The Regrarians Platform®

“…I believe this is one of the most profound assessments of human-ecology dependencies that exist…”
— Joel Salatin, in the ‘The Marvelous Pigness of Pigs’, referring to the Regrarians Platform®

In 2006, Regrarians’ founder Darren J. Doherty (CPAg AIA) started the process which culminated in what is now called the Regrarians Platform®.

This platform covers the broad topics that Regrarians Ltd. addresses as part of its global extension and outreach. The Regrarians Platform builds on ‘The Keyline scale of permanence’ (‘KSOP’), a concept first outlined in 1958 in “The Challenge of Landscape — The Development and Practice of Keyline” by P.A. Yeomans (1905-1984), an Australian mining and agricultural engineer.

~ p.26, ‘The Challenge of Landscape. The Development and Practice of Keyline’, P.A. Yeomans, Keyline Publishing, Sydney, 1958

In this book Yeomans’ made the suggestion that the KSOP factors were not complete, opening the way for our development of the Regrarians Platform:

~ p.28, Yeomans, ibid.

And so with this we broadened the scope and number of Yeomans’ factors—reflecting the increased complexity of agroecological landscape and enterprise planning that have become more obvious and understood over the 6 decades since Yeomans first came up with the KSOP concept. 

The Regrarians Platform has been developed to provide a structure for a strategic, holistic and logical process to agroecological landscape and enterprise planning which ensures all elements are taken into account:

~ The scope of the Regrarians Platform layers

As a meta-methodology, the Regrarians Platform also includes insights from agroecological and ecological designers and decision-making systems. These include the work of Allan Savory of the Savory Institute and the Holistic Management® movement (especially Kirk Gadzia, Graeme Hand & the late Bruce Ward); David Holmgren, the late Bill Mollison and others in the Permaculture Design movement (especially Rowe Morrow and the late Toby Hemenway); as well as John and Nancy Jack Todd, Sim Van der Ryn, Dr. Vandana Shiva, Art Ludwig, Joel Salatin, Paul Stamets, the late Lynn Margulis, Abe Collins, Jaime Elizondo Braun, Johann Zeitsman, Ethan Roland and Gregory Landua among many others.

All Regrarians Ltd. extension and outreach follows the Regrarians Platform of:

1. Climate – developing the ‘rules of engagement’ of the human ‘climate’ of those involved in a project, whilst generating an understanding of the activities the biospheric climate allows us to do. Key aspects of our analysis are: core ethics, ‘Holistic Context’ formation and decision-making.
2. Geography – analysing aerial, topographic and other maps in order to bring a local and physical context to the enterprise.
3. Water makes life possible, so we spend a lot of time when consulting and training in order to bring ‘water under control’ (Mollison, B 1995, pers. comm.); make it ‘do its duties’ (ibid.); and leave the property in better condition than when we arrived.
4. Most people have trouble getting Access right, whether on the largest or smallest scale. We define these arteries of movement and their engineering with the assistance of our analysis of the Geography and Water layers.
5. Ecosystems vary greatly—a myriad of natural and created forms and assemblies of all of the kingdoms of nature. Nearly all economic landscapes are part of forest complexes and in the Regrarians Platform, forests and their placement are defined by layers 1–4.
6. Buildings are often expensive pieces of infrastructure that require detailed planning and engineering. In the Regrarians Platform, the integrated placement of these structures is very much determined by the five layers before it on the permanence scale.
7. The placement of Fencing as relatively fixed infrastructure is a hallmark of our domestication of many species, particularly livestock (and humans!). Traditional systems are expensive to build and apply. The advent of electric fencing revolutionised our ability to manage landscapes, allowing us to follow topographic patterns and natural animal behaviours.
8. Soils are the foundation of life and therefore an important focus; we need to take care of the whole to support its foundation. Regrarians’ focus on determining the most cost-effective treatments to regenerate soil from the many that exist.
9. Economy is driven by our analysis of the previous layers, particularly Climate and Geography. This analysis and our consequent planning focuses on driving the economic engine of the various capital flows (Roland, E & Landau, G 2008, pers. comm.) that, like soils, are fragile and form the basis of the regeneration of the whole .
10. Energy is vital to fuelling all of the elements that drive any system. We therefore focus on organising energy systems that regenerate rather than atrophy — bearing in mind their cost-benefit in a rapidly evolving field.

The Regrarians Platform Layer Categories

As we and many thousands of others have embedded the use of the Regrarians Platform as a planning and management framework, we have found it useful to categorise the layers in three groupings: