The Field Day at Mollerin
A Nutrisoil sponsored event at Ian and Di Haggerty’s farm, Mollerin, WA October 2022
Hosted by Anthony James from The Regennarration podcast and the co-founders of Natural Intelligence Farming, Jane Slattery, Di & Ian Haggerty.
A friend asked me about the field day held on Ian and Di Haggertys’ farm, deep in the wheatbelt. I told her that one hundred and seventy souls were there on a Monday in late October, 300 kms north-east of Perth, which is enough to alert anyone to the fact that something special was happening.
Regenerative Agriculture has clearly hit its stride, feeling confident enough to talk openly about the intuitive and heart-based approach needed to restore land to the rhythm of its natural systems. This time last year, those of us in the Regenerative Ag zone - wary of the backlash – were cautioning each other to stay away from the word ‘regenerative’. Charles Massy, author of the influential and beloved tome Call of the Reed Warbler, 2017, told audiences over subsequent years that his publishers encouraged him to leave out a chapter on the ‘spiritual’ nature of the new and ancient way of farming he was documenting on the grounds that what he was talking about was incendiary enough without feeding the flames of controversy.
That cat is out of the bag: this mob were happy to talk openly: the restoration of the land starts with the regeneration of the human heart.
Jane Slattery, co-founded Natural Intelligence farming with the Haggertys’. She used the language of energy, flow, and connection to illustrate a nature-centred approach to farming that is sometimes difficult to articulate, but that is undeniably proving itself in economic, personal, social, and environmental returns in this area of WA’s wheatbelt.
FOUNDATIONAL STORY
During the day of interviews and presentation there were some illuminating moments. Anthony James, host of the RegenNarration podcast, interviewed Ian and Di, getting to the heart of their connection to country and to the importance of their relationships with First Nation’s people.
Ian told a wonderful story of his and Di’s first business venture in the Kimberley as a married couple with a small baby. They took over a BP service station business in Derby and the oil tanker arrived in town soon after they did, to fill the underground tanks. The Aboriginal man driving the tanker told them that he needed to take the cheque back down on his return journey.
Ian and Di clearly hadn’t thought this through – they had no way to pay for delivery of fuel and confessed as much to the driver. He said, what about I go walkabout for a few days, and we’ll see what we can do. Over the next few days, the whole community came in to buy fuel and by Monday they had the money needed to pay the invoice.
This was the start of a close and fruitful relationship with the locals and an introduction to a whole new way of being in relationship with people and country. Ian, a young white man in his early 20s spent a lot of time on country with the elders, and both Ian and Di stepped into a lifelong journey of ‘unlearning’: by letting go of control, learning how to support rather than overthrow nature’s cycles and nurturing their own instincts.
UNLEARNING
So much of the Haggertys’ subsequent farming practises were influenced by this experience in the Kimberley. They took their unlearning into their farming venture and seriously committed themselves to what was then an experimental pathway, acting with hearts open to what the land, plants and animals were showing them - even as local and mainstream farming and science communities assured them that the results they were getting were probably impossible and certainly, unwelcome.
They persisted, trialling their new and ancient way of farming and over years gathered support and knowledge from others involved in alternative agricultural practises.
In the early days they found champions in soil scientist Elaine Ingham and other folk sold on biological farming, and gradually the science started to support what their hearts already knew.
DI AND THE MOB
Di Haggertys’ slide talk and presentation begins in 1994 with 1600 acres and takes us up to present times, managing a farming outfit of 60,000 acres over 35 properties.
For Di, the sheep have been her teachers and the key to her learning – or unlearning - of farming ways. She has seen the self-replacing flock find their own health when the focus is not on genetics but on allowing the generations to stay together and hand on knowledge of the terrain to their young. The Haggertys’ maintain their own seed stocks and by cutting back on chemical inputs have started to see their pastures boosted by native perennials. These long-lost plants have magically sprung back to life in response to soils enriched by compost solutions, intensive grazing, diverse plantings and long rest periods. Di started seeing her animals resting longer, gaining weight with reduced feed, and regularly producing extraordinarily resilient fibre. They have developed a market for their wool with sellers keen to source product from regenerating land and are seeing the results in high-end labels like Stella McCartneys’ fashion house.
IN THE PADDOCK
After lunch we piled into buses to go and check out the land; first off to look at the soil profile in a paddock growing with native grasses, and dominated by a handsome, robust, perennial called Bandicoot grass. They’d dug a bulldozer-sized hole to allow us to check out surprisingly deep root profiles on the diverse plant mix. It was clear it was hard digging in hard ground, and Nakala Maddock from Nutrisoil (one of the organisers of the day) did a quick pH test to show us that the roots were starting to penetrate the acid soil.
Di explained that this paddock had been previously grazed, was currently being rested and despite not being rated by the humans as a productive zone, was showing a fair amount of flair in its ability to keep the earth covered with plants, including producing a range of native perennials that have not been seen in the district for decades. Jane invited us to see that ‘natural intelligence’ had provided the plants able to thrive in this poor soil and capable of tackling the acid soil profiles that lay under the topsoil; the Haggerty’s job was to get out of the way and let nature get on with its own healing.
The proof that they were working well with natural forces came for Di with the behaviour of the sheep. She assumed her mob of pregnant ewes would be camping in the next paddock, rich as it was with oats, wheat, and lupins - but left the gate open and was surprised to find the whole mob soon departed to the least fertile (to our eyes) paddock, where they camped for the duration of the birthing, only heading back through the gate when their lambs were up and about.
