There is a question farmers continually ask themselves. Usually, it’s a farmer standing in a field, hands in their pockets, looking at a crop that is doing something unexpected, either for the better or worse. The question is always some version of the same thing: “Am I doing it right yet?”
My thoughts have never changed. You are never doing it right yet. And that is not a criticism. It is, in fact, the whole point.
Regenerative agriculture is not a destination. It is a direction of travel. There is no certificate (although plenty are trying), no final inspection, no moment at which a farm crosses a line and becomes definitively regenerative. There is only the continuous, sometimes frustrating, always instructive process of observation, adaptation and improvement. The farmers who understand this, who have genuinely internalised it, rather than simply adopted the language, are the ones who are still moving forward 10 years after they started.
This issue of Direct Driller is built around our coverage of Groundswell 2026, and it is a fitting place to reflect on that idea. Groundswell itself was born from the same philosophy. When the event was first held in 2016, it was not a celebration of an arrived movement; it was a gathering of farmers who were asking questions, sharing failures as readily as successes, and refusing to accept that the way things had always been done was necessarily the way things should continue to be done. The farmers who spoke at that first event were not finished. They were, and remain, works in progress.
The sessions we covered at Groundswell 2026 illustrate this beautifully. Tim Parton, one of our own Farmer Focus writers and a man whose journey into biological farming began with a personal health crisis, spoke alongside nutritionist Dr Lucy Williamson about the connection between soil biology and human health. Tim has been farming without insecticides for over a decade and without fungicides for seven years. He is not done. He is still testing, still observing, still refining. His book, Intelligent Farming, is not a manual for a finished system. It is a record of a journey that is still underway – do buy yourself a copy.
The same is true across every session we attended. The pulse panel debated the gap between what farmers can grow and what the market will pay for. The rainfall simulator demonstrated, in real time, why soil cover matters, and why the answer is never simply “do more of this.” The data sessions revealed a genuine fault line in the industry between those who see farm data as a compliance cost to be surrendered to supply chains, and those who see it as a premium-generating asset to be carefully stewarded. None of these conversations are resolved. They are ongoing.
This brings me to an announcement I am particularly proud to make. In 2027, Direct Driller will turn 10 years old. To mark that milestone, we are planning a special anniversary issue that will bring together all our Farmer Focus pieces from the past decade – every farmer journey we have told since the first issue – with an additional piece from each of these farmers. The intention is not simply to celebrate what has been achieved; it is to show how much has continued to change.
The farmers we profiled in 2016 and 2017, the people who were considered pioneers at the time, many of whom were also speaking at that very first Groundswell, have not stood still. Their systems have evolved. Their understanding has deepened. Some of the things they were doing then, they no longer do. Some of the things they are doing now, they could not have imagined then. That is not a sign that they were wrong before. It is a sign that they are thinking properly.
Regenerative agriculture cannot be reduced to a checklist. It cannot be captured in a set of SFI actions, however well-intentioned those actions may be. It is, at its core, a commitment to infinite thinking, to the idea that there is always more to learn, always a better question to ask, always a reason to go back out into the field and look again.
The farmers who understand that are the ones this magazine exists to serve. We hope to still be learning alongside them when we reach our twentieth year.
