As Europe braces for another summer of drought fueled by climate change, new data from France offers a concrete path to resilience: regenerative farming. A study of more than 1,200 farms across the country found that those using regenerative practices lost only eight per cent of their crop yields during the 2023 drought, compared with 22 per cent for their least regenerative counterparts — a nearly threefold difference.
The research, conducted by Soil Capital — a B Corp that helps farmers transition to regenerative systems — in partnership with KU Leuven university in Belgium, analyzed independently verified field data from 1,262 farms covering 331,600 hectares between 2021 and 2024. It moves beyond theoretical models to demonstrate how regenerative agriculture can protect production at scale.
Drought resilience across France's cereal belt
The resilience was most pronounced in cereal-growing regions, which accounted for 82 of France's 96 departments during the study period. In about 85 per cent of cases, regenerative practices reduced drought-related yield losses by at least ten per cent, even after accounting for variables such as soil type.
Professor Erik Mathijs, head of agricultural, food and resource economics at KU Leuven, said the dataset fills a long-standing gap in research. “What has held us all back is the lack of robust field-level data across large geographies and multiple successive years,” he said. “Soil Capital's dataset is unusually strong in this regard.”
Soil Capital estimates that if the most regenerative practices studied were adopted across France, they would protect the equivalent of 17 weeks of wheat supply for a typical industrial flour mill during a similar future drought — enough wheat to produce approximately 130 million baguettes.
The findings come as the UN's January 2026 Global Water Bankruptcy report warned that the world has entered an era of “global water bankruptcy,” with drought-related damages now exceeding $307 billion (€264 billion) annually. The UN projects that droughts fueled by environmental degradation will affect three in four people by 2050.
The European Commission estimates that soil degradation — driven by unsustainable land management, sealing, contamination, and overexploitation, combined with climate change — already costs the EU over €50 billion per year in lost ecosystem services. In Europe, 60 to 70 per cent of soils are considered unhealthy, and more than half of the world's agricultural land is degraded.
How regenerative farming builds drought resilience
Regenerative farming takes a holistic approach to land management, aiming to restore soil health, promote biodiversity, and capture carbon. Healthy soil rich in organic matter acts like a sponge. Research by INRAE, France's national agricultural research institute, found that soils managed with regenerative practices held between eight and 15 per cent more water than conventionally tilled soils, and produced biomass yields 15 to 20 per cent higher for the same volume of water used.
In certain soil types, a one per cent increase in organic matter allows a single hectare to store an additional 350,000 litres of water — which also cools the planet through evaporation, according to Rothamsted Research. Cover cropping, crop rotation, and reduced tillage further enhance soil structure, while conventional farming's reliance on tillage, synthetic fertilisers, and monocropping typically degrades and compacts the soil.
The EU's Soil Monitoring Law, which came into force in 2025, sets out a framework for assessing and monitoring soil health across member states for the first time, with a goal of achieving healthy soils across the bloc by 2050. The UN Convention to Combat Desertification has repeatedly identified soil restoration as central to both food security and climate resilience goals.
“Soil's role in providing almost all our food calories, regulating water supplies, supporting biodiversity, and helping stabilise the global climate is widely overlooked and frequently undervalued,” the UNCCD states.
For European farmers facing rising costs, supply shortages, and extreme weather, the French data offers a clear signal: regenerative practices are not just an environmental ideal but a practical tool for building resilience against the droughts that are becoming the continent's new normal.
