Regrarians Ltd. Statement of Purpose
The objects for which the Company is established are (extracted from Schedule 1 of the ASIC ‘Certificate of Registration of a Company’):
“…’Regrarian’, a neologism of ‘Regenerative Agrarian’, is a term first coined by Darren J Doherty in 2013 to describe those who are actively undertaking the serious & timely process of regenerating, restoring, rehabilitating, rekindling and rebooting production landscapes, be they urban or rural, across the world.
The primary directive of Regrarians Limited entity is to the regenerative enhancement of the biosphere’s ecosystem processes. The secondary directive of Regrarians Limited is to internationally provide the potential for people to be informed about the regenerative economy by the delivery of extension, media, education, goods & materials, whether it involves their work in primary production, other themes of land management, extractive industries, corporate life, domestic services, manufacturing and other activities that are within the reasonable domain of humans — and to undertake and pursue all such other similar, related or compatible objects as may from time to time be considered appropriate by the Company…”
Integrated Design
We are unashamedly integrationalist in our approach to project design & delivery where we are not set on operating under a single set of parameters, approaches, disciplines or techniques. We carefully select the most appropriate tools for the right circumstances, considering with integrity how these fit with our charter and your objectives and expectations.
To be satisfied with mere sustainability is just simply lacking ambition and to be satisfied with ‘sustaining’ dying communities, ecosystems & economies is going no-where fast. We’ve scoured the planet for the best, most practical & cost-effective agricultural & living systems that take you, your land & our planet forward…
Family / World View
To us our family is our life & it always comes first. We focus much of our work with others who feel the same way as we do. We like to get on with things and like to work with those who like to too whilst having a good time in productive environments.
Regrarians Context
‘…To maintain creative, intergenerational family & community lives built around regenerative & profitable production, management & educational systems…’
Regrarians ‘Top 10’ Outcomes
1. Produce stable environments with sound watersheds
2. Restore profitability via integrated & regenerative agricultural development & management
3. Increase wildlife species, numbers with species & stability of populations
4. Improve water, soil & vegetation resources of cities, industry & agriculture
5. Re-establish riverine & riparian areas
6. Prevent waste of financial, human & natural resources
7. Entrench Holistic Decision Making Frameworks & Regrarian® Design & Planning
Principles within the education system, communities & organisations
8. Develop viable decentralised energy production systems
9. Restore local, regional & global mineral & water cycles
10. Provide value to our collaborators, course participants, clients & community
Farm Design
Cost-effective, easy to understand & practical farm layout plans & documentation full of the wisdom gained from a lifetime or work in the field & the experienced gained by developing & managing many of these systems for decades.
Family Bio
For over 20 years our family have travelled the world helping to regenerate communities, landscapes, farms & most importantly soils. Having helped develop 1000’s of projects with more than 2500 clients we have broad expertise & knowledge in our field. Since 2001 we’ve trained over 15,000 people in a broad range of methodologies drawing on the practical wisdom that comes from knowing what we’re doing, not just talking about it.
Lisa
Lisa Heenan (1966-) is a professional actor, singer, writer & entertainer. Lisa was the star in the cult-classic thriller ‘The Long Line’ (1992) and the acclaimed social drama ‘Shredded’ (2002) & has played in a number of roles in Film & TV such as ‘Road to Nhill’ & ‘Stingers’ along with ‘Blue Heelers’, ‘Hamish & Andy’ & ‘Neighbours’, having been involved as an actor on many Australian productions & commercials over the last 25 years. Lisa is well known not just for her sharp and probing talent but also for her no fuss capacity to adapt to any number of roles put before her, a true character actor.
Lisa has also performed as a singer, acoustic guitarist and drummer across a range of genre’s and currently does limited solo and band gigs mostly in South Eastern Australia. With a great range and broad repitoire than spans everything from rock to folk, Lisa is particularly renowned for her Jazz & Blues vocals, which when teamed up with her daughter Isaebella or going solo is something else.
