Why Regenerative Farming - and How?

Regenerative farming focuses on the health and wellbeing of the whole farm and surrounding agro-ecosystem. Drawing down carbon into soil via regenerative farming and grazing practices forms an important part of the whole systems approach to building a healthier and more resilient farm ecosystem.

By supporting regenerative farming, you are not only supporting local families producing tasty and nutritious food with low food miles, you are also supporting the regeneration of our broader ecosystem, leading to a more resilient landscape that can cope better with extreme weather events such as droughts and floods. 

But how does this actually work?

This little 4 minute video has captured 3 regenerative farming practices in a very simple yet effective way, so I really wanted to share it with you. It has been fantastic to help me explain how regenerative farming works when I’m speaking with people who don’t have a farming background, or even for explaining it to kids!

This video focuses on no till practices, regenerative or holistic planned grazing, and agroforestry. As the video explains, these are just three of the many (our Regenerative Farm Plan has 52!) regenerative farming practises, which are each specific and unique to each farm, depending on where they are and what they are growing. 

No till farming we have covered before here - essentially the less you disturb the soil, the more you encourage the soil microorganisms to create their own soil structure and highways underground for the exchange of nutrients and sugars. 

Regenerative or holistic planned grazing is explained very well in the video - keeping animals bunched together in a larger herd, giving them a small amount of space to graze, and moving them as often pas possible, rather than set stocking, or leaving the animals in one large paddock for a long amount of time. 

Agroforestry is also another great practice - trying to get as much diversity into a system as possible. Agroforestry is like permaculture on a large scale - think of food forests where you have trees, vines, shrubs and groundcovers all providing a food source, habitat or pollination benefit to the forest system. 

I hope you enjoy the video, and please let us know if you’d like some more in depth information about these practices, or how our farmers are practicing regenerative agriculture in their own farming ecosystems!