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Tuesday, 28 April 2026
Through a Food & Sustainability course I'm currently studying, I came to recognise an interesting duality in the world of sustainable agriculture.
In 2023, I was trodding through a smallholder farm in Busia, in the lush landscape of western Kenya, as a farmer enthusiastically showed us the difference between his maize fields. Those to the right of the footpath were taller than us, thriving with foliage and budding ears of corn. On these he had used the fertiliser recipe demonstrated in the regenerative agriculture training, and he was delighted with the results. The maize in the field to the left of the path was the control: cultivated without any unusual intervention. They were visibly enfeebled by their compost-fed counterparts.
I marvelled at the promise of regenerative agriculture. Here was an approach that could tackle poverty and hunger with improved yields, and save our planet at the same time. The farmers loved it, too. Chemical inputs had been prohibitively expensive already; after the economic shocks of Covid and Ukraine, they were completely unattainable. Besides, the farmers felt safer using manure and kitchen scraps in their fields, than toxic products with skulls-and-crossbones all over the packaging.
But of course, regenerative agriculture goes far beyond switching from chemical fertilisers to natural compost. It's a whole suite of methods which, employed in combination according to the specific farm context, promises to transform food production from a one-way, extractive process which gradually depletes the land, to a circular, self-sustaining process which feeds nutrients back to the soil even as it draws upon them.
The farm in question - control plot to the left of the path; plot fertilised with organic compost to the right
As I trod, I wondered: how can we translate these methods that are so apt for smallholders, such as intercropping, integrated pest management, agroforestry, and integrated livestock, for the kind of farms we have back home in Europe? It's one thing when the farmer lives on his one-acre plot and navigates it on foot with a hoe and a wheelbarrow; another entirely when the farm spans hundreds of acres and is navigated, worked, and harvested with heavy machinery.
This question of how regenerative methods can be applied to industrial farms is still one I am gradually seeking answers to. But, the stats on agricultural emissions and land ownership patterns that came up in my course materials made me realise: these are, in a sense, entirely separate challenges. 70% of the farmed land in the world is owned by just 1% of its farmers. At the other end of the spectrum, some 600 million smallholder farmers manage just 15% of the world’s arable land.
Those headline figures about how agriculture is the single greatest contributor to climate change and environmental destruction: they have little to do with smallholders. While deforestation in the global South is a growing challenge, the smallholders there are not responsible for mass forest clearance, nor for the huge fossil fuel consumption related to the chemical inputs and mechanisation of industrial agriculture, nor for the environmental impacts of intensive nitrogen-based fertiliser use, nor for the decimation of biodiversity through monocultures.
Simply put: sustainable agriculture at smallholder-level is primarily about tackling poverty and hunger. At industrial farm-level, it's about tackling climate change and biodiversity loss. It's one of those distinctions that feels obvious in hindsight but which, once clearly articulated, gives a new sense of clarity and order to the problem at hand.
It also poses a whole new set of questions:
Is mass-scale, industrialised agriculture the best (or indeed, only) model for western Europe? Must smallholder agriculture necessarily be associated with poverty and a lack of economic development? Is there some new, hybrid model we can work towards that serves both farmers and consumers while also protecting our planet? Could farming come to be seen as a meaningful, respected career in this AI-era in which intellectual knowledge and expertise are seemingly machine-replaceable, and entire societies are sick from too much screen-time and not enough physical movement?
These questions will join the list of things I ponder and seek answers to through readings, courses, conversations, hands-on farm work, and lived experience. But for the time being, what I will take away is this stark duality in farm types and the consequent duality in end-goals of sustainable agriculture in smallholder versus industrialised farm contexts.
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