When Regenerative Went Red

Fencelines and Frontlines: how global trade, geopolitics and power land at the farm gate.

I’ve always been a little hesitant to call myself a regenerative farmer. Not because I disagree with the principles, but because labels rarely capture the complexity of commercial farming.

Our cropping program still relies on chemistry where it’s needed to remain profitable. At the same time, we’ve always been mixed farmers because the relationship between livestock and cropping is one of mixed farming’s greatest strengths.

We grow crops because crops suit our country. We run sheep because sheep suit our country. The sheep return nutrients to the soil; they even eat the weeds. The crops benefit from both. We rotate paddocks and crops, conserve moisture, fix nitrogen, watch ground cover and try, season by season, to leave the farm in better condition than we found it. That’s never felt like a movement. It’s simply what mixed farming looks like.

That’s why I’ve always had a slightly uneasy relationship with the term regenerative agriculture.

Not because I disagree with the practices. Long before regenerative agriculture became a marketing term, good mixed farming was already trying to achieve many of the same outcomes. Building healthier soils, maintaining ground cover, cycling nutrients and leaving productive country for the next generation weren’t new ideas. We simply didn’t have a label for them.

The moment we describe one group of farmers as regenerative, we unintentionally imply that everyone else is something less. By definition, if one system regenerates, another must degenerate. That has never sat comfortably with me because it doesn’t reflect the reality of Australian agriculture. Plenty of farmers who would never describe themselves as regenerative have spent decades improving soils, reducing tillage, protecting ground cover, integrating livestock and crops, and thinking about the long-term health of their land.

Perhaps we’ve been arguing about the wrong thing. The real distinction isn’t between regenerative farming and conventional farming. It’s between regenerative farming and regenerative marketing.

Regenerative farming is what happens in the paddock. It’s the management decisions farmers make every day to improve the resilience, productivity and ecological function of their land.

Regenerative marketing is what happens after the farm gate. It’s the language, the verification and the story that allow consumers to understand how their food was produced and give markets confidence to reward those outcomes.

Those two things are connected, but they aren’t the same. Good farming doesn’t automatically become a good story; equally, a good story doesn’t always reflect good farming.

That distinction is becoming increasingly important because agriculture is moving from a world built largely on trust to one increasingly built on verification.

That’s why we’ve chosen to participate in the Land to Market program. Not because I think Australian farmers suddenly needed to learn how to care for country, but because I think the future belongs to farmers who can credibly demonstrate what many have been doing all along. Accreditation doesn’t tell me how to farm. It doesn’t ask me to adopt someone else’s philosophy. It independently assesses whether the ecological outcomes on our farm are improving over time. In other words, it helps bridge the gap between what we do in the paddock and what we can credibly communicate to customers.

Consumers don’t buy soil biology. They don’t buy grazing plans or nutrient cycling. They buy confidence. They buy trust. Increasingly, they also buy verification. Verification has become the bridge between farming and the marketplace.

That was why an announcement from Washington caught my attention.

Last month, President Donald Trump signed an executive order making regenerative agriculture official United States policy. For anyone who has watched the politics around regenerative agriculture over the past decade, that was an extraordinary moment.

Not because the farming changed, but because the story changed.

For years, regenerative agriculture has largely been presented through the language of climate change, carbon markets and environmental policy. The Trump administration has embraced many of exactly the same farming practices but has now wrapped them in an entirely different narrative that covers health, food security, lower input costs, chemical exposure and national resilience.

The practices didn’t change but the politics have definitely changed jerseys.

That’s why the announcement matters far beyond the United States.

Alongside the executive order is something much more significant than a political slogan. The United States is investing in the systems needed to define, verify and reward regenerative production: standards, measurement, carbon intensity calculations, supply chain verification and market incentives. It’s not ideology, it’s market infrastructure. Australian farmers have spent years debating whether regenerative agriculture is a philosophy. The rest of the world is increasingly treating it as a market specification. We’ve spent years debating whether regenerative agriculture is real. The Americans have skipped past that debate and instead are asking how do we measure it? How do we verify it? How do we commercialise it?

Australia has often been excellent at producing premium food but slower to define the standards that underpin premium markets. We’ve relied heavily on the trust and reputation that comes with the Australian Made and Australian Grown brands, and they’ve served us exceptionally well. But we shouldn’t take that reputation for granted.

Food may be a commodity, but increasingly it’s also a story.

Until food becomes so scarce that consumers stop caring how it was produced, that story will continue to matter. Grass-fed. Free range. Organic. Increasingly, regenerative.

If someone else writes the definition, they inevitably shape the premium.

That’s why I don’t think the most important question is whether regenerative agriculture is real. I think the more important question is who gets to define it.

Whoever defines regenerative agriculture decides what gets measured. Whoever decides what gets measured influences what markets reward; and whoever shapes what markets reward ultimately captures the value.

Back at Westpoint, tomorrow will look much like yesterday. The sheep still need moving. The crops still need some attention. None of that changes because of an executive order signed in Washington.

But markets do change. Consumer expectations change. Trade rules change.The language we use to describe farming changes. The soil doesn’t care what political party is talking about it. Markets do. Perhaps that’s the real lesson to take away from when regenerative went red.

Farming never changed, but the story did.

Australian agriculture now has a choice. We can watch on, continue quibbling about the label, or we can step in and help define it. Because if we don’t, someone else will, and they’ll almost certainly also define where the premium goes.