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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how regenerative agriculture rewrites the ecocultural narrative of sheep and cattle in the context of the climate crisis in Australia. Often the villain of environmental destruction, here livestock agriculture emerges as the hero.

Paper long abstract

The farming of sheep and cattle has often propelled concerns about destructive environmental change in Australia and in recent years there has been growing critique over its causal effect on the climate crisis. Framed as a nature-based-solution, the emergent alternative farming movement, regenerative agriculture seeks to address these concerns by rendering sheep and cattle agriculture as compatible with ecological restoration and climate mitigation. ‘Livestock agriculture’, which is typically framed as the villain of environmental destruction, here emerges as the hero.

This paper examines regenerative efforts to steward the harmonisation of soils, grass and cows as part of a redemptive re-storying of agriculture in environmental terms. However, I find that regenerative attempts to naturalise ‘livestock production’ is not as simple as a green rebranding of an environmentally destructive industry but is embedded within broader settler colonial nation-building narratives of pastoral expansionism and its underlying Judeo-Christian agricultural stewardship ethos. I argue that these ecocultural identities - along with the emergent politics of nature-based-solutions - will have to be reckoned with, as various forms of agricultural production lay claim to narratives of climate-secure futures. As the term regeneration is increasingly applied to a diversity of projects such as environmental rehabilitation, neoliberal extraction and retrospective, neo-agrarian agricultural revival this paper is a timely investigation into alternative stories of hope and environmental care in a period of escalating environmental crisis.