Saturday, July 15, 2006

Reasons to be cheerful 1 - 2 - 3


I speak to the first session of the Direct and Digital Creative School each year, a rambling dissertation about life as a creative communications professional. I received this email from one of the class the next day. The questions it posed deserve blogging:

Hi Michael,
I just wanted to thank you last night for talking to us/me, I found it really interesting and inspiring. Honestly.
It was some good advice and for me it was some good solid ground to know that you can pursue the career without loosing your soul and spirit - I think that you may have alleviated me of the only doubt that I think that I held (that I would have to be a mindless and ruthless show pony and suck-up).
From one Aries (dreamer) to another ... I wanted to have a chat with you last night about some crazy ideas that I have had for years ... in short (you will probably think that I am stupid now but you seem like a good person to talk to about this) ... For ages I have thought that the middle of Australia is a wasteland with not much happening ... is this true ? Is the soil just sand with nothing happening beneath the surface ?
Years ago I had an idea that the best thing that Australia could do (apart from adopting different farming techniques, especially by getting rid of the hooved animals that we have brought here as they destroy our soil and there are no native animals with hooves ... coincidently I am of the generation that saw aerial photographs of the Eastern Seaboard which showed the vegetation band running down the entire length when I was about 8 or so and I distinctly remember being about 15 and seeing more recent aerial photos that showed a HUGE decrease in vegetation !!! ... I digress, but I am just saying that I see the problems and I know that its the high yield crop rotation stuff that is doing it along with hooved animals and a transposition of European farming onto our country and maybe a general lack of understanding for our land and environment) .... but the idea that I had ages ago wasn't so much to do with this ... the idea that I had was that a channel should be dug from the base of Australia right up to the centre to fill up our inland sea ... with time (evaporation and precipitation along with life (and death/decomposition)) would this promote environmental growth and eventually would soil replace the sand ??
Quite an abstract email I know, but as I say ... you seem to be a good person to ask. Sorry if I ramble.
Thanks,
Chris

MY REPLY:

Chris,
There are many misconceptions about Australia’s soils and many misguided theories held by many people. There is a superstition that if we returned the landscape back to the way it was before 1770, it would be OK. But read the Future Eaters by Tim Flannery. There was a time before the Aboriginal people arrived when the fossil record tells us the vegetation was very different to what it was when Captain Cook and botanist Joseph Banks arrived. The Aborigines brought with them ‘firestick farming’, controlled burning to make green shoots appear in grassland to attract kangaroos for hunting. Fire was also used to hunt small marsupials. This constant burning led to the extinction of plant and tree species that couldn’t handle the heat, which also led to the extinction of a collection of plant eating animals. As well, like the Maoris in NZ, the Aborigines hunted the giant (megafauna) roos, wombats, emus, etc. to extinction. Firestick farming led to the dominance of acacias and gum trees which need periodic burning to flourish. They used fire to keep gum trees from choking their grassy woodlands that they used for grazing their roos. White man also changed the land management regime and caused extinctions and changes in plant species.
Which “original condition of Nature” should we return to? Pre 1770? Or Pre 40,000 years ago? Or should we ‘listen’ to mother nature and seek to work with her? Natural Agriculture seeks to mimic mother nature. But it’s still agriculture.
Some people believe we can do without agriculture. Read Jared Diamond’s book Collapse. Societies that distanced themselves from their soils tend to disintegrate.
Your inland sea idea was a good one half a million years ago.
It’s hard not to feel distressed about the environment. But you need to be sure you know enough about it so that you are being stressed about real things and not fantasms. For instance, I believe droughts are the land’s way of having a holiday every 7 or so years. The rest of us get a break. Why shouldn’t the land? Australia was deep in a drought cycle when white man arrived. So we didn’t cause them.
Ignorance led to 200 years of unsympathetic land management. But now there is a new generation of farmers who feel like they are stewards of the soil. They read Wendell Berry and Aldo Leopold and Allan Savory. It’s the dawn of a new age of humanity’s relationship with earth. There are reasons to be cheerful!!

Thanks for your email.

