18 The O'Leary Factor

Long-term agricultural investment has been growing under great new management at Macquarie Bank’s Agricultural division! Yay!….but Amanda’s excitement barely made it to the end of the day after a conversation with a cluey mate and a bit of a think. She had to wise up to what this investment was really all about, plus haul in Canadian growers and Induced Cultural Blindness Theory (just kidding) to make her point. Here’s what she found.

‘If you look after the soil it will look after you’ Liz O’Leary, Macquarie Bank

 I used to take that statement as a heartfelt expression of a primary producer who has dived into the fascinating world where farmers become harvesters of sunlight and champions of soil micro-biome.

 But that was last week when I was young and naïve.

I am quickly wising up to what is really happening out there as Conventional Agribusiness moves with agility into a space where farmers are starting to take matters into their own hands - and threatening the profits of the major sellers of industrial machinery and farm chemicals.

MACQUARIE BANK INVESTS IN AGRICULTURE

I saw the ‘looking after the soil’ quote in the November edition of the Ag Journal, a publication that has started to turn up as a monthly supplement in the Weekend Australian. This one has Macquarie Bank’s Liz O’Leary on the front cover and I loved the story about her as told by journalist Sue Neales.

Since becoming the chief of Macquarie’s Agricultural division in 2014 she has worked wonders in terms of (I quote) ‘streamlining operations and giving investors much greater line of sight and confidence in the transparency of costs.’ This has involved dividing the Ag investment business into three parts: Viridas Ag/ Paraway Pastoral and Lawsons which covers grain cropping.

Among other changes instituted, Liz had moved staff out of Sydney and placed them in rural centres. And is gradually attracting a lot more investment from savvy folk across the globe who are becoming aware that Ag has to be a long-term investment. This woman is the ant’s pants.

On closer reading however,  I noticed this, quoting direct from the article  ‘… the Australian Government’s Clean Energy Finance Corporation - or ‘green bank’ – has endorsed the direction taken by Viridas Ag with a $100 million equity investment made in 2018 based on its commitment to transformational technology and to provide a best practice reduced-carbon footprint for the broader cropping industry. ‘ 

MACQUARIE BANK GETS IT HORRIBLY WRONG

Hang on! ‘Transformational technology?’  It seems that about 70% of the returns Liz is now getting for investors comes simply from the rising value of farmland – the other 30% comes from lowering the carbon footprint, heading towards the goal of carbon neutral farming. Better emission controls and energy savings with machinery; precision targeting of pesticides, insecticides and fertilisers, so damage to the environment is reduced and costs of chemicals are kept low. Basically reducing operational costs, so inputs don’t outweigh harvest gains.

MORE OF THE SAME OLD

By the end of the second reading of this article my enthusiasm had waned…aided by a chat about the subject with a carbon-savvy friend.

 This is more of the same. This is chemical farming – smarter, cleaner, more focused – but chemical farming none the less.  And as usual it is attracting all the big bucks.

In the human health zone, I would equate this with ‘new look’ chemotherapy treatments. Instead of flooding the whole body with poisons, the health professionals are now creating a more targeted regime of inputs: thereby saving money and maintaining a better illusion of health by reducing some of the chemo-induced sickness.

And let me stretch this analogy between soil and human health further. Heading towards carbon neutral Agriculture is of course a sane and wise thing to do. But I would suggest that aiming at ‘carbon neutral’ rather than fixing as much organic matter/carbon in the soil as is possible is like aiming at ‘not being sick’, rather than going for jumping-out-of-one’s-skin, abundant health.

CO-OPTION

The danger is clear. As regenerative Agriculture makes its slow progress, spreading out in ripples from the kitchen tables of the farmers trying to wrest their farming operations out of the hands of merchants and banks – Conventional farming is doing a bit of shape shifting.

While I was lulled by Liz O’Leary’s natural, unforced smile, obvious connection to the land and financial smarts, let’s be clear that what she is formulating is at heart a technologically-led recovery – the place where the money always wants to go.

Because Big Money doesn’t want to sit at a kitchen table – it wants to sit in a well-appointed board room with a view of the harbour and a painting by William Robinson on the wall.

 SO What is this Technological Solutions Approach missing about the latest science, hot off the fields, and the great production potential suggested by Regen Ag enthusiasts?

Well, from my perspective, they are missing the point.

Here is what I think is happening. All indications are that big business, including agribusiness, are the acknowledged big polluters and have to lower emissions to have some kind of integrity or power to trade in the low carbon consciousness of the present and future world to come. Fair enough.

