Agroecology versus Regenerative Agriculture: A Question of Power
Belgian-Welsh farmer Ann Owen argues that regenerative agriculture serves corporate interests while agroecology builds practitioner power. The distinction matters: one treats farming as optimization, the other as transformative practice rooted in social and ecological balance.
During Regenerating Europe Week 2026 — which brought events to the European Parliament and farm visits near Brussels — Agroecology Europe spoke with Ann Owen, a Belgian-born agroecological farmer now working in Wales. Her diagnosis of the regenerative agriculture movement is unsparing: “Comparing agroecology and regenerative is like comparing apples with tomatoes, they’re just completely different things.”
The distinction, for Owen, turns on power and practice. Regenerative agriculture, she argues, serves agrochemical interests eager to sell pest management products and machinery to replace labor. Agroecology, by contrast, “empowers the practitioners” through peer learning rather than top-down certification, treating farming as worthwhile work that keeps people on the land with decent incomes. Where regenerative farmers might replace ploughing with glyphosate and call it progress, agroecologists build ecological balance that keeps pests and predators in equilibrium. “There’s a reason why agroecology is a peasant movement,” Owen notes.
The governance implications extend beyond farm practice. Owen points to subsidy structures that reward extensive acreage over productive intensity — her market garden produces 100% of its yield for consumption within 30 miles, yet receives no premium for local provisioning or job creation, while Welsh farmers exporting meat abroad collect subsidies from Welsh taxpayers. “How is that right?” she asks. When the European Economic and Social Committee calls for regulatory alignment around regenerative agriculture, it risks codifying the wrong model — one that treats farming as industrial optimization rather than socio-ecological transformation.
Owen’s prescription for advancing agroecology echoes The Garden’s own thesis: “It needs stories, and it needs good news stories.” People are receptive to what has changed for the better, she argues, invoking Rob Hopkins on the power of imagination. “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.” Governance, in other words, begins in the greenhouse.