Michael

Thursday, July 13, 2006

Boys will be boys

These are our boys who have been keeping our ewes company in recent days and we have - we hope - 1000 babies due in September. These magnificent men in their woolly jackets are our genetic "lever" which we use to increase the body frame size or the fineness of t he wool (micron level). We don't change them all at once. We cull a third of them every year or two.
Cruel really.

Wednesday, July 12, 2006

Early signs that we were on the right track


This photo comes from our first attempt at rotational grazing - in the late 90s at "The Springs", our first 1000 acre block. All the farmers around us thought we were mad combining our mobs, and we did make a lot of mistakes. But we started to see results, even with only 6 paddocks (one of them 600 acres). The crappy side is our neighbour's, naturally.

Bad luck comes in threes! Off to the pub!




[THE COW BELL ON THE BAR TO SUMMONS HELP WHEN YOU'RE DYING OF THIRST]

A couple of weeks ago we lost an important person from our Carbon Coalition team in an incident that made me so depressed I nearly threw in the towel*. Then we found out we were unsuccessful with the CMA Farming Systems 'talent quest' and couldn't understand where we were deficient (so you imagine everything you did was wrong). And then we lost Daniel's dog Jackson under the wheels of the ute.We emerged from 2 days of mourning and took ourselves off to town for a long lunch and home via the pub. Guess who we found there?[LOUISA & STEVE MINNETT, OUR GUN SHEARER]
Our shearing team, just the men we wanted to see. "We haven 't received our invitations to shear at your place," said Col Doherty. "They're in the mail," said Louisa. "Like the cheques." We have the best time with these guys in August. While other 'squatters' begrudge them a few beers at 'cut out' (end of shearing), we have beeers every night after a day's shearing - sitting around a fire, yarning. Steve Minnett is our gun shearer,
[LEN COONEY AND COL DOHERTY, OUR MENTORS] Col works like a Doherty, and Len Cooney is a fantastic roustabout/presser/general expert. Daniel 'runs' the shed. These guys recognised that we were enthusiastic amarteurs and undertook to educate us in the fine art of farming, especially shearing management, etc. We have become close friends.
]




[THE PUBLICANS HAROLD & BETTY, ALWAYS GOOD COMPANY]






Dan Gorrie is our next door neightbour. He and his brother and mother have around 2000 acres, a lot of it arable (cropping) but much of it rough country, with quartz outcrops and thin topsoil. His Dad, Viv, who died not so long ago, ran his sheep hard and not too much grass got a full set of rootmass, so their carbon lebvels will be delicously low. I made an offer to buy that day. Dan said "No Deal"....

[OUR NEIGHBOUR DAN GORRIE, MAKING A POINT]












[I WON 10 BUX ON THE POKIES]








[THESE THINGS ARE LIKE A CANCER IN COUNTRY PUBS]











*An old saying I live by: If you want to know how badly you'll be missed if you leave a situation, put your arm into a bucket of water. Then pull it out. The hole you leave is the gap your leaving will create. (Someone or something will always fill the void. This image keeps me from taking myself too seriously (mostly).

We start feeding two months later, thanks to controlled grazing


Jesus said: "Feed my lambs, feed my sheep" - but he didn't say "Right away." We saved 2 months worth of hand feeding by conserving pasture and giving it ma chance to grow thanks to time controlled grazing. Louisa has done an amazing job with only 20-odd paddocks in the rotation. Now we have 50 odd thanks to the CMA and Daniel and the fencing contractors (I''ll blog our electirc fence system soon.) Here is Louisa loading hay for feeding the lambs.

Cold! Colder! Coldest!




Armidale was reported to have had minus 11°C the other night. I lived in Armidale 10 years and thought it was cold. But Uamby taught me what cold means. I found the poor chook pecking at the water bucket trying to get a drink through the ice yesterday. We have had monster fogs that hang around til mid morning, and super frosts (too cold to go out and photograph). But no rain - aprt from a squirt last week and a squirt the week before. Funny thing - we have had only half the rainfall we usually get in the first 6 months of the year, and no electrical storms, where they used to come every few weeks. The weather pattern's gone mad. Global Warming? No. It couldn't be...