LOWERING EMISSIONS vs CAPTURING CARBON IN THE SOIL

But why is lowering emissions rather than a sequestration approach which is carbon farming, on the cards as the major target for all farms? Carbon farming remember, is not about changing what your farm produces, it is about changing land management techniques that support holding and building more organic matter in the soil.

Part of the problem is that if you model soil carbon sequestration on the current business-as-usual growing schedules, the numbers simply don’t add up. So you can have panel loads of soil experts telling you that on their modelling it WA farmers would only be able to sequester between 20-100 million tonnes of carbon in the soil over 20 years.

These figures are not going to make much difference to the environment in terms of tackling Greenhouse Gas emissions and would certainly not be lucrative enough to bring investment dollars to the table. This dismal-outcome modelling is based on data generated from the current industrial farming system, so yes, in this system, without adopting new practices, carbon sequestration would be a painfully slow and unprofitable way to go.

But look at the picture from another angle. In 2018, The Australian Government brought into being the “Measured Soil Carbon Sequestration Methodology” – this is a standardised mechanism by which carbon can be measured and used to earn Government backed Australian Carbon Credits Units (ACCUs).  Using this methodology and referencing data that is coming out of the kitchen table discussions I mentioned earlier we get a different picture emerging.

Granted, there are currently problems with the methodology in terms of the return to the farmer – but there is also significant pressure from political quarters and players in the energy market pushing hard for Government action to resolve these problems and open the door for investment into the Carbon Economy.

Louise Edmonds, Carbon Farming project manager and a major player in the WA agricultural scene, estimates that based on 15 million hectares of the wheatbelt in WA, using fairly conservative figures of measured carbon at the rate of two tonnes per hectare per year, farmers have the capacity to sequester 110 million tonnes of carbon every year. (a bit different from those modelling between 20-100 million over 20 years)

 At the moment carbon is trading at $16 a tonne. If you do the sums, this represents both a huge business opportunity for farmers and a huge win for the environment. Think of all those gas fields coming on line in the Kimberley – and the fact that they are legally obliged to buy their big pollution offsets within Australia as stipulated by the Government Environmental Protection Agency. Again, this is a huge opportunity for farmers to get motivated to drawdown carbon from the atmosphere and fix it in their soils.

ACTUALLY STOP THE PRESS. I’m having to adjust this paragraph in the light of this morning’s news. A small headline in the West Australian paper today. ‘WA’s Environmental Watchdog, the EPA has scrapped controversial guidelines that would have required major resources projects to offset their greenhouse gas emissions.‘ Sigh. The Dance of the Political Carbon: one step forward/slide to the right/one step back.

 Shouldn’t official science be engaging with the figures being presented by the soil carbon sequestration experts – data that is both science-based and replicable if anyone cared to investigate? Instead they are offering farmers a potential ‘price signal benefit’ (air quotes from Liz) for being more carbon neutral, a poor sop against Louise’s projected earnings.

 Why isn’t anyone engaging with these figures? Well that is a naïve question, let’s call it rhetorical. It is hard to see past the ‘It’ll-never-work’ and the generally poo-poohing from official science, and the carbon market is bogged down at the political level. But, on the bright side… Scott Morrison has just announced a quick release of a lot of money over a 5 year spend in response to the Eastern States horror years of drought and fire. There are new ideas being formulated into grant shape as we speak – and many will be coming from the ‘Regenerative’ end of the spectrum.  If some of these projects get the money we could see some positive action towards healing of land in the regions.

Turn the page in this same AgJournal and we have Louisa Kiely, director of private company Carbon Farmers of Australia, backing up Louise Edmond’s thinking with words to the effect that:  ‘I believe earning a carbon credit (ie getting cash payments for carbon stored while growing food or fibre) is better for farmers and farming and the climate in general, rather than striving for carbon neutrality. This is because it provides an income at a transparent price – which in my mind is far better than just seeking an uncertain price premium for your product.’

I am going to voice the opinion that the banks and the associated agribusinesses who deal in machinery and chemical farm inputs don’t want the farmers to have that much control over their own land and growing processes. If (BigChem/Big Machinery etc) can’t keep selling farmers updated and refined technology that is going to keep them in thrall to debt, then investors are going to lose profit, big time. Put simply, they get the big bucks when the farmers are persuaded that they need more bags of inputs and better machines to achieve their farm goals.

WHAT THE HELL IS BEING MEASURED HERE ANYWAY?

