An idea frequently associated with regenerative agriculture is that it will significantly reduce the profitability of farms that adopt it, making the economic results of regenerative production systems necessarily less favorable than those currently achieved by conventional agriculture.
The authors Francisco Avillez and Miguel Vieira Lopes consider that there is no comprehensive analysis on this issue in the context of the Portuguese agricultural sector, which justifies the need to promote such a study. In this sense, they identified an particularly interesting international case study on agriculture in Germany, entitled "The case for Regenerative Agriculture on Germany and Beyond".
The German study is based on assumptions that include two types of land use, three agricultural production indicators, three types of production system changes and three implementation phases of the transition process. The adopted methodology follows three steps: determination of baseline economic results, estimation of impacts per hectare and calculation of the impact on economic results for each farm type.
The impacts projected by the German study refer to a medium to long-term horizon of 6 to 10 years and were disaggregated for different technological changes and for the first two implementation phases. The authors chose not to consider the impacts of the third advanced implementation phase, as these are expected to only be felt in the long term and there are no empirical analyses yet to support them.
