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Regenerative Farming Practices - Europe
The project supports farmers across multiple European countries to adopt sustainable cropland management practices that reduce greenhouse gas emissions and build soil health. Key activities include reduced tillage to minimise soil disturbance, retaining crop residues to enhance nutrient cycling, planting winter cover crops and interim catch crops to increase organic matter inputs, and optimising nutrient management by reducing synthetic nitrogen fertiliser and switching to organic fertiliser.
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Project information
Sustainable agricultural land management
This project takes place in temperate agricultural regions, and it runs from 2021 to 2041, aiming to deliver greenhouse gas emission reductions and removals by helping farmers adopt regenerative land management practices that increase soil organic carbon and reduce nitrous oxide and carbon dioxide emissions. Each project instance must implement at least one practice beyond the baseline, including reduced tillage, retaining crop residues on the soil surface, planting cover crops, and reducing synthetic fertiliser use.
Together, these interventions address key drivers of farmland degradation by reducing soil disturbance and periods of bare soil, improving soil structure, and lowering vulnerability to wind and rain erosion. By generating verified emission reductions, the project provides farmers with access to carbon finance, creating an additional revenue stream linked to improved land management practices. This supports farm-level financial resilience while incentivising long-term soil stewardship. The adoption of these sustainable agricultural practices also contributes to more resilient and sustainable food production systems. In the first verification period, 1,652,643.85 hectares across 40,571 PAIs were monitored and verified as participating in these practices.
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Intervention
Improved Agricultural Land Management
Location
Bulgaria, Denmark, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Romania, Spain, Ukraine
Standard
Verified Carbon Standard (VCS)
Credit Type
Carbon Avoidance & Removal
Sustainable Goals
Project performance
The Earthly rating
The Earthly rating is the industry-first holistic project assessment. Earthly researchers analyse 160+ data points, aggregating information across the three vital pillars of carbon, biodiversity and people. Projects in Earthly's marketplace all exceed a minimum score of 5.5/10.
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Carbon
~2.6M
tCO2e of reductions and removals achieved during the first verification period
Biodiversity
~1.6M
hectares managed under regenerative agricultural practices during the first monitoring period
Social
40,571
farmers supported across multiple European countries
Project impact
Local impact
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Positive for people
The project takes meaningful action to address a range of social issues across its European operating regions through targeted, locally grounded initiatives. Pre-payments and estimated earnings projections actively support farmers through the financial challenges of transition, reducing income instability and lowering the cost barrier of adopting new machinery. Local Key Account Managers who speak the farmer's language build genuine trust and help counter the post-communist legacy of distrust toward collective efforts, while the Farmer Ambassador Program (launched 2024) ensures farmer voices are directly shaping project decision-making.
Explicit safeguards protect the safety and rights of women and girls on participating farms, and dedicated educational outreach and user-persona-based content are opening doors for younger farmers as agents of innovation. Community-building through social events and farmer networks is actively reducing the social isolation risks faced by transitioning farmers, normalising regenerative practice change across communities. Across all geographies, Validation Meetings in local languages ensure informed, voluntary participation, fostering a more equitable relationship between the project and farming communities. While observed impacts are still largely self-reported, the foundations for meaningful, measurable social change are clearly in place.
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Good for earth
The project supports farmers to adopt sustainable cropland management practices intended to reduce greenhouse gas emissions while building soil health and resilience. Key activities include reduced tillage to minimise soil disturbance, retention of crop residues to enhance nutrient cycling and protect the soil surface, planting winter cover crops and interim catch crops to maintain living ground cover and increase organic matter inputs, and optimising nutrient management by reducing synthetic nitrogen fertiliser use and, where relevant, shifting toward organic fertilisers.
These changes are expected to generate important local ecosystem benefits. Improved soil structure and greater plant nutrient uptake can reduce runoff and leaching, supporting better water quality by lowering losses of nutrients and, potentially, agrochemicals into watercourses. Biodiversity may also benefit through increased vegetation cover and improved soil functioning: cover crops can provide overwinter habitat and forage for farmland species, while reduced disturbance and increased organic inputs can support richer soil communities of bacteria, fungi, and other microfauna.
In addition, healthier soils with higher organic matter are typically better able to retain and infiltrate water, which can help buffer farms against drought stress and reduce flood risk during heavy rainfall. However, while these ecosystem outcomes are plausible, they are not directly monitored within the project, creating a key gap in the evidence base for claimed co-benefits. The project does, nonetheless, have a relatively robust system for monitoring practice implementation, combining farmer-reported data, remote sensing verification, and field inspections to check compliance and support credible reporting of the agricultural activities that underpin the carbon outcomes.
How we assess for quality
The Earthly scoring process
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