It has long been obvious that a truly regenerative agricultural system is one that minimises its dependence on external inputs like inorganic fertilisers, phytosanitary products and diesel.

Regenerative farmers focus on understanding, applying and exploiting the resources provided by every farm’s local ecology.

The study of natural ecosystems reveals that plants and animals never operate in isolation. Thriving ecosystems always include a multiplicity of producers, degraders and consumers, feeding off and nourishing each other in a never-ending dance whose only external inputs are rain, sunlight and the resources bacteria and fungi liberate from the soil’s underlying bedrock.

But making it work in real life can be a challenge for many farmers.

They have to worry not only about the functioning of their agroecosystems but also about feeding their families, meeting market demands, the unreliability of weather and dealing with their neighbours: in short, they must nurture their livelihoods above all else.

And they must do so in cognitive environments filled with conflicting information.

For most farmers, access to agricultural knowledge is mediated by actors that have ulterior agendas. Agricultural supply stores are not only wonderful places to meet other farmers and discuss the challenges of the day but are businesses that make their living from convincing as many farmers as possible to buy as much of as many inputs as possible. Agricultural advisors often support that agenda: the agricultural courses they took at university typically focussed on input-intensive mechanised agriculture and were often subsidised by the agricultural-input industry.

Despite these headwinds, the world is sprinkled with extraordinary farmers achieving amazing results by applying agroecological principles.

They combine the growing of annual crops and perennials such as trees and livestock in ways that deliver higher productivity, better resilience and much lower negative externalities.

Sebastian Scott, the son of Zambia’s vice-president Guy Scott, has devoted his career to the development of extraordinarily productive smallholding farming systems that require no inputs beyond sunlight, rain and the labour of human muscles and animal feet and snouts. 

His playground is his farm near Kafue, where over years of combining crops, legumes, trees and livestock he is achieving levels of productivity that are so extraordinarily high that most commercial farmers simply cannot believe his figures.

In the most recent cropping season, he achieved maize yields of 16 tonnes per hectare, despite the presence of fall armyworm, a feared pest devastating maize across southern Africa. This easily surpasses the returns of the most intensive large farms in the American Midwest or in Brazil’s Cerrado and is a full order of magnitude more than most Zambian smallholders typically achieve with the help of subsidised fertiliser. 

Scott achieves these results, which are being monitored by scientists from the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (known by its Spanish acronym CIMMYT: Centro Internacional de Mejoramiento de Maíz y Trigo), with intricate multi- and cover-cropping, the integration of several tree species, and the management, using mobile fences, of chickens and pigs as weed and pest controllers and legged fertiliser factories. He does not use machinery, inorganic fertilisers or pesticides. Every tool he uses is commonly available to Zambian smallholders and the farm always pays for its own investments.

“It is astonishing how quickly the farming system begins to deliver once you intercrop cereals with legumes, practice crop rotations, and integrate trees and animals,” he said.

But there are pitfalls: “If you don’t pay attention to your carbon–nitrogen ratios, even the best cow manure can go to waste”.

Getting it right may take practice but the first step is easy: “Make sure you have enough green matter in your mulch”. 

Zambia is also a global innovator in the use of grazing to pursue livelihoods’ and environmental objectives. In these systems, known as holistic grazing or adaptive multi-paddock grazing, the animals are mob-grazed at very high densities for very short periods of time — often no more than a few hours — before being moved to the next paddock. These are tiny, very numerous, and mobile: the animals are kept bunched up (by herders, dogs or moveable electric fences). Their impact is massive: the palatable grasses and legumes are grazed; anything unpalatable, along with the falling seeds of palatable plants, is trampled into mulch covering the soil, and the whole is fertilised by manure and urine. Once impacted, the land is allowed to rest, often for a full season.

This treatment leads to a rekindling of ecosystem functions within a single season: there is a lot more plant growth and the amount of bare ground between grasses and legumes reduces dramatically. This helps water percolation, slows down erosion and, of course, makes more fodder available to livestock and wildlife alike. And, when the animals are herded onto crop fields for the night, they beneficially impact them, too.

This is in stark contrast to the usual way of managing cattle, known as set stocking, where the animals are allowed to wander at will and eat what they like for an extended period of time. Not surprisingly, they repeatedly graze the palatable plants to the ground, eventually killing them as their root resources are exhausted. What’s left is the bitter, thorny stuff – unpalatable growth that benefits from all the manure the cattle are dropping. Soon, the pasture turns from one filled with rich grasses to a dusty landscape dotted with little more than thorny shrubs.

But while it is comparatively easy to make this kind of management work when a single manager controls hundreds of hectares and animals, it is a lot harder when individuals only own a few animals and farm on small plots.

And yet it is in those circumstances — in environments of smallholding farms and community land ownership — that the promise of this technique as an ecosystem restoration tool is most tantalising.

Input-intensive food systems are being battered by strong geopolitical headwinds. With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the global sanctions that followed, two massive suppliers of everything from diesel through fertilizer to wheat, maize, feed and vegetable oils have been taken off the global markets.

As of this writing, global fertiliser prices have already doubled, wheat and maize prices have risen by over 50%, and the rationing of bread has started in countries such as Lebanon and Egypt. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and World Food Programme, the planet may soon be facing famine-like conditions of biblical proportions across dozens of poorer countries. 

Zambia, with its reliance on subsidised fertilizer, will not escape unscathed. 

But unlike many countries, Zambia has massive advantages. It is a large country blessed with good soils and decent weather, whose population density is not yet critically high. With the right changes in management, Zambia could not only ensure its own food security but become a large agricultural exporter to its less-blessed neighbours as well. 

It is striking that the two most transformative agricultural innovations of the modern age, agroforestry and holistic grazing management, are now spreading around the world from their roots in Africa. 

The continent is not only the one where our species originated, but it is also turning out to be the one that may save us from the extraordinary damage that petrochemical agriculture has wrought.