Australian soils are among the oldest on Earth, weathered thin, and the rain that falls on them is about as unreliable as rain gets. That is the problem Dr Mark Farrell, a principal research scientist at CSIRO, keeps coming back to when people ask whether regenerative agriculture works here. "Our soils are older and more weathered, and our rainfall is far more variable," he said when the new project was announced this week. Most of the evidence comes from Europe and North America, so the answer, honestly, is that nobody is sure. Stress Testing Regenerative Agriculture Practices, STRAP for short, is a five year project to find out, with almost $8 million from the Australian Government's Future Drought Fund and trial sites spread across South Australia, Victoria and New South Wales. "We have trials running in very different environments across the southern region," Farrell said.
Read the full story: Farmers put regenerative agriculture to the test, CSIRO.
What makes it unusual is who runs it. Seven farming systems groups, the local organisations growers set up to test ideas in their own districts, have each taken a site: Ag Innovation and Research Eyre Peninsula, Agriculture Kangaroo Island, MacKillop Farm Management Group, Mallee Sustainable Farming, Upper North Farming Systems and Fleurieu Farming Systems, coordinated by the Ag Excellence Alliance, with the agronomy firms Agbyte, Agronomy Solutions and Coutts J&R alongside. "Each farming systems group knows its own district," said Dr Jade Rose of the Alliance. "Working together, they can answer questions that matter to the whole region." On the ground near Balranald and Murrayville in the Mallee, Dr Penny Roberts is seeding plots that compare intercropping, legumes grown for their nitrogen, alternative fertilisers and pasture worked into the cropping rotation, measuring soil health and the money side as well as the yields. "This project gives us answers from our own paddocks, alongside results from right across the southern region," she said. Five years is a long time to wait for an answer. It is also, for once, long enough to get a real one.
Sources and links
Our short take: from the CSIRO news release of 13 October 2026, with all three scientists' quotes verbatim from it.
- Farmers put regenerative agriculture to the test, CSIRO The release.
- Future Drought Fund Where the money comes from.
- Ag Excellence Alliance The coordinating body.
- Mallee Sustainable Farming Dr Roberts's group.
