Can regenerative farming save Europe’s peasant farmers?

By Annabel Murphy and Laura Tucker

Regenerative farming may hold the key to solving Europe’s farming challenges by mitigating the effects of climate change—but are policymakers and consumers ready to fully support it?

It’s been a scorching summer in southern Italy for smallholder farmer Antonio Onorati. His family has farmed the land just 20 kilometres from Rome for generations, raising goats, growing wheat, and harvesting fruit and vegetables in harmony with nature.

Now semi-retired, he worries about the future of small-scale farming in Italy.

“The climate has changed a lot in the last decade. Fifty-year-old oak trees are withering and my livestock are suffering. There has been a collapse in sheep fertility and poultry mortality because of the heat,” he says.

Onorati isn’t the only one. Farmers across Europe – particularly in the drought-prone south – are experiencing similar devastation and many smallholder farmers have gone out of business. Between 2003 and 2016, the number of farms in the EU-27 declined by 32 per cent, from 15 million to 10 million.

In the past two years alone, an additional 10 per cent of European farms have closed, largely due to drought and extreme weather, which have decimated crops and livelihoods.

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If this trend continues, by 2040, Europe may only have 3.9 million farms left, with industrial farms consolidating more power. This would spell disaster for the environment, as the delicate balance between climate, farming and the food system becomes increasingly threatened. 

To reverse this trend, policymakers must support the nature-based farming practices that Onorati and many regenerative farmers within the Climate Farmers community uphold. With the Common Agricultural Policy set for negotiation next year, now is the time to rethink farming policy.

Industrial farming is accelerating climate breakdown

The ecological impact of large-scale farming is significant. Export-driven farms operate in monocultures – growing single crops –  that deplete soil quality over time and rely heavily on pesticides and fertilisers to maximise productivity. This focus on short-term, maximum output threatens an already fragile environmental ecosystem.

“Across most of Europe, our soils are so depleted that they’re basically dead,” says Philippe Birker, founder of Climate Farmers, a social enterprise scaling up regenerative farming across Europe. “When rain comes, the soil doesn’t soak up water and this is called soil erosion. It is also why we have so much flooding damage right now.”

Based on the science of agroecology, more people in the farming community are turning to regenerative practices, not only to minimise environmental impacts but to build weather-resilient farms in response to an increasingly unpredictable climate.

“One of the amazing benefits of regenerative agriculture is that it increases soil water storage capacity. Healthy soil can absorb water and store that water to release in times of drought,” explains Birker.

Agroecology offers a hopeful alternative for smallholder farmers by focusing on seed diversity, community integration and curricular systems. Although this approach may not prioritise growth, it promotes long-term sustainability as Europe transitions to a net-zero future.

Reducing dependence on external imports

Fortunately, Onorati grew up learning agroecological farming practices from his nomadic grandparents and parents, alongside the rural farming communities in southern Italy.

“My grandparents had few resources and learned to work with nature without compromising productivity. Over time, this mixed farming-livestock system has proven its value,” Onorati explains. 

“We’ve also adapted our crops to climate changes, constantly working to make our farm less dependent on the external market – farmers can regain their power by becoming more independent from the mainstream system.”

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Like Onorati, Birker champions regenerative farming, providing evidence that these practices work, giving small-scale farmers the confidence to adapt their operations to their environment.

Early members of the Climate Farmers community are already drawing attention from neighbouring farms for their simple but innovative methods.

“Conventional farmers can’t believe that you can have green grass in June in southern Portugal without an irrigation system but simply by grazing cows,” Birker says, highlighting the regenerative effects of manure on soil quality.

“We need more model farms like this for farmers to relate to. What works in southern Portugal does not work in northern England; it’s very context-specific, which makes scaling much harder,” he adds.

Cost of inaction: Drought, flooding and extreme heat

Onorati’s experience with poor livestock fertility reflects the broader crisis facing European farmers as they contend with the increasingly extreme effects of climate change, which vary across the region. 

