Hi, my name is Andrew Ardington, and I’m from the Regenerative Agriculture Association of Southern Africa. I grew up on a farm in KwaZulu-Natal, a sugar cane and beef farm. And for the time, both my grandfather and my uncle were very advanced in their thinking around soil health and would today be described as what we would call regenerative farmers.
I studied agricultural economics at university and there I was pretty much told that you could not be an environmentalist and a farmer, that they were exclusive, and one had to practice industrial agriculture to feed the world and to make a profit.
I left agriculture at that stage, and became a game ranger and got involved in the tourism industry. I came back to agriculture when the global movement of regenerative agriculture hit the stage.
I saw this as an opportunity to bridge the gap that had existed my whole life between natural farming systems and the conventional industrial farmers. There was a big grand canyon between these two groups with the 99% on the one side and the 1% on the other.
I saw regenerative agriculture as an opportunity to try and bridge that canyon and to create pathways for conventional farmers to move towards more natural farming systems and also to create pathways for finance to invest in farmers moving towards agricultural systems.
I founded the Regenerative Agriculture Association to create community among South African practitioners and other people from various walks of life, academia, researchers, agronomists, horticulturalists, consultants, farming consultants, livestock consultants; all different people who were working under the umbrella of what we now call regenerative agriculture.
The climate change focus of regenerative agriculture is very significant. I see our problem as not just being about climate change, though. Climate change is a part of the problem. We need to realise that there’s also a bigger picture involved in this.
I think that if we look at things like biodiversity collapse and most significantly desertification, which really impacts a country like South Africa or the Southern African region, where large parts of the land that is used for agriculture are arid or semi-arid, these areas are desertifying, but not just these areas, large tracts of land, that one really wouldn’t consider as being in danger of becoming deserts or desertifying and losing their ecological function or suffering from a decline in their ecosystem function.
Together, these issues are all problems that we face from an environmental perspective. And they’re all intertwined, like most things to do with natural ecosystems, and we need to be working on all of them.
Regenerative agriculture is a crucial part of that struggle against these issues. Sometimes you see regenerative agriculture being pitched as the solution to climate change.
Well, it’s not the solution, but it has to be part of the solution without regenerative agriculture and without healthy soil and a functioning soil plant ecosystem, we’re never going to be able to deal with any of these problems that we’re facing. And so, if you look at regenerative agriculture in terms of these issues, what about it enables us to fight against these issues with regenerative agriculture?
Well, it comes down to having functional soil, and how over the years we have evolved practices that people understand result in better soil health and better soil function. If we implement those practices and improve our soil function, then we improve the farm ecosystem.
That’s not only to the benefit of the greater climate, but also to the farm itself and greater society. So really the groundbreaking regenerative methods are methods to enable us to implement the soil health principles. The principles of minimum disturbance: that’s minimum biological, chemical and physical disturbance.
Then the principle of keeping the ground covered, keeping it protected from the sun, the wind and the rain. Then the principle of diversity where you don’t just grow the same crops, you practice a rotation of crops and you incorporate cover crops to add more diversity to your system and to your soil. And then after that, we want to try and keep a living root in the ground all through the year.
If you look at your average grain field today, it’s probably got a growing plant in it for 4 months of the year. And the rest of the year it is left there against the elements. Much of what is creating soil health and creating and driving our ecosystem functions from that soil health is microbiology. And if you don’t have living roots all year round in the soil, that microbiology is unable to get any food from the soil.
So, it’s something we want to try for as long as possible, given the local climates and conditions, to have a living plant in the ground all year round.
Then the last, the fifth principle, is to incorporate livestock. Livestock were always incorporated inside agricultural fields before the invention of fertiliser.
In order to maintain field fertility, you had to have periods where livestock were involved in the life cycle of the field, where they were taking biomass and accelerating the breakdown of that biomass and adding their own microbiology to the ecosystem to accelerate that breakdown and create the fertility in the soil, which enabled you to then harvest a crop from that soil subsequently.
So all of those five principles, if you look into them, they’re all working with soil microbiology and how to protect and maximise the function of soil microbiology so that you create a healthy soil plant ecosystem and from that derive all the benefits that we need to in order to be sustainable.
Carbon markets in South Africa are probably more advanced because of our carbon legislation that has come in, the carbon tax. So various companies have come from around the world to try and create carbon markets here.
In terms of agriculture, this is a very new area. Although people have been working for some years now in South Africa to get carbon markets off the ground, it’s really been a struggle. It’s a complex process. It’s a process that a lot of people don’t understand.
And it’s complicated to measure it and to get it right and to get it in a way that it can be confidently verified that there are changes resulting from the practice changes that ultimately result in a better carbon situation.
But I don’t think that is the reason why regenerative farming has come to the fore. The rise in regenerative farming began before the rise in the carbon markets.
I think one of the main drivers behind interest from farmers in regenerative agriculture is that they have been squashed in a cost price squeeze. And the cost of inputs in industrial agriculture just keep rising faster than the inflation rate and the products that the farmers sell do not.
Therefore, farmers are looking for alternative ways of producing with lower inputs; and lo and behold, if you use lower inputs you’re going to produce less pollution. So all of these things have come together to result in regenerative agriculture coming to the fore.
