I’ve never had much patience for farming fashions dressed up as science, and none has made more noise than “regenerative agriculture.” These days it comes bundled with slogans like “resilient agriculture” and “carbon farming,” all as vague as each other.
My first real encounter was in 2019, when then Agriculture Minister Alannah MacTiernan launched the inaugural RegenWA conference. After two days of speakers, I was still no closer to a definition. The standout claims were bizarre: that regenerative farming could somehow prevent autism — put forward by keynote speaker Charles Massey, author of Call of the Reed Warbler — and that first nations people were supposedly better farmers than the first settlers.
Fast forward to last week’s Regenerative Food Systems Conference. Massey was thankfully not there, but the deference to Indigenous “guidance” on how we should farm remained front and centre. Farmer attendance was almost non-existent — confirmed by a walk through the car park where I counted one ute and only a handful of country plates. Inside, I found myself alternating between rolling my eyes and listening intently. That, in a nutshell, is how most practical farmers view regen: some solid agronomy smothered in ideology.
The term itself isn’t new. It appeared in the US in the early 1980s, defined as systems that not only conserve but improve soils, biodiversity, and resilience (whatever that means). In truth, it was just the latest iteration of older ideas: organics, biodynamics, regenerative grazing, permaculture — all born decades earlier with overlapping principles and a distain for heavy applications of chemicals and fertilisers.
The tragedy is that after 40 years, regen still has no boundaries. Organics has a rulebook; regen has rhetoric. Soil biology deserves more attention, yet when MacTiernan embraced the concept and became a loud advocate, she missed the chance to put her departmental soil scientists to work testing the claims. Perhaps she feared they might expose the more fanciful ones. Six years on, DPIRD has produced little more than a couple of literature reviews and a single trial at Merredin loosely linked to regenerative systems.
Despite this, every conference runs the same script: regen is “good,” and the proof is a PowerPoint slide of before-and-after farm photos. That is the core problem. Progressive farmers — the genuine innovators — will change production systems, but only if peer-reviewed trials show it pays. They want hard data: inputs, outputs, per-hectare returns. Instead, they get sermons about “soil health” with no definition. What even is a healthy soil? Virgin bush? A certified organic paddock? A conventionally farmed block lifting yields 1–2 per cent a year for half a century? Or the paddock that can handle a big hit of nitrogen and smash out a record yield in a wet year? Nobody seems able to say.
Regen’s other fixation on “human health” linked “soil health” reminds me of the health food industry. It makes a fortune selling supplements and superfoods to health-conscious but clueless consumers. Herbal remedies, micro-vitamins, probiotics for “gut health” — all pushed without peer-reviewed evidence. The same people who denounce “big pharma” for antibiotics and vaccines refuse to put their own products under the same scrutiny. They peddle dietary fads and lecture the gullible about giving up meat, carbs, dairy, or whatever is out of fashion this year. The appeal of a kelp pill is obvious — it sounds easier than the boring basics of exercising, losing weight, eating properly, and not smoking.
The overwhelming majority of conventional farmers think the same way about their soils. They don’t shop in the health food aisle and they don’t buy regen soil products that lack good trail data. Instead they stick to the fundamentals: a balanced diet of NPKS with trace elements, no burning, deep ripping for structure, lime for reflux, annual soil tests for check-ups, seed treatments for immunisation, and targeted sprays when needed.
This is where regen drifts from agronomy into liturgy. The language turns spiritual, while the goals stay conveniently undefined. Like the calls for Reconciliation, it sounds noble, but when voters couldn’t tell if they were backing a treaty, a Voice, or an apology, they tuned out — leaving the true believers mindlessly chanting “Treaty Yeah, Treaty Now.”
Yet buried in the hemp-beanie rhetoric of last week’s conference were presenters well worth hearing. The soil biology scientists were first-class: microbes, fungi, detailing the complex interplay beneath our boots that we are only beginning to factor into the productivity equation. That is agricultural science at its best. If more advocates of “Regen Soil Health” simply renamed their conferences “Rebuilding Soil Biology to Build your Bank Account,” the car park would be full of Utes and country number plates.
The next leap in productivity won’t come from incense and incantations, but from the new tools now probing soil biology — metagenomics, rhizosphere dynamics, mycorrhizal associations, the soil virome, metatranscriptomics, biogeochemical cycling, soil carbon dynamics, cation exchange capacity, hydraulic conductivity, bulk density, enzymatic activity, isotopic tracing, microbial guilds. All the things that light up molecular biologists but barely rate a mention in a regen sermon.
Many of these tools didn’t exist 40 years ago. Today they open windows into the soil microbiome, mapping the pathways that drive nutrient cycling, water retention, and, most importantly, yield potential. Used properly, they will unlock the next tier of productivity — through smarter rotations and targeted foliar or biological inputs.
But here’s the rub: “better soil health” or “more from less,” as the regen crowd like to champion, might actually mean growing more by using more — more microbials, more fertiliser, more chemicals, more fuel, more big machinery. Outcomes that no doubt would jar with a belief system built on the mantra of doing more with less, which is why I remain wary of the movement’s reluctance to embrace science that challenges the sermon.
This sort of underlying thinking is what turns off the only audience that matters: the 4,000 broadacre farmers managing 18 million hectares of WA farmland — the ones absent from last week’s conference. They don’t need lectures on first nations practices, case studies of marginal small farms selling to niche organic markets, or pastoral stations propped up by carbon credits. They need evidence that ideas scale across rainfall and soil zones, with systems and margins that hold up in the real world.
Six years on from that first conference, what’s changed? Very little. The believers are still preaching. The department hasn’t been funded to do the heavy lifting, aside from a handful of dedicated staff. The Minister looks disinterested. Meanwhile, corporates have slapped “regen” across their brands as the cheapest ESG tick-box going. And farmers? They’re still waiting for a definition, a metric, and a replicated trial that measures regen against conventional systems.
Here’s the irony: the regen crowd are onto something — it’s called intensive soil biology. But until they strip out the spiritual, drop the Indigenous worship, ditch the sermons, abandon the soil-health-equals-human-health mantra, and prove themselves as a production system, regen will remain a fringe movement of true believers. And if they can’t capture the attention of the farming community, what’s the point?
