Soil: The main Actor of Future Regenerative Agriculture

I am  passionate about agriculture and food production. As such, I often think about the role that agriculture has played in human history. Humans began to domesticate plants and animals about 10,000 years ago. That is when  communities started to emerge, eventually leading to huge civilizations being established. Astronomy, mathematics, philosophy, and everything else that characterize us as humans could not exist if we were preoccupied  with no longer being able to harvest  vegetables. We became sedentary people and established in permanent settlements when we were able to master the ability to plant crops and farm animals. Only then were we able to worry about more transcendent issues. Agriculture was what triggered one of the most fundamental social changes in our history. 

Over the last centuries, the world’s land has changed from wilderness to agricultural. The expansion of agriculture has been one of the most impactful activities on the environment and has generated great pressures on biodiversity and water use. 

Luckily, we also know that we can dramatically reduce these impacts through dietary changes, by substituting some meat with plant-based alternatives, and through scientific and technological innovation. In the last decades, crop yields have meaningfully increased, resulting in a simple equation: if yields are increased in the same agricultural areas, we will need to cultivate much less wilderness. As an example of this, today, we only need 30 percent of the farmland that we needed in 1961 to produce the same amount of food. 

We have a unique opportunity to restore some of this farmland back to the wilderness as natural habitats, while continuing to meet the food needs of an increasing population. 

Climate Change, CO2 and Agriculture 

For many millions of years, plants have pulled carbon from the atmosphere through photosynthesis. Carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere are rising mostly because of fossil fuels like coal and oil that are made from carbon and burned for energy. Carbon dioxide is the most important greenhouse gas because it absorbs heat radiating from the Earth’s surface. Without carbon dioxide, Earth’s natural greenhouse effect would be too weak to keep the average global surface temperature above freezing. By adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, people are supercharging the natural greenhouse effect, causing global temperatures to rise. Basically, in just a few hundred years, we will return that big amount of carbon to the atmosphere. 

Since the middle of the 20th century, annual emissions from burning fossil fuels have increased every decade, from an average of 3 billion tons of carbon (11 billion tons of carbon dioxide) a year in the 1960s to 9.5 billion tons of carbon (35 tons of carbon dioxide) per year in the 2010s.

In 2020, right after the COVID pandemic started, Syngenta launched the second phase of The Good Growth Plan in our Global Sustainability Initiative. To set our targets, we interviewed growers from around the globe and asked them what their principal concern regarding agriculture in the next five years was. Seventy-two percent answered that climate change was top of mind. Agriculture and food production are among the anthropogenic activities that will be greatly impacted by climate in the years to come.

So once again, agriculture has a unique and important opportunity to build on climate change mitigation. 

Why soil matters?

Soil is made out of a lot of complex components but an important element is broken-down plant matter, which contains a lot of carbon that ancient plants took from the atmosphere. They can sequester this carbon for a very long time. 

Scientists around the world have estimated that agricultural soil plays a leading role in carbon sequestration, sequestering over a billion additional tons of carbon each year.

This has led policymakers to increasingly look at soil-based carbon sequestration as an important negative emissions technology; for example, removing CO2 from the air and storing it within a structure from which it cannot escape.

Cropland, takes up 10 percent of the Earth’s land, so it has a unique role in carbon sequestration. Farmers can add more carbon to agricultural soil through relatively easy practices that we at Syngenta have been encouraging for many years. These practices include planting perennial crops, which  do not die off every year and grow deep roots that help soil store more carbon; using cover crops like beans or peas, planted after the main crop is harvested or even in an inter-cropping model (at the same time as the main crop but in different locations); and doing less intensive tilling. All these assure that stored carbon is not easily released. 

Through Syngenta’s Regenerative Agriculture vision and actions, we are promoting the  adoption of these practices among growers around the world, using our portfolio to assure that we increase yields, profitability and improve soil health, while contributing to lowering carbon loads in the atmosphere. This is how Syngenta is generating value for our growers and value chain, by building strong and resilient agricultural systems that help us better face the enormous challenges that are coming.