S2 Ep 2 Dandaragan Moments

In the middle of February, I had two wonderful days in Dandaragan, WA talking about Regenerative Agriculture with the Soil Farming Restoration crew and attendant farmers and agricultural workers. Dr Christine Jones worked her magic on Day1 with an in-depth look at the soil microbiome. On Day2, farmers and supporters met to nut out ways to get the best from their soils in the face of new understanding about the magic of soil biology and a whole systems approach to farming.

I had been gifted 15 minutes to wrap a fascinating two-days of regenerative talk at Dandaragan, a small farming community north-east of Perth. The occasion was Healthy Farming Pathways, a day long presentation by soil scientist Dr Christine Jones and a following day expo for farmers and supporters to discuss a way forward in Regenerative farming practises.

Now, a few weeks later, I get to expand on my 15 minutes…

My colleague, Kathryn and I were billeted at the Fox’s farm just out of Dandaragan. This farm is a family business run on 7000 acres, and very close to being certifiably regenerative in the way they produce their crops of potatoes and sheep. This is a gorgeous property with healthy natural springs and numerous stands of blackbutt, the local eucalypt. I gathered after a few days chatting to farmers that this property is a particularly well-favoured spot, a local gem - many locals face tougher conditions dealing with black clay, gutless white sand and outbursts of rock in their paddocks.

THE LANGUAGE OF REGEN

On the expo day – the one set up by Soil Restoration Farming to help growers orient themselves in the world of microbially rich soils we started with brief introductions from everyone in the room. I was struck by the words of a young local farmer, James, who shared with the collective his awe at the beauty of the natural world that he witnesses daily on his property.

James’ words cut to a deeper, less expressed reality in Agricultural circles. Beyond the language of ‘restoring ecosystem function’ and ‘increasing soil biodiversity’ lies a rich and simple thought:  to heal the land is to heal ourselves.

RE-SENSITIZATION

Regenerative Agriculture has been part of a long process of re-sensitization for myself.

I was bought up in a ‘dead’ world. A world where if you couldn’t stub your toe on it, it either didn’t exist or didn’t matter, and a world where everything was known. Somehow I understood that if I wanted to know anything, I needed to find an expert to advise me.

Religion might have helped me develop a stronger consciousness to the deep mysteries of life – but I was born into a type of watered down, cultural Anglicanism that was all form and no substance – as a child and teenager, attuned to hypocrisy, it was easy to dismiss.

INVISIBLE

Strangely, I was also told that everything in life that is really important is invisible. So I took in with my rusks the entirely opposite view, that things of the spirit were superior to any toe-stubbing matter – so love, breath, and I would now have to add - the microbiome - were given elevated status.

The idea seemed to be that ‘matter’ was not alive unless animated by a mysterious energy called ‘spirit’. Charles Eisenstein describes this divided understanding in relationship to the human body – we are ‘meat robots’ with added ‘spirit’ in this view .Now I choose to believe that everything is alive. With this belief, not only is the world transformed into a more precious and curious place of intricate relationships – but I become a living, breathing entity, indistinguishable from spirt, connected to everything that exists by life that pulses from every cell in my body.  

Like the farmers who are heading down a regenerative path, I am taking back this power to be a non-divided soul where reality is a relationship rather than an objective thing.

 DECOLONISATION

During this time in Dandaragan, John Thompson (https://thenaturecode.com/the-story/) reminded me in a conversation that we are all still caught up in a process of decolonisation.

When people who look like me – ie pale-skinned Caucasian types - arrived on West Australian shores a few hundred years ago – the Euro-fix was in. Now I am one of many in a process of revelation, throwing away filter after filter, learning along the way that Indigenous knowledge systems have as much to teach us as Regenerative farming systems. Where they connect is through the idea of holism: whole-of-landscape thinking. Systems where everything-is-included, where nothing can be left out.

THE MILLET

On the afternoon that we arrived, our farm host took Kathryn and I on a tour. We saw the massive pivots that allowed four huge circles of land to grow potatoes. Once the potatoes have been harvested, the Foxes plant millet and then a clover to help restore the soil. Kathryn and I were enchanted by the scale and abundance of the millet plants and the rainforest feel of the crop – like standing in a natural air conditioning unit, you could feel the aliveness and taste the sweetness of the crop.

By chance on the drive to Dandaragan from Perth I had been listening to a presentation by Dr Vandana Shiva. She is an Indian physicist and activist whose life’s work has been about restoring sovereignty to small-acre farmers of India and beyond. A large part of her fight is against what she calls the ‘patenting of nature’ – Big Ags efforts to control agricultural production through the creation of GM seeds. Vandana mentioned the humble millet as a grain that should be a major human food.

 Looking at Mick’s crop, I got it. The grain load per plant is huge – much bigger than wheat or oats or other common annuals. Millet is gluten free, an important factor in a country where an overload of gluten seems to have driven many of us into a sensitivity to wheat – and, as a crop for soil and food for humans, millet has wonderful nutritional advantages.

Interestingly, it seems that many potato farmers do not use crops like millet to revitalise soil. After harvest, it is standard for potato growers to inject the soil with methane gas as a way to sterilise against pests. As methane is deadly to humans and animals, the treated plot is left alone for the few days it takes the gas to be rendered harmless…. How can this be a sensible farming strategy, especially in the face of Christine Jone’s soil health message? Dr Jone’s suggests that by choosing to plant from at least 5 different functional plant species, you increase the potential for microbial diversity through the increase in root exudates. More life, more immunity and resilience in the soil and plants…..

