24 PRE-SEASON
March 2020. Midwest WA. The supply chains are broken, the farmers can't get their glyphosate or pre-emergent herbicides. Will this be the season where biological farming takes a giant step forward because of the chaos created by Covid 19? Amanda explores the crowded space that lies between conventional and Regenerative approaches to broadacre farming and finds that there is room for all sorts of thinking. And she shares some great compost tips gleaned from a workshop in Nannup at Bee's and Stewart's Merri Bee Organic Farmacy.
I ring my local CRT in Geraldton a shop that has been servicing farm needs for a long time.
And say to my contact: ‘I hear there has been panic buying of glyphosate?
And he says: No, that’s not true.
And I say: oh, feeling a bit deflated, because if felt like a great lead in to a story.
Then he says: Because we don’t have any, and there is none to be had across Australia. It is mostly manufactured in China and the Covid 19 has killed the supply chain. More importantly, we have no stocks of Triflurolin . (Trifluralin is a commonly used pre-emergence herbicide. It is generally applied to the soil with the first rains to provide control of a variety of annual grass and broadleaf weed species).
He explains to me that lack of Triflurolin is the bigger problem at this point, because across Australia there has been a massive rainfall event that is making lots of Ag zones swell with new (unwanted) growth. This agronomist is being run off his feet dealing with farmers who are facing a tsunami of problems. Many paddock plans have been thrown into disarray because of the rain and some farmers are coming off last year’s bad season and trying to get re-financed for another season. Farmers are scrambling to put together a program that uses the chemicals they have in their sheds that might be able to be thrown into use – as my contact said, there are many ways to kill a cat – and he is spending a lot of time tracking supply chains to try to judge what might or might not be cut off dates for last chance shipping arrivals of chemicals as the growing season gets going.
Sounds like a crisis. I asked how it feels in the shop and he says it was a matter of some farmers wondering in to pick up ‘the usual’ and being kicked into another reality when they realised how far their lives were going to be affected by the virus. For some, that’s when the panic buying of toilet paper stopped being funny.
I cross-checked with Craig Pensini, a man who has put in a few decades of work as a sales and marketing manager for Bayer. He left the job last spring and taken a new lease in an old life by connecting on the regen end of the scale. This is not as strange as it sounds considering his 4th generation connection to the land and the fact that he has a brother who farms cattle organically in Boyup Brook - there is a story here to be told later. Craig is deeply connected across a broad spectrum of farming practises in the WA Ag scene and I rang him to flesh out the details of what is happening in this pre-season.
The problems have been exacerbated by the fact that the 3 years up to February this year have been the driest on record. The eastern states use a lot of Glyphosate and Triflurolin because in some zones they can carry a summer as well as a winter crop. But dry conditions have meant demand for herbicides have been down, both these products use big amounts, they are bulky to ship, so Bayer has been sitting on stocks waiting for better seasons and better sales - consequently when the virus hit and the supply lines stopped, stocks were already low across Australia.
Funny thing about the dry season thing. I knew that the 2018 season was considered a good season across the Wheatbelt. Apparently in Geraldton it has gone down in history as the best season ever recorded, with a winning combination of high yields and good grain prices. By contrast 2019 was a bit of a disaster – and now it seems that money is extraordinarily tight as farmers who might have spent up big in the bonanza year, got knocked by a woeful following year and are now trying to come to terms with financing for 2020 within the context of a health crisis that is rapidly turning into a Global Financial Crisis.
DARREN WEST THE FARMER
Earlier in the week I had requested an audience with Darren West, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Growing Things, that wondrous soul, Alannah MacTiernan. The topic was all things regen. Darren’s a very busy man with a constituency about the size of Europe and is the only farmer in the current state government of WA. I am happy to announce that I came away with a much better idea of what no-till machinery actually does –I learned heaps.
ON THE SPECTRUM
I was also reminded talking to Darren, where the divide between conventional and regen Ag lies -notice I used to call it an ‘abyss’ and now call it a ‘divide’. My own stance shifts with every conversation I have with ‘so called’ conventional farmers as they detail the actions they are taking to experiment or transform land management systems on areas in their farms where they are no longer achieving profitable production.
MICROLIFE
It is in the biological zone where this ‘divide’ lies. The idea that the microbial action can beneficially effect pH levels, or influence frost events, or unlock hard to find trace minerals from within the soil profile of their paddocks, is a step too far for those used to working within the conventional sphere.
A broadacre cropping farmer recently detailed to me changes he wanted to implement on part of his farm where the system he had in place was no longer working or profitable. I wondered aloud whether biodiverse plantings and microbial action alone could shift a compacted soil profile that turns even lupin roots sideways at a certain depth? I argued that introducing a diverse array of plants - might introduce enough life in the soil to achieve this, given rain and enough organic matter in the paddock to work with. The farmer was persuaded that the best and quickest way to achieve a result was to implement a one-hit deep ploughing event. I understood the thinking, especially given an economic imperative that limits time and money to experiment.
