Beef 2018 Report

‘Our job is to get out of the way of mother nature’: Charles Massy

James Nason 15/06/2018

Charles Massy addresses an RCS Forum at Beef 2018 in Rockhampton last month. 

 

NSW farmer, scientist and author Charles Massy interviewed more than 150 farmers across Australia who practice regenerative agriculture, many of whose stories are recounted in his recently released book The Call of the Reed Warbler.

The book also documents Charles’ own self-described “mistake ridden journey” as a farmer, one that started with what he terms as the industrial agricultural paradigm of treating nature as the enemy before moving to ‘ecological literacy’ – in effect understanding how to read landscapes and simply how to “get out of mother nature’s way”.

This is not a story of locking up country but of farmers demonstrating how through learning to work with nature instead of against it, they have not only improved environmental outcomes, but more productive and profitable business outcomes as well.

When his father died at an early age, Charles, having completed a Bachelor of Science degree at ANU in Canberra, returned to take over the family Merino and cattle property near Cooma at just 22.

“If you want an expert on making mistakes I am the expert,” he told a room full of fellow livestock producers at an RCS-hosted forum at Beef 2018 in Rockhampton last month.

“I have set-stocked, over grazed country, watched it turn red in the 80s drought, watched it get washed away etc.

“And yet I was always keen on nature so I was at tension with myself.”

His story is one of self-deprecation rather than pulpit lecturing, a sharing of lessons learned from 40 years of closely observing the landscape as a farmer and a scientist, which included returning to ANU to complete a PHD in human ecology in 2009.

As a 22-year-old taking over the farm he said he sought the advice of other farmers and departmental experts, but after making mistakes he began to realise that his problem was one of “lanscape illiteracy”, in that he wasn’t able to read and understand and in turn effectively manage his own landscape.

He delved more deeply into history, and the land management role played by the first white settlers to Australia who came  from northern Europe, a very different and young land with post-glacial, humid soils ‘chock full of nutrients’.

“They hit this extraordinary and ancient landscape of ours, soils heavily leached over time, phosphorous in incredibly minute amounts, a landscape that over tens of millions of years had evolved remarkable ways of recycling scarce nutrients whether it is microbially under the soil or for energy and nutrients above the soil.

‘Europeans came with a different mind and in a very short time the landscape collapsed’

“So these Europeans came with a different mind and in a very short time the landscape collapsed.”

In contrast to the ‘organic mind’ of indigenous cultures, who saw themselves as inherently part of nature and its cycles, not separate from it, Europeans that arrived in Australia with a ‘mechanical mind’ shaped by the industrial revolution, through which they saw the earth as a resource for extracting for profit.

“It is a huge mind shift, and there was no empathy or understanding that came with that mind,” Mr Massy said. “The current industrial paradigm (is one in which) we see nature as the enemy to be dominated.”

It is only in the last 10 years, he says, that thousands of scientists around the world have put together a more complete picture of the earth’s systems and how they interact.

Industrial agriculture has been implicated in destabilising seven of those eight systems.

But counter to that is significant evidence that regenerative agriculture offers the best of all solutions to turn around those Anthropocene problems.

A key message was that “you can’t fool around and interfere with one cycle without all the other ones being destabilised”.

Turning it around involves increasing ground cover and nutrient rich shrubs to get “as many solar panels on our landscape for as long as we can, to pass those sugars into the soil to build the carbon to feed the bugs and to bury those long-term carbon polymers”.

He offered several case studies to demonstrate how quickly things can be turned around – examples of country that was previously bare and flint-hard after over a century of set stocking transformed in 10 years to regenerated grassland with soft and absorbent soils, a greater variety of shrubs “which have thousands of additional nutrients in them”, collectively maximising the ‘solar panels’ on the landscape.

“Once you drive the solar you get a deeper-rooted variety of plants, more air pockets, more active soil biology, and it leads to an enormous increase in water holding,” he explained.

Several pictures demonstrated the “fence line effect”, one showing the result of three inches of rain in two hours on two neighbouring paddocks – on the set-stocked paddock the water is pouring off, on the holistically managed paddock it is all being absorbed into the soil.

“If you think about it, here we are on the driest continent on earth, where we often get hard rainfalls, and in 24 hours one neighbour triples his effective rainfall.

“It is all pretty profound stuff.”

Mr Massy said these results have been achieved in “incredibly tough” seven to ten-inch rainfall areas in Australia and South Africa and Mexico, where graziers have been able to triple their production essentially by increasing groundcover and shrubs.

One farm revegetated and measured by an ex-CSIRO scientist near Canberra for the past 30 years has been shown to have sequestered 11 times more soil carbon than its total farmed emissions in that period, and has moved soil carbon levels from one to four percent in the same time.

“A lot of the research now into these cycles shows that if we can just put one percent more carbon into the soil we can store an extra more than 140,000 litres of water per hectare just by doing it.”

Mr Massy said that with returning to scientific study after 30 years came an understanding of complex adaptive systems – earth systems, water catchments, even the world wide web – which if destabilised have a capacity because of their complexity to adjust and ‘self-organise’ back to health.

“This concept of self-organisation in natural systems and even the world wide web have an in-built capacity if they’re destabilised or if there is a new factor such as a drought or change in management, to reorganise if allowed to reorganise back to health and resilience.

“And to me that is an extraordinary new concept.

‘I keep meeting these leading regenerative farmers who say ‘my job is to get out of the way of mother nature’

“I keep meeting these leading regenerative farmers who say ‘my job is to get out of the way of mother nature’.

“I have thought have about that and my job is to let natural systems self-organise back to a better state, and I think that is an extremely exciting concept.”

