Today is the culmination of Regenerating Europe Week 2026, which has seen events at the European Parliament and the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) followed by farm visits near Brussels. Agroecology Europe will shortly publish our position on regenerative agriculture, and we took the opportunity to speak to the Belgian agroecological farmer and food partnership activist Ann Owen, who was born in Flanders but who today farms in Wales, to gain a farmer’s perspective on regenerative agriculture.
We began by asking her why regenerative agriculture was enjoying an increasing public name awareness compared to agroecology?
“Because of lobbying by the agrochemical industry and other business interests,” she said. “Agroecology doesn’t earn any of such business interests a quick buck. There’s nothing that they can really sell to agroecologists: if they look at agroecology, they see people campaigning for better incomes, whereas if they look at regenerative there’s loads of products they can sell to them. You wouldn’t believe the cocktail of stuff that they’re using in order to deal with pests in a more so-called “sustainable” way.
What they don’t seem to understand is that in agroecology, if you’re talking about integrated pest management, you’re talking about creating an ecological balance that keeps pests and predators in balance, whereas with regenerative they still think of the whole idea of killing what they don’t want. It’s not about the balance, it’s just about killing it, getting rid of it, both with the glyphosate for the weeds and with all the different products that they’ve got for infections and pests.”
The regenerative farming organisation EARA refers to agroecology as part of a movement of regenerative agriculture. We asked Ann whether she saw the two approaches as occupying different points on a spectrum or as being two different paths?
“Comparing agroecology and regenerative is like comparing apples with tomatoes, they’re just completely different things. Agroecology is backed up by science, much more so than regenerative. And you’ve got the social political movement. Where is that in regenerative? Where is the empowerment of the grower? Regenerative looks at replacing people with machinery and just making more profit for the one owner of that land.
There’s a reason why agroecology is a peasant movement. It’s because it sees that working on the land is good work, it’s keeping people on their land, and it’s giving them worthwhile jobs and worthwhile incomes.
The main thing for me about agroecology is that it empowers the practitioners. It seeks to help them, seeks to guide them along to better practices, but it doesn’t do that from a top down position. It does that from a learning and a guiding principle.
That is different from organic farming where it’s very much “you’re either in or you’re out” and it’s a top-down big organisation that decides whether you’re organic or not. And for regenerative, who is actually doing anything like that? You can call yourself regenerative the minute you reduce ploughing, and then if ploughing gets replaced by the use of glyphosate you wonder ‘what are we regenerating?’”
The EESC has hailed regenerative as “a new narrative for agriculture that can drive the renewal of the sector” and called for an alignment of the regulatory framework for regenerative agriculture. We asked Ann whether a clearer codification would improve her perception of regenerative?
“Again, if they take the same kind of approach as for instance the Soil Association or the Organic Growers Alliance, and work with certification that is applied by a top down organisation rather than by peer assessment and self-assessment, you’re still not dealing with that power imbalance. You’ve still got that difficulty of when people are told what to do rather than come to a way of working because that is clearly best practice and they understand what they are doing.
To give you a concrete example, you can apply to be organic, then you go through conversion and maybe you get inspected and maybe you don’t, but it doesn’t stop some non-agroecological farmers from flaunting all the rules. We brought in a load of manure from the local organic farmer who has his cows and apparently it’s all organic, he even offered us a certificate, but we used it and it clearly showed signs of aminopyralid contamination. The farmer was buying haylage or silage from another farm, which if he would apply for derogation they’re allowed to do. He hadn’t applied for derogation, he hadn’t bothered, he had just bought silage from another farm that clearly had been treated with this aminopyralid.
So that’s two transgressions. The first farm had treated their crop with aminopyralid and had sold it to another, despite the very strict regulations stipulating it has to stay on the farm. The second transgression was by the organic farmer, by buying this silage without derogation and by not telling us. So we end up paying more for organic manure and it’s contaminated anyway, and this is because that organic farmer does not really understand the importance of organic principles.
That’s the difference with agroecology. People have come to agroecology not just from a desire to make more money from their products but from a desire to make a better world, from putting themselves socially, economically, and politically in a better position. It’s a whole movement, so it wouldn’t make any sense if you are trying to cheat while you’re trying to farm agroecologically. Unless you actually have the education or the drive of wanting to belong to the socio-political movement, and the desire to make a change in the world, or you have strict controls in place, people just do what they want.”
Ann sells her produce through a market stall in cooperation with other agroecological growers and also participates in a local veg-box scheme. She encourages buyers to freely visit Einion’s Garden, which she farms with her husband, so that they can see how their produce is grown. What, we ask Ann, are the greatest challenges to agroecology? Is it the army of corporate lobbyists? Is it a lack of public recognition of the term?
I don’t think it’s just the issue that people don’t know what agroecology is, or even organic, or even local food. The problem is that local vegetables being produced in small market gardens are not being supported at all by the agricultural policies of the country.
“We’ve never had any kind of subsidies, whereas animal farmers are supported. Now the government has finally agreed that horticultural set-ups, horticultural businesses, can now apply for the Sustainable Farming Scheme, but you would not believe the amount of work it is, and the subsidies are still determined by the area you cultivate, and are still created for people that farm over a vast acreage.
Market gardens are very productive on a very small land-area-based scale. Subsidies should be based on production and there should be an additional premium for locally consumed produce. So, if you take our produce, 100% of what we produce is consumed within a radius of 30 miles. Less than 5% of other agricultural produce in Wales is consumed in Wales, it’s all getting exported. How is that benefiting people from Wales? You might argue it provides income, but at the same time it’s not creating civil food in this country at all. And these farmers that export all their meat products get paid with the same agricultural subsidies that come from the taxes that we pay. So, it’s our taxes that pay our farmers to grow crops for people in other countries. How is that right?
There should be a social value premium as well based on the kind of jobs that we create. Market gardening can create interesting, highly skilled jobs that require a lot of experience over the years. All that kind of thing isn’t recognised: people assume that everybody can just grow vegetables. But they found out during the pandemic, when everybody was gardening during lockdown: they thought it was so easy to grow vegetables, but people soon found out it’s not. Growing produce is quite skilled if you want to get a good return.”
We ended by asking Ann what we in the agroecological movement can do to take agroecology more effectively into the public consciousness?
“It needs stories, and it needs good news stories. I think people are very receptive to stories that tell of something that has changed for the better because of agroecology. What we always hear is how bad everything is, and I think people are just sick of it. Rob Hopkins has been very good in demonstrating how the imagination is such an important element: if we can imagine a change then we are on the way to achieving it. As agroecologists our opponent in transforming the way we eat and farm is public despair, and our greatest asset is public hope.”