23 The Big Regen Part 1

What happens when a group of Regenerative farmers and thinkers get together in a larger group, and put all their projects on the table, using their talents, connections and expertise to help each other out? The pace of change is already pretty breath-taking - will this small band of future-thinkers be able to create a matrix that fast tracks change in Midwest, WA and beyond?

Amanda is convinced of it, and is excited to share some of what is building in the way of enterprises in this neck of the woods - including a new marketplace for local food growers, a Wheatbelt based Carbon Soil Sequestration project and on-country training for Aboriginal youth .

Part 2 will expand the remit on the understanding that it doesn’t always have to be about soil and plants and ‘regeneration’ is a shorthand term that finds life in other enterprises.

PHOTO taken by Louise Edmonds

BRINGING IT HOME

In the last podcast, SO IT BEGINS we looked at how capital is responding to climate change influences; demonstrating that what has long been clear to scientists, environmentalists and others is also becoming clear to big business and investment bodies.

Our political leaders are seemingly not geared for long term strategies… but the Minister for AG, the Hon. Alannah MacTiernan is WA’s not-so-secret weapon. She is pushing hard from the top to create new directions in Agriculture, and Geraldton is developing savvy businesses with sound environmental values to meet her agenda for change.

GERO

If you are listening to this in Midwest, WA, you’re lucky, we’ve got this covered.

In Geraldton, a small town of about 32,000 souls some 430 odd kms north of Perth - a little band of free thinkers met on a morning in late January to compare Regenerative notes.

The meeting went along like, well like riding a bike with slightly square wheels – but it felt great. In conversations I shared with everyone after the meeting, it became clear that coming together felt powerful.

There were many values shared between this disparate mob, no-one has to be persuaded that Change is upon us and that Big Change needs Big Regen thinking. Of the nine present, five are farmers with a fair amount of multi-tasking going on, in the areas of food distribution, training, carbon project developing, entrepreneurship, podcasting and facilitating.

Connections were criss-crossing and cross-currenting, and the few who hadn’t met face-to-face had the chance at this meeting to put names to faces and projects that have emerged from kitchen table chat to become discussions at various conferences, dinners, field days, cafes and, of course, kitchen tables for the past three years. Literally decades of experimentation, change thinking and a lot of work was represented at this table.

THE FOLLOWING WIND

Some of these people it has to be said - before we get into the tide-is-turning positive stuff- have suffered derision and isolation in their years of going against the grain of officially sanctioned land management techniques. But the energy for change is upon us and there is a sense that instead of struggling into the Southerly we now have the wind at our backs.  (the Southerly on a normal summer’s day around these parts is a force, so this is a pretty optimistic metaphor).

STARTING POINTS

We didn’t have an agenda, but we did have a few starting points. Clint Hansen, Minang and Balladong Noogar elder and trainer of youth, Rod Butler and Phil Logue, Perenjori based farmers and regenerative farm developers have come up with the term Land Culture and created a diagram of a triangle with carbon at its heart. The three sides are present social life/community, ecosystems/environment and economic return.

PANDORA’S BOX ADDITION

After this meeting, reflecting on how good it felt to get together as a group, Rod Butler and I agreed in principle that we have to do the Commonland thing. This Regenerative Agricultural investment crew have a ‘fourth’ return, inspiration/hope. So we’ll borrow it.

ON COUNTRY TRAINING

An important aspect of Land Culture is training young Aboriginal people on country. Rod O’Bree was at the meeting. At his farm, Yanget, on the outskirts of Geraldton he has worked with young Aboriginal boys from the Clontarff Football Academy, getting them thinking about water flow and earthworks designed to stop erosion and build soil. 

They get it,’ he says simply.

Rod started learning about water and flow in 2009 when he took over Yanget and met Peter Andrews. Ten years on, the student is coming into his own as he consolidates and value-adds to this knowledge. He has been working with Tim Wiley, Rangeland ecologist and scientist, to institute the kinds of healing processes that have worked at Yanget, on other people’s farms. Clint’s cultural knowledge will become a vital part of the process.

Most recently Tim, Rod and a few trainees did some earthmoving on Christine and Kingsley Smith’s Dandaragan farm – then ran a training and communication session for some locals. Christine, also at this meeting, was instrumental in finding the Shire grant to get it happening and hopes to use her hectares as a show piece for people interested in change in her rural zone.

