Regenerative farmer Colin Seis says agriculture has reached a fork in the road, and farmers have to make some big decisions about which path to follow.

Mr Seis is a farmer and pasture cropping exponent in his 70s, running the family place near Gulgong in the New South Wales central west.

Space to play or pause, M to mute, left and right arrows to seek, up and down arrows for volume. Listen Duration: 3 minutes 48 seconds 3 m 48 s Farmer Colin Seis spoke to ABC Rural about ideas for regenerative farming Download 1.7 MB

It was his father's farm, and Mr Seis started his farming career alongside his father, using the same ideas his father used.

"My father was a very good farmer; he was an early adopter, and he was proud of it," Mr Seis said.

"He listened to the advice that he was given by the scientists and he followed it.

"He was the first farmer in the district to start using superphosphate, and he was very proud that he had one of the first rubber-tyred tractors in the district."

But Mr Seis believes the old ideas of high input farming are no longer sustainable.

"That all worked when those inputs, the chemicals, the fertilisers were not so expensive," he said.

"But we can't keep doing this as prices keep rising."

Mr Seis said there were many farmers who agreed with him — farmers who have adopted techniques associated with regenerative farming — but there were many more who were still on what he saw as a treadmill.

"I think agriculture is going in two different directions at the same time," he said.

"Industrial agriculture won't stop; they'll keep using more pesticides, more herbicides and that includes genetically modified crops.

"But the other direction we can go in is to use biological or regenerative farming."

Mr Seis said he did not believe those two different types of farming could operate successfully side by side.

"The success of farming should be driven by consumers," he said.

"At the moment, so many consumers are not getting what they need ... They are certainly not getting good quality food.

"Tests that have been done in Australia and in Britain have compared the quality of food grown in the 1940s compared to now.

"And when they measure the nutrients in that food, some of them have declined by as much as 90 per cent.

"Farming is meant to be about growing food — a lot of the stuff we are producing now is hardly edible."

Mr Seis said that soils were depleted of nutrients and that was why the foods being produced were lacking in nutrients.

"With regenerative farming, when you are stacking different enterprises together on the same block, you are replenishing your soil," he said.

"Then you are in balance, then you can do it as long as you like.

"If we have agricultural practices that regenerate the landscape, and the soil, and our ecosystems and obviously our farms ...If we continually regenerate them?

"Then we can do it forever."

