John Larsen, farmer
Neighbours call him the ‘Miracle Farmer’, whose crops glow green while others wilt in drought. What is John Larsen’s secret?
John Larsen’s neighbours call him the “Miracle Farmer”. It’s not the first time the peanut and wheat producers of Kingaroy have interpreted the inexplicable as divine. Belief in miracles is a by-product of looking up so long at an empty blue sky, praying for raindrops and lucky breaks. Larsen’s miracle, they say, is the colour and texture of his elevated red volcanic soil contours; how – year in, year out – his peanut and wheat crops glow a vivid green when the rest of Kingaroy is in the grip of drought or frost. The miracle, others reckon, is the 81-year-old’s field stamina – or the way he attracts more rain to his 240ha of fertile land five minutes outside Kingaroy, in Queensland’s South Burnett region, because he prays longer than everybody else every Sunday at St John’s Lutheran Church opposite Big W in town.
One neighbour, John Dalton, the 59-year-old assistant principal at Saint Mary’s Catholic College, Kingaroy, was recently driving past Larsen’s property at West Coolabunia Road when a farmer friend in his passenger seat stared out of her window, mesmerised. “Johnny Larsen’s contours are a work of art,” she exclaimed.
Good contour farming lines on sloping properties like Larsen’s create water breaks that prevent rainfall run-off, and therefore soil erosion. Dalton was struck in that moment by the notion of Larsen’s farm as an ever-changing artistic landscape. “Johnny Larsen’s crops are framed by each contour,” he says. “But these are not any old frames, these are Johnny Larsen’s frames. The ends of them are bent so the water runs out and the silt doesn’t accumulate.
“The whole canvas changes with the rain. You only have to get a shower of rain on his dirt and it goes five layers deep. His wheat in the middle of winter is bright green. When everything is frosted and ugly and dry, there’s John Larsen’s wheat as green as can be. The colours are always changing. It’s this transforming thing, this timeless thing. It’s more than a work of art.”
Dalton did some sums in his head in that moment in his car. He’s lived next door to Larsen for 33 years. He figured he must drive past his farm twice a day, at least 300 days a year. He figured he has gazed out his car window at least 20,000 times at those red soil fields.
“You keep looking at the same work of art, it does something to you,” Dalton says. “They say we’re always influencing the land, but sometimes it works backwards. Sometimes it’s the land that is changing you.”
Every time he drives past Larsen’s farm, Dalton falls a little bit more in love with Kingaroy and grows a little bit more intrigued by his mysterious neighbour. “Has he taken you up the top of the farm?” he asks. “Up to the top where the antennas are? Just as you enter that paddock up there, a bloody great pile of rocks.”
This, he says, is where the great secret of Larsen’s success lies. Some great meaning to the man’s life is hidden up there on that hill inside a vast pile of old rocks. “There are thousands of them,” Dalton says. “It’s a mountain of rocks. It represents something, that pile of rocks.”
It represents the miracle, he says. This is the real miracle of the Miracle Farmer. A bloody great pile of rocks.
Audrey Larsen hangs a basket of her husband John’s blue flannel farming shirts on the outer wire of a Hills Hoist behind the small white wood homestead they moved into in 1962, the year of their marriage. She hangs the clothes largely with her right hand because her left is riddled with painful carpal tunnel syndrome. “I left it too long before I went and got somethin’ done about it,” she says.
Larsen’s work shirts and trousers are tinged the colour of the red dirt he ploughs and ponders from sun-up to sun-down, six and sometimes seven days a week. Around the clothesline is a manicured rose garden. A yard leads to a tractor shed and a dirt road meanders up a gentle slope to the acres of wheat and peanuts, soya beans and corn.
Larsen farms in white and blue Dunlop Volley sneakers and there are six pairs of them covered in red dust on a shoe rack near the homestead’s back door. The shoes are lightweight and cheap. One of their owner’s favourite tennis players, Ken Rosewall, wore Volleys in his playing days and that gives Larsen an extra spring in his step on the longer weeding days.
He is one of 304,200 Australians who work in the farming sector, producing 93 per cent of the country’s food supply. His neighbour, Dalton, once crunched the numbers on Larsen’s farming career and estimated that over 65 years of a working life he has grown at least $23 million worth of produce on this land, translating to $69 million worth of food at the supermarket.
Larsen was born on June 11, 1937. The family has kept meticulous weather journals for almost a century and he remembers flicking through the pages on 1937 and discovering that his birth coincided with one of the toughest dry stretches – 1935, 1936, 1937 – in Kingaroy history. “Three crook years in a row,” he says.
