Soil health depends fundamentally on the people who manage it. In Greece, farmers steward 45.5% of the national territory, making their behavior central to any effort to regenerate degraded soils. Yet adoption of regenerative agriculture (regen ag) practices remains low, not for lack of proven benefits, but because farmers face a sequence of compounding barriers—a "transition path"—each of which sharply reduces the probability of adoption.
Mapping the pathway of a farmer to transition reveals further insights at crucial intervention points. First, farmers must hear about regen ag at all: peer networks rarely transmit novel practices, agronomists are not trained in them due to outdated agricultural curricula, and commercial media has structural disincentives to promote practices that reduce dependency on agrochemical inputs. Second, farmers must judge the information credible, typically by seeking endorsement from universities or public institutions. Third, the farmer must actually be the decision-maker on the farm—a condition disproportionately unmet by younger farmers, who are more receptive to innovation but rarely hold final authority. Fourth, even a convinced, empowered farmer needs accessible, affordable technical guidance to adapt practices to local conditions, which is largely unavailable. Finally, and critically, regulatory and subsidy systems fail to recognize diversified systems like agroforestry: a farmer implementing multilayered agroforestry may be forced to register as monoculture, losing subsidy eligibility, insurance coverage, and market access for the crop grown.
Framed through the lens of ambiguity tolerance—only a minority of people readily accept ambiguous, unclassified systems—this analysis argues that regenerative practices remain structurally excluded rather than simply under-promoted. Concrete interventions at each stage are necessary: integrating regen ag into agronomy curricula and subsidy classification systems, establishing peer-learning networks, funding accessible on-farm training, and documenting real-world gaps through pioneer-farmer research. Understanding adoption as a probabilistic pipeline, rather than a single knowledge deficit, reframes soil health policy: the goal is not persuasion alone, but removing systemic obstacles at every step.