Mr Massy said humans evolved on the savannah eating meat and food produced from a nutrient rich landscape, but nutrient levels in modern cereals, fruits and vegetables had crashed, and chemicals such as glyphosate had infiltrated food, water and soils.

“We evolved to have a diversity of nutrients, where is all the modern disease coming from, particularly the immune stuff? These are the big factors,” he said.

“Hippocrates 2500 years ago said “let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.

“…There is a lot stuff now coming out to show (Glyphosate) is probably the most dangerous chemical in our environment… personally I think this is bigger than tobacco”.

Mr Massy said he interviewed over 150 regenerative farmers across Australia to understand why they had undertaken a paradigm shift from traditional farming to regenerative farming. Their stories are shared in his book “the Call of the Reed Warbler” – the title a reference to the return of the native bird to his property after a long absence.

Mr Massy said the urgent challenge is to “go beyond” sustainability.

“I use that word because I think the word sustainable is a bit passé, to me it means marking time, whereas regenerative means open ended improvement, and the only way as I see it, the response is to get ecological literacy.

“We have destabilised the systems through industrial agriculture but regenerative agriculture more than anything else going has the potential to start turning around those Anthropocene problems.

“That is an extraordinary and powerful and exciting thing I would have thought.”

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Comments

  1. Dean Tavanetz, 28/05/2021

    Took a holistic management course in 2000, sadly regenerative ag is not growing in this province, instead it continues to accelerate in the opposite direction,native prairie the most endangered eco system in the world still being lost at an alarming rate, aspen parkland being destroyed even faster, 2.4 million acres of wetlands lost and still draining, salinity over millions of acres and spreading, talk about a collapsed landscape we are living it, but supposedly we are feeding the world??

  2. Rosslyn de Souza, 03/01/2020

    I have gained so much inspiration and hope from reading Bruce Pasco’s DARK EMU and now C Massey’s Call of the Reed Warbler. Can’t put it down – recommended it , bought copies for my family for Christmas. Might the current devastating fires across all states in Australia offer a unique opportunity to initiate regenerative farming en mass? The ‘primary shock the final trigger’ as experienced by David Marsh (pg 408) may be the way forward through the broken-ness of fire devastation over poisoned land.
    I am hopeful that the advocates of regenerative farming will seize the day and lead the way out of the wilderness. Please pass on my message to Messrs Pasco and Massey. Rosslyn de Souza

  3. Mora Main, 15/05/2019

    If possible I would love to visit Charlie Massy’s property near Cooma. I’m a frequent visitor to Jindabyne and know this country. Is there some way of contacting Mr Massy to arrange a very casual visit, or does he run tours of the property?

  4. Brad Bellinger, 18/06/2018

    Have just started the book sent to me by a friend. Fascinating reading .Congratulations Charles Massey.I reference The Australian Merino and Breaking The Sheep’s Back regularly, this book will be the same. Putting in strainer assembly’s today thinking about what I have already read I’m seeing the farm in a different light.

  5. Joe McGrath, 18/06/2018

    How many people did our great native land and ecosystem feed before 1788? Modern agriculture is a great thing. Not perfect, but endeavouring to be so.

    • John Goudge, 27/09/2019

      Regenerative Agricultire is a more sophisticated than the brute force, chemical heavy industrial again. Rather than bludgening the land, it seeks to use nature to promote crops and soil health

  6. Paul Franks, 18/06/2018

    I think Deborah you are making the mistake of thinking all of Australia is like the land you are used to seeing.

    Here in Central Queensland some varieties of buffel grass are a wonder grass that has created huge wealth for Australia. You just have to look at how cattle on coastal Queensland native pastures do, compared to cattle off the coast that live off buffel grass country.

    The tropical grasslands organisation did lots of work over decades on grasslands. It seems a lot of that work is now ignored in favour of more politically correct work by modern university graduates.

    https://www.tropicalgrasslands.asn.au/

  7. Deborah Newell, 17/06/2018

    In 2002 when doing my Masters in Environmental Management in the Field of Sustainable Agriculture I wrote a piece noting that the British arrived in Australia as if going on a picnic – they brought their food with them. The issue extends to their concept of pasturelands which they thought should be green swathes not lumps and clumps of grasses, shrubs and various forbs. So our incredibly clever and well-adapted grassland communities were replaced by mono-culturing species from South Africa, South America and even the green grasses of the UK. That our deep-rooted, drought, flood, saline resilient native grasses happily co-existed with Australia’s own legumes, woody but nutritious shrubs as well as provide food and refuge to so many animal species was not even considered as our extensive grass lands were made to play host to these scientifically sponsored imports – albeit with the help of foreign fertilisers that then destroyed unknown soil biota. So, before Australia disappears under a blanket of Buffel Grass (which delivers virtually no flavour to grazed meats) can scientists please put some research effort to help our original grassland species. The money was there for the imports – how about some money for the originals?

    • John Taylor, 28/09/2020

      look at the nutriment values of both native mixed pasture and mixed exotic/native pastures, mass or bulk produced etc. I consider Lucerne a rich mans weed. But Australian story featuring Charles Massey had a Mrs Simpson suggesting his formula can’t be implemented in some cropping situations, I hope she understands that it is possible by simple means. Weed control through heavy mulch which will slowly break down in time for planting, look at the side of the road sometimes and not always into the paddock!

  8. Loretta Carroll, 16/06/2018

    Looking forward to hearing Charles Massy in Wodonga at the Nutrisoils Annual event on the 28th June. There is much to learn in agriculture and especially our soils and I have Call of the Weed Warbler on my kitchen table and it is a very good read.

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