The ‘Regrarian Permaculture’ 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 Regrarian Permaculture storyline, regenerative agriculture is about designing integrated farm systems that regenerate the land
The Regrarian Permaculture storyline introduces the systems thinking and design principles of permaculture (Holmgren 2007) to broad-acre farming. As participant 10 remarked, “permaculture is particularly good on kitchen gardens, orchards, food forests; it is very weak on agriculture.” The story is championed by the Regrarians (Doherty and Jeeves 2016; Regrarians 2021), which is a neologism of ‘regenerative agrarian’ (Regrarians 2021). The Regrarians are a consultancy and farmer network that introduced permaculture to broad-acre farming by integrating it with holistic management and keyline design (Soloviev 2019).
The integration of holistic management and permaculture is unique to adherents of this type of regenerative agriculture; typically, these approaches operate on different scales. However, participant 11 said, “holistic management is really strong on developing a holistic context, really strong on grazing planning, shit on land planning though. Permaculture is quite good on land planning, good on its principal set; but pretty bad when it comes to broad-acre stuff.” As such, farmers can have the benefit of permaculture’s land planning combined with holistic management’s broad-acre (and particularly grazing) expertise. Whilst this storyline also uses the holistic context, similarly to Big Picture Holism, its understanding of holism predominantly comes from systems thinking.
The work of the Regrarians is outcomes based, with clear regenerative outcomes listed on their website (Regrarians 2021). Participant 11 emphasised that the Regrarian approach was akin to the Savory Institute, “looking more at outcomes—have I increased landscape function, ecological value, biodiversity?” They remarked that regenerative agriculture “is sort of like permaculture; it’s a goal.” Participant 10 also took an outcome-based approach saying, “I see everything in terms of restoration—restoring the things that make life possible: air, water, soil, biodiversity.”
Participant 11 said the Regrarians have not adopted permaculture’s ethics because people can bring their own ethics to the work. Nonetheless, these ethics were referenced by other participants. Participant 9 felt that using permaculture without the ethics subverted the core intent of permaculture. They said, “if we don’t have ‘people care’ in this system, is it truly regenerative?” There is a tension in this storyline between the ideology of permaculture and the practicality of Regrarian Permaculture. Participant 10 summed this up neatly with the question: “are we just regenerating the land or are we regenerating agriculture?” Adherents to Regrarian Permaculture are focussed on land regeneration and do not typically address issues beyond the farm-gate.