Carbon farming initiative: a national-scale public-private partnership to promote regenerative agriculture in Brazil

Climate change (CC) challenges food and climate through reduced crop yields and increasing production risk. Regenerative agriculture (RA) emerged as a pivotal strategy for enhancing crop productivity and soil organic carbon (SOC) sequestration, contributing to agriculture’s CC mitigation and resilience. Nevertheless, expanding RA’s main challenges is providing sufficient science-based decision support for farmers and other stakeholders. In this context, we present herein the largest public-private partnership in Brazil to conduct research in a multidisciplinary collaborative scientific network on RA and describe the Carbon Farming Program approaches. Bayer SA leads the initiative, which also includes 11 partner institutions (i.e., Universities, Research Institutions and Foundations, and Farmers organisations). The programme aims to assess the benefits of improvement of cropland management, intensified and biodiverse crop rotation plans on SOC, soil health, crop productivity, and profitability in a no-till system. The programme has a multi-scale approach with three main steps (‘Research Partners’, ‘On-Farm Research Sites’, and ‘Carbon Program at Scale’). In total, it encompasses 1,906 farmers and 232 000 hectares across the Brazilian edaphoclimatic conditions. The programme has gathered a large database, integrating SOC and fertility determinations, and crop yields, to derive a quantitative evaluation of the impacts of sustainable agricultural land management practices adoption. Moreover, the programme enabled breaking through the gap of quantitative knowledge for the development of a novel mathematical model to predict SOC dynamics for tropical agroecosystems. This is worth supporting assertive decisions along the specific planning to promote scalability in the insertion of Brazilian agriculture in the global C market.