REGEN & ORGANICS WHERE DO THEY STAND ON SOIL?

In 2018, during the first Quorum Sense field day in Canterbury, two groups of farmers found themselves in a stand-off. In one group were the regenerative agriculture farmers, who were saying that the best way to improve soil health was to eliminate tilling, which allowed for the use of synthetic weedkillers, and in the other group were organic farmers – those who believed that the most important practice was to eliminate the use of herbicides, which meant there had to be some tilling.

Sustainable agronomist Charles Merfield (Merf) was there, and he recalls the disagreement becoming quite heated. “There was a reasonable bit of antagonism at the time,” he says. “They were all farmers and they all bloody knew each other. But there was this interesting