He was raised on a farm just a short walk down the road. This farm at West Coolabunia Road was bought by his father, Harold, and mother, Agnes, in 1948 for roughly $16,000. Harold worked long hours cutting and threshing peanuts through the crook years, and Larsen remembers him coming into the homestead at sundown and retreating immediately to his bedroom, where he lay for hours to ease the throbbing headaches that plagued his working life. He wouldn’t eat a meal on those nights.
Larsen wonders sometimes how much time his dad spent in that bedroom fighting the headaches, and how much time he spent flat out worrying and flat out praying. Because the land is a brutal thing that brings as many families together as it breaks apart. The land takes the spirits of men and rag-dolls them; bends them, pulls them down, shoots them up, snaps them in two, swallows them whole. Some days a man just wants to stay in his bedroom. He doesn’t want to see the sun. He doesn’t even want to see the rain.
In the farm’s homestead, Audrey prepares a pot of tea and lays out some ginger biscuits for morning tea. A calendar on the living room wall hangs above a bowl of home-grown oranges that are better for juicing than eating. There’s an old stove, and old bottles of sauce and Saxa salt on the benchtop. Bright, warm yellow light beams through the kitchen windows. Everywhere there are envelopes bearing Larsen’s scribbled sums.
“All the little sums he’s always working out,” says Dalton. “He’s working out ratios for sprays, crop yields. He possesses so much mechanical knowledge. You’ve got soil science, you’ve got crop genetics. You’ve got to have an understanding of commodity prices. You just keep going through all the skill sets required to be John Larsen. You need to understand weather. You need to understand plant genetics. You need to understand the local climate idiosyncrasies that we get here in Kingaroy: late frost, dry patches. You need to understand, chemically, so much about the many different fertilisers. Then you think of all the resistance he gets, the financial things like commodity prices and interest rates. Will I buy a new tractor this year? What do I invest in for this particular season? He’s got all this going on in his head, but he has to be able to get up and put all those things to the side and look at his farm clearly, day after day.”
He has to get up and walk out of the bedroom.
Her name was Beris Jorgensen. She was in John Larsen’s class at Sunday school when he was 11 years old. Beris was a couple of years younger than him. She was a sweet kid, bright as the Kingaroy sun.
One day the Sunday school teacher asked the kids if anyone wanted to sing a song for the class. Beris put up her hand. “I’d like to sing I Am Jesus, Little Lamb,” she said.
“And why do you want to sing that?” the teacher asked her.
“I’m gonna have an operation tomorrow,” said Beris, who was going to hospital to have her tonsils removed.
John always liked Beris. She was fun to be around and he was mesmerised by the way she sang that song with all her heart.
And when my short life is ended
By His angel host attended
He shall fold me to His breast
There within His arms to rest.
John came home from school the next day to be told Beris was dead. “Some kind of infection, I think,” he says, nursing a cup of long-cold tea. He scratches his chin. “Waddya make of that?” he asks, happy for the question to go unanswered. “I reckon she had some inkling something was gonna go wrong.”
These are the things Larsen thinks about when he’s weeding and building and shaping the crimson contours of his farm. And if he’s thinking about Beris Jorgensen while he’s building a contour, then maybe she ends up somehow being a part of that contour. And if that’s the case, then maybe all 240ha of his farm are filled with the memories of the ones he’s known and loved, and the ones he’s lost, because they’re all he thinks about out there when his hands are a foot deep in that rich soil.
He thinks about Audrey, the woman smiling in the black and white wedding photograph in the lounge room off the kitchen. “Those big blue eyes,” he says. He remembers when things were getting serious with her one day in town. “Where do you live?” John asked her.
“Well, you better take me home and find out,” she answered.
The house is as old as their love and the love grew like the farm. “You build a shed and you say, ‘How am I going to fill this big shed up?’” Larsen says. “But time goes on and the shed gets too small. It gets filled up with all these little things and you suddenly have no room.”
The family grew like that, too. They decided to have a child and then they had twin girls, Sandra and Ros. Two more kids followed, Ross and Karen, and suddenly there was no more room left in the homestead.
Sandra’s a physiotherapist, Ros is a dentist, Karen works in tourism and Ross is a town planner. Larsen hoped Ross might take over the family farm but he chose a different path.
“Maybe I never gave him enough encouragement,” Larsen says. “He doesn’t mind work at all, but I don’t think he would have liked the hours. I did offer him a farm if he wanted to keep farming, but I think when his own family came along he realised that the family time is pretty important.”
Larsen wonders sometimes if his son felt that way because there were times when he would have wanted his own dad around more.
“I never realised the value of time with the kids until later on,” Larsen says. “We were flat biscuit for a long time until things got more mechanised on the farm. We worked hard. Audrey was doing the lot with the kids and I had to concentrate on the farm. That’s the way it goes.”
He remembers a thing Ros told him once. She was talking about what was possibly her single favourite moment with her father. For all money Larsen would have thought that moment would have occurred somewhere on the farm, somewhere up on the top slope at sunset, or maybe running around the giant crows ash tree in the front yard, or rattling along on an old workhorse tractor. But Ros mentioned a trip one year when the crops were not quite ready to harvest and the whole family ducked away from the farm for a two-week trip to Hervey Bay, 200km north on the Fraser Coast. Her favourite moment was when her father sat down to build a sandcastle with her.
“It made me nearly cry,” he says, and he cries fully here in the telling.
Larsen wears a green John Deere hat when he’sworking the soil. It sits atop folded sheets of paper towelling that he places on his scalp to absorb the sweat. “Leave it better than ya found it,” he says, summarising his views on land management as he paces into a wheat field in one of the middle paddocks.
“When you’re in for the long haul you become personally accountable for that land,” John Dalton says. “He’s called the Miracle Farmer because of his yields. He’s not getting those yields with bloody drones and computers. His crops are always better than everyone else’s because he has an X-factor. He always seems to know his land.”
Larsen feeds the soil pig manure and lime, minimises the use of chemicals. He abhors weeds but he still removes them with a handheld hoe rather than spray. “He believes that’s more efficient,” says Dalton. “If you’re not John Larsen and you have acres of weed you could never do it by hand. But he’s put the time in over years and years to suppress the weed and he can do it organically, and that’s going out there with a bloody hoe. He has arrived at a formula for farming that is unique to him, and it is quite simple but it is so effective.”
Sometimes Larsen calls on God. He’s always specific in his prayers. Most farmers say rain’s good anytime, but a peanut farmer needs the sun sometimes more than anything else to dry the peanuts: “I don’t want to take any rain away from the O’Sullivans or the Tessmans or anyone else in the region, God, but could you just hold off on the rain on my farm for now?”
Larsen drives his ute up to the farm’s top paddock where the farm antennas are, and also the miracle pile of brown rocks. Rocks in their thousands, some the size of basketballs, others the size of tennis balls. The rocks form a kind of strange out-of-place pyramid, like something created by a contemporary artist or a visiting resident of Jupiter.
The miracle, of course, is the effort in the man. Every time Larsen’s plough blades or header blades catch on a field rock he stops his tractor, climbs down from his seat, laboriously digs up the offending rock and lugs it up to the top paddock to add it to the rock mountain. There are rocks in this pile that he dug up when Neil Armstrong was about to walk on the moon. There are rocks he dug up during the dismissal of the Whitlam government. There are rocks he dug up when his twin girls were born, when his grandkids were born. The pile represents his life as an adult.
“He’s the ant building the ant’s nest over years and years,” says Dalton. “Just consider the work involved in that pile of rocks. You can only do that if you love your land.”
For the past decade, various representatives from resource companies have visited the farm to tell John and Audrey about the benefits the Kingaroy region would receive from proposed underground coal gasification plants and open-cut coal mines. A mining representative once told Larsen that when they were finished with his land it would be left in better condition than when they found it.
He swallowed this statement as an insult. “Better than how I’ve cared for it?” he pondered. And he wanted to explain to the rep exactly what the land means to him, that this 240ha is, in fact, an extension of himself. He believes the land, like him, was made by God, so the land and Larsen are one and the same.
“You know when you see someone who does something that’s difficult for an extended period of time?” says Dalton. “You have to be in a particular mental state to do it. It’s a state of flow. There is an intrinsic belief that enables him to do it. A person like John Larsen can’t do what he does unless what he is doing is in complete agreement with his spiritual beliefs. He is physically sustained by the work he does, but he cannot do it without believing in the true intrinsic worth of being a farmer. Producing food.”
Just the other day Dalton found himself slowing again along West Coolabunia Road to gaze out at the figure moving along the endless wheat fields. It was 6pm and the sky was drizzling and Larsen was still out in that field, working. He was sitting on his old tractor, the one with no roof, and his John Deere hat and blue flannel shirt weren’t stopping him getting soaked. Dalton wondered in that moment if it was this land that was the transforming and transformative work of art he’s been watching all these years, or if the work of art was, in fact, John Larsen himself.
“You tough ol’ bastard,” Dalton said to himself. “You are a true believer.”
Next week: a policeman’s lot