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. A Kiwi going his own way.

READ MORE:

* Does NZ win or lose as world agriculture gets remade for a planet of 10b?

* Kiwi farmers are joining a revolution - farming the regenerative way

* Australian scientist urges farmers to take a light touch with their soils

* Regenerative Farming: Can meat save the planet?

* Regenerative farming can help grow food with less impact

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.

You name it. A confection of greenery, twisting and climbing over itself in its bid to reach the sun.

Frank Film Super-healthy soil and plants growing like crazy. Canterbury cropping farm hosts a field day to explain the regenerative approach.

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 exclaims.

The animals stay only long enough to graze the jungle down to shin height. Because the pasture isn't nibbled to bare dirt, because it has a deep root structure, it springs back surprisingly fast, Barrett 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. That is the message he wants to get across.

Forget the usual rigmarole of ploughing, fertilising, spraying, measuring, obsessing over systems and inputs.

The key is creating an above ground 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.

Feed the dirt with variety and design your farm system around that, Barrett says. Yes, this regenerative agriculture thing is the farming revolution New Zealand has been waiting for.

LESS CHEMISTRY, MORE ECOLOGY

It is pretty evangelical stuff. Much like how a hardcore of fed-up farmers were urging the country to go sustainable and organic in the 1990s.

So does regenerative farming have any chance of being a mainstream movement, an actual change of national direction?

SUPPLIED/LINNBURN STATION Peter Barrett has transformed the family farm with regenerative principles. Pictured are owners, Sue Velvin (left) with Helen and Paul Barrett.

The March AGM of the Organic Dairy & Pastoral Group (ODPG) brought together farming experts from all over New Zealand to talk about regenerative soil practices.

It was of course in the weeks when Covid-19 was still the looming storm cloud, not yet a crisis. 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 coming 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 conference's old hands at "soil first" farming, Waikato dairy farmer Max Purnell, says for New Zealand especially, as a premium foods exporter, this has to force a change.

And surprising even him, the politicians and industry leaders are now suddenly talking about it, he says.

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.

"After years of no policy, at last we've had someone come out with an actual national vision to get behind," says Purnell.

Just as significantly, industry lobbies like Beef+Lamb New Zealand are clambering 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 Christchurch-based regenerative consultant, says it feels New Zealand could be at a tipping point.

Right at the moment, many farmers are looking for radical change, having become 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 says he thinks a grassroots revolt is brewing.

JOHN MCCRONE/STUFF ODPG conference tea break: Australian soil microbiologist Dr Walter Jehne (right) says carbon is the issue.

Purnell adds New Zealand is well-positioned for it. It is not like the US where agriculture is truly industrial – the stock held in barns or pens, the 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 kiwi fruit growers and dairy farmers in Hawkes Bay.

Modern industrial farming is not much different from hydroponics in its mentality, Tichinin 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. Who cares if the plant roots are vestigial and nothing much else can survive in dirt that surrounds them?

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, Tichinin 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," says Tichinin. 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.

JOHN MCCRONE/STUFF Day out: ODPG conference goers check out the soil during trip to a Canterbury regenerative cropping farm.

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. Rich earth is a reservoir that can store any surplus for days or weeks.

So regenerative agriculture boils down to knowing how to nurture the life of the soil, says Tichinin. Everything else on the farm follows from first taking care of that.

Tichinin lists the principles.

▪ Minimise soil disturbance. Quit with the excessive tillage, the dousing with biocides, and all the other practices that stress the life of the soil.

▪ Maximise biodiversity. Do what Barrett is doing and plant a riot of foliage species, not the standard boring Kiwi pasture of ryegrass and clover.

▪ 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. The ground should never be bare.

▪ And 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 the organics revolution never happened because the world continued to demand cheap and high yield agriculture.

However regenerative farming will be a response to two new market drivers in particular – health and climate change.

Health is her speciality, she says. And we know how industrial farming strips out most of the nutrient complexity of what makes it onto our supermarket shelves.

Our bodies evolved to take a wide range of micronutrients – all sorts of obscure vitamins and plant hormones – for granted in our diets.

Tichinin says industrial farming becomes a false economy when stacked up against the world's soaring bill for chronic diseases – diabetes, cancer, heart attacks, immune disorders. 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.

