CLick go the shears, boys!

DAN SHEARING: A PROFESSIONAL JOB FOR A BEGINNER

Shearing this year was an explosive two and one half weeks, culminating in one marriage suffering extreme pressure and another falling apart completely. (I won't tell you whose marriage fell apart - it was someone who we have come to think of as family. But the marriage under pressure was mine.) Daniel has all sorts of issues with his employer (his mother) and doesn't hold back in telling her about them. I am proud of both of them, seeing them operate a shed. Daniel shore his largest number of sheep in a single run - 54. Altogether we shore 2500 sheep, 55 bales, average 4.5kg per adult sheep. Remember, we had not set foot on a farm (with serious intent) until 7 years ago.
THROWING THE FLEECE: THERE'S A KNACK TO IT
My wife and son have done an amazing job learning this business. We had the expert support of our regular shearers Col Doherty and Steve Minnett and as roustabout Len Cooney. Louisa's brother Breck baled up for a week, and his lovely girlfriend Robey was 'shearers' cook' (fantastic food). My friend and client Kevin James and the quite incredible Liesel, his wife, and two beautiful daughters visited. And my daughter Rachael and grandson Xavier were here for a week as well. And my best man's wife arrived to stay overnight, bringing the news that their marriage was collapsing. (Something in the stars?) All the while, the shearers kept clicking those shears. It was a glorious carnival of people, the place was buzzing. The most exciting time of the year. The crucible of human emotion.LOUISA SKIRTING THE FLEECE: TRIMMING OFF THE POOR QUALITY WOOL

The Manifesto of the Natural Farmer

Here's a stunner: "There is little scientific evidence to suggest that organic matter has any unique properties that cannot be done without." This is how Charman and Roper open their chapter of Soil Organic Matter in my new text book SOILS by Charman and Murphy. This statement perfectly encapsulates the "Soil as Mere Medium" ideology. It holds to the belief that soil provides nothing apart from the ability to receive chemicals, hold and release them to plants or pests. The giant petrochemical and fertiliser companies and the giant farm equipment companies won the ideological war in the 1930s and the science naturally favoured Scientific Farming (vs Natural Farming). Their legacy: depleted soils, poisoned waterways and greenhouse skies.
Far from being objective, scientific enquiry is directed by a set of beliefs about the nature of matter that determine the outcomes of enquiry, according to scientist and philosopher Thomas Kuhn in his book 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions'. These are called Paradigms. Students are taught them; academics write papers whose findings support them because their peers exercise a form of group-think by refusing to approve for publication work that is not conventional, ie. that does not perpetrate the Paradigm. If you don't believe me, look at the way mankind's knowledge of the nature of matter has evolved from Aristotelian "solid objects" to Newtonian "particles" and atoms, to Einstein and quantum mechanical packets of light energy that sometimes act like waves and sometimes act like particles... As each Paradigm fell, some people lost position, preferment, and power. Other people gained these things. This is why the battle is political, not scientific.
The existence of a ruling paradigm which overturned a previous paradigm tells us one important thing: there's another paradigm a'coming! And the 'revolution' which must take place to overturn the current paradigm started long ago. The new paradigm is based on the theory that there lies hidden away from dominant paradigm scientists an entire universe of natural systems and forces that can be used to support the production of agricultural goods. This universe includes natural processes, networks and interactions, transmissions of energy in various forms, and patterns of potential that can operate only when acknowledged and sought. Much of it is dismissed as quackery, and much of it might be. But one fact stands like a beacon in the darkness: there is a new paradigm coming. Question: Is it better to be searching for the new vision than defending the old?
The reason why now is the right time for serious consideration of many ancient and not so ancient natural farming practices is because the natural resource base of the nation and the world is in crisis. Australia has lost 50% of its topsoil in 200 years and 50% of its soil organic matter in 20 years of scientific farming. The economics of agriculture is also in crisis. The falling line charting prices is meeting the rising line charting input costs. The scientific farming model is entering a period of challenge. Soil as mere medium is no longer Gospel. The popularity of controlled grazing, minimum tillage, pasture cropping, biological farming and Natural Sequence Farming, plus the growing demand for organic products, coincides with the greatest environmental challenge since the last Ice Age.
The time could be coming for those who believe a new paradigm is inevitable to form a self-supporting community, similar to the one that supporters of the old paradigm have formed. Not an association or a federation, but a Movement - and Action movement that has a limited number of clearly defined goals that, once achieved, will see the Movement shut down. (Too many organisaitons past their use-by date refuse to fall on their swords.) Membership of the Natural Farmers' Movement could be open to all landholders who use techniques that mimic Nature or which seek to harmonise with Nature's processes.
There's strength and confidence in numbers. Instead of feeling like a misfit, members of such a large body will feel proud.

Beware the Community Structure of Science

"A paradigm is what the members of a scientific community share, and, conversely, a scientific community consists of men* who share a paradigm," according to scientist and philosopher Thomas Kuhn in his book 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions'.

