Israel has substantial assets for advancing regenerative agriculture: excellent researchers, innovative farmers, extension and advisory services, demonstration farms, agri-tech companies, public institutions, civil society organisations and philanthropic partners. Alongside the need to continue building the research base, one of the central challenges is to strengthen the infrastructure and mechanisms that connect stakeholders, so that the system can learn from implementation in the field and improve over time.
What would it take to move from successful regenerative agriculture initiatives to establishing a system that fosters learning, research, implementation and adoption at scale?
That question was at the heart of a recent learning visit to England taken by Yad Hanadiv’s Environment and Academic Excellence Programme teams. Built around the Groundswell Regenerative Agriculture Festival, it included visits to the University of Leeds and LEAF, a leading global organisation in the field of sustainable agriculture.
Yad Hanadiv’s teams saw first-hand how different parts of an agricultural system reinforce one another: long-term research shaped by questions arising in the field; extension and knowledge-brokering professionals who link science to practice; demonstration and peer-learning networks; and support and funding mechanisms that make experimentation and implementation possible.
The challenge is not just to generate more knowledge, but to build an infrastructure in which challenges from the field shape research, research becomes actionable knowledge, solutions are tested under commercial conditions, and lessons from implementation feed back into research and practice.
This thinking guides the regional Living Labs that Yad Hanadiv supports in Israel. They are not demonstration projects, nor simply forums for convening stakeholders. They are working platforms that bring farmers, researchers, extension and knowledge-brokering professionals, and regional partners together around real agricultural challenges.
Collecting data from the field systematically is an essential part of this. It is what makes it possible to understand over time what works and under what conditions, thereby strengthening the knowledge base, raising new research questions, and creating opportunities rooted in agricultural reality.
The aim is to build up, over time, a system that can learn from experience in the field, adapt knowledge to changing conditions, and improve implementation and adoption – while maintaining farms’ economic resilience as they transition to regenerative agriculture.