Opinion: A regenerative farming revelation and an old joke

Great news. One of the biggest mysteries of regenerative farming has been solved. And all thanks to a speaking engagement at a very jolly dinner in the eastern counties.

Where, exactly? Let’s just say it was a part of the world where they haven’t heard my joke, and somewhere I could tell it to a throng of slightly tipsy farmers.

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About the author

Charlie Flindt

Charlie Flindt is a National Trust tenant in Hampshire, now farming 40ha of recently “de-arabled” land with his wife Hazel – who still runs a livestock enterprise. He also writes books and plays in two local bands.

Read more articles by Charlie Flindt

We turned up in suits, had a drink, then settled down to a wonderful meal.

There’s the inevitable “blind date” scenario at these dinners – you have no idea who you’re going to sit with for 90 minutes. I simply ask, as if impersonating royalty: “And what do you do?”

It turned out that the charming man on my right was big in AD plants.

Now, it isn’t often that you get the chance to quiz someone from the AD world about nutrient cycles; you usually come across a bit like the weirdo on the bus who claims he has a UFO in his pocket.

But as I was the guest speaker, everyone had to be nice to me and the atmosphere was convivial, so plain, no-consequence speaking was most definitely on the already well-stocked menu.

I warmed up with a good-natured poke at his industry for making a right hash of rent reviews.

How many times have we tenant farmers sat down with one of Cirencester’s finest for our triennial humiliation and heard: “Well, I think you should know just how much we could get for your land if we let it to an AD plant.”

Having agreed to disagree over that, we moved on to the big one. Why, I asked, do so many regen farmers claim they have stopped using chemical fertiliser because they now use digestate? He looked somewhat baffled.

Not “oh no, he says he’s got a UFO in his pocket” baffled, but a genuine “what do you mean?” baffled. I explained my issue with this claim.

Digestate is what comes out of an AD plant after it has done its bit for producing biogas.

The feedstock for AD is produced on farms directly in the form of maize and its ilk, or indirectly in the form of animal manure and chicken litter. Even food waste originally came from farms.

So the nutrients that are in the digestate may well be “replacing” the nutrients in a bag of fertiliser, but they have been imported from another farm, which will need bagged fertiliser to replace them. So far, so good. 

In effect, regen farmers are indeed “using” bagged fertiliser – but it happens to have been applied by other farmers a couple of seasons ago. He disagreed, suggesting the nutrients aren’t tracked back that far.

It was a moment of revelation for me. I realised long ago that regen farming has rewritten many of the science-based rules we all learned at uni, but snipping the nutrient cycle to give an unaccountable, so-called nature-friendly stream of fertiliser is a new one on me.

There was no time to take it further, though. I was summoned to the podium to speak.

I confess to being slightly distracted, and I worry my joke might have fallen a little flatter than I’d hoped.

Nothing to do with it being two decades old, of course. It’ll need changing soon.

I might tell the one about the pesticide-free regen farmer using fungicide, or the one about the UFO in my pocket.