From soil health to farm resilience: Policy, finance and risk sharing for scaling regenerative and conservation agriculture practices

  9 June 2026, 11:00-13:00 CET

Organised at the European Parliament, Brussels – Room4F384

Co-organised by the TRAILS4SOIL consortium, which IEEP is part of, and the MEP Group on”Climate Change, Biodiversity and Sustainable Development”, we invite you to a discussion to explore how soil health policies can contribute simultaneously to farm income resilience, climate adaptation, and long-term budget efficiency.

Healthy soils are a foundation of food security, climate resilience, and thriving rural economies. Yet more than 60% of agricultural soils in the EU remain degraded, undermining farm productivity, increasing exposure to climate risks, and driving long-term public costs through disaster relief, yield losses, and ecosystem degradation.

Regenerative and Conservation Agriculture Practices (ReCAP) offer clear environmental benefits, but their large-scale adoption is slow. Evidence from across Europe shows that the key obstacles are no longer a lack of agronomic solutions alone, but economic risk, social lock-in, and an insufficiently supportive policy and financial environment.

This Science4Policy briefing takes place at a critical moment in EU policymaking. Discussions on the post-2027 Common Agricultural Policy, the Multiannual Financial Framework, the Common Market Organisation, National and Regional Partnership Plans and the implementation of the Soil Monitoring Law and Nature Restoration Law are converging with a growing debate on farm income stability, risk management, insurance schemes, and performance-based payment systems.

Drawing on early findings from the TRAILS4SOIL project, this event focuses on how to design an enabling environment that makes soil health practices economically viable, socially acceptable, and scalable across diverse farming systems. TRAILS4SOIL brings together evidence from multiple EU projects and Living Labs to identify:
• the main financial, technical, policy and socio-cultural barriers facing farmers during the transition;
• the enablers that reduce risk, build trust, and lower costs;
• the implications for CAP design, transition support, insurance and risk-sharing instruments, and sustainability benchmarking tools.

The event offers policymakers actionable insights for ongoing legislative and budgetary debates: how EU policy can better reward outcomes, de-risk transitions, and ensure that public spending on soil health delivers social, economic, and environmental returns.

This event aims to:
• Present policy-relevant evidence on why scaling soil health practices requires more than voluntary uptake and technical advice
• Discuss farmers’ perspectives on economic risk, income stability, and social feasibility during
transition phases
• Explore how current and emerging EU instruments (CAP, post-2027 transition tools, insurance schemes, benchmarking frameworks, MFF investments) can reduce barriers and strengthen enablers

This event is organised within the context of TRAILS4SOIL, an EU-funded Horizon Europe project that aims to accelerate the transition towards regenerative and conservation agriculture by generating robust, context-specific evidence on soil health outcomes. The project is building a network of Living Labs across nine European countries, bringing together farmers, researchers, advisors, value-chain actors and public authorities to co-create, test and evaluate regenerative and conservation agriculture practices under real farming conditions.

The event is open to all interested MEPs, APAs and policy advisors