In the last few years Rod has found himself sharing conversations on how to rehydrate landscapes. He has been refining his communications, testing what works, and favours using hoses and ant-scale landscapes to demonstrate water, plants and earth building the landscape. The quality of questions the Aboriginal boys ask and their quick understanding is another stream feeding into his big dreaming for our region.

INDIGENOUS THINKING

Maybe this understanding is down to the Aboriginal capacity to think in patterns. I have been blessed to find a book called Sand Talk. The author Tyson Yunkaporta sits with folk in Australia and Greenland, teasing out the strands of Indigenous philosophy. I ended up concluding that if you can understand things in terms of function and relationship to each other, see the patterns, then it makes it easier to grasp concepts in the land that are simple, as in, profoundly simple, but counter-intuitive for mainstream thinkers. As Westerners, we are trained to see things in bits, which is why some of might lag behind the footy boys when we watch Rod manipulate water flow in the land.  

WHITE MAN’S THINKING

I’ve got to tell a story here – it illustrates cultural difference so beautifully.

In Perth, growing up, I loved my auntie Judy. She was a bit of a legend in Guildford and was one of the first to lobby for the planting of trees endemic to the area. She was a keen local historian and considered an oracle on all things WA. A formidable woman really. Large, wide and country born with the fine features and the little head of her ancestors, the fabled (at least in their own minds) Drummond and Harper clans. She had a good chuckle and a twinkly-eye thing happening that was attractive.

I was interested in plants, and really impressed by her grasp of Latin as she tossed words around going about her gardening and politicking.

CULTURAL OVERLAY

One day Jude and I were touring her backyard checking out different species. Jude: And this is an acacia blah blah and a casuarina something or other, and this is the casuarina blah blah…’

How can you tell these apart? I said out loud.

Jude pulled down the nearest Casuarina branch, and we both ­­­leaned in looking over our glasses with noses close to a bunch of those skinny little sticklings that pass as leaves. She started counting out the lines marking jointed intervals on the leaf…one, two, three, a model of differentiation based on leaf segmentation…..at some point I stopped listening.

There it was - the cultural overlay– seeing it so clearly was funny. Imagine if my Auntie was an Aboriginal woman – what would she be telling me…maybe something like – and I am making this up – when these leaves are tipped with brown, then the birds that feed on the insects that are attracted to the pollen arrive and we know it is time to ….. you get the idea, it’s about connections. I reckon a black auntie would be telling me about how it all works together - the sun, the water, the season, plants, insects, animals, humans, ancestors, probably with a story filled with drama and energy containing all these elements and an educative moral to tie it all together.

This is how a holistic world view works – in the connectivity of all living things. Even as a teenager I knew I had stumbled into a rich zone of cultural relativity. What I didn’t feel until much later was just how much I was missing; how much everyone was missing, by not having a black auntie telling us Aboriginal ways alongside the Western way.

I reckon we all see Aboriginal knowledge as crucial in the unfolding story of regeneration – and that this will expand the capacity for land and people to heal from past trauma. This is the zone where Clint needs to be able to do his stuff – he, the two Rod’s and Phil are keen to formulate the best way to get kids back on country. At the moment Batavia Coast Marine Institute, a part of the local TAFE, and Clint’s current employer, is in the mix to become the Registered Training Organisation. The curriculum under development is old school, non-regenerative – so, from my perspective, there is some horse-trading to be done.

DEEP SPIRIT

More on the spirit stuff. Apparently when Charles Massey wrote The Call of the Reed Warbler he was persuaded to leave out a chapter. It will be hard enough to sell regen land management ideas he was told, don’t go there….but I think there is a hunger for any expression of a deep connection to the land. The Southerly might have enough in it to start filling out these sails as well.

CATCHMENT FOOD

In podcast,21 Road Trip, I introduced listeners to Rod O’Bree in his role as a food distributor and creator of Catchment Food brand. The big news is that as of early February he is part-owner of a local butcher’s shop.

Rod is pretty much flowing with the ‘J curve’ as he rides the escalating pace of change happening around the officially formulated Midwest Food Cluster. Catchment Food now has a home for meat and other produce coming from land in transition to more nature-based management systems, and is a crucial part of the developing food strategy .

A NEW LOCAL MARKET

Catchment food could provide a great new market for the farmers in the room, all of whom run sheep and several who are trialling broadacre cropping at the regen end of the spectrum.  Brian Baxter, grower of fine wool and lambs, on a farm in Perenjori, took notes. Here is a new market for him, with ready-made interest in some regen cropping he wants to undertake this coming season. He has read the signs, is convinced that the season will be a good one and is keen to keep talking with long term neighbours Rod Butler and Phil Logue about the potential to join forces.

