Friday, March 29, 2024

ALTERNATIVE VIEW: RA is a US initiative we don’t need

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With many having opinions on Regenerative Agriculture (RA), here’s my five cents worth. My dictionary gives three definitions for regenerative.
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The first is “growing new tissue after loss or damage.” The example given was a lizard and to my knowledge we don’t farm lizards.

The second example of regenerative is to revive in economic terms. Inappropriate to agriculture.

Finally, we’re told regenerative means “reformed or reborn in a physical or moral sense.” 

While that may be true of some of the RA acolytes it doesn’t refer to farming.

Regenerative Agriculture is an American initiative to lift the fertility of degraded soils. We don’t have that problem.

It uses management, fertiliser, irrigation and rotational grazing to build organic matter – all of which we do.

A big part of the pro RA brigade is to claim that the increased organic matter – carbon – is used to help mitigate climate change.

That’s fine but in America they say RA can lift carbon in the soil to 6%, whereas ours is 8% already. The amount of carbon that can be sequestered by soils is finite.

The other issue to consider is that if in 50 years’ time, someone ploughs the paddock that carbon is released back into the atmosphere.

Andrew McGuire, an agronomist from Washington State University says that “the extraordinary claims over RA just haven’t been proved.” I agree.

American geologist David Montgomery makes the point: “Putting more carbon in the soil will buy us some time. But if we continue to burn fossil fuels once we fill up the soil with carbon all we have done is delay things a bit.”

There are few hard facts about RA. For example, no-one talks about profitability or gross margins per hectare under RA. It’s all warm fuzzies.

The Australians have with the Holmes Sackett Report that was produced for the Australian Farm Institute and reported in May this year. It analysed data over a 10-year period from 2007 to 2016. While RA generated a return on assets of 1.66%, the return from conventional farming was 4.22%. 

The increased costs per farm of regenerative over conventional systems was an additional AU$2.46 million over the 10-year period.

The whole of farm profits (EBIT) were a massive AU$4.5 million higher with conventional farming than with RA.

The report is on the internet and worth a read.

The Holmes Sackett report suggests a 10-year deficit with RA producers of AU$4.5m and that equates to over $400,000 a year. 

Hands up if you can afford that.

I also remain unconvinced that adapting an American system to NZ agriculture will achieve greater market access.

In a phrase, RA to me is like organics without a premium.

The Lincoln University Agricultural Economics Unit has evaluated Willingness to Pay (WTP) in various countries and for a range of products.

Consumers were most WTP for organic followed by animal welfare. Hormone/antibiotic free, grass-based and environmentally friendly were down the list.

While people were prepared to pay premiums in Australia and NZ, the North Americans weren’t. 

My major frustration is that we are good stewards of the land now with good animal welfare. We don’t have to adopt any foreign systems to try and prove that.

That we’re efficient and good environmental stewards was highlighted in last years OECD report which identified NZ as a model of decline in emissions intensity. The reasons given were the adoption of policies focused on R&D, farm profitability, productivity and emissions intensity reductions. That was followed by changes in the production mix of animal species and the fact we were unsubsidised.

With all that in mind, I found it irresponsible that the Government gave a handout of $1.87m to the Quorum Sense charitable trust. It was to support farmers to share knowledge about developing and implementing RA systems.

I wouldn’t have given them 18 cents, and I’m still miffed that Beef +Lamb can waste levies on RA.

The July 13 edition of Farmers Weekly’s front-page headline read: “The future is with Te Taiao.” It is the roadmap for NZ farming going forward and was launched by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and the Minister for Primary Industries Damien O’Connor.

In his speech O’Connor made the point that “we need to create new, billion-dollar category-leading products while respecting Te Taiao, the natural world.

DoC has a Te Taiao strategy. It is to ‘achieve significant conservation gains as well as social, cultural and economic benefits.”

I don’t see why that can’t be adapted for food production.

Te Taiao means ‘fit for a better world.’

My point is simple.

We are doing many things right now. We grass feed, have high animal welfare standards and are mainly environmentally responsible.

Why then are we promoting foreign generated unscientific fads? And why aren’t we generating a NZ Te Taiao brand that is based on hard science?

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