Why regenerative agriculture is not a retreat from productivity
Earlier this year, a Victorian beef and lamb producer ran the numbers on what skipping fertiliser and lime could theoretically cost a grazing business in north-east Victoria. The hypothetical scenario details costs incurred from withholding of fertilizer and lime, resulting in lower pasture production, reduced stocking capacity, weaker weight performance and soil remediation costs.
The article was right that every load of stock leaving the farm takes nutrients with it, and that production will fall if acidity and phosphorus go unmanaged.
Where we see it differently is the choice the article presents between keeping the fertiliser program and letting the soil run down. For the producers we work with, those aren’t the only two options.
“Doing nothing” suggests failing to monitor soil fertility, allowing land condition to decline and making no response when production falls.
This framing confuses regenerative agriculture with neglect.
This commentary presents farmers with a misleading choice: continue using conventional inputs in the same way or risk declining productivity, depleted soils and financial loss.
What the model really tests
The “doing nothing” model framed keeps the same management, then removes fertiliser and lime and tracks the decline. That’s a fair picture of what neglect costs.
However a regenerative transition changes the management around the fertiliser decision as well. On most properties that can mean:
- Matching stocking rates to feed and season
- Giving pastures time to recover between grazings
- Maintaining ground cover and living roots throughout the year
- Building legumes into pastures for nitrogen
- Fixing acidity and compaction where they hold back growth
- Testing soil and plants to target deficiencies and help nutrients go where they’re needed
Fertiliser still has a place in this approach, whether that means keeping the current rate, applying more where testing shows a real deficiency, or cutting back where it’s going on beyond what the pasture can use.
Like any model, the costs and results depend on assumptions about pasture decline, stock performance and input prices, and on the assumption that nothing else on the farm changes when the fertiliser stops.
As CarbonLink Laboratory Manager Julie-Ann Malan-Harris puts it:
“The most productive farming systems don’t manage soil chemistry in isolation. They manage soil as a complete system, where biology, structure, water and nutrients all influence performance.”
What the research shows
A 2026 University of Tasmania modelling study simulated four Australian sheep farms, from Western Australia to Victoria, over 100 years to compare grazing approaches. Adaptive multi-paddock grazing, where stock move often through smaller paddocks with longer rest periods, grew more pasture, stored more soil carbon and cut more emissions. When productivity, profitability and emissions were considered together, adaptive multi-paddock grazing performed more favourably than the alternatives.
The results weren’t all in one direction: lower-intensity grazing was generally more profitable, and rainfall and stocking rate shaped outcomes more than grazing method or pasture mix. It’s a reminder that management has to fit the property and the season.
A working example at Walcha, NSW
At Cheyenne Pastoral near Walcha, Nick Blomfield didn’t stop feeding his soils. He subdivided paddocks, added water points, changed how and when stock grazed, improved pastures and replaced some conventional inputs with chicken manure, rock phosphate and liquid plant nutrients.
The Clean Energy Regulator lists fertiliser application to address deficiencies among the project’s registered activities.
Today, the project has been issued 28,859 Australian Carbon Credit Units for measured and verified increases in soil carbon.
While the Cheyenne project doesn’t mean every property will see the same result, it does demonstrate a successful soil carbon project running alongside active soil fertility management, with verified soil carbon gains adding a second income stream for the farmer.
The actual cost of doing nothing
Doing nothing as a landholder is expensive, but we’d describe the costs differently. The ones we’d point to are:
- Spending on inputs without measuring the response
- Letting bare ground, compaction or overgrazing wear down the soil
- Treating fertiliser as the whole fertility plan
- Leaving the income potential of verified soil carbon unexplored
Dr Terry McCosker OAM said it well on the Regenerative Agriculture Podcast:
“To be truly regenerative, a farmer needs to understand that they are a part of the ecosystem, not apart from it. If you understand that you’re a soil manager, the production and the economics of your farm will actually look after itself.”
Regenerative agriculture isn’t about doing less. It’s about managing the whole system more intelligently, for the long-term sustainability of our farming industry and food production systems.
