Photo: Sarah Langford by Richard Allenby-Prat ©
What is regenerative farming? The easiest way of describing regenerative farming is a description that a lovely farmer friend of mine, George Young, uses. He says, 'I'm putting back in more than I'm taking out.' At its essence, that's what it is. So, you measure everything at the beginning of your rotation: your soil, organic matter, biodiversity, whatever it might be. And at the end of your rotation, if there's more there, you've regenerated it, putting more back in than you're taking out. And that's why it's not sustainability that we want, because our systems are so depleted. We don't want to maintain a depleted system. We have become too used to a low biodiversity baseline. My kids, for example, have never heard a cuckoo, which is a song that I grew up listening to. We don't want to sustain [this]. We need to regenerate it.
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How does it differ from conventional farming? We'd got to a place in farming where you could create immaculate fields from a bag or a bottle. You had to put so much money into that bag and bottle – into that crop. If you have bought a high-yielding variety of wheat that has required a pre-emergent herbicide, post-emergent herbicide and insecticide, possibly even three rounds of fungicide plus a huge amount of synthetic nitrogen, you can't afford for it to fail. If you have spent nothing more than seed and diesel, the pressure is off a bit. The objective, really, with regenerative farming is to make your natural systems the ones that provide you with what you need. A farmer once said to me, 'I'm
really just a tractor driver, you know. My agronomist tells me what to grow and how to grow it. My grain merchant
will tell me what price I'm going to get for it. I just basically do what they tell me to and drive the tractor.' And he's not wrong; he didn't really have a huge amount of autonomy. So I think regenerative farming puts
the autonomy and the creativity back in. Farmers can make their own decisions and say, 'You know what, I think I'm going to go and grow chia, and I'm going to find a small supplier and grow on a contract for them,' as opposed to just chucking something in the ground that's on the approved list.
Do you think this approach can scale up? How easily can the farmers find the markets they need? The marketing side's really hard. That's been one of our biggest challenges. Because if you've spent 45 years just putting wheat, barley, and oilseed rape in the ground every year, and the lorry
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