I also understood that this farmer doesn’t believe that a biological solution is a practical approach. Regen ag has made the on ground advances, but now needs to make the business case that will convince mainstream farmers that a biological approach is feasible. This will be the task of the regen projects currently waiting for the stars to align and finance to land: data required.
SOILS ALIVE
Around the same time I listened to a YouTube presentation by Joel Williams, an independent plant and soil health educator and advocate from the United States (Australian born though, we can claim him as one of ours). And was struck again by the profound simplicity of an equation of soil health. Soil has physical and chemical and biological components. Joel uses intersecting circles to show the cross-overs in thinking and practise that are currently occurring in the world of Ag production. From my perspective it is clear that the physical and chemical are built into the agricultural land management systems, but the biological is the odd one out - and the knowledge while arguably eons old, is in another sense as newly minted as Youtube or Instagram.
But things aren’t just shifting in me. Darren shared a story he holds dear about last season’s Dowerin Field Day, an annual rural wheatbelt event that is usually opened by the sitting Minister for Ag, our Alannah in this case. Because she is a controversial figure, because she is not of the Coalition and because she has been characterised as being against Live Trade – the first two points are true, but not the latter – she was not asked to open the event. This was a slight and was felt as a slight. Darren said with some satisfaction, because he thought not asking the sitting Minister of Ag to open the event was disrespectful, that on the day there were 30 people at the official launch. Later, when Alannah launched RegenWA in a tent down the paddock, there was a crowd of about 200 people. Just goes to show. (RegenWA is supported by funding from the Western Australian Government’s State NRM Program and managed by Perth NRM)
COMPOSTING
It was great to attend a 2-day compost course recently at Merri-Bees Organic Farmacy in Nannup, about 270 kms south-east of Perth. It was like going on an African safari, only underground, where the wildebeests were bacteria. Bee’s example here is that some bacteria are like these huge herds of roaming herbivores in that they carry nutrients for predators that can then be excreted and made digestible for plants.
So I reconnected with the world of soil predators: flagellates and ciliates and amoebae and bacteria feeding nematodes, fungi feeding nematodes, earthworms, micro-anthropoids and the like. And re-engaged with fungi, that astonishing organism that shares more in common with humans than it does with plants and has been given its very own category in the world of living organisms. From the dictionary Historically, fungi were included in the plant kingdom; however, because fungi lack chlorophyll and are distinguished by unique structural and physiological features (i.e., components of the cell wall and cell membrane), they have been separated from plants. In addition, fungi are clearly distinguished from all other living organisms, including animals, by their principal modes of vegetative growth and nutrient intake. Fungi grow from the tips of filaments (hyphae) that make up the bodies of the organisms (mycelia), and they digest organic matter externally before absorbing it into their mycelia.
Melissa and Bee contemplate a microscope spinning with lifeforms.
RELEARNING
At Bee’s course I also re-met some of my simple misconceptions. I was startled, afresh, when Bee stated that earthworms don’t actually feed on the organic matter – they live off the bacteria that digest the organic matter. I knew that, but those moments of gazing into my compost pile I tend to fall back on believing the evidence of my eyes when I see writhing masses of worms, not the interactions invisible to the human eye which are a constant cycling of eating and being eaten as real and dramatic as on the African plains – just on a microscopic scale.
HOT SCIENCE
According to Joel Williams, the hot new science is focused on the exudates that are released round living roots. The most important way to build soil carbon is to get the function and role between plants, root exudates and microorganisms pumping and the boffins are digging deep to try to understand the immense complexity that is at play here. It is becoming clear that : The most effective way to sequester carbon in soil is to grow it, rather than add it.
DREADIES
Bee backs this up by taking us into a fertile part of her garden and digging up roots that are daggy with dreadlocks, a simple way to see whether the exudates – that is the sugars released into the soil by the plant - are being used righteously by the underground organisms and the whole carbon cycle is in play. Clean roots is a sad sign that you are growing in dirt rather than soil with minimal functioning microorganisms.
Let me remind you of the age old story - the plants draw down CO2 from the atmosphere via the process of photosynthesis and produce sugars/carbohydrates, some of which they use to grow their above ground green bits, some that they release into the soil as exudates from the roots to feed the microbial life. Bacteria are part of the cycling of nutrients from the exudates and release a sticky glue or bio-slime that clumps earth together to create aggregates that open the soil to the passage of oxygen and water. Fungi creates glomalin, a slightly acid glue that helps form bigger aggregates and allows that spongy, springy feeling of beautifully, breathful soil. So these exudates stimulate the cycling of organisms and nutrients that ultimately release the minerals bound up in the soil, that plants need to be healthy. Joel keeps the wheel turning by saying that minerals are catalysts for photosynthesis.
