Project
Regenomics: Assessing the cost-benefits of the transition towards regenerative arable farming in Europe
The Public Private Partnership (PPP) project will contribute to a better understanding of the economic cost-benefits of the Regenerative Agriculture transition in Europe. This will be done by developing “Regenomics,” a replicable cost-benefits framework to generate scenarios for (arable) farms. It will identify key drivers for the depth and length of the farmers’ transition cost.
The Regenerative Agriculture transition in European arable farming is highly important for the Dutch Agri-Food Sector (100 M ha, 51% of EU farmland), as Dutch companies are involved in sourcing EU arable crops, providing inputs & technology to arable farming.
Regenerative Agriculture is considered a promising approach to support sustainable agriculture in Europe, and many actors across the supply chain have picked it up. However, in the process of scaling Regenerative Agriculture, the economic impacts for farmers remain largely unclear. This is largely driven by the complexity of the outcomes, which vary for farmers, farming systems and regions. Currently, there is no rigorous and scalable approach to identify these.
The “Regenomics” framework will be developed to understand context-specific cost-benefits over time and this will be tested in 4 different regions in the EU member states: Germany, France, Hungary and Poland. Finding answers related to the economic value of Regenerative Agriculture, provides opportunities for arable farmers to make balanced and measured choices in their specific sustainable farm practices, considering both socio-economic and ecological considerations.
This PPP project will be linked to the currently running PPP ‘Verdien-en Ontwikkelmodellen voor regeneratieve landbouw’ (Verdien- en ontwikkelmodellen naar regeneratieve landbouw – WUR) and the Re-Ge-NL project (Regeneratieve Landbouw (Re-Ge-NL) | Projecten ronde 3 | Nationaal Groeifonds), which will start in 2024. Researchers from this proposed PPP are involved in these projects and will bring in results and learnings into this proposed PPP (NL lessons à Europe). The learnings from this PPP will vice versa be translated in these two other projects (European lessons à NL). Since this proposed PPP will have a duration of two years, the results will be implementable in the Re-Ge-NL project. The partners have an extensive network to reach farmers, landowners and food companies in Europe.