In an era where the legacies of the first Green Revolution are as much a cautionary tale as they are a testament to human ingenuity, a cohort of global scientific leaders converged under the aegis of the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation to sketch an agricultural renaissance—one in which regeneration, rather than mere sustenance, is the organising principle. The symposium, alive with the cross-pollination of ideas from India to Kenya and Nebraska to Tanzania, became a crucible for reimagining food systems that can heal the land, empower rural economies, and restore the balance between humanity and nature.

Dr. Himanshu Pathak, President of the National Academy of Agricultural Sciences and Director General of ICRISAT, unfurled a vision grounded in hard-won experimentation. From the resilient cropping systems of millets to the restorative sweep of conservation agriculture, his approach married resource optimisation with landscape regeneration across both Alfisols and Vertisols.

The data was not abstract but intimate, tied to specific geographies and livelihoods: in the havelis of Uttar Pradesh, water tables rose to 4.5 metres and base flows strengthened; in Odisha, a 500-acre intervention touched 410 households, lifting average incomes to Rs 30,160; in Maharashtra, groundwater recharge strategies reinforced the very foundation of sustainable agriculture. His work in Tanzania saw pigeon pea yields leap from 300 to 500 kilograms per hectare, while Ethiopia embraced nutrient-water budgeting as part of a regenerative agricultural blueprint. The scaling ambitions were no less audacious—expanding conservation agriculture to a quarter of India’s arable land, some 140 million hectares, and reclaiming 25 million hectares of degraded terrain.

Yet the discussion was not devoid of introspection. Professor Chittaranjan Ray, Director of the Nebraska Water Center at the University of Nebraska, invoked the “lingering effects” of the Green Revolution’s first wave—pollution, biodiversity loss, and compromised public health—reminding the audience that the triumvirate of fertilisers, credit, and fair pricing once offered to governments came with ecological costs now impossible to ignore. He described the slow attrition of the High Plains Ogallala Aquifer, counterpointed by Nebraska’s relative success in stalling its decline, and warned of rising nitrate levels in irrigated groundwater.

Regenerative agriculture, he argued, must transcend the yield fetish, anchoring itself instead in returns on investment that embed environmental conservation and soil vitality. His blueprint was unambiguously technological: crop simulation, dynamic yield estimation, evapotranspiration monitoring, in-season nitrogen management, IoT applications, and yield-gap analytics—all tied to precision interventions. Linking this to global energy transitions, he spoke of ongoing efforts to produce sustainable aviation fuel from canola, a reminder that regenerative thinking must embrace industrial as well as agrarian spheres.

If Dr. Ray offered a bridge from technological exactitude to environmental prudence, Dr. Ch. Srinivasa Rao, Director and Vice Chancellor of ICAR–IARI, elevated the discourse into philosophical terrain. Regenerative agriculture, he insisted, is not merely a set of practices but a paradigm shift—a deliberate turning towards healing lands, restoring livelihoods, and tempering the climate. He enumerated the four cardinal principles: minimal soil disturbance, maximum biodiversity, permanent soil cover, and the integration of livestock.

In Bastar’s Tahakapal district, an integrated farming systems model was transforming lives, while the prescription that one-third of all farmland be placed under agroforestry hinted at a structural reordering of Indian agriculture. He championed agroforestry as a mechanism for restoring soil carbon, lauded India’s four million hectares under organic farming, and underscored the potential of a circular carbon economy through crop residue management. His call for a National Mission on Regenerative Agriculture, coupled with the development of next-generation fertilisers, aimed not at incremental change but systemic transformation—anchored in climate-resilient villages, with Maharashtra’s 107 model villages already replicated five thousandfold.

From this Indian crucible, the conversation leapt to the global commons. Carlo Fadda, Director of Agrobiodiversity at the Alliance Bioversity International and CIAT in Kenya, warned that the annual economic toll from lost ecosystem services stood between $ 4.3 and 20 trillion, with ten million hectares of forest disappearing each year.

The “true cost” of food—encompassing environmental degradation, social dislocation, and health impacts—remained invisible in conventional economic metrics. His advocacy for “nature-positive” agriculture was both moral and operational: conserve natural capital, support smallholder farmers, halt deforestation, rehabilitate degraded lands, deploy appropriate technologies, reduce agriculture’s carbon footprint, and institutionalize traditional knowledge through participatory research. In Kenya, aggregated farming villages and community seed banks were fortifying resilience, while in Maharashtra, model farms embodied the promise of such principles in practice.

Closing the loop from macro to micro, Dr. V. R. Prabavathy, Former Director of Biotechnology at MSSRF, returned to the very bedrock of life—the rhizosphere where plant, microbe, and soil are in constant colloquy. Regenerative agriculture’s core principles, she reminded the audience, demand minimising soil disturbance, maximising biodiversity, maintaining living roots, and integrating livestock. Her research illuminated the shifts in soil microbiomes induced by cultivated crops, and her development of biocapsules as biostimulants—trialled in turmeric and ginger, with a mere one capsule sufficient for an acre—offered a tantalising glimpse of low-cost, high-impact interventions that marry science with farmer pragmatism.

By the symposium’s close, the rhetoric of regeneration had been grounded in field data, economic logic, ecological necessity, and moral imperative. The vision that emerged was not simply of agriculture as a food-producing enterprise, but as a civilisation-sustaining covenant—one that measures its success not in yield alone, but in the restoration of soils, the replenishment of aquifers, the resilience of communities, and the reconciliation of humanity with the natural systems that cradle it. In this synthesis of science and stewardship lies perhaps the truest homage to Swaminathan’s legacy: a future where agriculture’s purpose is not only to feed the world, but to heal it.