To the science community, regenerative “whole earth farming” practices are an arbitrary designation with no evidentiary merit. We even caught the largest regenerative 'agency' selling stickers to places that don't exist.
That hasn't stopped environmental NGOs from aggressively lobbying for nebulous regenerative practices. They even say it will offset airline travel emissions. The big problem for small farmers is it will drive them out of business.
Just in the global south, nearly 500,000,000 small farms have 5 acres or less - but produce 30 percent of the world's food. What happens when governments pushed by wealthy elites force them to adopt "regenerative" practices that take over their arable land for less food? They are out of business.
It's wonderfully naive of people who claim they care about both nature and the poor to cause the extinction of small farmers but that is what computer models promoting idealize some notion of soil health and forests will cause.
Regenerative agriculture would not cause better yields on less land, as proponents claim, or science would not exist. What does cause arable land to revert to nature is modern technology. It would be cheaper to make small farmers in poor countries more efficient than for Europe to create more laws dictating what products poor countries can use or face bans on imports.
Instead of embracing failed tactics of the past, if the entire world adopted America's farming practices, farmland currently in use equal to the country of India could revert to nature.
Only 3 percent of US land is taken up by cities and 17 percent is taken up by food. We have so much open land that the Obama administration turned over 5,000,000 acres of federal land to corn farmers willing to grow crops for his party's 1990s ethanol boondoggle that never seems to go away.
Science works so well that over 16 million acres of US farmland went out of use so far this century. While our emissions per capita are lower than they were before World War I. Compare the US to China, where organic practices are common because science costs money. They have more emissions than every other country in the top 10 combined.
Why make poor farmers in developing countries go out of business to satisfy white people in big cities? It's not helping nature, they will need more land to grow the same food, which means it will be driving poor farmers into extinction.
