Once there was a beautiful bit of land called Yanget east of Geraldton, named for the local, water-loving bulrushes. Rod O'Bree and his family have spent the last 15 years learning how to rehydrate and restore fertility and abundance to this land and that of the Chapman River Catchment. At the heart of his story are before-and-after pictures that have emboldened and inspired many in WA to tackle erosion on their farms and stations. Yanget has a lot to teach us about how we live on this country.

If, by the time you have listened to, or read, this transcript, you want to hear more, Rod O’Bree is presenting at the upcoming Regenerative Agricultural Conference in Margaret River in early September.

Rod O’Bree has before-and-after pictures taken on Yanget, his property just east of Geraldton. Both images show a body of water in a fold in the land, following the creek.

Both are taken in February from the same point in the landscape, similar weather conditions, 8 years apart. The first, in 2009 is a desolate, barren affair, foregrounded and backgrounded by a large stretch of bare land. The water spreads out, a few crippled bushes and trees totter around the edges of the photo, disconnected and isolated. The second picture, from 2017, reveals the water pooling as part of a creek, with grasses, reeds, a wattle in full flower, the foreground showing a scattered covering of grasses and forbs.

THE RIGHT QUESTION

Where I am going with this story, is that recently, long after these pictures became part of a story of rehydration in the Midwest, I listened to a podcast with Krista Tippet called Biomimicry: an operating manual for earthlings https://onbeing.org/series/podcast/. She was interviewing Janine Benyus who wrote a book called Biomimicry in 1999 – a book I suggest you read, or at least get a taste of by listening to this conversation.

At the end of the podcast Krista characteristically feels her way into a question by suggesting that the defining image of her generation might be that of the moon-shot of the earth, the one that shows a fertile blue and green sphere suspended alone in deep space.

What, she asks Janine, do you think is the defining image for today?

Janine’s answer: the before-and-after picture.

Something clicked into place when she said this.

WHEN DATA MEANS LIFE

Janine is right. The before-and-after has to be the defining image of our time. You can call it data, but it looks like life. This is proof positive that restorative work, done on arid and degraded land in WA, the coastal edge of the wheatbelt, can be achieved. And it can be done while running a business, working with grazing animals on the property, and facing financial hardship.

These pictures cut through.

I’ve seen Rod use them in presentations and heard the gasps in the audience. I’ve used them and got the same effect. The audience gets it.

Rod and Ralf the filmmaker discuss angles

I entered a competition in Geraldton run by Pollinators, a local outfit geared towards sustainability. I used the before-and-after pics with a 3 minute talk, I won enough money to pay a local filmmaker, Ralf Mulks to launch his drone and shoot a movie of the whole creek system that runs through Yanget, tracking its gradual repair. Rod used this 2-minute movie when doing the rounds of relevant state ministers – for Ag, for fisheries for anyone in Government willing to pay attention to methods that not only rehydrate degraded Ag lands, but have consequences that flow all the way through to the health of our fishing industries.

WHAT IS YANGET

Yanget is an Aboriginal – or at least a bastardised version of an Aboriginal name - for the local bullrushes which formed a major bushfood in the old days, common around Perth, around all fresh waterways. Apparently, the old people would set fire to big stands of it when the rains started. The idea being you could get a feed from the critters flushed out from the dense stalks, and have a free run at the roots, thick corms that were pounded to make a nutritious carbohydrate, give the mob energy for the coming cold months.

I did a bit of experimental pounding on a few bulrush roots on a mates farm in Boyup Brook myself, a while ago. What I got was surprising - some very fine white powdery stuff and a lot of fibre – some ancestral help and a bit more field work required before that becomes a go-to food source.

That’s a bit of a digression. I just wanted to point out that the name Yanget is synonymous with water and fertility. It’s no accident that this was the name given to one of a chain of properties in this area inland from the coast of Geraldton, nabbed early on after the arrival of the first European boat people. The gentle hills, rich winding water courses and treed and grassy areas must have been resplendent with this water-loving plant. It was deemed to be perfect grazing land.

A big swathe of land was taken in the 1850s and lots of money was made, initially from horses supplied to the British in India. Yanget the farm, is one of several beautiful old houses still standing in the district, testament to the good times. It’s a glorious monster of a place with a massive ballroom, a tennis court complete with fountain and a maintenance bill the size of – well – the size of a 19th century mansion that’s fallen on hard times.

SELLING THE STORY

By the time Rod got there, all his newly acquired acres looked like the 2009 picture. For the last 15 years he has been on a long journey, looking to uncover the patterns in the land that enable him to create interventions fostering environmental and social healing.

