Regenerative Agriculture and the Need for Small Targets

The key to fostering bigger changes is to facilitate smaller ones. For that reason we work on small, worthy targets that farm managers can adopt.

A Manifesto for Regenerative Agriculture? Back in mid-November, a group of experts and practitioners got together in Germany to develop a common understanding of what the term ‘regenerative agriculture’ means. More details of the Manifesto that the group agreed on are found at the link above.

There are two principles embedded in the Manifesto worth mentioning here:

‘The experts at the Congress were clear that there are no “regenerative practices” per se, which also means that there can be no prescriptive, practice-based approach to regenerative agriculture….No practice should be seen independently as harmful (or beneficial) for ecosystems, before being assessed in relation to the specific context and the long term regenerative impact.’

‘The first step in regenerating a landscape must be the deep analysis of the “given ecological, socio-cultural and economic context” which includes “multiple levels, including field level, farm level, landscape level, biomes level and food system level”.’

There is no compelling need among practitioners - land managers and farmers using their understanding of the word ‘regenerative’ - to have agreement at national, continental or global scale. The need only arises when you wish to use the concept in a quality assurance program, and as part of a marketing and distribution project. In that case, the need to succinctly state your products’ special benefits is critical, as is the need for validating that the users of your mark adhere to practices that deliver those special benefits.

The second principle is probably the reef on which the regenerative initiative will crash. No farming enterprise will build the required knowledge and infrastructure for all the components of the food system. Each of the levels above farm level is a special domain in itself. The current concentrated distribution systems deliver reliability and convenience to food consumers. Changing them is an enormous task, requiring complex political and practical cooperation. Each component requires specialist knowledge and insight. Farming is also a specialist task, and takes considerable judgement and commitment for success. To foster a change in the food system requires the stakeholders to cooperate over decades while focused closely on their own responsibilities (eg the farm or the chain of distribution outlets).

The glue that keeps the current food system together is the slow but continuous cementing of human decisions not to change their approach… this time. It is persistent. The whole system is supported by the decisions of everyone in the food system from consumer back to farm manager.

There are initiatives to link the products from a better form of agriculture to consumers in new distribution models. The success of these initiatives relies on larger amounts of capital than we have seen in that sphere previously. Their success is not critical to changing soil and farm management approaches, but seeing that market clearly would inspire more suppliers to take the next step.

‘We shall never achieve harmony with land any more than we shall achieve justice or liberty for people. In these higher aspirations the important thing is not to achieve, but to strive.’ - Aldo Leopold, the famous American conservationist and writer.

We support and foster what is often called the food web concept though we prefer ecological agriculture. In such systems farm managers learn to understand and manage ecological factors to maintain and enhance farm productivity. Integrated pest management might be the first step along the path, learning to manage the pest habitat to reduce numbers below the economic threshold level, rather than try (unsuccessfully) to eliminate them. There is much to learn about the integrated effects of management systems on soils. Some pesticides, for example, reduce the levels of activity in soil biology.

The core principle of ecological agriculture is soil health, which is the enhancement of soil conditions that foster the growth and functioning of the soil microbiome. We are starting at the small scale, creating tools to assist farm managers to confidently build soil health, because it optimises the outcomes of their business.

The key to bigger changes is to facilitate smaller ones. People want to absorb change and convert the new methods into a familiar process. Only when rapid change is driven by events do people adapt more quickly. We cannot be confident however that even changes that are widely agreed to be very good, will continue to be supported over time. Substantial change is a slow dance.

For that reason we work on small, worthy targets.