On a warm weekend in the English countryside in June, thousands of people milled around at Lannock Manor farm in North Hertfordshire for Groundswell, the UK’s biggest regenerative agriculture show dubbed the Glastonbury of farming.
Some took part in an educational “dung beetle safari”, others sampled heritage grain sourdough buns.
Fairlie-born farmer Tim Williams talked about farming practices that improve the resilience of soil and nutrient density of crops; that grow healthy plants and remove carbon from the environment.
Williams is one of a handful of New Zealanders who have been driving forces in the UK’s regenerative agriculture movement, developing pioneering compost solutions and regenerating damaged farmland.
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Regenerative agriculture, which puts nature and soil health at the heart of farming, is booming in the UK.
Though an uncertified term, it is widely defined as being based on a few principles: minimising tillage, or soil disturbance, to maintain soil health and minimise carbon emissions, keeping soil covered as much as possible to avoid the depletion of nutrients, diversifying crops on the same land to boost soil health, and incorporating animals onto arable, or crop-growing land to help fertilise the soil through manure.
Fran Bailey, who works with businesses and people to communicate their work in food and agriculture to the public, says the concepts largely mark a return to “foundational farming principles” practised both in New Zealand and Britain.
“The introduction of chemicals and fertilisers and the idea that we must produce as much food as possible to feed everyone, has sort of taken over,” Bailey says. “We have to change, it’s not sustainable.”
New Zealand farmers have been supplementing the natural nutrient levels of their soil since modern agricultural practice began, adding fertilisers such as nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus to improve production potential. The tide has begun to turn on the use of these inputs, towards creating systems that are more cyclical.
The global production and use of fertilisers is a contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, while runoff can cause issues in waterways.
Bailey, who grew up on a small dairy farm in Tokoroa, lives in Cambridge after 10 years in London, but continues to work on regenerative agriculture projects in the UK. Seeing the backlash about the Country Calendar episode on Geoff Ross and Justine Troy’s work at Lake Hāwea Station, just days after Groundswell, was “disappointing”.
The episode profiled Lake Hāwea Station – Australasia’s first certified carbon-zero farm – and its owners, Kiwi entrepreneurs Geoff and Justine Ross. The pair farm 10,000 merino sheep in Central Otago, where they use regenerative soil and grass types aimed at reducing stock methane emissions and have introduced techniques to the wool shed to improve animal welfare, including playing Vivaldi to the animals being shorn.
It attracted intense criticism on social media. One claimed it “wasn’t real farming”. Another said “wokeness” had “invaded” the show. The outrage was strong enough for Country Calendar to address the negative feedback on its Facebook page, where it doubled down on the value of showing what “different types of people” were doing on the land.
Bailey’s take away was that “we need to get behind entrepreneurialism in farming”.
“New Zealand has always been an entrepreneurial-spirited country. If anyone says, ‘you can’t do that’, a Kiwi will come out and say ‘why not? I’m going to prove them wrong’, or ‘I’m going to do it differently’”.
She recognises that regenerative farming practices are already in place on many NZ farms, albeit sometimes unacknowledged. In the UK, a recent survey conducted by AMTEC, a leading supplier of used agricultural machinery, found 75% of farmers feel regenerative techniques were important to the future of farming.
Participants cited improving soil health and reducing spending on fertilisers as motivations, along with caring for the environment and benefiting from government grants associated with sustainable farming in the UK.
On the other end of the food production chain, Kiwi bakers and chefs are championing the food produced through these practices.
On the menu of Tim Williams’ farm cafe in Cornwall is a fresh take on the Cornish pasty. The British baked pastry is traditionally made of shortcrust pastry filled with meat or vegetables – though mass-produced imitations trading on its heritage are sold in supermarkets and bakeries.
Williams’ is a little different; the pastry is made of butter from his cows and stone-milled flour from UK company Wildfarmed and stuffed with aged sheep, globe artichokes and fermented turnips grown on his land.