Catchment Food also has an eye and connections going into South East Asian markets – more of that later.

HOLISTICALLY MANAGED

Christine Smith has been a networker and advocate for regenerative practices from her hectares in Dandaragan for years (see podcast # ‘Measuring the Immeasurable’) – She was one of the movers of the Soil Restoration Farming group that has been connecting farmers with the regen scientists and facilitating peer-to-peer learning for a few years now. They Martin Staaper, Dr Christine Jones, Nicole Masters and Walter Jehne and more to WA – providing light bulb moments for growers looking for information and support.

On a personal level she seeks healing for her land and her family, while hoping their farm can be used as a demonstration site that will convince more locals to hop on board the regen train.

WHAT ALLAN RECKONS

Christine recently shared on online interview with Allan Savory that had a few gems in it. The Allan Savory Institute is a global organisation, offering farm planning and training in Holistic Management. In this interview Allan talks about how to make lasting change and relates it to a real live case in point, the management of a National Park.

He prefaces it all by saying that all who are involved in an environmental restoration project must come to an agreement about action that paves the way for an outcome where everyone can achieve (quote) ‘a deeply satisfying life that ticks all cultural, spiritual and social boxes’.

This means there must be no compromise and total agreement on any action taken. To get this point across, Allan promises us that any action taken to ameliorate an environmental situation that does not have the agreement of all parties will lead to conflict – the situation must be dealt with holistically. I believe him, this feels profoundly true.

But in this example? Even though Allan’s words make complete psycho-social sense, it seemed like such a tough call that I fell into: it’ll-never-work mode.

Action taken without the agreement of all involved leads to conflict because it comes from the mindset that is concerned with ‘fixing a problem’ which is by its very nature reductionist, and will create other problems. Allan uses my favourite, weeds, as a case in point. Over decades a reductionist approach to weeds has seen untold billions of research and product dollars thrown at ‘the weed problem’ with the result of a more intractable weed problem and the side effect of adding to widespread ecological devastation.

HOLISM vs REDUCTIONISM

From the perspective of holistic management, weeds are not a problem, they are fast growing pioneer plants that are part of the natural cycling of vegetation and need to be considered as an aspect of any land management plan – understanding this, incorporating weeds into action as a given rather than a problem, will obviously result in very different actions and outcomes from the first scenario.

THE LOUISE FACTOR

This is by way of introducing you to Louise Edmonds, also at this meeting. She has been working with Rod Butler for some time while putting into place all the pieces needed to develop her Carbon Soil Sequestration project. Louise is close to securing impact investment dollars to facilitate the rolling out of a project that has been years in the making and has its heart in broadacre agriculture farming in the WA Wheatbelt.

One of the major points of difference of her Carbon project, Carbon Sync is that it is the exclusive WA hub of the Global Savory Network. That means that any farms signed up to her project will have expert help on hand in the form of long-term training and on-ground support in Holistic Management to navigate the transition to more natural farming.

The numbers Louise is crunching for the potential of Wheatbelt cropping land to store carbon, talk to the capacity of the Wheatbelt to return to rich ecological and social balance while creating significant financial returns.

HOW SHE GOT HERE

Before she became a Carbon Project Developer Louise was making compost extract for farmers in her business Intuit Earth. She recognised that some of the farmers she was working with were struggling to manage their farms effectively – often because the couples or families running the show were not on the same page.

Being Louise, she did a bit of research, quickly picked up on Allan Savory’s breakthrough work and set about bringing a Holistic Management trainer to WA, no mean feat, considering she had to talk a bunch of people into something they didn’t know they needed. 

Down the track, the Savory work has become one of the pillars of her own personal development and an essential part of her Wheatbelt regeneration project. Rod Butler has just recently graduated as a trainer in Holistic Management.

WHEN PRACTISE INFORMS THEORY

Just before writing this, I chatted to Rod Butler about Allan Savory’s insight into management and decision-making processes, expressing my disquiet at ever being able to achieve the kind of total agreement he talks about.

Rod, in what I am learning is a very Rod-like way, made it real.’ It is more about a feeling that grows in the room’ he said. I prefer to think of it as going for more of what you want, and less of what you don’t want’.

I got off the phone, happy. That sounds achievable. It is, after all, exactly what happened in this meeting between 9 souls in Geraldton.

STAY TUNED

The Big Regen Part 2 will continue as an ongoing series, bringing you fabulous Midwest and WA based projects as they develop.