It started with a rain event and a meeting with Peter Andrews in 2009 and it has propelled him into all the corners of political, business, and social influence in our fair state. He has been in and out of ministers’ offices, hung out with billionaires and learned how to swim with the sharks and other deep-sea creatures looking to drive the carbon and biodiversity credit economies. He has sat in yarning circles with Aboriginal custodians – it’s an amazing story – one that needs telling….later.

STILL NO DEAL

So, Rod is sitting on a bit of land where nature’s capacity to heal has truly been revealed, stitching together rough plans with shifting alliances of collaborators also keen to publicise a successful land restoration project. Rod started with his own Chapman Valley, the formerly fertile stretch that hosts the Chapman River, a windy little affair that begins about 50 kms inland and empties out into the sea just north of Geraldton.

Over the years he’s had the ear of a few ministers. They have come onto Yanget, Alannah McTiernan, and Mark McGowan and seen the change – got excited enough to launch the small pot of money that was their contribution to the Carbon story a year or two ago. A few months ago Yanget hosted a big mob of people for the Shoreleave Festival showcasing celebrity chefs and local food for tourists and residents. More interest, more publicity.

Still no deal.

Lately he has been talking to the people in the State Fisheries department. Again, lots of conversations and interest. Rod reiterating the news that fishing industries vital to the Midwest economy are being badly affected by the run-off of chemicals and dirt entering the coast from the river mouth, due to poor land management practises. For example, the prawn harvest in Shark Bay was closed this season due to dangerously low prawn numbers with the suggestion being that it was for environmental, rather than over-fishing, reasons. Rod has done his research over the years and conversation with scientist Matt Landos, Director of Future Fisheries Veterinary Services back up his arguments with some scary statistics of the decline of the health of the coastal sea grasses.

Rod gets frustrated – people seem to understand what is happening – but can’t seem to find their way to dealing with the complexity of the problem. Progress is slow.

THE CUSTODIANS

Rod notes the quick uptake of understanding by First Nations’ people when it comes to the land. From the earliest sessions conducted during an alliance with the local Clontarf crew on Yanget he recognised that the young trainees understood instinctively what they were observing. He has gone on to develop a good working relationship with the Burringurra people, inland in the Gascoyne, cemented over Covid times when he was able to help the community survive by trucking in loads of food and water via his Western Independent Food business. Rod has strong connections with the elders of this small enclave of Wajarri people. They recognise the way he works – he is looking at the patterns of creation in a way that resonates with their traditional knowledge.

The message Rod and the Burringurra people have for the politicians and the engineers is that rather than spend millions of dollars patching up the seawall that has failed to stop destructive flooding at Carnarvon at the mouth of the Gascoyne River, they could spend a fraction of that money and fix the problem by doing interventions with earthworks on the land where the river begins, hundreds of miles inland.

MEANWHILE

Meanwhile. The story keeps growing.

The Chapman River Rehydration idea was born a while ago now, and Rod worked with scientists and interested regenerative types to get 6 farmers in the valley interested in learning how to slow water across their farms using earthworks. By the second attempt at a grant, he and his collaborators finally got a bit of funding, not enough, but a start. The local NRM’s eventually came on board, triggered by Alannah’s interest - things seemed to be coming together.

Rod, with a couple of decades experience under his belt running his family’s food distribution business from Geraldton’s industrial centre, then bought Mick Davies butcher shop in the main street of town. Partly out of respect for Mick Davies, the man and a shop that had been a part of the community for years, partly because he had a big idea.

Catchment Foods, he reasoned, could be a way to capture the public with the regenerating land story while getting a premium price for products from local farmers working with Regenerative principles.

With his food trucking systems already set up, Rod was well-placed to do something different in the meat industry. But this has had its problems. Getting butchers has been a bit of a nightmare – not all the employees could be persuaded to embrace the good news about Regen Ag, and the abattoir options continue to be a limiting factor. Then Covid hit, his food distribution business and home got damaged by a cyclone and his wife, a crucial part of the O’Bree family business, broke her leg. Maybe his dog died – I didn’t dare ask – it was a bad run of luck.

While he was putting out fires, right, left and centre, not to mention running stock on his property, and keeping an eye on the horse-racing business, former colleagues and hangers-on pulled out, took his before-and-after pictures and ran with their own regenerative and carbon business ideas.

It's been a journey.

Rod has had to learn patience.

There are synergies here with Louise Edmond’s Carbon Sync story. It seems only the most determined and the one’s with the strongest hold on an inclusive, collaborative, multifaceted vision survive in this game of landscape renewal. Up to this point the big money seems to have been looking the other way.

A COUPLE OF AHHA MOMENTS

Rod will tell you he isn’t a farmer. His interest in the land was always about horses, but he now speculates that this might have been what gave him the advantage in terms of seeing land practises with new eyes. Rod had a few ‘ahha’ moment that allowed him to twig to a different way of doing things.

