Members of the 5th World team—Kelly, who leads the Land Regeneration Team, and Danilo, who leads the MRV team recently attended the Regenerative Agriculture and Food Systems Summit in Chicago, USA, to learn about the big ideas that are shaping the future of regenerative agriculture.
Their learnings from the summit could fill an entire book, but we boiled down a few of our favourites, along with the ideas and questions we walked away with:
- Regenerating land will also produce nutrient dense food and environments that regenerate human health.
- The current food supply chain wastes about 40% of its produce. Fixing this would of course cut food and energy waste… But could a new supply chain also be regenerative in the way food is grown, transported, sold, consumed, and composted? It’s an exciting proposition!
- Transitioning to regenerative agriculture is risky, even though economic models prove that it works and returns from regenerative practices can be good or even better than conventional agriculture methods. Better solutions, incentives and security nets are needed if more farmers are going to transition to regenerative practices. How can invested groups support farmers during the high risk transition period to help set them up for success?
- Consumers are pushing corporations to be regenerative by asking important questions about how their food is produced. How will genuinely regenerative food be incorporated into daily life?