Learning from farmers’ experiences with participatory monitoring and evaluation of regenerative agriculture based on visual soil assessment

Participatory action research involving farmers and researchers is crucial to enhance the adoption of farming innovations and ensure the long term sustainability of agroecosystem restoration. However, the factors for successful participatory research for agroecosystem restoration are not always clear and have been rarely evaluated from the perspective of the subjects from whom change is expected. Despite the increasing call for agroecosystem Living Labs, farmers are still seldom involved in structured and shared co-monitoring and co-evaluation of farming innovations as part of participatory monitoring programs. Therefore, we developed a participatory monitoring and evaluation project to evaluate the impacts of regenerative agriculture between farmers and researchers in the Mediterranean drylands of Spain. Here we present and evaluate the project outcomes by reporting farmers’ monitoring results using a co-developed visual soil assessment (VSA) manual, and by documenting farmers’ evaluation of the VSA and other key aspects of the participatory monitoring and evaluation in the third year since the beginning of the project. Farmers’ VSA results pointed out regenerative agriculture as a promising solution to restore degraded agroecosystems in Mediterranean drylands with insights that are complementary to the scientific monitoring. Farmers’ evaluation of the participatory monitoring process revealed the need to enhance farmers’ support for implementation of VSA tools in initial stages, and to include farmers in the design of VSA tools to adjust them to farmers’ priorities, possibilities and needs. Farmers highlighted the importance of the participatory monitoring and evaluation process to enhance knowledge exchange, learning, and capacity building regarding soil quality management to adapt and adopt regenerative agriculture. Our results confirm that including farmers in the design, decision-making and evaluation of research projects for agroecosystem restoration is imperative to enhance efficient, sound and inclusive transitions towards long term sustainable agroecosystems.