Lisa has fit being an active family-oriented mother, daughter & sister in, whilst managing her professional career along with playing a pivotal role in the development and operation of Regrarians Ltd. with her husband Darren Doherty and children Isaebella, Pearl and Zane. On the many events and projects that Regrarians has been involved, Lisa has been right there from the start, providing strategic, practical, no-nonsense guidance and support to all involved. Those that know her or work with her are always impressed with her grace & ease under pressure & her ability to roll up her sleeves and get to work.
Lisa is also the owner & manager of ‘Dehesa Felix’, our family farm at Eppalock just outside of Bendigo in Central Victoria, Australia. This property has been purposely designed & is being developed to sustain generations of our family & others using the variety of techniques & infrastructure that Regrarians’ is renowned for.
Lisa is a Director of Regrarians. Ltd.
Isaebella
Isaebella Doherty (1993-) is a precocious and multi-award winning talent who has produced a body of work that includes writing, performing, singing, filming and editing the Hillside Film Festival-winning ‘SWAN’, the Australian & International short –film series ‘Filthy Youth’ and TV series ‘Polyfaces’. Continually penning scripts, stories & songs whilst incessantly filming and recording the still and moving stories of people and places around the globe with her dazzling array of modern & vintage lens hooked up to ‘Toola’, her beloved 5D, Isaebella can also found pumping out the best coffee as a vibrant, hard-working and gregarious barista and host, a passing support role to her burgeoning career in media and entertainment. All of this will see her producing and performing in a wide array of memorable, powerful and integral productions long into the future.
Isaebella Doherty, is Regrarians Ltd. Media Manager. She also manages the brand ‘Isaebella’.
Darren
Darren J. Doherty (CPAg AIA) has extensive experience across the world in project design, development, management & training. A career-long focus on the profitable & regenerative retrofit of broadacre landscapes has seen Darren acclaimed as a pioneer in this important & often overlooked field.
With the advent of the Regrarians Ltd. non-profit in 2013, Darren has shifted his service profile to being that of a volunteer of that organisation, and is a leading attendee at conventions and conferences organised in conjunction with local organisations, companies and individuals all over the globe.
Darren is a 5th generation Bendigo region land manager, developer, author & trainer and has been involved in the design & development of well over 3000, mostly broadacre projects across 6 continents in more than 50 countries, ranging from 1 million hectare cattle stations in Australia’s Kimberly region to 110,000 acre Estancia’s in Patagonia, EcoVillage developments in Tasmania to public:private R&D agroforestry & education projects in Viet Nam, novel AG Machinery development + family farms across the globe with a range of private, corporate, government & non-profit clients.
A true ‘integrationalist’, Darren is the originator of the Keyline® Design (2006), Carbon Farming (2006), Carbon Economy (2007), Regenerative Agriculture (along with RegenAG® {2009}) & Regrarians® (2012) and Regrarians’ REX®, ROC & RAP conventions and conferences across Europe, North & South America and Oceania. This wide experience has created an international reputation of achievement plus and enviable & expansive Regrarians Network that integrates many disciplines. Globally many of Darren’s alumni of more than 15,000 people are at the cutting edge of the movement towards regenerative agriculture & living systems.
At 51 years of age, Darren is the originator of the Regrarians Platform® process which outlines a strategic & logical process to the development of regenerative agricultural systems, and is the program extensively outlined in the Regrarians Handbook which is now being released chapter by chapter as an eBook.
Darren is married to Lisa Heenan & together they have three children, Isaebella (25), Pearl (19) & Zane (17).
Pearl
Pearl Doherty (1999-) is most studious of our children and is an expressive animal lover who has done many things including finding herself on the poultry processing line pulling heads & cutting feet at the venerated Polyface Farm along with developing art & stories in her own style, which is well, Pearl. Pearl is named after all of her grandmothers, all proud, strong women & she’s got a bit of all of them in her as she loves a deal, is hard-headed with her finances, a indefatigable bargainer & is extremely enterprising, all great qualities that her parent’s wholeheartedly encourage. Pearl completed her Permaculture Design Course certificate with her father, Darren Doherty on the family farm in 2014. Pearl is great with other children & when we travel she can often be found helping to keep attendees children amused & entertained more often than not in concert with her younger brother Zane.
