The ‘Big Picture Holism’ storyline in regenerative agriculture
There are nine different stories of regenerative agriculture that I identified in my PhD research. These stories impact the way people interpret, talk about and practice regenerative agriculture. They are consequently important for understanding debates about how regenerative agriculture should be defined and measured. Each story comes from a different agricultural lineage (e.g., organics, holistic management or permaculture) and subsequently emphasizes different things when defining regenerative agriculture. This blog post is an extract from my recent publication in Sustainability Science. You can read the paper here for more information: Regenerative agriculture: a potentially transformative storyline shared by nine discourses
Artwork by Hannah Cox of Nanny Potts Illustration. Big Picture Holism is predominantly used in grazing systems; utilising livestock as a management tool. In this artwork, we see a grazier walking with her animals through healthy pastures.
In the Big Picture Holism storyline, regenerative agriculture is about looking at how everything is connected on the farm to make good management decisions and enhance quality of life
The Big Picture Holism storyline is typified by holistic management, which is a decision-making framework used predominantly by regenerative graziers and developed by Savory and Butterfield (2016). The holism of Smuts (1973) is core to this story and finds form in the Savory and Butterfield (2016) holistic decision-making framework. Participant 12 said, “when it comes to complex dynamics, like the social and environmental, we’re trying to simplify things by focussing on one thing at a time. As soon as you do that, you lose sight of the big picture. Holistic management gets you to look and see that everything is connected. All living things: environment, soils, the business.” This is a ‘big picture’ approach to holism that goes “away from the part to get an overview” (Bortoft 1996, p. 25).
The social well-being of the farmer is integral for adherents to this type of regenerative agriculture, which hope to move “farmers away from just looking at production, production, production. It’s about the environment, and it’s about people” (participant 12). However, this manifests on an individual level; the rhetoric does not generally extend to broader issues of equity and power. Instead, it is about getting people to understand those “feelings and values that they hold” (participant 12). To do this, adherents create a ‘holistic context’ (Savory 2012). This is a personal vision that considers the ‘big picture’ and is based on the feelings and values of adherents.
A farmer’s holistic context is the ultimate outcome in this storyline. The Savory Institute’s ‘Land to Market Ecological Outcomes Verification System’ is an outcomes based program for ecological monitoring that requires a positive trend line for ecosystem improvements. Adherents to this story prioritise outcomes and are willing to use diverse ‘tools’ to get there. E.g. “there’s a need to be careful about how we use tillage, but it’s a tool like anything else. Fertiliser is a tool. All these things are tools. It’s the misuse of tools that get us into trouble, not the tool itself” (participant 5).
Adherents to this storyline think about which tools are going to work best for them in the pursuit of their holistic context. Participant 12 said, “the processes that people are coming up with, they’re all fantastic. There’s no good or bad, even chemicals—they’re not good or bad. It’s how we use them, how we manage them. And we can’t manage without context. If we just focus on processes, we will fail.”