Ed Brown, agronomical consultant from UK: going regenerative can increase farmer’s profits

CEO of team Estonia Kristjan Anderson on the left with Ed Brown on the right.

Ed Brown is a Head of Agroecology at H L Hutchinson Ltd where he provides holistic and independent agronomical advice to farmers who are predominantly located in the UK. Ed consults on agroecological farming practices and is passionate about systems that are high yielding, consist of healthy crops, and benefit the environment.

To get an insight into his expertise, we asked Ed some questions at the Northern Roots Forum (regenerative agriculture event that took place in Estonia), where he was one of the main speakers.

Why do you believe in regenerative agriculture?

I believe in regenerative agriculture because I think that we've had a long period of focusing very much on food production and output and we've become incredibly successful at that. You know, the world is pretty well fed if it wasn't for some distribution and waste issues, but we've caused a lot of damage along the way.

And we've got some agronomic, some environmental issues, and we've done some damage to our soils. I think now we need to find a new way forward for farming, where we can still produce food, because it's very important we do so, but we do it in a way that's positive for the environment and is less reliant on some of the more damaging inputs.

Have we done farming in the wrong way?

I'm always cautious to say we've been doing it wrong. As I said, we've done it how we thought we needed to do it, which is to produce food for a growing population, and I think we've been very successful at that. So I don't like telling farmers that they've all done it wrong, but I think we've sort of been a little bit unaware of some of the impacts that we have made. I think we've become more aware of them.

We see incidents like soil erosion more often and we seem to be more susceptible to drought and our soils don't seem to be able to infiltrate and store water as well as they used to. We're now beginning to realize these implications of how we farmed. So it's not to say that we've done it wrong, but we can do it better going forward.

A Polish farmer taking a look at his field.

When did you start with regenerative agriculture?

I've been an agronomist for ten years, and I would say about three years into that career, I sort of found regenerative agriculture via soils and learning about them. I saw with lots of my clients that they had issues with growing crops which was related to lack of function in their soils.

So I learned a lot about soil health and how it all works. And that naturally led me into the world of regenerative farming. I've read close to 200 books on the subject and watched all the YouTube videos of people who are speaking here today (added later: some of presenters, who were at Northern Roots Forum, were Ray Archuleta and Rick Clark).

I was also very lucky to have a small group of my clients who were open-minded and willing to try things, so I pushed them all the time to have a go and let's see if this works and we learned together basically.

Did you learn about regen ag during your university studies?

No, absolutely nothing. 

Really?

I went to Agricultural University and learned all the conventional methods and I thought that was how we did things, so it wasn't until I actually got into my career and started practicing agronomy that I began to realize there was a different way. 

Winter wheat that has been sown with a direct drill.

What regenerative farming practices do you apply or recommend?

It really is as simple as on the surface - looking at those five key principles of regen ag: minimizing disturbance, so that's in physical terms tillage, but also chemical disturbance, keeping the soil covered, maintaining living roots, maximizing diversity and integrating livestock.

Those are the five key principles and they're widely talked about - they are recognized, accepted and I know that they work because I have done them. That's basically what I follow. Now, it sounds very simple - just do five things - but obviously within each of those there's a huge amount of detail and things that you need to get right to make it work.

Sometimes it's quite nice that you can simplify it like that because talking to new people and trying to get them to understand what it's all about, is as simple as following five really good principles.

Have you witnessed any positive changes thanks to these activities? 

Yes, I mentioned that I kind of fell into soil and regenerative farming because I was seeing problems in the field and definitely from implementing these practices, those problems have been reduced. We've still got some time to go before they're completely fixed, because on some farms it had gotten quite, quite bad.

There's definitely been improvements in soils. When I say that, I mean water retention structure, being able to drain excessive water, cycling nutrients better, growing better yielding crops, healthier plants, which get less diseases... and that leads me on to the fact that we're now seeing plants which where we used to have to put loads of nitrogen and sprays on just to get our yield. We're now able to achieve that same yield from a lot less inputs and that's just been really kind of testing and trialing to see what we can reduce this time. Then, over time, we learn that we can start to pull back quite significantly. 

I mean, we're talking about it today at the conference, but the other thing is it's just a lot more enjoyable. So I find conventional farming actually quite boring, because you plant seed the same way, you put all the same fertilizer and same sprays on as you did last year and then the outcome differs slightly depending on the year.

It's really basic, boring, one-dimensional farming. So when you start to think about implementing all these different ideas, practices and learning your farm and how it works for you, it becomes really exciting, both for the farmer and the agronomist.

Dug up cover crops.

Have you seen any negative effects as well?

I would say the negatives come from not doing it well. What we see in the UK and when I get farmers asking me can you come and see us, can you come and help. Usually it's because they've understood regen ag relatively well. They've then tried to go and take those principles home, but they've not implemented them particularly well - they've done four of them and forgotten the fifth... or they've just not done it particularly well and haven't thought it through and haven't planned how they're going to do it. 

The key thing I always do with my farmers is a day one test; understand and learn about the soil that you've got currently and what it's capable of and more importantly - what it isn't capable of. So when you then come to implement the practices, you can do so in a way that's going to be successful and suit your farm. The downsides and the negatives are usually always associated with those principles not being implemented particularly well. 

Are there any concerns about the farming sector moving too much into regenerative agriculture?

Some people have concerns. I don't particularly, if it's done correctly. I suppose the negative regen ag gets is that it’s going to somehow produce less food. For me, it's never been about that. It’s been a criticism of some speakers of regen ag in the past that they say that yield isn't important, profit is, but of course yield is still a key component of profit and we still need to produce food.

So I don't think we need to produce more food because we have some structural political social issues which mean that some parts of the world don't get much food at the moment, but if you actually look at what we produce, we already produce enough. So we need to maintain production and yield is still important, but we need to get that yield for a lot less inputs and have a lot less negative effects.

If I look across my growers, who have introduced these practices, sometimes in the first 2 to 3 years, you may see a very small yield decrease, as in 10%... But generally thereafter it's back up to where it was before and in some cases it's actually even higher -  they get better yields because their soils were sometimes damaged before. So actually putting these principles in place is improving the soil and it's actually improved yields. 

Horsch Avatar, a direct drill, in action.

Are your clients making more profits thanks to regenerative farming?

At the moment, one of my big focuses is on generating recordings and sharing financial evidence for regen ag. I think particularly in the UK, farmers have not always been particularly good at recording their and knowing their costs, output, and their profit - they just look at the bank balance at the end of the year and say: "We've done okay", or "Oh no, we haven't". So I'm trying, regardless of the system, to get my clients to understand that we really need to know our numbers. The benefit of that at the moment now is we're generating lots of data and financial information around these systems. 

Sometimes they've lost profit and it's always associated with the point I just made around the practices that haven't been implemented particularly well. Often it's going from normal amounts of inputs, fertilizing sprays, all of a sudden tomorrow going; right, we're going to cut this in half - reduce everything by 50%... and that's always a disaster. You have to gradually wean out of the system. 

Where it's done well, it's implemented with some thought, I would say 99 times out of 100, they're making more money and now the good thing is we can evidence them.

Is it mostly thanks to saving?

Yeah, it's thanks to saving, but it's interesting coming back to my point before yield is still really critical. If you reduce yield by 10%, but you've reduced inputs by 20%, that still isn't enough to make more money. There has to be a degree of maintaining yield as well as reducing inputs.

The other thing we're lucky with in the UK is now we've got government support shifting away from basic payments towards environmental payments and subsidies to support better practices. That's now making a big difference on the bottom line - so you can maintain yield, reduce costs, but also get paid for doing so. That really helps farm profits.