Regenerative agriculture: practical management and evidence

Few terms in agriculture carry as much weight, or as little agreed meaning, as regenerative agriculture. To some it is a specific set of grazing practices. To others it is a philosophy of land stewardship, a marketing claim, a certification, or a movement. The variety of meanings is a problem for anyone trying to decide what to actually do on a property, because a term that means everything gives no guidance. This article sets out what the term means at Brampton, what it requires in practice, and how we propose to tell whether it is working.

What do we mean by regenerative agriculture?

At Brampton, the term describes an approach aimed at improving land condition while maintaining a viable agricultural business. Improving land condition means measurable things: more groundcover through the dry season, more perennial grasses in the pasture, better water infiltration, more organic matter in the soil, less erosion, more habitat retained. Maintaining a viable business means the operation pays for itself and can keep investing in its people and its land through variable seasons.

It is a direction for management and assessment, rather than a guarantee attached to a particular practice. Rotational grazing, for example, is a tool that can serve the direction, but a property can rotate cattle and still decline if it is overstocked, and a property can graze continuously at a conservative rate and improve. The practice is not the point. The condition of the land, assessed over time, is the point.

Begin with the constraints

Every property has conditions that set the context for what is possible. Rainfall and its variability determine how much pasture can grow in a year and how often a dry period will test the management. Soils determine how much water is held, how fast nutrients cycle and which species will persist. The pasture that is there now, and its history, determine the starting point. The cattle enterprise, its market and its cash needs determine how much flexibility the business has in a bad season.

A management approach has to respond to those conditions and to the requirements of the enterprise. The same practice produces different results in different places: a rest period that rebuilds a perennial pasture in one region will not rebuild one that was never there; a stocking rate that is conservative on heavy flats is destructive on a light ridge. This is why Brampton's approach begins with understanding a property before changing it, and why we treat every claim about what a practice achieves as something to be tested on the country in question.

The practices, and what they are for

The management choices usually associated with the term are the ones this series describes in detail, and each has a specific job:

• Groundcover maintained through the dry protects the soil, gets water in and carries the next pasture. It is the first constraint on stocking rate.
• Rest and recovery between grazings allows perennial plants to rebuild leaf and root reserves, which is what lets them persist through drought and respond to rain.
• Stocking matched to carrying capacity, with the core herd sized to an ordinary year and the seasons managed through a variable component, is the discipline that makes the rest possible.
• Water and fencing designed together spread grazing across the paddock instead of concentrating it, which protects the sensitive areas and uses the under-grazed ones.
• Trees, shelter and riparian areas retained and regenerated provide shade, shelter, bank stability and habitat, and are managed as infrastructure rather than left to chance.
• Inputs used where the soil test shows a response, rather than by habit, and cultivation avoided where it is not needed.

None of this is novel. It is competent grazing management with a long view, and much of it is what experienced producers have always done. The regenerative label adds an emphasis on the land condition outcome and on measuring it, which is where the difference, if there is one, lies.

Keep the commercial questions visible

Changes have costs, labour requirements and practical consequences, and an approach needs to be assessed for those alongside its intended effects on the land. More paddocks mean more fencing and water. Longer rest periods mean more management attention. Conservative stocking means fewer cattle in a good season. Retained vegetation means land out of production. Each of these is a real cost, and the business has to carry it through the years before the benefit, in pasture, resilience and lower input costs, arrives.

A business that cannot keep investing is not regenerating anything, which is why commercial viability is part of the definition rather than a competing objective. The approaches that fail are usually the ones adopted as a package, at once, on borrowed money, by a business that could not afford a bad season. The ones that succeed are adopted incrementally, tested, and paid for by the improvements they produce.

Test the claims

The claims made for regenerative agriculture range from the well-supported to the extravagant. Better groundcover and perennial persistence under rest-based grazing are well documented in Australian research. Large and rapid increases in soil carbon, universal improvements in food nutrition, and the suggestion that grazing management alone can offset a region's emissions are not, and treating them as established does the approach no favours.

The useful discipline, for any claim, is to ask what was measured. What were the starting conditions? Over what period was change assessed? Was there a meaningful comparison, a paddock managed differently under the same seasons, or a long enough record that the seasons average out? What else could explain the result: a run of good years, a change in stocking, fertiliser applied at the same time? A claim that survives those questions is worth acting on. One that does not is a hope, and hopes are expensive on grazing land.

What measuring looks like on a property

Measurement on a working property does not require a research station. Fixed photo points, repeated at the same season each year. Transects recording groundcover and pasture composition. Soil tests at fixed sites, including organic carbon, every few years by the same method. Cattle weights and condition scores at the decision points. Rainfall and stocking records alongside all of it, so that a change can be read against the season. The measurement article in this series describes each of these.

The record is what separates an observation from a conclusion. "The pasture looks better" is an observation. "The perennial component has increased over six years across three land types under the new grazing regime, in seasons that were below average for four of the six" is a conclusion, and it is one that a buyer, a lender or a regulator can be shown.

Our direction

Brampton's country-development research direction is intended to investigate management approaches under real property conditions, and to distinguish plans, observations and established findings in public updates. We will say what we intend to do, what we observed, and what we are confident of, and we will keep those three separate. The questions we are working through are described on Research and learning, and the management side on Land and grazing.

Related reading

• Rotational grazing: recovery, stocking decisions and monitoring
• Research and learning in agricultural development

Sources

• CSIRO, Soil research
• Meat & Livestock Australia, Grazing and pasture management research
• Meat & Livestock Australia, Environment and sustainability research

This is an explanatory article about an approach, not a report of Brampton trial results.