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Regenerative and conservation agriculture: researchers and farmers test what works

Group picture.

In autumn 2025, the project team met with its 22 partner organisations for the kick-off meeting in Córdoba, Spain.

Project logo consisting of a leaf and the title "TRAILS4SOIL".

Researchers from FiBL and partner organisations are embarking on a European project to discover how regenerative and conservation agriculture could help reverse soil degradation. Working directly with farmers, the TRAILS4SOIL project, co-funded by the EU and Swiss Confederation, will provide evidence from 100 sites across Europe on regenerative and conservation agriculture’s impacts - not only on soil health, but also on crop yield, farm income and farmer wellbeing. The project team comprises 22 partner organisations and met in autumn 2025 for the kick-off meeting in Córdoba, Spain.

According to European Environment Agency figures, over 60 per cent of soils in Europe are degraded – meaning they are eroded, compacted, contaminated and/or drained of nutrients and moisture. The project aims to investigate the potential of regenerative and conservation agriculture as a solution to this degradation.

Large-scale evidence

Over the next five years (2025-2030), TRAILS4SOIL project members will work closely with farmers and land managers across a network of 100 experimentation sites in nine European countries from Portugal to Ukraine.

They will evaluate the impacts of regenerative and conservation agriculture methods on soil health and crop yield, as well as farmer income, farmer wellbeing, and the environment.

Each of the 100 sites will explore one of five specific issues or techniques, namely:

  • permanent crop cover
  • organic farming
  • climate-change adaptation
  • black-soil conservation
  • crop-livestock integration

Sites in Switzerland

In Switzerland, FiBL and BFH-HAFL (the School of Agricultural, Forest and Food Sciences at the Bern University of Applied Sciences) are collaborating with ten farmers to advance regenerative and conservation agriculture by applying the principles of organic farming while at the same time making organic farming itself more regenerative. The field trials are being co-designed with the participating farmers to integrate their expertise in regenerative and conservation soil management and to address practical challenges in further developing regenerative and conservation farming practices. FiBL is also working closely with Austrian farmers and researchers from the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (BOKU) in Vienna, who are conducting parallel field trials with the same objectives.

Further information

Contact

Tim Schmid

Links

Financing

The project TRAILS4SOIL - Transformative living labs for soil health: advancing regenerative and conservation agriculture across Europe is to drive the transformation of European agriculture towards resilient, sustainable and climate-friendly systems. For this, a network of five Living Labs (LLs) will be jointly created, implemented and scaled up in diverse European agroecosystems. 

TRAILS4SOIL is funded by the EU's Horizon Europe programme (Grant agreement ID: 101218949) and the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI).