Developing Sustainable Food Systems through Regenerative Agriculture

In recent times, the pressing need to develop sustainable food systems has been rising amidst the already existing concerns over environmental degradation, resource depletion, and issues related to mental health. The issue of long-term food security and ecosystem health is driven by poverty through the traditional agricultural practices that are common across the world, including soil erosion, reduced fertility, and increased greenhouse gas emissions. To address these issues, this study brings forth the evaluation of sustainable agricultural methods to provide answers to what the most appropriate sustainable agricultural practices are to establish resilient food systems. Based on the impact to soil health and crop yields, the comparison is made between Organic Farming, Conservation Tillage, Agroforestry, Integrated Pest Management (IPM), Permaculture, and Regenerative Agriculture. We then propose our system, which integrates these methods to see what kind of benefit and what kind of limitation they have and identify the most promising strategy. Our results show that all methods have very valuable benefits, but Regenerative Agriculture is the best of the best. Compared to other methods, it is good for soil health, crop yield, and environmental sustainability. Regenerative Agriculture is superior concerning soil organic matter, erosion control, and resilience of the ecosystem.