“We’ll have our own flour soon,” Williams says, “we’re in harvest at the moment”.
Williams is one of the trio behind the 130-acre regenerative Crocadon farm and its new cafe The Granary. The farm is home to around 100 pasture-fed chickens, some sheep, a microdairy where they milk just 12 cows, and fields of heritage grain. Williams runs the food and farming project with his wife, grower Claire Hannington Williams, and chef Dan Cox.
Williams got into regenerative agriculture after witnessing “some pretty terrible farming systems”, which were at odds with the “almost organic” mixed-farming enterprise he grew up on. After moving to London after university, Williams worked in marketing for two years before leaving with his British wife in tow for Atarau, on the West Coast of New Zealand, where he dabbled in farm work. The pair returned to the UK in 2010 with the purpose of throwing themselves into farming.
Despite having left with the assumption that the UK would have more opportunities in organic farming, Williams’ first farming job abroad was anything but. Chemicals were commonplace and animals were housed in barns, fed on cereals and “beef cake” (processed feed for cattle). He rapidly found another job on an organic farm and hasn’t looked back.
Organic practices later made way for a regenerative system of farming and land management, after learning the ropes during a stint back home working at Mangarara Station, one of New Zealand’s original regenerative farms.
While organic farming, which is regulated and certified, entails a system with no harmful chemicals or artificial inputs, regenerative methods place a stronger focus on soil health. This is through cover cropping; planting a diverse, close-growing crop mix to increase soil biology and reduce erosion between periods of crop production, and eliminating ploughing, which can release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Williams splits his time between Crocadon Farm and Erth Barton, a large farm on Cornwall’s Antony Estate which he is managing as part of a National Lottery-funded project with the goal to make the farm net zero in five years. The estate had historically been a conventional arable farm, which Williams has taken “cold turkey”.
“In conventional agriculture when there’s no livestock to keep that balance, they apply soluble fertilisers, like nitrogen, potassium, phosphate. But in a world of limited resources, obviously we cannot keep doing that and so it’s about ‘how can we create a system that’s more cyclical, that feeds the soil and then takes from the soil, then gives back from it?”
The first step to getting those natural processes working again has been to introduce livestock into the system, with around 150 cattle rotating over the entire farm. “It’s been challenging and stressful, but also very rewarding as well,” Williams says.
In Northamptonshire, England, north-east of Williams’ base, is a 250-acre plot of land on Althorp Estate, where Williams has helped Kiwi Bridget Elworthy establish a regenerative growing project. Elworthy is one half of The Land Gardeners, an enterprising pair designing gardens and growing flowers alongside their research into soil health and production of a pioneering compost solution, ‘Climate Compost’. Abundant in naturally-occurring microbes, the solution enables more effective storage of carbon in the soil it’s used on, while increasing the nutrient density of the produce grown from it.
Althorp Estate, owned by the late Princess Diana’s younger brother Earl Spencer, is one of the pieces of land on which Elworthy and her business partner Henrietta Courtauld are trialling their product Climate Compost at farm scale.
Initial success on the trial farm is one of the reasons the Spencers have decided to turn 2500 acres of their estate organic, where Climate Compost will be applied as part of a regenerative turnaround of the land. Made from straw, old hay, fresh greens, animal manure, weeds and clay, along with a dose of finished compost from a previous batch, the compost is turned and tested frequently over the eight to 12 weeks it takes to fully mature.
At Althorp, where The Land Gardeners also produce Climate Compost for sale, the compost has been direct-drilled at a rate of 10kg/hectare into the fields with a 30-species-rich cover crop and then applied as compost tea during the growing season. Courtauld says the process has been “healing” for the land, which has historically been farmed conventionally with chemicals.
“The brilliance of this microbial compost is that it enables microbes in the soil to work in conjunction with plants, taking the sugars from plants and releasing… to take the nutrients from the soil to feed the plant that way, rather than bringing in third-party chemicals to grow plants,” she explains.
