These days, so much of the conversation about improving food and agriculture systems revolves around regenerative agriculture. The term itself has many definitions—it’s used by everyone from smallholder farmers to executives at the world’s largest agrochemical companies.
For me, regenerative agriculture means protecting and improving soil health, enhancing biodiversity, creating diverse and nutritious diets, and ensuring economic sustainability for farmers.
Of course, many other approaches share these same principles.
Agroecology, for example, is not only a set of practices but also a movement. According to the Agroecology Fund, it “operates within a justice and rights framework” that seeks to minimize external inputs—like synthetic fertilizers and herbicides—while optimizing the relationships between plants, animals, humans, and the wider environment.
Similarly, conservation agriculture (CA) is practiced around the world. CA emphasizes maintaining soil cover and reducing tillage—because the less we disturb soil, the better it functions. It helps retain nutrients, improve water use efficiency, and support biodiversity on farms—from beneficial insects to pollinators to birds.
In Ethiopia, CIMMYT—the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center—is working with regional and national partners to bring conservation agriculture to scale. For the past three years, the Scaling Conservation Agriculture-Based Sustainable Intensification (SCASI) project has supported farmers in eight districts to implement solutions tailored to their contexts—not cookie-cutter approaches, but flexible practices that strengthen soil, increase incomes, and build resilience to the climate crisis.
“We’re helping farmers reclaim their land, restore soil fertility, and make it sustainable for the next generation,” says Dr. Moti Jaleta, principal scientist and food systems lead at CIMMYT.
For many, SCASI is about more than yields—it’s about empowerment.
“Communities should have the resources to solve their own problems,” says Tilahun Tadesse, Senior Programs Manager at Terepeza Development Association (TDA), a faith-based organization working with CIMMYT.
Before SCASI, Tadesse explains, farming families often struggled to feed themselves for even half the year. They lacked resilience to climate shocks. But now, by experimenting collectively and finding solutions locally, farmers are changing that story. SCASI is not prescriptive—it encourages trial and error, diversity, and farmer leadership.
The impact is tangible. In some places, farmers are seeing yield increases of 50 percent by restoring degraded soils. In Boloso Bombe and Boloso Sore, two woredas in the Wolaita Zone, farmers proudly showed me comparison plots.
On the SCASI plots, maize stands tall alongside legumes, climbing yams, and other vegetables. The soil is dark, moist, and alive. On the conventional plots, the maize is thin and spindly, the soil pale and crumbly, and there are no secondary crops. You can literally see the difference.
But what matters most are the farmers’ own stories. One single mother of three told me that thanks to SCASI, she can now afford to send her son to private school. Another farmer/mother explained that forage production allowed her to keep two cows. And instead of eating once a day, her family now eats three meals daily.
That’s more than improved agriculture—that’s life-changing.
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Photo courtesy of CIMMYT/P. Lowe