SUPPLIED Eco-nutritionist Phyllis Tichinin: Gazillions of microbes peeing, pooping, bonking and dying.

Soil microbiologist Dr Walter Jehne of Healthy Soils Australia steps up to provide this side of the story.

A regular participant at world climate conferences, Jehne says the current emissions trading scheme is based on shonky carbon accounting.

There is ten times more carbon sequestered in healthy soils than in the vegetation above it, Jehne says.

An inconvenient truth is world agriculture has been releasing massive quantities of carbon with its intensive farming methods, 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. And we can do this 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 into 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. Chemistry had to replace biology just to feed a fast growing population of mouths.

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 New Zealand farmers have been trained to make the equation that they need high inputs to maximise their yields, and thus their profits. Squeeze every dollar out of the ground that they can, while they can.

Robyn Edie/Stuff Southland regenerative crop and dairy farmer Mark Anderson wishes he'd started 15 years earlier. (First published September 2019)

They chase each year's harvest by throwing more weed suppressor or urea at their land, spending on another irrigation pivot or importing animal feed.

However too often they get hit by a drought or disease outbreak anyway. So the outlay that was going to amplify their gain instead increases their loss.

"There's more ups and downs farming like that," King 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, had brought their photo albums to the conference too.

Bielski, who started converting a 300ha spread near Balclutha six years ago, says he used to love his bare muddy winter cropping fields. The neat furrows marching up hillsides. It was how farms were meant to look.

Now they seem horrid and naked without a natural plant cover to keep the soil going.

Bielski says he is still learning, but regenerative farming also appears to be paying its own way. That is not a problem.

His fertiliser use has plummeted from 125 tonnes a year to about 2. Diesel has 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.

TONY BENNY/STUFF Regenerative consultant John King: Farmers always pushed to go bigger, faster, harder.

Everyday, the decisions are about what is best for his soil. That keeps life simple, Bielski says. Rebuilding its 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

The sales pitch has been prepared. There is a life beyond dairying for New Zealand. Even the policy-makers can see the sense in going a whole foods and carbon-friendly approach.

Yet the regenerative conference also heard warnings of why not to get too carried away.

Peter Fraser, a Wellington economist and former top government dairy industry advisor, says other revolutions are happening in world agriculture and New Zealand may be about to get side-swiped by those.

Fraser says regenerative agriculture is promoting itself as the ethical and sustainable alternative. 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.

"The argument is pretty simple. We don't need to feed the world. We just need to feed 40m rich folks."

But many have been reading a "future of agriculture" report from Silicon Valley forecaster, RethinkX, which looks at the coming economic impact of "fake" milk and meat – the Impossible Burgers and other high tech, factory-synthesised, protein replacement products.

That study should be sending shivers down farming's spine, Fraser says.

Artificial meat is on an exponentially dropping price curve. Soon enough, it will taste as good as real meat for a fraction of the price.

So it will win on cost. 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 eco-sustainably the animals are reared. The reality is New Zealand will still be sending its frolicking lambs off to an industrial slaughter process. So attitudes to eating real meat may change fast.

"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 fall out 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.

SUPPLIED/LINNBURN STATION Wading through the paddock: Sheep at Linnburn Station on the move through head-high foliage.

But then all that associated farm land is suddenly going to come free, points out Fraser.

"That will mean there's something shy of 200 million hectares of land currently in animal agriculture up for grabs." Or about seven times New Zealand's total land mass. "It's quite a big chunk."

Fraser pauses for the obvious to sink in. If the future does offer a top end market for regenerative products, there will be no shortage of others, with their provenance stories and "happy farm" pictures, fighting tooth and nail over it.

Within a decade, New Zealand agriculture could be caught between an ethics-driven collapse in animal protein demand and a stampede of overseas farmers all rushing to go planet-friendly and organic, Fraser warns.

SUPPLIED/LINNBURN STATION The mixing shed: Bags of the many different seeds that Linnburn's Peter Barrett tries out on his fields.

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. Regenerative farming would have to be one of numerous national conversations pushed onto the back burner for the moment.

Yet with tourism trashed, the global food supply chain a matter of concern, New Zealand'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.