Australia’s carbon market has been evolving alongside our climate policy and I can now boast (again) that we have one of the most advanced carbon markets in the world, with nationally legislated methodologies in place that standardise the measuring of carbon, both as it is emitted and as it is sequestered. We have the Clean Energy Regulator presiding over the Emissions Reduction Fund and other expanded mechanisms – topping it all off are the officially formulated Australian Carbon Credit Units that can be traded via the Government or on the open market.

 Australia’s forward thinking becomes very real when I am chatting with Kevin Elmy, a farmer and cover-cropping expert from Yorkton, Saskatchewan in Canada. Turns out he doesn’t know too much about the carbon market – mainly because it is not nearly as developed in Canada as it is in Australia.

 So part of his interest in getting involved with Carbon Farming projects in Australia is his desire to support farmers to lift their soil carbon content from 1% into the 5% and up zone, thereby lifting these farmers’ capacity to farm with better margins.

Kevin’s mind is refreshingly unclouded by the ‘harsh, dead land’ culture we all took in with our rusks; he sees the environmental challenges offered by the WA Wheatbelt as totally doable. Problems to be solved.  Once farmers can up the Organic Matter in their paddocks and start seeing gains in productivity and profitability he is interested in seeing what a workable Carbon Market can bring to the table in terms of an associated income stream for the farmer.

OLD SCIENCE

But how to convince the Old Science – this is what I seem to be calling the ‘It’ll never work’ science when it comes to creating viable financial gain from soil carbon sequestration – how do we get them to start valuing and measuring what the regenerative farmers want valued and measured? It is a big ask, because it requires that famous paradigm shift, an ability to see things from another perspective.

Let’s look at the term ‘yield’. Kevin doesn’t set too much store by ‘yield’. ..but I’ll use it as a useful concept to highlight the potential intersect between conventional and regenerative ways of thinking.

KEVIN likes to tell the story of a Canadian dairy farmer in North Saskatchewan he has been working with over a few seasons. This farmer started cautiously on a new regime, using a small amount of land to try out different species blends of plants with the aim of getting  good protein and energy for his cows by keeping green cover year round. This proved so successful with his cows that he started work over the whole farm, including following suggestions from Kevin to try introducing turnips and beets to tackle areas of his land that were so wet in spring that they required sluices to drain away the surface moisture. After several seasons of experimentation, he reported that he could now increase his pasturing capacity by planting in the areas previously taken up by drains.

 He also reported that his cows went from producing 46 litres per cow per day to 42 litres per cow per day. But he experienced a 3% rise in his profits due to the fact that his milk had a higher fat content, and he reduced farm inputs. All in all the pressure was off, and this farmer, with a bigger margin to play with, started having more fun on the farm.

So Kevin’s question to any farmer is – how much profit did you make per hectare?

SOIL DATA

We meet the same restrictions when it comes to the measuring of soil health. Conventional science measures soil for the quantities of nitrates, potassium, phosphates etc. Basically, they measure for chemicals……..you don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to imagine that this will be a neat tie-in with agribusinesses that can sell them bags of elements deemed missing. And, of course, it is this kind of data that the agronomists are modelling that tells us that soil carbon sequestration will- never-work in the wheatbelt of WA.

This kind of science does not allow for working out how well the soil functions which is a much more complex calculation to make – the margins for interpretations are bigger when you are trying to judge what an effective balance for conditions on a particular plot of land between bacteria and fungi would look like…or clocking all the living micro-organisms including the spores, metabolites, enzymes and phytochemicals which are the by-product of microbial digestion and carry out important functions for plants: you are looking at a FAR more expansive and open to interpretation methodology.

Conventional science is simply not set up for dealing with the dynamic interplays represented in living ecosystems. New Science on the other hand loves complexity and the farmers who have embraced it love the sense that they are taking matters into their own hands.

THE MICROBIOME FRIENDLY LAB

Part of the problem over the last decades for farmers wanting to experiment with soil health was the struggle to get the data that validated what they knew in their bones – that by shifting to more regenerative farming practices they were on the path to increasing resilience, productivity and long-term profitability.

For some WA farmers in the early years, sending soil samples to the eastern states was the choice, as local labs were not able to rethink the test-tube. Some farmers kept it in-house, getting hold of a microscope and learning to identify what was twisting and skidding across the glass plate.

Kevin has other simple tests for getting an idea of whether you have reached the right kind of soil biology that will enable carbon to stay in the soil – some are as simple as sticking a spade in and counting earthworms or judging the degree of sponginess under your feet that indicates healthy moisture and oxygen levels. He puts handfuls of soil in jars of water to test the different levels of carbon and root exudates as evidenced by how well it aggregates or separates – it is complex, but it does seem possible to get a handle on soil biology via these simple tools.

