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Sustainable soil management is essential to prevent agricultural soil degradation and maintain food production and core soil-based ecosystem services. Regenerative agriculture, one approach to sustainable soil management, is rapidly gaining traction in UK farming and policy. However, it is unclear what farmers themselves consider to be sustainable soil management practices, and how these relate to the principles of regenerative agriculture. Further, there is little insight into how sustainable soil management is currently promoted in agricultural knowledge and innovation services (AKIS). To address these knowledge gaps, we undertook the first national-scale survey of sustainable soil management practices in the United Kingdom and complemented it with targeted interviews. We found high levels of awareness (>60%) and uptake (>30%) of most sustainable soil management practices among mixed and arable farmers. Importantly, 92% of respondents considered themselves to be practising sustainable soil management. However, our analysis shows that farmers combine practices in different ways. Not all these combinations correspond to the full set of regenerative agriculture principles of reduced soil disturbance, soil cover and crop diversity. To better understand the relationship between existing sustainable soil management practices in the United Kingdom and regenerative agriculture principles, we derive a “regenerative agriculture score” by allocating individual practices among the principles of regenerative agriculture. Farmers who self-report that they are managing soil sustainably tend to score more highly across all five principles. We further find that sustainable soil management messaging is fragmented and that few AKIS networks have sustainable soil management as their primary concern. Overall, our study finds that there are multiple understandings of sustainable soil management among UK farmers and land managers and that they do not correspond to regenerative more...

Within agri-food scholarship, longstanding debates have focused on the empirical applicability and conceptual utility of differing agricultural paradigms. These have often dovetailed with considerations around the future of agriculture in countries such as the UK given a shift in emphasis away from the central tenets of a high-input, yield-oriented productivism. Alternative diagnoses, particularly in notions of a post-productivist paradigm, have proven influential in capturing broad changes in the restructuring of agricultural activity. Whilst debates around the characterisation of these paradigms continue, they highlight distinct contestations in broader (and shifting) questions around what agriculture should be ‘for’, e.g. whether environmental ‘goods’ should be valued more highly than material production. Situating our paper within these ongoing debates, we draw on farmer perspectives in examining the adoption of regenerative agricultural practices in two farmer clusters in the East and South-West of England respectively. As a diverse array of practices which appear favourably positioned in a post-Brexit policy environment, we explore the ways in which regenerative agriculture can be understood as seeking to reconcile productivist and post-productivist tendencies. Drawing attention to the tensions, contradictions and uncertainties at play in these farmer perspectives, we highlight: the environmental and emotional appeal of regenerative agriculture compared to its adoption for more pragmatic (economic) reasons; the parallels and differences between regenerative agriculture and organic production; and the multiple sources of trusted information drawn upon by farmers in an uncertain policy environment. We conclude the paper by reflecting on the need to better contextualise and conceptualise contemporary interest in regenerative agriculture within longer theoretical lineages, in which the voice of farmers themselves must be central. more...

Habitat loss and the intensification of farming practices have caused severe declines in the range and abundance of many bumblebee species in the UK. This study examines the long-term effectiveness of four different management strategies to enhance and restore bumblebee foraging habitat on arable field margins in two regions with markedly contrasting landscape structure, farming systems and amount of semi-natural habitat. Bumblebees were monitored on 120 field margins in July and August, together with estimates of flower abundance and the vegetation composition. There were no differences in the abundance and diversity of the bumblebee assemblage between the two regions (East Anglia and the West Midlands), despite a greater abundance of flowers and flowering species on the lighter soils of the West Midlands. Very few bumblebees were recorded on intensively managed cereal field margins due to the lack of dicot species. Conservation headlands supported a significantly greater number of flowering dicots, but the majority of these were annuals which did not provide good forage for bumblebees. From an agronomic and ecological perspective, the removal of field margins from the cropping system was the best strategy for providing foraging habitat for bumblebees. Non-crop habitat resulting from natural regeneration provided good foraging habitat for bumblebee species, but most of the key forage species were pernicious weeds of agriculture (Cirsium spp.). Sowing non-crop field margins with wildlife seed mixtures had the potential for providing the best foraging habitat for bumblebees, so long as preferred forage species were introduced (e.g. Trifolium pratense). Further research is required to refine and target this management prescription for bumblebee conservation in the wider countryside. more...