For the past fifteen years, I’ve spent a lot of my time on farms most people will never hear about: small plots in rural Haiti that average less than 5 acres and which are worked by families who have seldom had access to the credit, training, research or markets that industrial agriculture takes for granted. I co-founded the Smallholder Farmers Alliance (SFA) with Haitian agronomist Timote Georges back in 2010, and what I have watched happen there over the past decade and a half convinced me of something I didn’t fully appreciate when we started: these farmers aren’t a development problem to be managed – they actually represent one of the biggest opportunities global agriculture has to transform.
| That conviction is at the heart of my new book, Whole Earth Farming: Smallholders and the Great Regenerative Transformation, out now from George Ronald Publisher. Here are the numbers that anchor the whole argument. There are roughly 475 million smallholder farms across the Global South, most under five acres or two hectares. Together they already grow about 30% of the world’s food, with almost none of the institutional support that large-scale agriculture receives. If we helped just half of them, which is about 240 million farming families, to transition to regenerative agriculture and agroforestry, they could produce all of the additional food humanity will need as the population grows by roughly 1.5 billion people by 2050. And they could do it on just 12% of the world’s arable land, while improving the soil instead of depleting it and actively helping to mitigate climate change. That’s not a hypothetical for me. It’s what I’ve seen happen in Haiti. When SFA farmers get basic agricultural support built around sustainable practices, their yields go up by an average of about 40%, and household incomes rise somewhere between 50% and 100%, depending on conditions. Our farmers in Haiti also plant close to a million trees a year, through a model we call “tree currency”: farmers plant and tend trees in exchange for training, seeds, and other support. It ties increased productivity directly to environmental restoration, instead of treating them as separate goals. I want to be clear about what regenerative agriculture is and is not, because the term gets used loosely these days. It’s not a checklist of practices: cover crops here, reduced tillage there. It draws on three things at once: Indigenous and ancestral farming knowledge, decades of experience from organic and agroecological movements, and current science in soil biology and ecosystem measurement. What actually matters is not whether a farmer is using a particular technique. It is whether the land, the ecosystem, and the farming community are measurably better as a result. A practice that makes sense for a smallholder in Kenya may look completely different from one that fits a farm in Canada, and that’s fine, as long as we are rigorous about measuring outcomes rather than practices. That is also why my book leans heavily on the emerging Regen10 Outcomes Framework, built through more than two years of global consultation, as a shared reference point for what “regenerative” actually means across very different farming contexts. There is a climate dimension too, and I’ve tried to be careful with the numbers rather than overstate them. Drawing on peer-reviewed research, the transition I’m describing, roughly 240 million farms across about 480 million hectares, could eventually remove up to 0.72 gigatons of CO2 annually during the active soil-carbon-accumulation period, plus further savings from reduced synthetic fertilizer use. Altogether that’s an estimated 0.6 to 0.85 gigatons of CO2 a year at full maturity, in the same range as the entire global aviation industry’s annual emissions. I want to be honest here and clarify that soil does not absorb carbon forever; it accumulates over one to three decades before reaching a new equilibrium. This is not a license to keep emitting elsewhere. It matters because it comes bundled with everything else we need anyway: healthier soil, more resilient farms, stronger rural communities. I call this the ‘Great Regenerative Transformation,’ deliberately echoing the Green Revolution of the mid-20th century, but it is a fundamentally different kind of transformation. The Green Revolution ran on standardization: improved seed varieties, irrigation, synthetic inputs, applied the same way everywhere. What I am describing runs on the opposite instinct: combining traditional knowledge with modern outcome measurement, adapted to local conditions rather than standardized against them. Smallholders are well positioned to lead it precisely because many of them never fully industrialized in the first place. What they need is not a new farming ideology: they need access to training, finance, markets, research, data, and extension services. There is one more thread in the book that is new to most discussions about agriculture, namely the proposition that that the Bahá’í Faith offers principles relevant to agriculture’s future, and that its teachings help to anchor farming with humanity’s spiritual, social and economic development. There is a particular focus on one of the early central figures named ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, who from 1901 to 1921 directed the model farming community of ‘Adasíyyih in the Jordan Valley. The practices used there anticipated many now associated with regenerative agriculture, including crop rotation, agroforestry, integrated livestock and soil-building, while also applying broader spiritual principles of equality, consultation and justice. I frame these spiritual principles as open-source foundational truths that require no particular religious belief or affiliation, and which transcend their source to help reenvision farmers, governments, companies, and institutions as part of one interdependent system, regardless of where you’re starting from. Whole Earth Farming carries a foreword from Roy Steiner of the Rockefeller Foundation, who puts it better than I could: the world’s 475 million smallholder households are “not a measure of the problem, but a measure of the possibility.” The book also includes endorsements from President Bill Clinton, chef and World Central Kitchen founder José Andrés, and a host of others working across agriculture, conservation, and development. It is built around 21 stories from 18 countries on five continents focused how regenerative is being put into practice right now, because I wanted this to be grounded in actual farmers’ lives, not just presented as an abstract global model. The stories encompass diverse collaborations between farmers, ranchers, farmer cooperatives, NGOs, corporations and even a Michelin-starred restaurant. The examples profiled range in size from individual family farms to programs involving several hundred thousand farms at a time, and everything in between. One story features a comic book heroine who is the daughter of regenerative farmers, and while she is fictional, the message she carries about the dignity and importance of smallholder farming is entirely real. The proposition at the center of the book is simple, even if the work of getting there is not: we do not have to choose between feeding a growing population and restoring the planet. We can do both, if we finally give the farmers who have been operating at the margins of agriculture the means to lead. Whole Earth Farming: Smallholders and the Great Regenerative Transformation is available now. You can learn more and purchase it by going to WholeEarthFarming.com. |
| Regards, |
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| Hugh LockePresident, Impact Farming FoundationPresident, Smallholder Farmers AllianceHugh’s Substack Channel |