The ‘Regenerative Cultures’ 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
In the Regenerative Cultures storyline, regenerative agriculture is a spiritually rich and emotionally fulfilling practice at the heart of regenerative, place-based cultures
The Regenerative Cultures storyline moves beyond the farm-gate to challenge supply chain issues and has emerged predominantly from regenerative development: a practice that seeks to align human activities with the continuing evolution of living systems (Benne and Mang 2015; Haggard and Mang 2016; Mang and Reed 2012; Muller 2020). The consultancy Terra Genesis has been fundamental in bringing this approach into an agricultural context (Soloviev and Landua 2016).
Unlike others, this type of regenerative agriculture is closely aligned with the rhetoric of the broader regeneration movement (e.g. regenerative economics). It has had a lot of interest from multi-national non-government organisations, such as the World Wildlife Fund (WWF 2022). Regenerative agriculture is considered a pathway for shifting towards a “culture of regeneration” (participant 9). Adherents to this story believe that “deeply regenerative agriculture can exist only if it is completely interwoven into a thriving regenerative culture” (Soloviev and Landua 2016, p. 13).
Participant 8 remarked, “we really love regenerative agriculture because of how it’s not only changing the practice of farming, but the practice of how we engage regeneratively in the economy and trade and radically shifting how power and land is viewed within the agricultural industry.” The Regenerative Cultures storyline is not just talking about regenerating land, but shifting supply chains by creating regenerative producer webs (Soloviev and Landua 2016). These move the focus beyond “regenerative agriculture to regenerative culture. So, it has to be the growing of food, it has to be the relationships with the people on the farm, it has to be their relationship to the people who transport the food, it has to be the relationship to the people who sell the food. And if at any point that gets co-opted by capitalism, or colonisation, that’s not a regenerative system. It has regenerative parts, but it’s not regenerative” (participant 8).
Regenerative Cultures emerge from the context of bioregions (Wahl 2016) and include “songs, stories, myths, rituals, foods, ceremonies and music that transform agriculture from a functional economic activity to a spiritually rich and emotionally fulfilling central heart of an agricultural community” (Soloviev and Landua 2016, p. 14). The transformation of the supply chain is critical to this. Participant 8 posed the question “what does it take to have regenerative consumers? Once we’ve gotten to that point, we really start to step into the space of an actual regenerative food system culture.”
Working regeneratively requires discerning the potential of a place, based on its essence (Mang and Reed 2012). This is “the true nature or distinct character that makes something what it is” (Haggard and Mang 2016, p. 48). Such work often involves addressing the colonialism, extraction and degradation experienced by First Nations people. As Brewer (2019, p. 4) says, “to learn about regeneration of landscapes is to find atonement for the loss … a great Truth-and-Reconciliation is needed in each little piece of land.”