In the face of declining food quality due to unsustainable farming practices, we have an opportunity to shift paradigms towards regenerative agriculture from an individual to a global scale. Regenerative agriculture is not yet present as an application domain in requirements engineering research. We open the discussion with an agroecology case (food forest design) that offers a perspective of how our natural environment has significant influence on potential yield and, consequently, on a supporting system’s design. This requires specific attention to domain modeling and requirements engineering. We contribute a clarification of terminology, a research roadmap, and the sketch of a pilot. They serve as foundation for a larger body of work.

Birgit Penzenstadler is faculty at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, and Lappeenranta Lahti University of Technology, Finland (before: California State University Long Beach). Her research focus is how neuroplasticity practices can support engineers and other computer workers in improving their presence, creativity, cognitive abilities, immune systems, sleep and overall resilience (for details, see https://www.twinkleflip.com). She has been researching the relation between sustainability and software engineering for a decade and focuses on artifact-based requirements engineering and requirements engineering for sustainability. Her expertise includes requirements elicitation, analysis, design and documentation techniques, for example sustainability goal modeling, as well as artifact models, quality modeling, tool support, and process improvement (see https://www.sustainabilitydesign.org and http://birgit.penzenstadler.de). Penzenstadler received a habilitation from the Technical University of Munich’s Faculty of Informatics. She’s a member of IEEE and ACM. Contact her at birgitp @ chalmers.se