Regenera Cerrado enters new phase with focus on carbon emissions

“In the first phase, we focused on productivity, costs, and the crops’ resilience to climate challenges,” said Letícia Kawanami, Cargill’s director of agricultural business sustainability for South America. Now, the program will assess metrics such as carbon fixation and emissions reduction, the effects of bio-inputs, biodiversity improvements, and soil health. More workshops and field days will also be held to bring knowledge to more producers.

Ms. Kawanami noted that many of Cargill’s clients—including companies like Unilever, PepsiCo, and Nestlé—have their own environmental targets for reducing carbon emissions and protecting ecosystems, which also extend to their suppliers. Regenerative agriculture programs like this one help meet those goals. “These companies are increasingly interested in sourcing sustainably produced raw materials,” she said.

Launched in 2022, Regenera Cerrado was created to study and promote regenerative agriculture on soybean and corn farms in Brazil’s Cerrado. The initiative currently monitors 12 farms in southwestern Goiás, covering 7,841 hectares.

Each farmer adopts the practices best suited to their own property, such as no-till farming, crop rotation, cover crops, and the use of biological inputs. “These farms contributed all of their empirical knowledge so that researchers could scientifically validate it,” said Priscila Calegari, agriculture director at the BioSistêmico Institute.

A team of 35 researchers collected and analyzed data from the 2022/23 and 2023/24 crop seasons. Results from the first phase showed that in the 2023/24 harvest, average soybean yields in fields using regenerative practices reached 69 60-kilo bags per hectare. In areas using conventional methods, average yields were 66 bags per hectare. The average in Goiás, affected by drought, was 56 bags per hectare.

Marion Kompier, from Fazenda Brasilanda in Montividiu, Goiás, is among the program participants. Her family grows 6,600 hectares of soybeans each year. She said that by adopting regenerative agriculture, they were able to cut costs on fungicides, herbicides, and fertilizers by 50%. The average cost of soybean farming in Goiás is about 60 bags per hectare, but at Brasilanda, it dropped to 45 bags, she said.

Ms. Kompier also reported improved productivity. Some fields yielded up to 79 bags per hectare. On average, soybean yields in the 2024/25 season reached 70 bags per hectare in Goiás, compared to a national average of 60, according to Brazil’s National Supply Company (CONAB). “Improvement is gradual. Regenerative agriculture is a journey; you don’t flip the switch overnight,” she said.

Practices adopted at Brasilanda include crop rotation, cover crops, crop-livestock integration, organic fertilizers, and biofertilizers. Insect control is done with traps.