What Is a Community of Practice?
- Johanna Tanhuanpää
- Oct 13
- 2 min read
A community of practice (CoP) is a long-term, peer-to-peer learning group of farmers and allies who share a commitment to regenerating land and continually improve their practices together through regular interaction, shared experiments, and open exchange of what works and what doesn’t.
A community of practice has three key ingredients:
Domain – a shared area of interest or purpose
Community – the people who build relationships and trust
Practice – the actual know-how, tools, stories, and routines they develop and share
What does that mean in regenerative agriculture?
In a regenerative agriculture community of practice, the domain could typically be something like:
Transitioning arable farms to regenerative systems
Pasture-based livestock with high animal welfare and soil regeneration
Producing your own farming inputs, such as biostimulants
The community is made up of people actively involved in or supporting regenerative agriculture, for example:
Farmers and ranchers experimenting with cover crops, no-till, mob grazing, agroforestry
Advisors, agronomists, vets, and farm business consultants
Researchers, NGOs, sometimes value-chain actors (buyers, processors, retailers)
Local community members, educators, and policy people in some cases
The practice is the concrete, on-the-ground know-how of regenerative farming, such as:
Designing rotations and diverse cover crop mixes
Managing grazing density and rest periods
Reducing synthetic inputs while keeping yields and animal health stable
Monitoring soil health, biodiversity, water infiltration, profitability etc.
How a regenerative agriculture CoP typically works
A CoP in this context isn’t just a WhatsApp group or a one-off project meeting. It’s ongoing, practice-oriented learning together, for example:
Regular meet-ups / farm walks
Members host each other on their farms to look at fields, pastures, machinery, financials.
People share what actually worked, what failed, and what they’d change next season.
Peer-to-peer troubleshooting
“My cover crop failed after a dry autumn – what would you do?”
“How do you keep weeds down with zero tillage in this soil type?”
Shared tools and frameworks
Common soil health indicators, grazing calendars, observation logs, economic benchmarks.
Sometimes co-developed guidance or “codes of practice” for regenerative management.
Boundary-spanning
Bringing in researchers, policymakers, or supply-chain partners into the farmer learning space so policy and markets start to align with real farm-level practice.
What a CoP is not
Within regenerative agriculture, a community of practice is different from:
A top-down training programme – knowledge flows horizontally between practitioners, not just from “experts” to “students”.
A loose network or mailing list – a CoP is more focused, with a clearer shared purpose and more regular interaction.
A short-term project consortium – CoPs usually persist beyond one funding cycle; members stay because they get real, practical value.
