Regenerative landscape management is the application of techniques which seek to restore landscape function and deliver outcomes that include sustainable production, an improved natural resource base, healthy nutrient cycling, increased biodiversity and enhanced resilience. These outcomes benefit not only primary producers, but also the community - environmentally, economically and socially.
Regenerative landscape management techniques generally focus on integrated management of soil, water, vegetation and biodiversity and becoming more efficient in the use of natural resources.
The Soils for Life case studies revealed that consistent principles underlie the application of regenerative agriculture, regardless of enterprise type or location. Techniques applied by the case study participants include:
- Applying organic composts, fertilisers and bio-amendments
- Encouraging natural biological cycles and nutrient transfer
- Adopting Holistic Management
- Implementing time-controlled planned grazing
- Download a Guide to Planned Grazing to set up a trial on your property. Courtesy of NRM South.
- Using grazing management and animal impact as farm and ecosystem development tools
- Retaining stubble or performing biological stubble breakdown
- Constructing interventions in the landscape or waterways to slow or capture the flow of water
- Fencing off water ways and implementing water reticulation for stock
- Investing in revegetation
- Pasture cropping
- Direct-drill cropping and pasture sowing
- Changing crop rotations
- Incorporating green manure or under-sowing of legumes
- Managing for increasing species diversity
- Reducing or ceasing synthetic chemical inputs
- Integrating enterprises
Allan Savory, Rhodesian ecologist and farmer, developed Holistic Management, a systems thinking approach to managing resources. Holistic Planned Grazing, which is central to this approach, has since been replicated all around the world. Learn how it can regenerate the landscape:
ADVANTAGES OF REGENERATIVE LANDSCAPE MANAGEMENT
Benefits that can be gained by applying regenerative landscape management, as identified through our case studies, include:
- Increasing soil health - structural, chemical and biological properties
- Supporting a diversity of vegetation to moderate temperatures, provide habitat and build resilience
- Sequestering greater amounts of carbon from the atmosphere
- Retaining more water in the soil for uptake by plants and animals - extending the growing season
- Supporting health and biodiversity in soil microbes
- Facilitating healthy nutrient cycling
- Producing more nutrient-rich vegetation and livestock
- Producing healthier, more nutritious food and livestock, and therefore healthier people
- Regenerating, rather than degrading the natural resource base
- Healing landscape degradation
- Building a landscape which is more resilient, especially to climate extremes (such as flood, drought and fire) and able to recover more quickly
- Reducing input costs
- Enabling sustainable production
- Smoothing out production and profit peaks and troughs
- Applying a technique that could sustainably feed growing global populations
- Obtaining a greater sense of personal wellbeing.
If you're wondering what's in it for your bottom line if you change the way you manage you landscape, have a look at the Production and Economic Benefits that have already been achieved.
Michael Jeffery talks with case study participant, Colin Seis of Winona on the benefits of practising regenerative landscape management:
A small but growing group of land managers in Australia are using practical, effective, high-performance regenerative practices that we believe can show us the way to restoring the landscape.
These land managers are exploiting the Australian landscape’s unique natural processes to regenerate healthier, more productive and resilient landscapes through:
- improving the structural, mineral and biological balance of their soils
- repairing riparian zones
- recharging wetlands
- increasing the biodiversity and extent of groundcover and vegetation
- better managing pastures and stock
- implementing no-till sowing and managing crops with a focus on soil biological health
- minimising the use of synthetic inputs
Farmers applying such practices see themselves not as owners of the land but stewards of it. This connection, derived from experience, has given them the insight to understand that it is their responsibility to enhance and preserve their landscape for future generations.
Such farmers should be recognised not simply as producers of food, but as the primary carers of the land and be rewarded accordingly.
Watch John Ive of Talaheni discuss how he overcame saline seeps across his property, restoring the health of his landscape and enabling quality wool production:
Read the Soils for Life regenerative agriculture case studies and find out more to help you to adopt regenerative practices...