THE HEART OF THE FARMING ENTERPRISE

Back to Louise Edmonds, WA Carbon Farming project developer. A few years ago she wrote: Regenerative agriculture does not live in bottles, bags or research papers, it lives in the hearts and minds of farmers, around the dinner table, the BBQ and in the land itself. Bringing this knowledge to the land and the farmers requires education that is in deep dialogue with the social, cultural, environmental and economic context in which farmers are operating.  

CULTURAL CHANGE

And this touches on another reason why the technological innovation approach to agriculture is taken as the main event. Cultural change is complex and difficult to achieve.

The kind of paradigm shift in thinking that is needed to effect change in our rural zones goes deep into the hearts and minds of people

RETHINK

Imagine rethinking/re-imagining this land.

Say we recognise and reject a narrow, reductionist way of thinking and started to embrace an expansive, diverse, inclusive, whole-of-nature systems approach - who knows what could be achieved?

Reducing carbon emissions from machinery use in farming is great – but advances in machinery is not what is going to get families moving back into dying wheatbelt towns; and it is not going to ensure that the IGA in Perenjori reopens. That kind of problem requires a culture-deep realignment.

CULTURAL BLINDNESS

I am conscious that culturally, over the decades, I have been sucked in to absorbing certain ideas about the capacity of the WA wheatbelt. Bare hills, salt and sun scoured paddocks, summers filled with dirt blowing in from ag land, jagged lightning bolt shapes blasted into the land – that is the ‘norm’.

But now, common sense and experience tells me that this is the sort of erosion and degradation that any landscape would exhibit after having 96% of its natural vegetation removed. The capacity of wheatbelt soils to hold water or biology is severely diminished.

 Added to this are long-held truths constantly being wheeled out as a kind of back-handed support for unsustainable farming practices…we have the ‘oldest soils, the least fertile, the most fragile’…..whatever truth lies in these words falls quiet in the face of what some of our best regen farmers have achieved.

They have the results, but not the science –the old science and most of the money is heading away from the examination of natural cycles and the true potential of the land and the people who farm it..

 Louise Edmonds again: ‘we are at the point where farmers do the discovery and science comes behind in an attempt to understand. ‘ 

HOW THE BLACKFELLAS DID IT

I can’t really talk about nature based farming systems, without talking about Aboriginal land management. Bruce Pascoe’s best-seller, Dark Emu, is another pointer to the big rethink that is taking hold across Australia, regarding how we treat the land. The park-like aspect noted by all the early colonists, the rich fields of summer grains that covered huge areas of inland Australia – these point to a capacity of this land to cycle an abundance that was completely misunderstood by our Euro trained forebears. Two hundred years later we are still walking in those same wagon wheel tracks, driven by our desire to ‘feed the world’, or the idea that ‘technology will save us’ or whatever other cliché continues to drive the wilful disrespect for true abundance.

HARD TRUTH

The truth is, we have trashed the natural capital of the wheatbelt and this has placed enormous pressure on today’s farmers and their broken, dwindling communities.

SOIL CARBON SEQUESTRATION PROJECT DEVELOPMENTS

I am convinced that the only sure-fire way of getting natural and social capital back, is through a plant-led/soil-based recovery. The job of the people currently working behind the scenes creating Soil Carbon Sequestration Projects is to support the farmers to learn how to fix carbon in their soils and kickstart real environmental healing. Plus to get these same farmers up to scratch with the Carbon Market by assisting them to navigate the measurement protocols, guidelines and contracts required to negotiate the best price per tonne of carbon on offer.  

Blokes like Kevin know the score – he doesn’t yet know his way around the Carbon Market, but is really confident he can help anyone who wants to raise the carbon content of their paddocks.

What he requires is a free-ranging conversation that takes in particular soil types, weather patterns, seasonal variations, topography, water movement, plant types, available equipment and labour and – most importantly – goals. And this is the treasure, the raw data that is sitting, ready to go, between the ears of any switched-on farmer. Oh, also required - the desire to experiment, to learn from doing, to try something different.

THE BIG QUESTION

I’ll leave any growers listening to this with a question:

QUESTION: How can you tell a genuinely regenerative Carbon Farming Project Developer from one who is coming from the same old mind-set? 

ANSWER: The first one won’t be trying to sell you newer, better machinery, soil supplements or genetically modified seed that is chem-ready. They will be the ones who are encouraging you to think that sunlight, water, soil, plants and a good plan that hears from everyone involved in the running of the farm, can make profitable farm magic.

A.Rowland 6/12/2019