RegenAg – A New Movement or Back to the Future?

Reading the headlines about regenerative agriculture in recent times has got me thinking. Is this really a new idea? Regenerative agriculture has a growing body of passionate advocates and devotees; however, there seems to be a deep divide separating what might be seen as a polarising movement to more sustainable practices, and what is considered mainstream.

I have been thinking about my Dad, Colin, a dairy farmer, and the things I learned from him, learnings I’ve since deployed across the world in over 40 years of professional agribusiness practice. It struck me that Dad would today be called a regenerative farmer. However, what he did and what he taught me were the application of practices and knowledge that were a combination of tradition and science. Applied science, validated by astute observation of the impacts of our activities on the natural world. Basically, things that worked, where you could clearly see and measure positive results.

Our family dairy farm was pastured with a salad of plant species that ensured animals always had nutritious feed in front of them throughout the changing seasons. These pastures didn’t need to be ‘renewed’. They renewed themselves. Dad could tell you what the soil was doing by looking at what was growing and the health of those plants. Sometimes we dug holes and looked at the soil texture, searching for little fungal filaments and worm casts. Over the years, the soils got darker, more aerated and there were more worms. At the same time, our dairy herd comprising crossbred animals, bred and selected for the environmental conditions, grew healthier and more productive. Metabolic diseases and bloating became a thing of the past. And finally, when Dad became unable to keep farming, and my brother and I had taken up other professional paths, the dairy herd that had looked after us so well, fed and educated us, was sold for the highest price achieved for any herd that year.

Somewhere during the years in between then and now, pastoral farming entered an era of monoculture – limited pasture species fed by tonnes of external nutrient inputs, and irrigation, often used to push out more green matter per hectare; and animals that had a narrow genetic base which might or might not suit the actual farming conditions should those be different from the ‘norm’. In some cases, feed has become highly concentrate based, flying in the face of how the ruminant animal’s digestive system actually works. I think the weaknesses of this approach are now becoming apparent through high cost structures, carbon inefficiency, compacted soils and polluted water. And there is a move to look for a better way. But maybe what is needed is simply a re-examination of the fundamental principles of the farm as biological system and an evolution of combining new technologies with practices that are actually based on knowledge from an earlier era.

So, let us look at mainstreaming those old principles into our new farming systems and learning from a movement that I see is looking to do exactly that, even if some of the language being used around regenerative agriculture is just a new way of describing a biological cycle that is as old as life itself. 

All comments are welcome...