Rebooting Agriculture: an interview with Bioneer Darren Doherty

Darren Doherty, a 5th generation Australian farmer and Permaculture pioneer who has worked in over 40 countries over 20 years as a farm planning consultant and educator, originated the Keyline Design Course and the RegenAG concept. Darren has designed thousands of projects, focusing on the practical regeneration of agricultural landscapes, soils, communities, and families. Darren will be a keynote speaker at the National Bioneers Conference and his plenary talk will be shown at the Central Coast Bioneers Conference on Saturday, October 26 as part of our Food & Farming program. Local workshop speaker John deBruin of Best Beef Ever will expand on Doherty’s principles Saturday afternoon and give them a local, Central Coast perspective.

Bioneers: What are the principles of Regraianism?

Darren: Some of the key principles are to produce stable environments with sound watersheds; increase wildlife species & stability of populations; improve water, soil & vegetation resources of cities, industry & agriculture; prevent waste of financial, human & natural resources; utilize permaculture design principles; and develop viable decentralized energy production systems.

Bioneers: How does Regraranism help farmers mitigate and adapt to climate change?

Darren: One of the things we look at, which might seem like an unusual climate change strategy, is reducing debt, which in an agricultural environment is really crippling because it disempowers farmers from making the land stewardship decisions they would normally make. We try to get the debt out of the way by getting some higher margin activities in the stream of an enterprise so we can start to self-fund the more regenerative practices…. (Cont’d)