Charles Massy, Call of the Reed Warbler
Charles Massy shows his fellow farmers the way on more economically efficient farms, a healed landscape and a land that can help reverse climate change.
Disruption arrives in a landscape. That landscape is usually inefficient, ruled by vested interests, governed by sclerotic processes and dismissive of the consumer. Into this landscape comes an innovation or an idea that’s so workable everyone wonders why it took so long to appear.
Agriculture is the biggest landscape for disruption today. It covers almost 40 per cent of the world’s land mass; it’s permeated with old practices and new vested interests, and investors are beginning to worry whether it will be fit for a climate-heated future. Last year a new voice emerged from an Australian farm that declared “a bottom-up challenge to a very powerful establishment on the land”.
Dr Charles Massy doesn’t look like a disruptor. At 66, this fifth-generation sheep farmer from southern NSW is a world away from urban hubs, where start-ups set out to change the world. Yet his book, Call of the Reed Warbler, published last year, has captured urban and rural readers, shaken the scientific establishment and made him something of a rock star at community halls.
The book is both a handbook and manifesto and, while it exposes poor practices, it also offers solutions and insists on a new way of viewing agriculture in the landscape.
Massy believes agriculture can be regenerative; it can help nature heal the environment, and if farmers adopt regenerative ways they will end up with more economically efficient farms, a healed landscape and a land that can help reverse climate change through carbon capture.
It’s a big call.
“When you write something you hope that it will have an impact, but in my most optimistic dreams I didn’t think it would have this response,” he tells The Deal. “It’s the luck of timing I suppose, but also I was articulating stuff that cuts to the matter of the heart and the mind. I think what that’s telling us is that organics and regenerative agriculture, and things like healthy foods and concerns over glyphosates, are bubbling up everywhere, and I tapped that.”
Massy arrives at this point from deep experience in farming, research and failure. He took over the family farm, Severn Park, in the Monaro district, when his father died and during the next 35 years made many of the mistakes that he exposes in his book. Then he decided to explore solutions. After writing the game-changing book Breaking the Sheep’s Back (University of Queensland Press, 2011), he embarked on a PhD in human ecology at the Australian National University and set out to find farmers who had found new solutions.
The result of his work reimagines agriculture in almost every way. For instance, he says livestock should be rotated regularly through small paddocks so their movement mimics the herd behaviour in wild Africa. He backs Keyline farming, which manages water through contours in the landscape to maximise and conserve rainfall. He outlines how soils can be nourished so weeds are minimised and chemicals such as glyphosate aren’t needed. He takes lessons from Aboriginal people, African farmers and Australian outliers and comes to a holistic view of agriculture.
A book on agriculture, spun off a PhD, doesn’t usually get reviewed in mainstream media, or attract international publishing deals (with Chelsea Green Publishing in the US) or invitations from government ministers, but the fact that Massy’s book hit such a chord points to its arrival at a pivotal time on the land.
Massy speaks to The Deal from Byron Bay, where he is having a break from a year of promoting his ideas and the work of managing his 2000ha farm through the worst drought in decades.
It’s hard to ignore the drought when talking about disruption on the farm. The eyes of Australians are once again on the wide, brown land, wondering whether farming can still be viable in a climate-changed era, whether things could have been done better.
“Drought is a disruptive force,” says Massy. “Lots of people say the eighties drought and the millennial drought were head crackers – that is, they’d change things forever. For my PhD, I looked at change after the eighties drought and found that in 60 per cent of cases it was such a shock that it opened up new ideas.
‘We don’t have rich soils or moist climates or government subsidies and all of that encourages innovation’
“It’s not something I want to talk about much at the moment but I’d hope this time we can learn from it, maybe do things differently. I made mistakes in the eighties drought and ended up more in debt and with land that was knocked around. But in front of this drought, ecological managers are managing better. We sold 60 per cent [of livestock] well before the worst because we had charts showing we had to sell in advance of it.”
