Alternative agriculture must unite

Australian agriculture is in crisis. So since when has it not been in crisis? The first colonial farmers nearly starved to death and had to be fed by government handouts. Aborigines, rabbits, drought, wheat rust… always something.

But this latest crisis is different, because the foundations of our agricultural system have been eroded and weakened. This has made us vulnerable to shocks from outside – such as Climate Change.

The foundations of agriculture are the ecosystem, the natural resource base. This is made up of the soil and all the living and dead things it depends upon and that depend upon it, including water, vegetation, microbes, insects and on up the food chain. It’s not being overdramatic to say that the system that sustains the production of food and fibre in this country are breaking down.

Most people don’t know this, even those living and working on the land. But those that do, when they turn to alternative agriculture, find a bewildering array of options. As things get worse, more solutions emerge. There is Holistic Resource Management, Natural Sequence Farming, Biological Farming, Biodynamics, Keyline Farming, Pasture Cropping, Permaculture, Composting, and on it goes. None of them contradicts any other. They are broadly based on the same principle in that they seek to mimic Nature’s processes.

No one of them has risen to sweep all before it and solve all the problems of agriculture. Nor is one of them likely to become the dominant new paradigm, replacing the old system. There are three reasons for this:

1. It takes time for new ideas to become popular. Usually more than a generation. Newton’s physics dominated modern science for 300+ years before Einstein. Old ideas live on long after they’ve lost their relevance.
2. All these alternatives offer a diversity of solutions to he same problem. This diversity divides the already small market into even smaller segments.
3. The market is also diverse. Different styles of regenerative farming will appeal to different types of farmers.

The reality of the marketplace for alternative agriculture is divided in another way: by the users themselves. The tend to mix and match from the selection available, The proponents of these alternatives in many cases either ignore or disparage the others. But they can’t ignore the fact that customers (farmers) will drive the market and the result will be combinations of techniques, each as different as each farm and each farmer.

Here lies the opportunity for alternative agriculture to respond to the marketplace by presenting itself as a whole solution with many parts.

As a collective, the marketplace presence of the whole would far outperform that of the parts. In the same way, the political presence of a body representing the growing ranks of ‘natural’ farmers would tell a different story about agriculture to the government and the community, a story that challenges the stereotype of the farmer as environmental vandal. Instead of a random series of individual events to promote each separate discipline, a jointly-funded ‘trade show’ that visits every farming district and uses effective promotion would give each of the alternatives more exposure to the market than any other option.