From the archive
16 Sep 2026
In the spring of 2020 Olivia Boothman was a farm vet in Cornwall who had never heard of regenerative agriculture. The headlines were about empty supermarket shelves, but what she saw in front of her was the opposite: local growers and farmers quietly stepping up to feed their own communities with fresh, seasonal food. Between on-call shifts, waiting for the dreaded pager to sound, she spent her nights reading instead.
The reading pulled one thread after another. She found the 4per1000 initiative and its account of soil organic matter as a buffer against climate extremes, then community-supported agriculture, where eaters share the grower's risk. Books like English Pastoral reframed the job itself - not food production alone but the keeping of a place, its ecology and its culture together. At the Groundswell festival, by then a masters student, she scribbled down the five principles of regenerative agriculture as a speaker flashed them up.
The principles, she came to think, are where the trouble starts. Two farms can follow every one and get entirely different results, because a farm is not a blank canvas. It carries centuries of previous land use, the way its neighbour farms, the policies pressing in from outside. On a drought-prone mixed farm, permanent ground cover may cost more water than it saves; elsewhere, cutting livestock numbers may be what lets a damaged habitat recover. What matters is whether the land, and the people on it, are getting healthier.
That argument now has an institutional home. Boothman works with the Global Farm Metric, on which Regen10's Outcomes Framework - the first globally co-developed attempt to say what regeneration should actually deliver - is built, through farm trials and extensive consultation. The agreed list runs wider than the early framing of carbon, biodiversity and water, taking in social and human health too. The model is the Sustainable Development Goals: prescribe no method, but give farmers, funders and policymakers a shared picture of success.
Before adopting any practice with a good name, choose three outcomes you can check yourself and measure them the same way twice a year: earthworms in one spadeful of soil, the time a litre of water takes to drain through a bottomless tin, one bird species counted each June. A spade, a tin and a notebook - under £10.
Sustainable Food Trust · Read the source