"A scientific community consists of the practitioners of a scientific speciality. To an extent unparalleled in most other fields, they have undergone similar educations and professional initiations; in the process they have absorbed the same technical literature and drawn many of the same lessons from it... The members of a scientific community see themselves and are seen by others as the men* uniquely responsible for the pursuit of a set of shared goals, including the training of their successors. Within such groups communication is relatively full and professional judgements relatively unanimous."

"The study of paradigms... is what mainly prepares the student for membership in the particular scientific community with which he will later practice. Because he there joins men* who learned the bases of their field from the same concrete models, his subsequent practice will seldom evoke overt disagreement over fundamentals. Men* whose research is based on shared paradigms are committed to the same rules and standards for scientific practice. That commitment and the apparent consensus it produces are the prerequisites for normal science, ie. for the genesis and continuation of a particular research tradition."

The shared values and norms of the scientific community form a barrier to out-of-paradigm phenomena and concepts. Kuhn says normal science aims to 'force nature into the preformed and relatively inflexible box that the paradigm supplies. No part of the aim of normal science is to call forth new sorts of phenomena; indeed those that will not fit the box are often not seen at all.'

All this suggests that Carbon Farming will meet staunch resistance from the scientific establishment because it is out-of-paradigm. In the face of this resistance we should be 'unreasonable'. In the words of George Bernard Shaw,
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

*Kuhn's paradigm of the gender structure of science is a reflection of the date at which he was writing.

A student of the soil

I have decided to become a student of soil. I bought a thick text book – SOILS: Their Properties & Management. It has 448 pages, and articles by people I know, like John Lawrie (“Truck”) and Andrew Wooldridge (“Woolly”) and people I’d like to know, like Brian Murphy. It tells me that drainage and the amount of time soil is saturated is important. Well-drained soilsjhave red tp reddish brown colours. Poorly drained soils (that remain wet for weeks or all winter) have dull yellow and grey colours. Very poorly drained soils are wet most of the time and are usually very pale grey, bluish or olive green (“gley” colours). In these cases iron has been leached from the soil. From what I have seen, we have grey coloured soils that remain wet for weeks. From this photo – taken in an erosion site down by the river, in Cemetery Paddock, you can see the colours tend to grey-ish.
We hope to improve the drainage of our soils by encouraging the growth of deep-rooted perennial pasture grasses which help to grown soil organic matter and CARBON.

A sign of tough times

Not everyone struck it rich during the Gold Rushes in Australia. In fact, the majority found little or no gold, arriving too late as each new field opened up. Men carried their 'swags' (or bedding rolled up like a fat cigar) along the dusty roads, usually flat broke and looking for a handout. After the last gold rushes in the 1860s and 1870s, we drifted into the long drought of the 1880s and a slump in wool prices, followed by a damaging shearers' strike (the woolgrowers tried to cut their rates) which led to the formation of the Australian Labor Party. (We can thank woolgrowers for the ALP.) By the early 1890s the colonies were in the grip of a long depression, and 40 years later came the Great Depression of the 1930s. A lot of people went 'on the wallaby track' (hit the road in search of work or a handout). Australia has long had a tradition os the 'swagman', an itinerant worker/drifter who lived rough and entered the mythology of the nation in the 1890s when bush poet Banjo Paterson wrote "Walzing Matilda" (now the country's unofficial anthem).These people of the road had their own language and signs to indicate to each other what conditions were like at the next farm house. They would scratch symbols in the dust of the road or lay twigs out on the ground. A number of these symbols have been reproduced in the pavements in the streets of historic Gulgong, our nearest township. This idea was Chester Nealie's; he's a local potter, who conducted research at Sydney University. It's a great way to keep the past alive. A nation that forgets its past has no future, I say. (I studied Australian history at the University of New England in Armidale and taught it at Charles Sturt University in Bathurst.)
TWO DOTS OR SMALL CIRCLES meant "Tell a pathetic story and you'll get a handout."
JAGGED LINES meant "Angry dogs"
TRIDENT meant "You have to work before you eat"
THREE DOTS OR SMALL CIRCLES MEANT "Money usually given here."

"On The Gulgong"

Our nearest town is called Gulgong, an old gold rush town that in the 1860s held hundreds of thousands of 'diggers'. The shopping centre still has the main street winding through town, a legacy of the fact that gold rush towns were built before government surveyors could get to them and lay out the city centre in military base squares. (Look at the street maps of Bathurst and Tamworth. They were pegged out by military men and have the geometry of an army camp - all squares and right angles.) Many of the original buildings still stand, which gives Gulgong a the feel of a set for a movie. At its height, the Gulgong rush was the biggest in Australia and every language on earth could be heard on the street corners. It had its own Opera House - named after the Prince of Wales. Many men ran away from their jobs in Sydney and Melbourne to make their fortune "on the Gulgong." This was the last of the gold rushes for the small operator. When the huge wave of humanity swept on to the next "strike", what was left was the township of Gulgong, today home to 2000 souls.