The relationship between carbon, nitrogen and water in the soil is a black box, Landcare Research chief executive Richard Gordon said.
Landcare wants to do more to understand that interaction.
But such work is not funded here, Gordon says.
The Crown research institute has applied for Ministry for Business, Innovation and Employment funding for a home-grown project involving other institutes, universities, Ngai Tahu and a small number of international researchers.
If fully funded it will be a national project looking at a wide variety of farm systems.
“We would be doing studies on 180 farms and 60 of them in depth.”
Gordon acknowledged there’s debate about the strength of the evidence to support regenerative agriculture.
“You have the relationship between the nutrients that are being put on, the nutrients that are escaping out of our system into the waterways, the carbon that’s being sequestered in the soil – how long is that there and does that represent a carbon sink that could be useful for our national accounting.
“And, obviously, there’s our water; the impact of irrigation and how is that impacting the soil system.”
All of that is mediated by microbes in the soil, he said.
“That’s the bit that’s really the black box. We need to get a better understanding of that.”
On that basis Landcare wants to get data so it can really understand what’s going on and what the benefits are.
The answer might be “Can’t see any, we can’t put any benefits on a really firm footing, so think again”.
Landcare is already studying regenerative agriculture as a member of Australia’s Soils Co-operative Research Centre.
Meantime, a Landcare worker is involved in a short-term regenerative agriculture project in the United States.
The study in California, funded by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, is gathering experiences of regenerative agriculture in several countries.
Regenerative agriculture is based on a systems approach to farming, Gordon said.
“It’s thinking about soil health as fundamental to the productivity of the farm and through that to the wellbeing of the farmer and the community.”
Landcare also wants to examine the economic and social impacts of regenerative farming, Gordon said.
“I think it’s worth emphasising that our interest, at the moment, is to get the evidence around regenerative agriculture and to try to put the concept on a firm footing from a scientific evidence point of view.
“We’re taking a neutral position on that. We’re not trying to get the soil data for everybody to promote this and say ‘this is the way that everybody should go’.”
As a science organisation Landcare has said there is a lot of interest in this and many farmers in other countries are going this way.
Gordon said farmers seem to be interested because it’s a broad, systems-based approach.
“I think that feels natural to farmers. It’s like a Maori attitude, they take a whole systems approach, thinking about land, nature and communities.”
In its funding brief Landcare says it wants to study how regenerative agriculture can restore the health of soil damaged by past production processes.
In practice, farmers already widely understand practices such as minimum till, plant certain forage crops to maintain soil health and avoid bare soil times of the year, for example.
They almost aim for biodiversity in their agricultural systems.
“I wouldn’t say that any of these concepts is necessarily new. Some of them have been around for a long time but I guess regenerative farming as a concept is saying ‘let’s bring all this together as a concept as a whole system. Let’s think about the practices that are used on the land and their relationship with the quality of the product’.”
Understanding these production principles will help farmers, manufacturers and retailers to tell a story to consumers. It could also shed light on the wellbeing of farmers, who have to constantly deal with worries like variable pricing and the cost of agricultural inputs.
MBIE funding is critical to the work.
Gordon said the organisation and its prospective partners did a lot of work to get the proposal this far and they expect to hear from MBIE in September.
“I hate to think of the prospects if we don’t get that funding but we have to accept there’s a lot of risks associated (with a science funding bid).”