Kathryn and I hopped around like excited field mice in Mick’s millet crop shooting questions at him: why only millet and clover? How about if you tried planting?….blah blah blah. A lovely man, he took our suggestions gracefully, not for a minute making us feel like urban amateurs….

Turns out he doesn’t harvest the seed but buys his millet from the Eastern states – it seems there is a bit of a problem with seed species biodiversity for farmers in WA. As cover-cropping gains traction in this state, growing for seed is surely going to become a growth industry.

Kathryn and I suggested we collect the millet seed for him – COVID has shown us that supply lines can easily be disrupted. Mick laughed saying he needed 90 kgs of the stuff. But agreed that if he added a trove of different species to make up the weight, we could theoretically, harvest a workable amount by hand.  In the end we persuaded Mick to come to Christine Jone’s presentation. He went and and said he enjoyed it – lots of food-for-thought – so you never know. Watch this pivot?

GOOD VS EVIL

Transitioning to regenerative farming processes, brings on a big change of heart. And maybe it is important to remember that all change can trigger grief and fear – there is always something to let go of when we step into a new way of thinking and being.

 What comes up for supporters of Regen Ag is always how best to support this paradigm shift? How do we meet each other where we are at, and find new stories to tell that help make sense of the new way of being that beckons?

 For starters, we need better stories to drive our new collaborative efforts. And that means recognising the stories that currently drive us, and may no longer serve our best interests.

 A long time ago I heard the writer, George R.R. Martin, give a talk. He wrote a series of novels that became a hit TV show Game of Thrones. In this talk, he compares his work to Lord of the Rings. You have probably either read Tolkien’s novels or watched the film versions, so you know that a young man/hobbit sets out from home on a quest, facing ugly trolls, finding allies, being tricked and tested in all manner of ways. By the end of the story, the evil guys are thwarted, the good wizard wins and a golden peace reigns over the whole kingdom….yeah well.

I saw enough of Game of Thrones to understand that this Good vs Evil scenario comes a bit of a cropper. Think for example of the beautiful dragon heiress who overcomes terrible adversity, finds her power as a queen and frees a nation of slaves – only to go on to become an even worse tyrant than the ones she was replacing….Martin’s suggestion is that the ‘good’ queen morphing into a monster is probably a more relevant story for our times than the Tolkien’s good vs evil. 

This struck me as true on so many levels. Especially on a systems level,  where to knock off the bad person at the top is simply to invite another baddie to replace them.The story now, is about all of us facing both the good wizard and the ugly troll as they manifest in our own behaviour. No virtue can be ours alone, no bad behaviour can be ours alone, and we can all stop pointing the finger of blame. When we create a space where we embrace our own ‘shadow selves’ and stop demonising the ‘other’ – then we are embracing a truly holistic system. Nothing is left out.

Rachelle and Justin Armstrong, conveners of this meet-up and founders of Soil Restoration Farming have a phrase: ‘everyone is free to be their own kind of different’. This is the space we need to nurture, where everyone can flourish, and all have something to offer in an expanded understanding of farming.

RETHINKING THE HERO’S JOURNEY

And even the trajectory of the story encompassed in Tolkien’s ‘hero’s journey’ is getting a bit long in the tooth. ‘Young man sets out to find adventure and conquer new worlds’. We need these young men, no argument there. Their energy and power is a crucial part of the mix. Sure, let’s send our hero off on adventures that will allow them to test their abilities in the world. But let’s be there to welcome them home; where they can be with a bunch of people who provide context for their ideas and allow them to integrate the inevitable suffering and pleasure they experienced in terms of the good of the whole community.

This new world need a broader range of experience and vision than can be represented by a young man’s journey alone. We also need people, young and old, with a bit of ‘get up and stay’: those willing to stick their spades in the soil and go deep into the barely comprehended worlds represented by seeds, plants and the microbiome.

Do we need more Elon Musk’s? I know he is not that young, but his story fits the hero’s journey very nicely. Someone blasting off on their own trajectory to find more planets with exploitable resources in a spaceship that I suspect is loaded with freezers full of ‘impossible’ burgers… Elon’s is a well-traversed story of technological innovation, shit loads of money and individual genius that I am pretty sure is not the one that will get us out of the ecological and social mess that we have created. 

Gadgets, widgets, spaceships and funky new software programs is where Big Capital still looks for profit – and I mean profit in the narrowest sense of financial gain and ego fulfilment. But the real work that needs doing is being nurtured in forums exactly like Healthy Farming Pathways – and there is a very diverse range of folk making this happen. Older women, for example, are very well represented. These two days were the result of a lot of small groups working together, sharing ideas and resources so a crowd of regeneratives are given a chance to nut out ways they can transition their souls and soils to fertility, abundance and resilience.

 Here I feel I should mention that Dandaragan soils host an extraordinarily large earthworm that grow up to 6 inches long. I didn’t get to see one unfortunately – they are easy to find in the cooler months and are a regular part of the potato harvest. Apparently all the normal-sized earthworms we are used to seeing are descended from European stock - these are indigenous worms, our worms, and need to be celebrated and protected for their uniqueness and what they bring to the particular ecosystems of the area.

 Earthworms aside, these days represented sanity to me. It has been a celebration of work that is humble, grounded, and local - a different kind of hero’s journey is being enacted in our rural communities.

Community rocks! Circa 1970

IMAGE AT THE BEGINNING: Dr Christine Jones, Ellen from EarthWhile and participants look at perennial grasses in Murray Gray’s paddock out of Dandaragan