Written by Richard Boldan
Agriculture stands at a crossroads: climate change, evolving regulations, market demands, and increasing public scrutiny are reshaping how we farm.
As a regenerative agronomist, I’ve witnessed how innovative agronomy can transform farm resilience and profitability while meeting the demands of a changing world.
The Forces Reshaping Modern Agriculture
Soil Health
Healthy, biologically active soils are the bedrock of regenerative farming, providing resilience against weather extremes and reducing reliance on external inputs. Recent mutations to wheat yellow rust (YR15) and the first signs of septoria resistance to the latest fungicides underscore how nature finds a way round our interventions. The principle is simple: the further we stray from nature’s model, the greater our risk.
Regulatory Landscape
The regulatory environment continues to tighten, with the ongoing loss of active ingredients, potential EU alignment requirements, and Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) measures emphasising Integrated Pest Management (IPM) and the UK Pesticides National Action Plan introducing the Pesticide Load Indicator. All pushing us towards reduced chemical reliance and the need for farmers to adapt their pest control strategies.
Climate Change and Carbon Auditing
Building resilience to climate change and reducing carbon during production are vital in modern agriculture.
Market and Public Pressures
Public concerns about food safety, nutrition, healthy diets, and environmental impact are driving buyer protocols and market requirements. Slim margins mean every input must earn its place.
How Farm Agronomy is Evolving
Traditionally agronomists focused primarily on maximising yields through conventional inputs. Today’s regenerative agronomist must think more holistically, balancing production with soil health, environmental stewardship, regulatory compliance, and economic viability. This requires moving beyond prescriptive recommendations to collaborative problem-solving integrating soil science, plant physiology, ecology, livestock integration and farm business management.
What does this mean for day-to-day farm management?
Cultivation and Establishment
Cultivation intensity should be minimised, with flexibility to respond to conditions – as little as possible, as much as necessary.
Consider low disturbance subsoilers where compaction exists but remember that ploughing isn’t taboo, you can build soil health even with occasional inversion.
However, cultivation begets cultivation, breaking the cycle requires patience and the right equipment. Remember that any soil disturbance damages fungal networks, so minimise unnecessary passes.
No single drill suits all conditions, match your establishment method to your soil and weather. A spade remains one of the best diagnostic tools.
Placement of nutrients and biologicals at establishment can give crops a strong start.
Cover Crops and Diversity
Cover crops require active management to deliver benefits. Consider companion crops, bi-crops, and understories to increase diversity within cash crops. Diversity extends beyond cover crops to:
- Crop rotations including SFI legume fallows
- Variety blends to slow disease spread and provide genetic diversity
- Enhanced soil biological diversity through reduced chemical stress
- Livestock integration for grazing crop residues and cover crops
Advanced Nutrient Management
Many farms now replace some soil nitrogen with foliar applications for improved efficiency. Options include urea (scorch risk and weather-dependent efficacy must be managed), methylated urea, amide products formulated with other nutrients, amino acids and peptides.
Diversifying nitrogen forms helps manage risk, but requires adequate initial soil nitrogen supply, which depends on soil health and favourable weather. Adding carbon sources like molasses, humic, or fulvic acids, to soil or foliar applications, supports soil biology and plant health.
The benefits extend beyond nutrition – reduced nitrate levels in plants correlate with decreased pest and disease pressure and less lodging. Careful application can build carbon through increased root exudates and crop residues. However, inappropriate use can burn soil carbon.
Balanced Nutrition Beyond Nitrogen
Regular tissue and sap testing provides real-time insight into plant nutrient status, allowing targeted corrections. Many nutrients play crucial roles in enzymes, energy transfer and nutrient mobility within the plant. Proper nutrition reduces pest and disease susceptibility; potassium helps manage yellow rust, while calcium reduces phoma. It’s important to consider how products impact soil biology, for example organic materials often provide multiple benefits beyond their NPK analysis.
Plant Health and Pest Management
Variety blends slow disease spread while providing market flexibility, maturity variation, and genetic diversity (but require planning). Drilling dates remain an important cultural control and nutrition plays a direct role in plant defence. Remember fungicides damage leaf wax, potentially opening pathways for subsequent infection.
Silicon and Plant Strengthening
Silicon strengthens the plant tissue and cuticle, improves nutrient uptake, enhances stress tolerance, stiffens straw, and reinforces leaf wax. Sources of it include monosilicic acid and potassium silicate. Silicon can reduce cabbage stem flea beetle damage when combined with products like Citadel (glutamic acid, humic extracts).
Elicitors and Biological Controls
Salicylic acid (essentially aspirin) acts as an elicitor, triggering plant defence responses. Seaweed extracts, particularly from ascophyllum nodosum, provide laminarin and numerous beneficial compounds. Biological consortia, especially bacillus species, function as plant growth-promoting rhizobacteria (PGPR) while providing disease control and suppression. These can be purchased as products or home-brewed and applied to soil or foliage.
Advanced monitoring tools—including T-sums for BYDV, sclerotinia risk models, wheat bulb fly migration alerts, and trap systems, enable threshold-based intervention, to minimise pesticide use while maintaining crop health.
Bio stimulants
The bio stimulant market offers numerous products, including:
- Biologicals with diverse bacteria and fungi (bacillus subtilis being common)
- Hydrolysates and amino acids (particularly valuable for herbicide stress recovery)
- Humic and fulvic acids
- Seaweed and seaweed extracts
- Phosphites and other inorganic compounds
- Chitosan
- Plant extracts
They contain a limited range of active ingredients and work by stimulating plants and / or soil biology. They’re most effective when soil fundamentals are in place.
Soil Biology and Carbon Management
Carbon equals life and the goal is getting as much of it as possible into the soil and keeping it there. Promoting fungal growth builds a stable soil structure, which leads to a healthy, diverse soil biology, enhancing plant defences and nutrient availability and naturally suppressing pathogens.
Every input should be evaluated for its impact on soil biology. Soil testing for biological parameters has limited value unless you’re prepared to change practices based on the results. It’s important to focus on management practices that support biology rather than trying to measure it in isolation.
Manure and Organic Materials
Proper management of organic materials, particularly manure and slurry, will not only supply nutrients but also organic matter and biological inoculation. Spring applications can be timed to match crop demand more precisely.
‘It’s not about the soil in your life. It’s about the life in your soil.’
Transitioning to regenerative approaches isn’t without its challenges. It requires farmers and agronomists to learn how to use new products and practices, balance short-term economic pressures with long-term soil building, and integrate data from soil tests, weather forecasts and pest monitoring.
The key is flexibility; no single approach works everywhere. Direct drilling suits some conditions but not others. Variety blends require market acceptance and logistical planning. Cover crops need active management. To succeed you need to understand the principles and adapt them to your specific soils, climate, markets and goals.
The benefits of reduced input costs, improved soil resilience, enhanced crop quality, access to premium markets, and the satisfaction of farming in partnership with nature rather than against it, far outweigh the challenges.
The future of farming is regenerative, and it is already taking root across the British countryside.
