I really do love my job. At Scotland Food & Drink I work with a group of passionate people and we’re tasked with delivering the national food and drink strategy – “Sustaining Scotland, Supplying the World”. My own role is focussed on championing the development of the organic sector in Scotland, and specifically leading the development of a new Organic Action Plan.

My journey to doing this work has taken me from studies in environmental science, across a range of commercial roles in food, to managing a small organic farm enterprise, with a focus on rural skills and community development where we grew, bought and sold organic produce.

As a consumer, buying organic food when I can, makes sense. The main driver for me when making organic purchases is a belief that I’m supporting the growth of organic farming and rewarding organic farmers for using a system of production which I understand, which aligns with my values and which I think we need more of in the world.

So, after working within organic food and farming for several years, what does seeing an organic symbol on a food product tell me? It tells me that the farm that made the product is on a journey to building naturally resilient soils, plant health, diversity, healthy animals and biodiversity. It tells me that the toolbox of chemical inputs available to them has been exchanged for a long-term investment in building a more circular, biological system.

An ever-growing toolbox of fertilisers, pesticides, fungicides and herbicides enabled the green revolution and saw that modern industrial agriculture could meet the calorific needs of the world’s growing population. The development of these products and their continued and growing use have helped to minimise the risks from pests and diseases to farming, while maximising yields and income. However, over time we are recognising legacies of soil degradation, biodiversity and nature loss, evolving pest and disease resistance to protection products and the build-up of pollutants in water, plants, animals and ourselves.

As a response to this, it is my belief that we need to invest in a multitude of ways of feeding ourselves in order to build diversity and resilience into the food system, and organic is one of the paths that we must continue to push forward on. This is easy to say, but in any scenario it is farmers who carry the risks of changing the way we produce our food. So, of course, organic farming may not be right for every farmer, or every situation.

Organic farming is knowledge intensive, and it takes time to reboot the biological activity in soil which is needed for organic systems to make nutrients available, and produce good crop yields, particularly after years of chemical dependency. This is one reason the Scottish Government offers financial support through the organic conversion period and beyond through the AECS scheme. Additionally, challenges exist along organic supply chains due to the smaller volumes of production and demand. This lack of critical mass looks like inefficiencies for processors, particularly as they compare their organic lines with commoditised big volume alternatives.

So where does “regenerative” agriculture come in? And what does it mean – for farmers, and for consumers? Big players in food and drink such as Nestle, McCain and Diageo are making commitments to regenerative agriculture, and the Scottish Government wants Scotland to be a “leader in sustainable and regenerative agriculture” so it is certainly gaining traction and scale in its use.

Interestingly the term regenerative was brought into common use by the Rodale Institute in the late 70’s, an American organic farming organisation, who used the term to describe what good organic farming systems can do – namely regenerate the health of soil, plants, animals and people. This early use of the term also aligns broadly with agroecology, with both terms referring to what are essentially organic farming systems in practice but associating more closely with ideas about the restoration and regeneration of soil, water, communities, farm workers and indigenous knowledge and practices.

Today, the term is having a resurgence and there are many definitions of regenerative agriculture in use. Watch this video for Groundswell, the UK’s biggest regenerative agriculture festival, and it’s a collection of people giving their own interpretation of what the word means, each one of them different, and there’s even one person reflecting that what’s great about the word is that doesn’t have an agreed definition, giving much needed flexibility to farmers.

From a production point of view, my experience has been that regenerative is usually a term used to describe the space between conventional agriculture, and organic. In this space farmers can trial organic practices such as no or low chemical input production, crop rotations, cover crops, grazing animals and circular systems or they can embody some of the values of organic agriculture – health, ecology, fairness and care – and they can do all of this as little or as much as they want.

As a consumer, seeing the growth of the word regenerative feels positive, but it doesn’t tell me anything specific about the practices of a producer using the word, so it’s difficult to know if its greenwashing or not in each case. Maybe carbon is being sequestered in the soil through minimum, or no-tillage practices (one of the more commonly adopted principles in regenerative production), but maybe they use pesticides or herbicides that I would prefer we were trying to ween ourselves off. Or even if they say no ‘cides’ were used on the product, what about before or after that crop was grown?

At present, only organic can give me assurances that the system of production meets the standards and whole system approach I am familiar with. Through its regulated and internationally accepted standards, third-party certification and inspection regime, organic certification tells me more about what I’m buying, when it comes to the practices used to produce it. So, in all of the excitement about regenerative agriculture, let’s not forget what we as consumers already have – organic food and farming, which can deliver on the promises of regenerative, if we keep supporting, developing and investing in it.

All of that being said, as a farmer, the regenerative space is exciting – it feels new, it feels flexible, it feels like a route to growing the positive impacts that organic farming practices can deliver. For me the word regenerative emotes ideas around fixing some of the challenges we face as a society through food and farming, and it’s engaging people young and old, traditional and new entrants, as well as attracting large amounts of investment capital which could be transformational at a time when we need a multitude of new and better ways of doing things.

I want to be a part of the discussion about how we harness this energy around what regenerative could be and could do, which is what makes Groundswell and Scotland’s own Groundswell event – Go Falkland on July 17th and 18th, so exciting. Join me there and join the conversation!