Targeting regenerative farming practices to increase crop yields globally

Regenerative farming practices (RFP) such as no-tillage (NT), cover crops (CC), agroforestry (AF), and organic farming (OF) are increasingly being promoted to improve soil health and sustainably increase food production. However, how the suitability and impact of these practices varies across the landscape is unclear. Here, we evaluate the environmental suitability for each of these four practices across the world’s croplands and identify areas where these practices could increase crop yields. To achieve this purpose, a Random Forest model was used to estimate and map the relative yield change globally using field-scale experiments from multiple meta-analyses linked with global gridded climate, soil and environmental datasets, at 5 arc-min resolution. Areas with increasing yields varied across practices and regions, ranging from 0.86 to 60% of the potential areas of the cropland. When evaluating the area coverage for various RFP, whether individually or together with other practices, it appeared that AF would be more suitable for increasing yields with about 60% of the cropland area followed by cover crops (59%), no-tillage (32%) and organic farming (1.3%). For possibilities where more than two RFP might potentially be suitable, cover crop occurred more frequently alongside agroforestry (CC, AF), organic farming (OF, CC) and no-tillage (NT, CC, AF). These results highlight how regenerative framing practices’ impact on yield varies across places and can be used to target policies and actions to have a greater impact on both soil health and food production.