Roots ’n’ all
Before coronavirus, people were worried about other things. Like the state of New Zealand farming, and climate change. So why were policy makers suddenly getting interested in regenerative agriculture? John McCrone reports.
Wait, are those sunflowers poking their yellow faces above the waist-high tangle? Did he just say he loves thistles too? All biodiversity is good?
No wonder Peter Barrett – former campervan entrepreneur and now manager of Central Otago’s 9300-hectare Linnburn Station – has had neighbouring farmers looking askance.
At the regenerative farming conference at Lincoln University, Barrett stands chest out, jaw jutting. Gruff and combative.
On the screen behind is a giant photo of his version of a beef and lamb pasture. A seed catalogue run riot.
Barrett says his philosophy is just to throw a bit of everything edible at his fields and discover what will grow lushly in the harsh climate of the Maniototo Plain.
Lucerne, fescue and a bunch of different clovers of course. But also chicory, cornflowers, peas, lentils, linseed, ryecorn, faba beans, buckwheat, vetch, radish, mustard, millet, oats, beet, rape, turnip, sorghum, kale.
It sounds like chaos theory. But Barrett says he wants the land to produce its own instant ecosystem. ‘‘You just put pinches of everything in the ground and then nature will define what grows.’’
If the soil is stony, salty, compacted or acid in spots, it doesn’t matter. Whatever takes, takes.
Then over this cottage border assortment, Barrett runs a mixed mob of 4000 cattle and sheep – a single gang that is kept bunched and moving through the day. ‘‘The staff love it because they’re using their dogs all the time to shift, shift, shift,’’ he says.
The animals stay long only enough to graze the jungle to shin height. Because the pasture isn’t nibbled to bare dirt, because it has a deep root structure, it springs back surprisingly fast, he says.
Any trampling of the field is also part of the story, as that helps armour the earth, keeping the ground underneath hidden and moist. A haven for slugs and bugs.
And it is such a relief to be farming this way, says Barrett. Forget the usual rigmarole of ploughing, fertilising, spraying, measuring, obsessing over systems and inputs.
The key is creating an aboveground biodiversity which in turn nurtures a thriving sub-soil ecology – a rich, damp world of earthworms, fungus and microbes – on the otherwise barren Otago landscape.
Less chemistry, more ecology
So does regenerative farming have any chance of being a mainstream movement, an actual change of national direction?
The March annual meeting of the Organic Dairy & Pastoral
Group (ODPG) also brought together farming experts for a conference on regenerative soil practices.
It was of course in the weeks when Covid-19 was still only a looming storm cloud. Although subsequent events also mean that agriculture – the country’s bread and butter – matter all the more because of it.
But anyway, the regenerative argument is that standard industrial farming, dependent on over-powering the land with tractors and chemistry, is under threat for two good market reasons: A demand for ‘‘real nutrition’’. And a world that needs to take its carbon seriously.
One of the meeting’s old hands at ‘‘soil first’’ farming, Waikato dairy farmer Max Purnell, says for NZ especially, as a premium foods exporter, this has to force a change.
And surprising even him, politicians and industry leaders are now suddenly talking about it.
Last year, Agriculture Minister Damien O’Connor set up the Primary Sector
Council to figure out the long-term direction for farming. Its report in
December, Fit for a Better World, broadly endorsed the regenerative approach.
Just as significantly, industry lobbies like Beef +Lamb NZ are coming aboard too. In February, Beef +Lamb announced it would spend 2020 doing a global study of regenerative agriculture – a move bound to anger traditionalists, but a sign of where things are headed, Purnell says.
John King, a Christchurchbased regenerative consultant, says it feels New Zealand could be at a tipping point.
Many farmers are looking for radical change, disillusioned with the road the industry has been on. ‘‘I call it the Y chromosome syndrome. Farmers have been rushed down this path of going bigger, faster, harder, all the time. And they just end up crushed under a whole lot of debt.’’
