sustainability scientist at the Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University. He co-wrote a 2022 report from the European Academies’ Science Advisory Council on the state of regenerative agriculture in Europe. “There is fairly strong scientific evidence for the practices having an impact,” he says.

For example, growing different crops on the same field in rotation can boost the number and types of microorganisms in the soil³. And a 2021 meta-analysis⁴ spanning 85 countries showed that diversifying crops in this way increased the biodiversity of other plants and animals by 24%. Growing a variety of crops brings a host of other benefits: the study also found the practice led to a 51% increase in water quality, a 63% boost in pest and disease control and an 11% spike in soil quality.

A 2022 study⁵ using soil samples from 1,267 farm sites across Germany found that tripling the area used to grow cover crops could boost the amount of organic carbon added to the soil by 12% within 50 years.

When it comes to crop yields, the results are less clear. A 2019 review⁶, for example, found that using cover crops decreased grain production by 4%, but including legumes such as clover in the cover crop could increase yields by 13%.

Other studies show positive trends in terms of profitability for farmers. In June, Krämer’s group released a multi-year analysis⁷ that looked at 78 farms across 14 European countries. The results, which have not been published in a scientific journal but were reviewed by agricultural experts across Europe, found that farms that had adopted regenerative practices used 61% less synthetic nitrogen and 75% less pesticides than did their conventional counterparts. Per hectare, regenerative farms also achieved a 20% higher margin (the difference between income and costs).

And a 2023 analysis of regenerative farms in Germany by Krämer and his co-authors — written for the Boston Consulting Group, a global management consultancy firm — reported that these operations should be at least 60% more profitable after six to ten years compared with conventional farms using other approaches.

But what works in one location might not work in another, Elmqvist says. “More long-term studies are needed to fully understand the sustainability and profitability of regenerative practices over multiple growing seasons, in different regions and under different climatic conditions,” he says.

A push for reform

On paper, at least, the EU has some of the world’s most ambitious commitments to sustainable agriculture, several of which encourage a regenerative approach. But in practice, observers say, the bloc has struggled to deliver on those promises.

In 2020, after a brutal European heatwave in 2019, the EU committed to building a food system that “works for consumers, producers, climate and the environment”. It had also launched its signature environmental law in 2019, the European Green Deal, which aims to make Europe the first climate-neutral continent by 2050. And, last year, the bloc adopted a landmark nature-restoration law, which includes a requirement for member states to boost biodiversity on farmlands.

The bloc now funds an initiative to help farmers to scale up regenerative practices and, in February, it unveiled a road map that calls for farmers to be compensated for increasing carbon storage, boosting biodiversity and providing other environmental benefits. If implemented, this should encourage more farmers to make the switch to regenerative agriculture, says Teresa Pinto Correia, a landscape ecologist at the University of Évora in Portugal, who served on a recent EU-funded task force for regenerative agriculture.

“I think it will help,” says Correia. “There’s a strong economic argument.”