Starting Anew with Regenerative Agriculture
Agriculture is at the centre of a number of global challenges today. Climate change, depleting water tables, degraded soils, loss of biodiversity along with a staggered social and economic development—to name a few. For cotton farmers in India, regenerative agriculture spells a new beginning.
Conventional farming has shown its limits, contributing to persistent soil destruction that include decarbonization, erosion, desertification and chemical pollution. All of this for the sake of increasing yield, ensuring food security and apparently securing the farmer a higher income from his land. The narrative was played out alongside the Green Revolution that emerged to stave off widespread starvation in 1960’s India. Since then, through the succeeding decades, the trend of yield-focused agriculture has continued to grow, only to be adopted across all crops, involving inordinate chemical use and genetically modified varieties.