So even if the regenerative method isn’t pushed as official policy, King thinks a grassroots revolt is brewing.
Purnell adds that NZ is wellpositioned for it. It is not like the US, where agriculture is truly industrial – stock held in barns or pens, feed trucked to them from genetically modified wheat and corn lots. We still have a country of animals in fields, Purnell says. As Barrett’s Maniototo experiment demonstrates, you just have to run the land a little differently. Stop with the fertilisers, herbicides, insecticides and other chemicals killing the life of the soil. Then rethink your production system so it starts working with nature again.
The soil carbon sponge
Regenerative agriculture is all about the hidden health of the soil, says Phyllis Tichinin, a Californian nutritionist who now consults with kiwifruit growers and dairy farmers in Hawke’s Bay. Modern industrial farming is not much different from hydroponics in its mentality, she says. The soil is just a convenient growing matrix, the sun a giant lightbulb. The farmer tips on water and inputs as necessary. The focus is on getting speedy above-ground growth. To demonstrate what real soil is about, Tichinin starts the conference by flourishing two plates. One holds a small dusty mound of flour, the other a slice of bread.
This flour represents the industrial farmer, she says, sprinkling the plate with water from a paper cup. The water puddles on the surface and runs off, scouring tracks. Just like a typical compacted paddock when caught in a heavy burst of rain, she says. It has no porous soil structure and so an abysmal absorptive capacity.
But the same cup of water poured on the bread is immediately sucked out of sight. ‘‘The difference is the biology,’’ she says. With its yeast reaction, the bread is a carbon sponge.
Real soil is the same. Bound into an absorbent crumb by its carbon. ‘‘Gazillions of microbes, when they pee, poop, bonk and die, release this nutrient-rich cytoplasm that ultimately forms the glue holding the silt, sand and clay together.’’
Tichinin says plants with healthy root systems then become a symbiotic partner to these microbes. Not only do the roots drill deep to break up the compaction, they also exude sugars and other nutrients to feed the soil organisms in exchange for the minerals they can release from the rock and clay. The cycle of life is producing its own fertiliser.
And when it rains, this ‘‘soil carbon sponge’’ has the pores to capture it.
So regenerative agriculture boils down to knowing how to nurture the life of the soil, says Tichinin. She lists the principles: Minimise soil disturbance. Maximise biodiversity. Keep the earth armoured. There needs to be a living root in the soil at all times – some kind of cover crop. Or at least a thick trampling of mulch.
Add animals. Their waste is part of the formula for feeding the ground – at least in a soil with the deep biology to absorb it.
‘‘These are the core ecosystem principles we’ve know for decades. But we’ve continued the 60 years of ‘better living through chemistry’ that has delivered markedly worse human health and environmental degradation.’’
New market drivers
Tichinin says regenerative farming will be a response to two new market drivers in particular – health and climate change.
We know how industrial farming strips out most of the nutrient complexity of what makes it on to supermarket shelves. Our bodies evolved to take a wide range of micronutrients – obscure vitamins and plant hormones – for granted in our diets.
Tichinin says industrial farming becomes a false economy when stacked up against the soaring bill for chronic diseases. And governments are now coming to realise that. Time to switch back to food with a proper nutritional density.
The other telling argument for regenerative agriculture is climate change. Biologically active soil is a huge carbon sink.
Soil microbiologist Dr Walter Jehne, of Healthy Soils Australia, says the current emissions trading scheme is based on shonky carbon accounting. There is 10 times more carbon sequestered in healthy soils than in the vegetation above it, he says.
World agriculture has been releasing massive quantities of carbon with its intensive farming, digging over the ground, swamping it with artificial fertilisers.
Jehne says impoverished soil is left holding just 0.3 per cent carbon when it should be 3 per cent. Or better yet, 6 or 8 per cent. ‘‘We can naturally cool the planet . . . through rebuilding, through regenerating, the Earth’s soil carbon sponge.’’
