From Farm to Planet: The InSEEDS World-Earth Model for Simulating Transitions to Regenerative Agriculture

Industrialised agriculture and its externalisation of environmental costs have contributed to accelerating ecological degradation and the transgression of planetary boundaries. Vice versa, agriculture is increasingly affected by ecological pressures such as climate change. While sustainable approaches like Regenerative Agriculture offer promising alternatives, most studies focus on the biophysical impacts of individual practices and overlook the complex dynamics underlying their large-scale adoption. In particular, the roles of social-ecological feedbacks, tipping dynamics, and transformative change remain underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce the InSEEDS integrated World-Earth model – a novel co-evolutionary approach to simulating agricultural transitions that couples a process-based vegetation model (LPJmL) with an agent-based model of farmer decision-making. InSEEDS integrates socio-cultural, social-ecological, and biophysical dynamics and can be applied from local to global scales. Distinguishing between a traditionalist and pioneer farmer types, we analyse the adoption dynamics of conservation tillage as a key practice of Regenerative Agriculture. We find that social networks, ecological heterogeneity, and decision-making inertia play a critical role in determining transition dynamics. Adoption of conservation tillage yields overall positive effects on soil carbon and crop yield, though outcomes are strongly context-dependent. InSEEDS provides a foundational tool that opens up avenues for understanding complex human-environment interactions in land-use transformations and advancing the next generation of World-Earth models.