Regenerative agriculture as the new normal

How strange… As a farmer, you need to be certified to be organic. You need to register with an approved control body and undergo a thorough inspection process to ensure your farming practices meet the required standards – that you’re helping soil regeneration, not adding harmful pesticides and herbicides, providing the space and environments that your animals need. But if you follow ‘conventional’ practices (aka industrial farming), there’s no certification required to farm in ways that destroy the topsoil, poison biodiversity with pesticides, pollute waterways with fertiliser runoff, raise animals in intense confinement, produce lots more carbon emissions.

Regenerative agriculture

What if we inverted the ideas of regenerative agriculture and ‘conventional’ agriculture? What if we looked at both with the clarity that children have: some things are simply good and other things are simply bad.

It is good to keep our soils healthy by building soil organic matter, allowing plants to grow to their maximum productivity and for soils to store more carbon. It is good to use fewer synthetic pesticides in smaller amounts, and more natural ones that do not cause any harm to people or the environment. It is good to raise farmed animals to have a better quality of life and stay naturally healthy, with more outdoor access and humane treatment.

It is bad to degrade the soil (by tilling, monocropping, etc), reducing its ability to support plant life and so grow crops. It is bad to use chemical pesticides that are linked to chronic human diseases and are toxic to other animals. It is bad to inject farmed animals with unnecessary antibiotics or artificial growth hormones (with residues transferred into our own bodies). It is bad to use synthetic fertilisers in such quantities that the runoff leaches into our water systems, creating dead zones where aquatic life cannot survive.

Nature friendly farming

Some might say that to look at these things in terms of simple good and bad is naïve. So let’s be clear on this too: clarity on which kinds of farming practices should be normal is not the same thing as being naïve. It is naïve to expect that the Government and others will promote sustainable farming practices without our insistence. It is naïve to assume that farmers will be driving decisions around nature friendly farming without adequate financial support and a long-term policy vision. It is naïve to focus only on what farmers can do as individuals, instead of what we can do together, in community and by supporting them.

A lot of people are already on side and are friendly about nature friendly farming. As Kathryn Machin, Head of Community Engagement Campaigns at WWF, said:

“In the People’s Plan for Nature, which we co-commissioned in 2023, there was a clear public mandate for better support for farmers, and for ensuring that the people who grow and produce our food have a say in the key policies that affect this sector. An overhaul of current farming subsidy systems to prioritise sustainable and nature-friendly farming was in the top 10 recommendations voted for by members of the People’s Assembly for Nature, so this really is an issue that people care about.” 

Showing our collective support for regenerative agriculture and that we really care about it should be a part of this new normal too.

For more ideas on some of the bigger local actions that we can take together, visit Farm with Nature.