Before he and his family bought Yanget they had a few acres in Woorree, a suburb in Geraldton, where they kept racehorses. He and his family hand-fed these athletes the finest quality nuts and grains money could buy and lavished the sort of attention that horses need to perform at their best. The family then bought another 200 acres nearby so they could rest five older horses that they weren’t actively training.

The O’Brees made regular trips to make sure the water troughs were full, fences up and the horses happy. They soon noticed that not only were the horses happy, but they were also bursting with health and sporting the dappled coats signalling a truly contented and healthy nag.

This was Rod’s eureka moment. These horses were living on paddocks that had not been grazed or cultivated for years and were alive with different types of herbs, grasses, forbes and weeds – and therein lies the difference.

Above and below ground biodiversity is what happens when the soil is healthy and can support diverse species so the grazing animal gets to eat what it needs, when it needs it. No amount of careful feeding can emulate the effect of grazing done on paddocks where the soil is truly alive, the plants correspondingly nutrient rich and the horses able to feed themselves, guided by their own innate intelligence. Rod became a convert for natural eating vs a diet full of supplements.

The second big ‘ahha’ moment came at Yanget when he witnessed a 20ml downpour soon after he and his family moved onto the farm. A sudden and savage drenching churned down the creek and roads and ran off the property, carrying with it a load of red dirt. 24 hours later, there was nothing to show that rain had blessed his land.

As he said: this can’t be right.

Then he met Peter Andrews and started to get a feel for exactly how wrong it all was.

Peter’s ability to read the landscape was uncanny, and Rod was fascinated by this knowledge, he started to get serious about learning how water shapes land. He took instruction from Peter over many conversations and repeat visits and ran with it – working out where he needed to place interventions in the land to slow the water, watching the rain to see how it moved debris, what caused it to turn, slow and stop. Peter and Rod experimented with different interventions – Pete’s Pond bears his name as an official part of the creek - and Rod started to work with this wisdom, learning from blow outs and mistakes how best to direct and slow water flow.

THE PUSHBACK

At this point there was not much support, and he was copping some flak for his earthworks: there was a rumour going around that weirs, leaky or otherwise, were, if not illegal, at least against what was considered ‘best practise’. His neighbours were also furious that he wasn’t poisoning or chopping out the star thistles that blighted the paddocks in this area over the summer months.

WATER WAYS RUN DIFFERENTLY IN WA

But Rod was running on a different program to them, taking in information about how plant succession works within ecosystems. He realised that any plant that held living roots in the soil over summer had to be part of the healing of the landscape. He spent a fair amount of time with a spade in his hand standing in the rain, observing how water behaves, starting to sense the patterns in the land.

Rod began to trust that whatever nature was doing in response to any intervention was towards an effort to protect and promote fertility and biodiversity. He wanted to honour the abundance and grace he saw developing in the explosion of seed germination that occurred as the water began to rebuild the creek system at Yanget. So, he persevered, copped the criticism.

RUNNING HOSE

Over the years there were demonstrations, field days and seminars run at Yanget. Word was getting out and Rod got used to scientists and ecologists, Ag industry bureaucrats, interested farmers and locals wanting to come and have a look at what he was doing.

He worked out effective ways of sharing the knowledge, using a running hose to demonstrate how water shapes the land. How it picks up and carries light litter, building little banks of organic matter as it pushes up against obstacles, slows down with dips in the earth, curls around small stones and other barriers. How these banks build enough stability to become quiet havens for opportunistic seeds to germinate. And how as these strengthen and become more fertile, the first responder plants give way to the broadleaf and softer varieties preferred for farming operations.

The running hose became an effective party trick, tuning people into the idea that one of the first steps towards instituting new regenerative land management techniques on severely eroded land had to be about capturing and slowing the water. By getting down and dirty in a stream of water he was letting people see how biological systems build, joining the dots on the relationships between water, earth, and plants. The more he worked with the land, the more his understanding grew.

He knew he was onto something big.

CHAIN OF PONDS

On Yanget, his acres responded to water being held in the land, and he kept a watch over his weirs, learning how best to place and strengthen them as he faced different rain events and conditions with each season. The star thistles gradually made way for prickly acacias and other fast growing pioneer plants; grasses and forbes reappeared and slowly the creek began to restore ponds along its length.

Over good and bad seasons, the whole system showed many signs of life. Surprisingly early in the story a big patch of bulrushes, the Yangets, established themselves in a quiet body of water. He let his cattle in to graze them, but they turned up again in the following year, thicker and stronger than ever. Gradually the land started to build, raising the water level, the underwater aquifers were replenished, and the pools started flowing into each other, gently, encouraging an abundance of plant, insect, and bird life.

Peter Andrew’s vision of a land restored, the chain of ponds, became a reality.

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