Thursday, March 28, 2024

ALTERNATIVE VIEW: Let’s create our own brand

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Regenerative agriculture (RA) tends to bounce around the media like a ping-pong ball. It embraces whatever the proponent wants.
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The Farmers Weekly editorial last week made the valid point that there’s an “urgent need for clarity about what the concept means in a NZ context”.

There also needs to be “more scientific testing of evidence and claims provided by advocates”.

RA originated in Japan in the 1970s with agricultural leader and philosopher Teruo Ichiraku, who made it his mission to “alert the public to the chemicals used in agriculture and to encourage people to only buy produce from organic family farms”.

Interestingly, the average family farm over the majority of Japan is but 1.8ha.

What can happen on a 1.8ha family farm may be quite different from a NZ sheep and beef unit.

Then in the early 1980s the American Rodale Institute described RA as “based on minimal soil disturbance and the practice of composting”. Over the next 40 years at Rodale, RA became regenerative organic agriculture and then restorative agriculture.

At the same time in the US, Allan Savory was preaching RA as “holistic management”. “Holistic management restores grasslands, sequesters carbon gives food security, drought resistance and financially viable communities,” Savory said at the time.

As holistic means that “the whole is greater than the sum of the parts,” I would strongly argue that the NZ farmer is currently farming in a holistic manner.

I asked three local scientists who I respect what they think RA means.

Lincoln professor and president of the NZ Institute of Agricultural and Horticultural Science Jon Hickford’s view was succinct. 

“There is no clear definition, just a whole lot of feel-good activities. It’s not prescriptive,” he said.

Professor Jacqueline Rowarth made the valid point that a considerable amount of research has been done in NZ to produce high-quality animal protein from pasture. “Claims being made about a better way are not supported by research in New Zealand – and the research overseas is generally being described without important details,” she said.

Dr Doug Edmeades view, strongly stated that “we must stop this virus before it takes us back to the middle ages”.

Regenerative is described in my dictionary as “to undergo moral, spiritual or physical renewal or invigoration”. That suggests to me that anything else is degenerative, which means “decline or deteriorate to a lower mental moral or physical level; degraded corrupt”.

I know it is an international fad and I’ve read both the Danone and Unilever RA definitions, which are quite different to those I’ve quoted here.

My position is simple: banish the term RA from our vocabulary. We have a reputable, sustainable, grass-fed farming system now. Chasing fads will achieve nothing. We can always improve, but not with RA.

The Primary Sector Council details RA in its Fit for a Better World document. They claim that there “is an expectation that regenerative farming systems will improve the profitability of farming while leaving behind a smaller environmental footprint”.

How that will happen they don’t say, and my rural banker tells me they won’t loan to RA exponents as they’re not profitable. That begs the question as to how many disciples of RA are relying on their farms to survive.

Not to be outdone, Beef + Lamb NZ paid a group associated with the University of Otago to investigate RA. What the tender process involved, how much levy money was wasted and what the results were they haven’t said.

My strong belief is that both the Primary Sector Council, MPI, B+LNZ, Nuffield and Landcare Research have been blinded by the enthusiastic advocates of RA and have ignored where NZ agriculture is at.

RA’s success was with the American prairies where land has been mined for over a century. We don’t mine our soils and the carbon content of our soils is high.

Yes, the disciples of RA suggest it can be used as a marketing tool, but for how long? People are bound to start asking the hard questions like “What’s the carbon footprint of RA, where are the nutrients going and how economic is it?”

And as the majority of our land is hill country, with the major fertilisers being rain and sunlight, how will RA work there?

The NZ Institute of Agriculture and Horticulture Science has produced an excellent booklet on RA. It is factual, unemotive, science-based and written by NZ’s leading agricultural scientists. It should be compulsory reading for everyone. We don’t need to waste more money with Landcare Research.

Finally, the RA promotion lauded the system as a solution for bad farming. That’s resulted in public perception that our farming practices are poor. They aren’t, they are the best in the world.

Yes, we can improve, but it needs to be a NZ initiative with a NZ brand and not something derived as a result of mining the prairies.

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