Every year on December 5, we celebrate World Soil Day as designated by the United Nations. This year, the theme “Soils: Where food begins” has been set to raise awareness about the importance of maintaining healthy ecosystems and human well-being by addressing challenges in soil management, increasing soil awareness, and encouraging societies to improve soil health. Soil is often perceived as an abundant resource.

This narrative needs to change so that everyone treats soil as an asset that must be protected, nurtured and regenerated to grow healthy and safe food.

Regenerating soil makes it possible for farmers to grow enough food for everyone besides allowing them to achieve a decent standard of living. It protects the environment for future generations and restores natural resources—soil health, water quality and biodiversity. It also provides an opportunity to capture carbon and manage land and ecosystems more sustainably to reduce the likelihood of climate hazards such as landslides or floods. Because of the ability of soil to provide tremendous benefits to people and the planet, farmers must be encouraged to improve soil health through regenerative agriculture practices and incentivised through appropriate incentive schemes.

Keeping soil healthy

The Food and Agriculture Organisation has stated in a report published in 2015 that 95 percent of our food comes from the soil, and up to 58 percent more food can be produced through sustainable soil management to feed the growing population. Soil consists of living organisms, minerals and organic components that provide food for humans and animals. One of the critical problems the world is currently facing is soil degradation due to the loss of soil nutrients, the same report has said. According to the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock Development, the soil organic matter—an important indicator for measuring soil health—is less than 2 percent, which should ideally be 4-5 percent to achieve good crop yield. Likewise, most of the agricultural soil in Nepal is acidic, which compromises its ability to grow healthy food.

Just as humans need good food, medical check-ups and physical fitness to live a healthy lifestyle, the soil also requires care. Crop plants like potatoes, for example, take all the nutrients from the soil and exhaust it during their growth. Thus, the soil needs to be periodically tested to find out the nutrient status and supplemented with adequate nutrients, including organic sources. Healthy soil contains essential nutrients to allow healthy growth of plants, and is the foundation of healthy food and a better environment.

Adopting regenerative agriculture practices helps restore soil fertility in the long run. Regenerative agriculture practices include improving the biological features such as (i) Improving soil health and water management by increasing the soil cover by using crops or mulch, applying natural fertilisers and pesticides, and minimising the use of chemical fertilisers, pesticides, herbicides and fungicides; (ii) Increasing on-farm biodiversity, crop diversity and landscape biodiversity; (iii) Conserving natural resources by promoting community engagement in forest and wetland management.

A circular economy is another important regenerative agriculture practice that encourages maximum use of farm resources by conserving local seeds and using inputs derived on-farm, such as compost, crop residues and green manure. These are a few examples of regenerative agriculture practices that promote soil health and provide safe food.

Incentivising farmers

As stated in a report in The Kathmandu Post in 2020 entitled “Why agricultural subsidies have failed to benefit needy farmers”, input-based subsidies such as subsidies on seeds and fertilisers have failed to bring the desired outputs and have often been misused. Additionally, there is no mechanism to measure the effectiveness of such schemes and the performance of the beneficiaries. Therefore, output-based incentive schemes could be a way forward to incentivise farmers to adopt regenerative practices to improve soil health.

Output-based incentives reach the proper beneficiaries and are easier to plan and implement. They also discourages and controls misuse of the funds, besides being measurable and concrete.

Under this scheme, farmers receive a discount on crop insurance premiums based on cover crops. The effectiveness of the incentives can be seen in the increased presence of organic matter in the soil. Another method is paying for ecosystem services under which farmers receive money for adopting regenerative practices.

These incentive schemes will also contribute to achieving the 4 percent soil organic matter target envisioned in Nepal’s second nationally determined contributions submitted to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

A group or cooperative approach might effectively monitor and ensure compliance with regenerative practices. Local governments can play an important role in incentivising farmers to improve soil health. The market is another way to incentivise farmers to produce safe food. Establishing regenerative agriculture practices, ensuring their adoption through groups or cooperatives, and monitoring the performance through local governments can promote trust between farmers and buyers. Output-based incentive schemes have the potential to provide a long-term solution for farmers to continue to adopt regenerative agriculture practices and restore soil health.

Restoring soil health is a forward-looking action to promote sustainable agriculture in Nepal, considering the declining soil health. Farmers must be incentivised through appropriate plans to adopt regenerative practices to maintain soil quality and health. At the policy level, a framework and guidelines for incentive schemes need to be developed which can support local governments to implement them.