Regenerative Agriculture A Future For Many Farmers In Africa

By Bongani Siziba It’s winter in South Africa and Danie Bester's fields are being harvested. However, in the same fields, new crops are already sprouting and extending for miles. He is getting ready for the spring. Danie Bester has been farming in Mpumalanga, roughly 100 km from Johannesburg, with his father for more than ten years. Later, when he took over running the farm, he began to observe that his land was producing fewer and fewer crops of a high grade. He realized he had to alter the way he farms because of the mounting pressure to lower carbon emissions. He ultimately adopted a different farming strategy, known as regenerative agriculture, to improve yields and bring down the farm’s carbon emissions. “All that you see here are not weeds, l am preparing my land for spring, l don't have to till the land, instead l keep crops on rotation so that my soil remains fertile,” he said. Regenerative agriculture is a growing movement in agriculture as the need to improve or maintain the quality of topsoil has come to the fore.