Talking at the AgriFocus 2025 conference in Sydney, hosted by agricultural services provider PrincipleFocus, Mr Richardson argued that farmers need to shift their thinking from “being done to”—as in being victims of policy and markets—and move into “a place of doing”.

While forecasts for the future are grim, farmers today have a unique opportunity to improve their farm ecosystems and generate wealth from the oncoming world of carbon trading, he said.

“We have an opportunity to set up future generations with debt-free land on high carbon-content soils,” Mr Richardson said.

“It would be like arriving in Australia all those years ago to find virgin land, carrying no debt.”

“You have a future of high biodiversity, low cost and high production from natural farming systems.”

Mr Richardson, who owns a 7000 ha ranch “Brussels” at Vryburg, on the edge of the Kalahari Desert in South Africa, is also a leading Holistic Management (HM) educator and an articulate proponent of the power of the HM decision-making process to generate balanced returns to farmers.

At “Brussels”, between 2000-2006, Mr Richardson said planned grazing of beef cattle had taken soil carbon levels on poor Kalahari sands from zero to 0.7pc, on an average 400mm of summer rainfall.

On the clays, average soil carbon had increased from 2.6pc to 4.1pc over the same period.

“That’s why if you go to Google Earth and look at my place, you can see the boundaries,” Mr Richardson said, showing a slide of a fenceline dividing a neighbour’s bare paddock from his own well-grassed one.

Mr Richardson argued that it will be essential for farmers to be innovative in moving away from energy-intensive production systems, to systems that use minimal fossil fuel but capture the maximum amount of solar energy through green leaf matter, which is converted into agricultural products and soil carbon.

* Matthew Cawood attended AgriFocus 2025 as a guest of PrincipleFocus.