Zane
Zane Doherty (2001-) has an engineer’s brain in the scarred & often bruised body of an extreme sportsperson: he lives the kind of life that kids his age should whilst being known for his kind and sensitive manner. Both he & his sister Pearl have done many property designs though Zane takes this a few steps further & is already a very talented & skillful project planner & trouble shooter due to the eclectic experiences he’s had with his parents & extended family and friends the world over, & like Pearl is great with other kids & animals whilst being able to hold his own with adults: unfortunately rare qualities in this day and age. Zane completed a 10 day REX® Farm Planning Program with his father, Darren Doherty, in rural Morocco in 2016. Now 17, Zane is an international model who is represented by Chadwick Models.
‘Dehesa Felix’
The expansive Dehesa’s (integrated widely spaced evergreen oak in open grassy woodlands or savannah) of the Iberian peninsula have long been an inspiration template for our broadscale agriculture designs. ‘Dehesa’ was so named for our fondness for these wonderful systems & ‘Felix’ from the Latin prosperous & Happy, also a homage to surveyor/explorer Major Thomas Livingston Mitchell’s description of SE Australia in 1836 as ‘Australia Felix’.
‘Dehesa Felix’ was purchased by our family in 2006 and is a 9ha gently undulating corner block 20 minutes to east of Bendigo & 5 mins to the west of Lake Eppalock. The property is just a few kilometres to the several of our pioneering ancestors’ farms, having first settled in the area from the 1850’s to 1870’s, so we are pretty familiar with this terroir. The farm receives between 400-600mm of rain in an ‘average’ year, most of it falling over late winter-early spring. In 2009 the rainfall dropped to just over 200mm followed with a new record of 1400mm in the latest canonical La Nina event of 2010/2011, much of it falling over summer.
The property was selected based on a long list of criteria that included: proximity to main roads, distance to Bendigo, region, easy layout, ample northerly aspect, undeveloped, access to services/utilities, lack of trees, pasture, less than $170,000 & at least one decent dam. We scored on all of these accounts.
Dehesa Felix is now being developed according to the Regrarians Platform® process with a focus on soil development, water resources, building infrastructure & fencing. In 2011, 30% of the production widely spaced tree systems were established following 5 years of soil development, using the famous Yeomans Keyline Plow. In 2010 an additional dam was built along with an adjacent building site for our main building, plus 3 cabin sites, 3 water tank sites & main access road which collects water from the two public roads that border the property & feed this to the new dam at a gradient of 1:300.
An additional 3 dams (1 sump, 1 contour & 1 turkey’s nest) are still to be constructed giving a total of 25ML in storage (much of it gravity) supporting the agricultural enterprise, reducing our fire risk whilst ensuring that even in the severest of drought periods there is ample water.
The widely spaced forest systems are designed to be at once an arboretum of mediterranean production tree crops & frame the needs of the agricultural enterprise over the very long term. Our clear objective is to regenerate the soils to the point where we have a dominance of C4 perennial native (& exotic) grasses using extremely low to no inputs via management intensive grazing of a range of livestock.
Dehesa Felix’s progressive development is designed to:
1. Service the regenerative agricultural enterprise of the brand ‘Dehesa Felix’
2. Be the intergenerational home & refuge to our extended family
3. Become a proving ground for a range of agricultural, architectural & engineering research projects to inform Regrarians’ design & development services
World / Growing family
We have ‘family’ all the world over, a enduring legacy of our approach to travel and work and how we have embedded ourselves in the lives of the often family-run enterprises we’ve had the privilege of working with over many years. We promote at the forefront an inclusive family-focussed approach to planning, education and events that we provide and have pricing policies, which throughout our business model enable family participation wherever possible.