The world's 475 million small farms produce about 30% of global food, but face growing pressure from climate change, land scarcity and declining agricultural employment.
A study projects that the number of farms worldwide could fall to 272 million by 2100, raising concerns about future food security.
In his book Whole Earth Farming, development expert Hugh Locke argues that helping 240 million smallholder families adopt regenerative agriculture and agroforestry could meet additional food demand through 2050.
Locke cites an initiative involving more than 10,000 farmers in Haiti, where yields reportedly rose by an average of 40% and household incomes increased by 50–100%.
Research cited in the book suggests that widespread adoption could also remove up to 0.72 gigatonnes of CO₂ from the atmosphere annually.
The foundational economic activity of farming is under immense pressure on multiple fronts. First, it is reliant on land, a finite resource fiercely competed over by several users. Climate change is another factor that directly impacts farm profit and productivity. Moreover, industrial and intense farming is coming under scrutiny for its greenhouse gas emissions, making it a target for evaluation—rather, there is a growing call for a complete makeover of the food system. At the same time, there is a dip in interest in farming, which is labour-intensive and labour-centric. What makes this worse is that farming is dominantly practised by smallholders, who constitute the world’s poor population. An expected question arises: how will these factors affect the world’s food security?
The world has 570 million farms, of which 475 million are small farms (less than 2 hectares), mostly in the Global South. A quarter of the world population lives and works on these small farms, which contribute a significant 30 per cent of the world's food production. Small farms provide up to 74 per cent of kilocalories to people in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. But this food-providing population is fast ageing—the average age of a farmer is 55, close to the outer limit of working age. This is met with widespread withdrawal of people from farming. In 2025, agriculture accounted for 26 per cent of global employment, down from 39 per cent at the beginning of the 21st century, as per World Bank data. And, agricultural land use has peaked after expanding for nearly 1,000 years. A study published in Nature Sustainability forecasts the number of farms globally would drop to 272 million in 2100, from 616 million in 2020. “As a country’s economy grows, more people migrate to urban areas, leaving fewer people in rural areas to tend the land,” says the study.
So, the world is staring at a gloomy future for food security—more people to feed, but with fewer farms. However, a recent book, Whole Earth Farming: Smallholders and the Great Re-generative Transformation, presents an alternative. Author and development expert Hugh Locke asserts, “helping just half of the smallholders farmers worldwide—about 240 million farm-ing families—to adopt regenerative agriculture and agroforestry could yield all the additional food required by population growth through 2050 while improving rather than degrading nature.” He calls regenerative agriculture “a holistic approach to farming that aims to improve the natural systems on which agriculture depends.”
In the next 25 years, the world population will grow by 1.5 billion, mostly in developing countries. But Locke says that “meeting that additional food does not have to come at the cost of further soil degradation, biodiversity loss and climate change.” Locke, also co-founder of the Smallholder Farmers Alliance in Haiti, says, “The world's smallholder farmers are too often treated as beneficiaries of development assistance when they should be recognised as architects of the next agricultural transfor-mation.” Citing his experiment with over 10,000 small farmers in Haiti, he says that basic agricultural support based on sustainable practices has boosted not just crop yield but also family income. “Small farmers’ yields increase by an average of about 40 per cent, while household incomes rise between 50-100 percent.”
There are co-benefits to this pathway. Peer-reviewed research quoted in the book says if 240 million small farmers move to regenerative farming, it would remove up to 0.72 giga-tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere annually. Regenerative farming will also reduce use of synthetic fertilisers, further lowering 0.1 gigatonnes of CO2 equivalent annually. Farmers have never been compensated for their ecosystem services. In the new context of climate emergency and a declining farm sector, this pathway seems to be a win-win opportunity.
This article was originally published in the October 1-15, 2026 print edition of Down To Earth