Disruption works best when systems are under stress and the drought is putting such pressure on many farming communities. But while Massy is scathing about the industrial mindset he holds responsible for the destruction of fertile lands, he has confidence in the farming community to be open-minded in the face of adversity.
Australians, he says, have a great history of innovation in agriculture, in particular the permaculture planting methods and Keyline water systems. “Some pretty interesting stuff has been coming out of Australian farmers and most have gone worldwide,” he says. “That’s not surprising, because we don’t have rich soils or moist climates or government subsidies and all of that encourages innovation.”
Massy is not the first to suggest that Australia could be the home of agtech, in the same way that Silicon Valley is home to consumer technology and Israel is known for security technology. This is partly because Australia regularly faces the climatic conditions that the world will face in the future; it’s partly the independent and can-do mentality of farmers – the fact that there are fewer than 100,000 farmers and their farms are getting bigger.
It also helps that generational change is occurring on the land, reflected in the decline in the median age of farmers from 59 to 57 years of age.
But effective disruption needs more than ideas. It needs tools, and Massy says these are coming.
“There is a lot of new technology and methods that are using biological approaches to fertilisers, and technology for sowing crops; even soil monitoring technologies are starting to look for things like biological markers, DNA mixes and diversity,” he says. “And it’s an ongoing roll of innovation. Once people realise there’s this exciting space of regenerative agriculture and it leads to self-organising systems that are more ethical, it leads to other things. If you look at the innovation adoption curve we’re at the stage of the early adopters at the moment, and there’s still a gap between early adopters and what they call the early majority, but we’re getting there.’
In the past few years technology has been adopted rapidly across agriculture. Drones, soil monitoring, blockchain, GPS, computerised stock management systems and predictive tools have all arrived on the land. Rural innovation hubs have been set up and visiting venture capitalists now seek out agtech innovations.
‘If you look at the innovation adoption curve we’re at the stage of the early adopters at the moment’
The next step for implementing a new paradigm is education, and here Massy says he is encountering resistance. While soil and water scientists from around the world have sought his views, he says a group of senior scientists and educators have been unable to interest any university in a regenerative agriculture course. “We’re curious about that,” he says.
Surprisingly for a book that savages the use of chemicals on farms, there has been no public response from chemical companies and few public responses from scientists, who believe that chemicals such as glyphosate are safe.
“That doesn’t mean the critics are not there,” says Massy. “It’s just they’re not putting their heads up.”
So on the back of this disruptive idea, products are being developed (especially biological fertilisers), devices are being tweaked to look for different biological markers, data is being collected, networks are being formed and relationships made.
One relationship Massy is working on now is with Paul Hawken, the author of Drawdown (Penguin Australia, 2017), who writes that climate change can be reversed through many different methods, including refashioning agriculture so more land can act as a carbon sink.
But the biggest accelerator may well be money. Says Massy: “I’ve had some approaches from senior bankers, and they’re telling me there are superannuation funds, ethical investment funds and the like and they have billions to invest in this area. They are long-term thinkers and they’re seeing that there’s a future coming that will challenge things like food quality, nutrient densities, soil problems and climate. Then there are some small operators with private wealth who are thinking of either investing in regenerative farms or starting their own.”
Massy concedes he’s been too busy to think of the many ways to further propagate his ideas. Right now he’s a town hall campaigner, but his influence is growing as a network of scientists, educators, authors, bankers and, indeed, farmers gather around him and his ideas.
As a farmer, Massy knows the value of resilience. As a disrupter, he’s going to have to rely on it. His 600-page book might have been nurtured by his “empathy with nature” but the aftermath takes guts. As he sees it: “You do have to be tough, stick to it, have a bit of stubbornness, but I think any innovator has to have guts because anything that challenges the powerful takes a lot of guts.”
Call of the Reed Warbler by Charles Massy was published by University of Queensland Press in 2017
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