A question of imagination
The theme of the conference was that farming has become trapped in a system of production by a particular set of economic forces. But a change has to be coming.
Jehne says the world turned to intensive farming in the 1950s as an answer to global hunger. That then created a powerful lobby of vested interests – the fertiliser companies, pesticide manufacturers, machinery suppliers, even the bank lenders – dependent on keeping farmers on that treadmill.
Now the damage, in terms of the ecosystem and environmental damage, is all too apparent.
King, the Christchurch regenerative consultant, says NZ farmers have been trained to make the equation that they need high inputs to maximise their yields, and thus their profits. That means more weed suppressors, irrigators, and imported feed.
‘‘There’s more ups and downs farming like that,’’ he says. The regenerative approach is more about the steady average. It cuts out the highs, but also the lows, so comes out ahead in the long run.
The issue is imagining things being different. Barrett’s Linnburn Station is an example of something that immediately smacks you in the eye. Sheep and cattle wading through tangles of peas, millet and bobbing sunflower heads.
Other regenerative enthusiasts, like Southland farmer Hamish Bielski, brought their photo albums to the conference too.
Bielski, who started converting a 300ha spread near Balclutha six years ago, says he is still learning, but regenerative farming appears to be paying its own way.
His fertiliser use has plummeted from 125 tonnes a year to about two. Diesel’s gone from 50,000 litres a year to 5000l. Big savings from not tilling the ground or planting out separate fodder crops.
And with the animals being moved as a mob through the fields year round, he has even managed to increase his stock numbers from 2600 to 3500 units.
Rebuilding his soil’s nutrient and water cycles are now his main job. ‘‘Once I started understanding our farm was one big solar panel, things started to click. We just happen to run sheep and beef.’’
Expect the unexpected
Yet the regenerative conference also heard warnings about getting too carried away. Peter Fraser, a
Wellington economist and former government dairy industry adviser, says other revolutions are happening in world agriculture and NZ may be about to get sideswiped by those.
The game plan for NZ Inc should be to fade out its dirty dairying and concentrate on producing nutrient-dense food for discerning international consumers, he says. ‘‘The argument is pretty simple. We don’t need to feed the world . . . just . . . 40 million rich folks.’’
But many have been reading a report from Silicon Valley forecaster RethinkX, about the coming economic impact of ‘‘fake’’ milk and meat – Impossible Burgers and other hi-tech, factorysynthesised, protein-replacement products.
That study should be sending shivers down farming’s spine, Fraser says. Artificial meat is on an exponentially falling price curve. Soon, it will taste as good as real meat for a fraction of the price. There is the world commodity market gone.
Yet also, for both climate change and animal welfare reasons, even wealthy consumers may view it as the more ethical alternative.
Fraser asks how long will it be before sending animals to abattoirs becomes a socially unacceptable practice. It won’t matter how sustainably the animals are reared.
So attitudes to eating real meat may change quickly. ‘‘Poor folk won’t be able to afford it. But rich folks won’t want to buy it.’’
And Fraser says even if there continues to be a world market for premium regeneratively farmed foods, there will be other fallout for Kiwi producers.
The RethinkX report predicts synthetic protein will replace 70 per cent of US stock farming by 2030. Virtually all the commodity producers. In just 10 years.
But then all that associated farmland is suddenly going to come free, Fraser points out. ‘‘That will mean there’s something shy of 200m hectares of land currently in animal agriculture up for grabs.’’ Or about seven times NZ’s total land mass. Within a decade, NZ agriculture could be caught between an ethics-driven collapse in animal protein demand and a stampede of overseas farmers all rushing to go planetfriendly and organic.
Can the conference imagine a worse scenario?
Well, as it happens, about a week later, coronavirus arrived to show life’s disruptions take many forms.
Yet with tourism trashed, the global food supply chain a matter of concern, NZ’s agriculture will emerge at the end of it even more at the centre of some necessary long-term policy decisions. So sheep among the sunflowers might still become the new season look.