Over the past two years alone, southern Europe has endured severe droughts and heat stress. However, the situation has become unprecedented in the 2024 harvest, with drought now affecting both southeastern and northern regions. 

The latest data from the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), implemented by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, shows how temperatures continue to increase as carbon floods the atmosphere.

The average temperature in September 2024, for instance, was 1.54°C above the pre-industrial level – the 14th month in 15 months for which the global average surface air temperature exceeded 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. The 2024 summer in Europe was the hottest on record. 

Samantha Burgess, Deputy Director of C3S, noted the widespread impacts of these heat extremes and record temperatures: “Prolonged high temperatures damage entire ecosystems and stifle agricultural productivity. It also forces farmers to rely on intensive irrigation, putting immense pressure on already scarce water resources.”

For farmers like Onorati, whose resources are limited, these conditions pose an existential threat. As Burgess pointed out, more nature-based solutions—like agroecological farming—are becoming crucial. 

“Farmers need to work with current climate conditions, adapting their practices to be more sustainable and resilient as we move toward net-zero industries in the coming decades” he said. 

Fluctuations in rainfall are also playing a role. There were varying degrees of rainfall over the last European summer, with 35 per cent of European rivers notably or exceptionally low, especially in the southeast of Europe, while much of central Europe saw exceptionally high average river flows for this time of year. This, combined with the ‘dead soil’ Birker mentioned, suggests devastating future consequences if farming systems do not change. 

To support the industry, C3S offers access to historical climate data specifically for agricultural applications, as used by the UN-supported FAO Geospatial Platform. This data allows farmers to evaluate the effects of climate conditions, such as the impact of temperature and rainfall on crop yields and the influence of humidity variation on disease resistance. 

The data can also help local farmers anticipate risks from extreme weather events by analysing historical patterns for specific regions. Governments can also use this information to study past weather trends in key agricultural areas, assisting in yield forecasting and agricultural policy development.

But will farmers and consumers change their ways?

To scale up ecological farming practices, consumers need to support farmers to drive demand and make these farming models economically viable. However with high inflation, eroding purchasing power and rising living costs – are European consumers ready to make this change? Are farmers willing to risk everything in the transition?

Arnaud Petit, Executive Director of the International Grains Council, argues that “the main driver for EU farmers to develop their businesses will remain market demand rather than public support. This is even more relevant in periods of uncertainty regarding the policy environment in the EU.”

Currently, larger-scale farming operations can often produce food at lower costs, using chemicals like pesticides to boost productivity and reduce losses. But this, according to Birker, is a false economy. “The prices we see in supermarkets are not reflecting the actual cost of the product. This is a policy issue that we’re experiencing.”

In the long-term, Onorati believes that by working with nature rather than against it, agroecological practices will help stabilise prices by insulating farmers from market fluctuations and helping lower agricultural production costs.

“If supported by appropriate public policies and financial resources, small and medium-sized agroecological farms can produce at decreasing costs. This allows them to offer consumers more stable prices and generally lower prices in relation to the quality of the product.” 

Measuring and pricing the ecosystem

Scaling up this new type of agriculture will remain a challenge as long as the market does not clearly value specific farming practices.

The solution proposed by Climate Farmers lies in the measurement and pricing of ecosystem services. After spending two years devising a Carbon Credits Methodology, Birker aims to take this concept further. 

“Companies don’t know what the damage to biodiversity is and they don’t feel the responsibility to pay for it. If there was a wider market for ecosystem services, we could measure biodiversity increase with eDNA technology and soil water storage capacity increase with satellite technology quite easily,” Birker explains. 

“If farmers proved that they achieved these ecosystem services, they would get more subsidies. From this, we would see a large-scale transition towards regenerative agriculture because, suddenly, farmers would have a business case.” 

For this to happen, the public sector needs to step in, valuing the role of smallholder farmers in preserving environmental stability, Europe’s food system and biodiversity for future generations. 

“We all have an interest in supporting farmers to make that happen,” Birker concludes.