What would a river-centred food system look like?
by Emmeline Eastwell
In the six years I’ve lived alongside the Richmond River since moving to the area, I’ve realised something I couldn’t have understood before. A river is not a thing, but a consequence. The story of the catchment can be read in our water, the flow carrying pieces of our landscape – from the forested ridges to the floodplain paddocks and roadside drains. Tom’s piece on chemicals in bush regen made me stop and consider my own choices and reasons. It’s a fair question, and one that deserves nuance. But it also made me think about the much larger chemical story unfolding quietly, continuously, across the Richmond catchment and beyond, the one written in the structure of our food system itself. Once you see the river not as an object but as an outcome, the conversation about chemicals shifts. It stops being about whether we as individuals should cut‑and‑paint or spray during bush regen work, or switch herbicides or reduce rates while farming. Those questions matter, but they sit on the surface. The deeper story is the one the river carries: the story of a landscape shaped by an economic and food system that rewards speed, uniformity, and control above beauty, slowness, diversity, and care. In short, a system that was never designed with the river in mind.
In subtropical catchments like the Richmond, most herbicide movement happens during high‑flow events. Studies from catchments in Queensland show that herbicides like glyphosate, diuron and atrazine can latch onto fine sediments and move with them as floodwaters rise, and monitoring in northern NSW confirm that these chemicals are accumulating in our waterways and sediments. The river becomes a conveyor belt, carrying the chemical signatures of land use from the upper catchment to the estuary. This isn’t unique to the Richmond, but here, where the river has endured repeated floods, long recovery times, and over a century of colonial intensification of agriculture, the cumulative effect is particularly visible. Historic and ongoing land management choices exacerbate this – over-grazing, cleared slopes, loss of groundcover, eroding creek banks, and the removal of riparian vegetation all increase the transport of sediment and chemicals from farms to waterways.
Chemical use is often framed as a personal choice or moral stance. But the reality is far more structural. Agriculture accounts for the overwhelming majority of Australia’s herbicide use. Not because farmers are careless or unaware of the impacts, but because the system they operate within demands efficiency, predictability, and risk minimisation. Most farmers I know don’t want to rely on chemicals. They want resilient farms, stable production, and a river their kids can swim in. But they’re operating inside a system that rewards yield, punishes risk, and leaves little financial room for transition. Scientists call this process, the way a system locks itself into certain patterns, path dependency. Once agriculture is built around chemical inputs, everything else aligns with that assumption: machinery, crop varieties, labour structures, debt, contracts. So when we talk about chemical use in the Richmond catchment, we’re not really talking about individual decisions. We’re talking about a food system that externalises its ecological costs, and a river that ends up carrying them.
Regenerative agriculture is often framed as a path to healthier ecosystems. It works with ecological processes: groundcover that suppresses weeds, soil biology that builds resilience, diverse pastures that outcompete invasives, infiltration that reduces runoff. Peer‑reviewed studies show that regenerative systems improve soil carbon, water infiltration, microbial diversity, and landscape function. These changes potentially reduce both the need for and the impacts of agricultural chemicals. But regenerative agriculture is still a minority practice. It requires time, support, and a willingness to rethink deeply ingrained assumptions. After three years of study, it’s tempting to treat regenerative agriculture as the solution. And while I think it is a powerful step in the right direction, it can’t transform a catchment alone. So, the important question becomes: if regenerative agriculture makes a broken system less harmful, what would it take to make the system itself different?
What would a river‑centred food system look like?
Currently, we pay farmers for yield. We don’t pay for clean water leaving the property, intact soil structures, biodiversity improvements, flood buffering, drought resilience and reduced chemical loads to our water system.
If we designed agriculture around the health of the Richmond River, the entire system would look different. It would require us to imagine a food system that doesn’t treat the river as collateral damage.
We’d invest in long-term transition support, not short-term grants.
We’d treat the river as a partner in land-use decisions.
We’d build markets that value food grown in ways that protect waterways.
And we’d recognise that ecological restoration, social revitalisation, and agricultural production are not opposing forces, but interdependent ones.
A river‑centred food system would give farmers the security and support to invest in soil, water, and ecological function. It would align economic incentives with ecological reality. And perhaps most importantly, we’d acknowledge that the river’s health is not a side issue — it’s a measure of whether our food system is truly regenerative.
Our river shows us that the issue is systemic, and so the solutions must be too. If we want a different river, we need a different system.