FARMING BY THE BAG
All this is happening with the combination of sun, plants, soil and water. And if the prospect of free mineralisation and fertilisation processes don’t turn you on, Joel gives the statistics for plant uptake of the NPK (nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium) that are routinely applied to a crop during the growing season: of NPK
N Nitrogen – 40-50% is taken up by the plant, P Phosphorous – 10-20% taken up by the plant, K Potassium 40% taken up by the plant. The rest is lost and leached. These statistics represent significant inefficiencies in the dollars and labour sense - and there is the collateral damage done by the stuff that ends up in our water systems.
I have given you only a a tiny snapshot of these gem-like facts as put together by Joel Williams – treat yourself to more of this knowledge via a YouTube link you will find in the text of this podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KVBNlQlDUU
MAKING COMPOST
Another great take home for me that is ultimately going to make a big difference in my quarter acre house garden in Geraldton, is the probe temperature gauge: a 30cm long steel rod with a little circular temperature reader on the end. I have been getting into creating piles of alternating green and brown organic stuff and manure and now understand I might have been killing the beneficial microbes with heat. Ideally you want your pile to reach temperatures into the mid 50’s for 3 days in a row, but not go over 70 degrees. The good microbes, quaintly called ‘beneficials’ die off at 72 degrees.
I now know that when the temperature gets into the 60’s I need to turn the compost to expose the inner to cooler temperatures, and I need to start with a big enough mass that the microbes can retreat to the inner sanctuary if I don’t manage to create the best environment for them to thrive. The urban dwellers biggest problem is finding a space in the backyard that has some shelter from the sun but doesn’t render the backyard – currently littered with cars and buildings - uninhabitable.
Here’s what Bee says in her document Nourishing Soil, a substantial read that represents a lifetime of devotion to compost and the effect of live soil on live human beings. It comes as part of the package for all participants in her workshops:
We want the minerals in the original organic matter to be transformed into aerobic microbes. The soil food web provides the trace elements which are so important to enzyme production in our bodies, and only nature knows what we need. We keep discovering more and more essential micro nutrients as time goes by.
COMPOST TEA VS EXTRACT
And I now get the difference between compost extract and compost tea. The tea I am definitely going to try and create at home, using some of my finest compost suspended in a net teabag of a large bucket of water that is being furiously bubbled by a little submergible pump. To really get the beneficial’s going, I will add a component of fungi-producing matter - fish emulsion and molasses - to the brew for a 24-48 continuous boil.
This tea will be used as a foliage spray as insecticide – not in terms of killing unwanted critters, but in terms of pumping up the plants’ immune system. I have a plant in mind, my desert willow tree (a type of native pittosporum) harbours a little insect that is curling and browning the new growth, the humidity we have experienced recently has allowed it to have a free-for-all. I aim to support the plant to create conditions that will bode ill for the insect.
This is strangely counter-intuitive, delightfully counter-intuitive, to someone bought up in a culture where if something is causing problems in the growing zone it is immediately hunted down and destroyed – with little or no regard for the collateral damage caused. I love the concept of bringing the conditions around to where the ‘pathogen’ or ‘disruptive element’ simply can’t find the conditions to thrive.
Interesting that this is a growing experimental space in some cancer treatments – immunological treatments are now attuned to supporting the good rather than destroying the bad influences.
I feel aligned with the approach.
SAINT ELAINE
It still amazes me to think of Dr Elaine Ingham’s much quoted statement, ‘that there is no Agricultural soil in Australia that lacks any mineral to grow crops.’ Dr Ingham is, from what I can determine, the grandmother of microbial soil health in Australia and beyond. She has decades of experience to back this outrageous claim.
So I dutifully continue to pay my respects to the biology of the soil because it is the functioning of the micro-organisms that will unlock these mineral goodies, things like phosphorus that exist in a tightly bound matrix can be released by the complex interactions that take place around the root and its exudates. And it is also pays respect to the plants, because when they get to run the show, they get to access the nutrients they need, at the exact time when they need them, to achieve full health.
Don’t the analogies and metaphors just swing into view for the above-ground world at this point? This is like a blueprint for parents – how to grow healthy well-rounded children – plant them in an area rich with biodiverse plants and naturally cycling nutrients and observe what eco-services they employ as they reach for things that interest them, trusting that what they reach for will help them find their full potential as individuals.
ADDENDUM
Panicum decompositum in the tame
For those of you who have been following my podcasts thus far. First, thank you.
I wanted to update you on the story of the native millet seed started with the first Wildfood from the Rangeland stories. This was panicum decompositum, the perennial grass found on Edah Station that was going to be my life’s work – until I found out it was well nigh impossible to grow from seed.
Luckily a nursery mob near Perth worked out how to sprout a few and were then able to determine that they can be propagated with ease and in numbers from an existing plant. My ideas became about growing perennials in a whole-of-landscape solution, which has turned out to be more in alignment with what I have learnt about how land regenerates over the last three years.
We successfully potted on some small plants at the Drylands Nursery and I put them in at home where they have been firing and creating seed almost continuously over summer from all spots in the garden. I can still regenerate the landscape one plant at a time….
Panicum decompositum in the tame