A corollary to this story is the reduction of costs of this way of farming represents and how there is an easier pace to the work. The Haggartys’ have got to the point that they can use their animals to stimulate and fertilise a paddock, harvest a crop in late spring and then leave the paddock to its own devices, allowing it to re-establish summer active plants to keep the soil alive with life above and below ground during the long hot summers. Therein lies resilience.
There is such beauty in allowing the land and then the sheep to find their own pathways to vitality. And it can be seen as a profound act of decolonisation – it that it challenges cultural filters, removes the sense of control and superiority that models an old relationship to nature, and reveals the energy that flows through all living systems.
THE STORY OF HARD WORK
I know I’ve told this story before, but it is so germane to this moment I am compelled to retell. I read a diary written in the early days of colonisation where a man wrote an account of his observations of a local man, fishing.
The Aboriginal fella lounges at ease by the river and flicks fish out of the water using a simple noose arrangement mounted on a few sticks. The observer writes with admiration that the man tosses a steady flow of fish onto the riverbank behind him, resetting the noose with practised ease and maintaining an extremely relaxed pose throughout. In his account, the diarist writes that the fishing technique was extremely effective, graceful even, but ends the description by deploring the ‘laziness’ of the young man doing the fishing. Interesting huh?
Kevin Elmy, cover cropping specialist from Canada seems to be covering the same ground when he talks about his own pathway to regenerative farm management – he says that after a while farming started being ‘fun’ again – meaning multi-dimensional, full of choice and connection and the unexpected.
FARMER SPEAK
At the beginning of the day, AJ had determined with a rough show of hands that there were 60% farmers in the room, 40% other. There was plenty of farmer-speak for these growers. Ian filled us in on the mechanics of seed inoculation, the spreading of compost that is the major input for his crops and the quantities and costs involved in working across his huge holdings.
At the second stop, in a healthy and harvestable field of wheat, he said he used a judicious amount of chemical inputs – a pre-emergent and something else. We also learned that where chemicals were used, the grain from these paddocks was shipped to the USA to be tested to parts per billion and found to have no trace of these toxins. The microbiome was being used specifically to detox the soil and plants of industrial poisons, and the process of detoxification is also an inoculation, with the microbial life shouldering the role of the immune system for the plants and soil.
ZACH BUSH AND GRACE
Ian reckoned that they have recorded results showing they have detoxified chemically saturated and exhausted fields within an incredibly short amount of seasons. Anecdotally, there are many stories shared in the regen ag zone that support how quickly nature can return to balance. Zach Bush MD, in his renowned work on soil and human health says that when you change practises in your own body and in the body of the ecosystems that support you, nature responds with what he calls grace at the cellular level, the capacity to heal faster than you injure.
Something else from Zach Bush: ‘When a cell has unfettered access to information it always goes into a regenerative state.’ What a statement! Zach’s context is that of humans and our co-evolution over thousands of years with the vast web of living ecosystems that support the functioning of all life. This functioning is about the ability to draw on all resources, in the proper sequence they are required, for self-healing. What stops living components communicating? What hampers ‘unfettered access to information?’ The limiting factors can be social, physical, mental, emotional, environmental – how beautiful to imagine that the more networked, the more enmeshed and connected, the healthier an organism within an ecosystem will be. The Haggartys’ are on it.
Let us dwell lovingly on the superpowers of these microbes. To know that for every toxin in the world there are fiendishly adaptive and clever bacteria up for the job of being an anti-toxin, is infinitely reassuring. If we are preparing to roll up our sleeves and join in with what Tyson Yunkaporta refers to as the ‘thousand-year clean-up,’ it is great to get a sense of the power of the micro-forces that are lined up on our side.
THE YIN/YANG OF FARMING
Someone asked the question of the Haggertys’, ‘do you run the farm on all aspects together or are there defined areas of interest?’ Di gave this some thought and said that it is best when her and Ian get to cruise round the farm in the ute, because when they have this time together the whole enterprise works better.
Sounds like a good description of a great partnership – especially when you think of the size of the lands they manage, their sheep, huge machinery, JohnsonSu bioreactor, international business dealings, public educative roles, local trading, growing number of employees and ambassadorial and committee roles. They are really pushing the envelope for Regen Ag.
THE CIRCLE
I’m sure that this strong, supportive relationship combined with a lot of applied practises has let Di and Ian dream big and be brave in their experimentation. Their decision-making comes from a place of knowing and feeling right, and they place trust in their animals to decide for themselves where they chose to lamb, or if the season could sustain a late batch of lambs. Di’s shared with us how the sheep improved the genetic qualities of their own flock without interference, and the language echoed her care: the sheep being ‘content’ and well-fed because they napped during the day instead of scrounging for fodder.
She tells another story: they noticed the sheep drinking at the shallow water covering a salt area in a paddock during summer. They worked out that the green groundcovers they had established in land above the salt had caused there to be a freshwater lens on the nearby salt – a change the sheep alerted them to. The wisdom of the animals reflects the wisdom of caretakers prepared to honour the intelligence of the creatures in their charge.
REVELATION
It was a renegade landscape gardener from the west coast of North America who said: ‘If we all looked after the land outside where we lived – the world would start to heal in myriad ways’ It is a radical act to grow soil, plants, and food, by observing and working with the natural cycles in the ecosystems that surround you. Therein lies resilience. Like the healthy cells that Zach Bush talks about in his riffs on healing and the human body, the field day at Mollerin inspires us to weave ourselves more securely, become more networked, more enmeshed and connected to the ecosystems that supports us.