I hope that one day there will be carbon markets or ecosystem service payment markets for farmers who farm better and who contribute water, oxygen, stable climate and healthy food to society, as I think there is a market error.
We need a market correction. All agricultural land needs to give us those things I mentioned, water, oxygen, healthy food and stable climate, not just cheap food, which is what the current system is rewarding farmers for. And so, for all of our sakes, we need that to change.
There are a number of challenges to changing to regenerative farming. Farmers have become very accustomed to the industrial agricultural system, which is very recipe-based.
Consultants or salespeople come to your farm to sell you products, and tell you how to use them. And you buy those products, and you use them, you follow the recipe, and the end result is hopefully a profitable crop.
In terms of regenerative farming, there are no recipes, there are principles, and there is context. And context means the context of the farm, where it is in terms of climate, geography, geology, the human capital around it and markets that it has access to. All of those things constitute the context of a farm, and they impact how you farm.
Really behind regenerative agriculture is a movement to farming with nature rather than against nature. To treat soil as a partner in your farming operation rather than just a medium for holding plants.
And then you bring in the nutrients for those plants and you bring in the chemicals to protect them from pests and diseases. And so, that is more complicated. There is a cost to changing to regenerative farming.
If any business changes its means of production, its technology, there’s going to be a period of investment and a period of management change and those are difficult times to go through. But the opportunities are significant. At the moment, the rates of bankruptcy amongst what we would call medium-sized family farms in South Africa are extremely high.
The combination of the cost price squeeze that these farmers are being subjected to and very high levels of debt mean that bankruptcies are high. If you can get out of that system and work in a system where you work with nature and you develop a low input model of agricultural production, then your chances of remaining economically viable increase.
The kind of investments that would be needed to change to regenerative farming from conventional farming: if you look at a cropping scenario, you need to get planting equipment, no-till planting equipment and minimum tillage equipment.
You need to invest in various changes, literally at that basic physical level. And then to change your systems to get different inputs, pay consultants to help you with your new type of farming. A large part of investment is an investment in livestock.
A lot of farms don’t have livestock on them anymore, as livestock were totally removed from the equation. So they need to be reintroduced back into the system to help drive the fertility of that system. And not only is it livestock, but it’s infrastructure around livestock.
This is a big issue in regenerative farming. There is very little external investment, in regenerative agriculture in Southern Africa. I’d go as far as to say there is none. And this is something that needs to be resolved.
Regenerative agriculture can never become compulsory. It is definitely a carrot solution, not a stick solution. Farmers have to engage with it. They have to believe in it. And they have to work with the natural ecosystem of their farm that cannot be legislated.
What can be legislated is incentives. We can give farmers incentives; we were discussing a carbon credit system; we could come up with other ecosystem service payments; we could come up with tax incentives.
There are lots of different incentives that the government could implement in order to assist. But I think the biggest hurdle is finance. Farmers will do this themselves if they can find the financial partners to help them make the change.
We are in this rather strange situation of a world where everyone is expecting the farmers to invest in this transition. Agriculture constitutes less than 3% of global GDP, and it is a very indebted sector of the global economy.
So it’s really in no position to pay for this transition that is required to maintain the planet as a welcoming and habitable place for human beings. So we need to have an in-depth look as a society how to set up the investments with farmers in primary agriculture by 97% of GDP that’s not involved in primary agriculture.
I was told by a global development bank that they don’t invest in primary agriculture. I pointed out to them that without primary agriculture, we can’t have secondary agriculture or in fact any other sector of the economy. So I think, that is where society, governments and non-government players need to be focusing for solutions.
So our message as an organisation is that the human race needs natural farming systems to become the dominant farming systems. We need to get oxygen, water, food, stable climate and all the other ecosystem services from farm ecosystems, not just the 20% of the planet that is preserved under conservation.
The 70% or 65% of the planet that is involved in food production and fibre production also needs to be part of that solution and we need to find ways of making this transition viable.
So yes, a large part of this comes back to finance. How do we make all of that work? It is possible for farmers that are not in dire financial straits to slowly fund regenerative change on their farms themselves.
There lots of farmers who are doing this and have done this. These are the pioneer farmers all around the world and here in Southern Africa. They have done an exceptional service to greater society by showing the way in which this can be done that we can actually produce food and make a living and it be a benefit for the ecosystem and society in the way that we do it.
In terms of regenerative farming on the continent, my vision is that we want to strive to reach 25% of farmland that has been converted to regenerative farming. We know from many things that if we reach that level, it will slowly become mainstream and the dominant system of farming.
This needs to be the case from the largest corporate or government farms, all the way down to smallholder subsistence farmers. There’s been a problem all across sub-Saharan Africa, where there have been programmes supporting industrial agriculture into smallholder farming across the continent to not very positive outcomes.
You can’t have a system where you’re having to buy external inputs when most of what you’re producing is food for yourself. You have to make a profit in order to pay for next year’s external inputs. And so this applies to all sections of the economic scale and size of farming.
We all need to find solutions so that those farms can continue to produce food and fibre into the future in a way that is environmentally sustainable and economically sustainable at whatever level it’s taking place.
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