A week or so ago Nick had the opportunity to hang out with Allan Savory, the founder of Holistic Management, way out west at Brewarrina. He was in the car and off before I could say ‘biological accelerators’.
7 hours of driving into the great flatness of the Aussie outback later, Nick and his mate Trev were in the middle of a crowd of farmers from all over the country. They’d all gathered to hear what this venerated pioneer of regenerative agriculture had to say. It sounds like it was an inspiring trip. Read More »
December 7, 2010 – 11:13 am
pasture cropped oats growing in symbiosis with native perennial pastures at Col Seis’s farm
Grain cropping is something that, for the vast majority of us, is someone else’s problem. We just eat the results; certainly every day, and nearly with every meal. Bread, rice, corn, soy, beans and so on. Produced somewhere out there, by someone else.
So a portion of our every single meal is coming from a grain crop, somewhere way out west. We wish it were grown organically, and in a way that doesn’t destroy too much of our topsoil. But we’ll eat it regardless of the farming practices, really. It’s in our diet. It’s what we do. Read More »
April 27, 2010 – 12:00 am
Grazing animals bad, undisturbed grass good. That’s how we personally thought regeneration worked, five years ago. And we were not alone. You could be forgiven for thinking that any and all grazing animals (particularly of the introduced kind) have no role whatsoever to play in regenerating pastures, soils and land, simply because we know how much damage badly-managed grazing and animal management can do.
And we as a society do love a good bit of polarity, especially when it comes to nature. Perhaps it’s our quest for simplicity. At the same time, we inherently know that an ecosystem cannot be simplified down to a set of polar opposites.
However we frequently farm the land and expect it to give back without much thought or consideration for the complexity within the pastures, the biological relationships, the edge effects, the soil. The results of this approach speak for themselves – widespread desertification, aridity, loss of topsoil, salinification and the introduction of a catastrophe of chemicals and hormones into the food chain, which our grandchildren will not be the last to bear the legacy of. Read More »