“It’s very much about opening people’s eyes to the importance of soil health and how the choices we make about how we grow food or where we buy it affects our health and that of our land. Cheap, chemically-produced food is not doing anything for the planet or anything for your health.”
This is a view echoed by award-winning Kiwi chef and restaurant owner Chantelle Nicholson, whose restaurant, Apricity, in London’s Mayfair has been widely acclaimed for its green methods of sourcing food and its low-waste approach to cooking.
A favourite on the menu is a hyper-local salad comprising a whole baby lettuce, grown hydroponically in Southwark, before being delivered to Apricity in reusable boxes by electric vehicles. The lettuce is sprinkled with locally-grown crispy kale, house-dried tomatoes grown in Kent, cashews, and dressed with an aioli infused with miso made in London.
Nicholson is a member of the UK’s Pasture for Life association, an organisation championing grass-based farming and meat production. The work coming out of groups like this was pivotal to her decision to incorporate meat into Apricity’s menu, she says.
“If I’m going to have meat on the menu it needs to come from somewhere I can trust is doing some of that great work. I think that there are some really great things that happen in farming, and regenerative agriculture is definitely at the top.”
Angela Clifford is convinced that the regenerative agriculture movement is also gaining momentum in New Zealand. The CEO of Eat New Zealand says, “It’s allowed a group of farmers the space to challenge the dominant narrative.”
Clifford, who is based in North Canterbury and has been a permaculturist for the last 20 years, says government, agribusiness organisations and eaters have a part to play in supporting regenerative systems. There was a danger, she says, in the term ‘regenerative agriculture’ being “co-opted for marketing purposes”. A lack of certification meant the definition of what it was could be set at a very low bar, allowing for non-regenerative practices to be continued.
Regardless, Clifford thinks New Zealand has a “unique opportunity to lead the world in this thinking”.
She references Whenua Haumanu, a new $26.1 million collaborative programme investigating the impacts of regenerative farming in New Zealand, an “exciting” next step in the space. The largest study to date on regenerative farming in Aotearoa, its aim is to enhance development, sustainable practices and reduce wastage by looking at the agrifood sector from field to fork. The programme will span several research sites and involve universities, Crown research institutes, iwi and industry groups.
Andrew Hoggard, president of Federated Farmers, says every farmer in New Zealand already incorporates at least a little of the theory behind the movement into their work, with some going “full hog while others pick and choose”.
“I just generally farm on the basis that I want the farm to be left in a way that if my daughters decide to go farming, that they inherit a better farm than what I started with.”
Despite this, he thinks there is a time and a place for replenishing soil with nutrients in the form of fertilisers. This winter he had been late getting fertiliser on the paddocks that had come out of May silage and it was “too wet” by the time he applied it.
“It soon showed up because those paddocks were very yellow; weren’t growing that much grass. It kind of proves to me that you do need fertiliser. We’ve learnt stuff through science and so it is important to follow that science.”
Much like Clifford, Fran Bailey is excited about the future of regenerative agriculture. New Zealand’s history of pastoral farming, particularly in sheep and beef, means the country is “well placed to capitalise on the global interest” in the movement.
A 2022 study by New Zealand’s Ministry for the Environment found that nearly half of NZ’s greenhouse gas emissions came from agriculture, with the main source being methane from livestock emissions. The next-largest source was nitrous oxide from nitrogen-based fertilisers added to soils.
However, the potential for agriculture to have positive outcomes for the climate has been demonstrated through methods like those seen on Lake Hāwea Station. When the crop and soil biology is right, it can pull carbon out of the air and store it in the earth, offsetting greenhouse gas emissions.
“On a global stage where industrial scale agriculture has eroded trust in farming as a whole, we need something people can get behind and to show them that actually farming can be a positive solution in the face of climate change,” Bailey says.
“It’s about getting to a place where all farming is derived from a mindset of regeneration (of soil, land, people, communities) and then how we communicate that and take it to the world.”
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