The world doesn’t need to choose between feeding a growing population and restoring the planet’s soils. According to a new book, it could do both — using just 12 per cent of the world’s arable land. The answer, argues development expert Hugh Locke, lies with a group of farmers rarely credited with that kind of power: The world’s smallholders.
In Whole Earth Farming: Smallholders and the Great Regenerative Transformation, Locke notes that this overlooked segment of agriculture may hold the key to meeting one of the biggest challenges of the next quarter-century: Feeding roughly 1.5 billion more people by 2050, with that growth concentrated in developing countries, without pushing the planet’s soils, water and biodiversity further into decline.
Locke lays out a case in the book that helping just half of the world’s smallholders — about 240 million farming families — transition to regenerative agriculture and agroforestry could generate all the additional food required by population growth through mid-century, while improving the land those farms sit on rather than depleting it.
There are roughly 475 million smallholder farms across the Global South, most of them work on plots smaller than two hectares (about 5 acres). Collectively, they already produce about 30 per cent of the world’s food.
Access to credit, markets and technical training remains thin or non-existent for most of these farming families, even as they quietly underpin global food security.
Smallholders are already producing nearly a third of everything humanity eats, despite operating with a fraction of the resources devoted to larger farms. Research funding, infrastructure, extension services and financing have gone disproportionately toward large-scale agriculture for decades, leaving hundreds of millions of productive farmers working well below their potential.
Locke argues that the gap is an opportunity in disguise. If farmers producing 30 per cent of the world’s food are doing so without substantial institutional backing, then closing even part of that support gap could unlock outsized gains — not just in yield, but in soil health, water quality and biodiversity.
“The world’s smallholder farmers are too often treated as beneficiaries of development assistance when they should be recognized as architects of the next agricultural transformation,” said Locke, co-founder of the Smallholder Farmers Alliance in Haiti.
Central to the proposition is that the additional food isn’t produced through conventional intensification — more chemical inputs, more irrigation, more land under cultivation. Instead, it comes through regenerative techniques adapted to local conditions: Cover cropping, composting, crop rotation, agroforestry, reduced tillage and integrated livestock systems, among others.
Locke’s own experience offers a working example of what that support can produce. Through the Smallholder Farmers Alliance, which he co-founded in Haiti in 2010, participating farmers who receive basic agricultural backing see yields rise by an average of about 40 per cent and household incomes climb 50 to 100 per cent. It’s a small-scale proof point for the argument he’s making at global scale: That one major constraint on smallholder productivity is the lack of investment and institutional support behind them.
Locke, however, says that regenerative agriculture should not be reduced to a fixed menu of practices. He argues that the test should be in the outcomes: Whether soils are healthier, biodiversity is recovering, water is better conserved, food production rises and farming families are economically better off.
The book draws on 21 stories from 18 countries, using examples from farming communities in Colombia, Thailand, Canada, the Netherlands and across Africa, Asia and Latin America, to show how regenerative agriculture is being applied under very different ecological and economic conditions.
Drawing on peer-reviewed research, the book estimates that if around 240 million smallholder farms shifted to regenerative agriculture across roughly 480 million hectares, their soils and vegetation could eventually remove as much as 0.72 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year during the period in which soil carbon is accumulating.
Reduced use of synthetic fertilisers could bring the combined climate benefit to an estimated 0.6-0.85 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent annually at mature adoption.
But Locke also puts limits around that claim. Soils do not continue absorbing carbon indefinitely; sequestration generally slows after one to three decades as a new equilibrium is reached, and results vary substantially depending on climate, soil type, farming practice and starting conditions.
Regenerative agriculture, he stresses, cannot be treated as an offset for continued emissions elsewhere.