Down the Dirt Roads

by Rachael Treasure

  I was originally going to call the pup Cassie after the township of Casterton, but at the last minute I changed my mind. Ian had been such a champion, giving me the idea to write a novel about Jack Gleeson and cheering my efforts on as a mum, dog woman and writer, that I named the pup Connie – short for O’Connell. The next step for Ian and me is to have a film producer see the potential in The Stockmen as a movie. We want to make Jack Gleeson and the story of the kelpie breed part of our nation’s psyche and what better way than to put the story on the big screen!

  A few days after Ian’s school, when the kids went to visit their rellies in Gippsland with their dad, my old mate George Pickles, who is a stock contractor, offered me a day’s work drenching sheep so I could give the dogs a bit of a go and reconnect with my favourite place on earth – the stockyards. Rousie did me proud, and as we drenched nearly 2500 sheep on a back road near Hamilton I was in seventh heaven. George did me proud too. Instead of a bustling noisy day, we worked steadily and calmly in relative silence, apart from the air compressor for the drenching machine. The day flowed. The sheep flowed. My heart healed a little more.

  As we hoisted the stock contractor’s gear onto the back of his truck and loaded the dogs, George gave me one hundred bucks. It was the best hundred bucks I’d ever earned.

  My son is bursting at the seams to breed kelpies and border collies and train them like his mum did when she had a farm. We talk about it each day, and each day we get closer to our wishes being fulfilled. I know that the divinity of a dog that will be the leverage to get us three back onto a farm.

  Picture a road that hurtles you along like a theme park ride. It has a narrow blacktop strip and faded curving double white lines that twist like ribbons in the wind. It dips and turns, spiralling up, falling away, winding up again through deep green tunnels where sunlight strobes through bushland in a maddening flicker. Above you there’s the surprise of towering steep-sided cliffs whizzing past, and below, just a couple of metres away from spinning wheels, is a sheer bush-covered drop that is treacherous enough to turn your stomach just glimpsing it. A sudden gap in the bush reveals a view to the most glorious waters that offer up many Tasmanian moods, depending on the day – slate-grey seas or blues borrowed from the tropics – but each time it is breathtaking.

  We would tackle this road when visiting my Auntie Susie and Uncle Colin on their mixed-enterprise farm in Tasmania’s north-east, near the tiny town of St Marys. At the time they lived at the top of that mountain climb along a much more subdued, flat, pale dirt road, which ended at an eagle-nest cliff face. Here my mum’s sister Suze and her husband Col milked an array of dairy cows of varying breeds but mostly old-style shorthorn, and in a paddock they fattened pigs, who bedded down inside a straw-filled shed at night. On the river-flat paddocks, they ran a few beef cattle and some coarse-wool sheep. Both of them tended a farm vegie garden that was like an Eden to a child in its beauty and bounty, with finger-staining strawberries and crunching green peas. The farmhouse was always alive with kids and cooking and the back step busy with cast-off boots, poddy lambs, cream cans and persistent cats. It truly was the best foundation that immersed me in a multi-enterprise farm business, made up of life and love. Because of it I’ve never let go of that dream to create a farmscape that supported both ecology and economy.

  Even as a keen, but wild, agricultural college student at Orange in New South Wales when we visited farms for our ‘case studies’, I would view them through the lens of my formative years. Our college was showing us the latest and greatest agriculture on offer as we headed into the 1990s. Impressive though the farms were, I still felt uncomfortable amidst state-of-the-art large commercial piggeries, laser-levelled rice and cotton fields and the huge battery farm chicken sheds. This larger, more intensive style of mono-cropping and industrial single-species meat production sat at odds in my gut. I could see that while the fellas loved the big machines, big inputs and computerisation, and we were taught about futures and grain trading, along with global economics and the importance of deals with China, I always thought that bigger was not always better. To me, local trade and local community support made more sense . . . even though it may have made less cents. This industrial style of system left many questions unanswered for me. There was little room for nature and her cycles, particularly in breeding and reproduction of farm animals. In the modern methods we studied at college, man seemed to tamper with everything and the aim was ‘better genetics’ and ‘increased production’, not healthier food. At first I thought maybe I was a ‘backward Tasmanian’, but during the almost three decades since my rural college days, I’ve seen agriculture morph into an unrecognisable industry, and our population has never been sicker or more obese. I believe it’s because we are getting out of balance with our food systems. There is a chronic absence of agricultural understanding from our political leaders and educational institutions, and increasingly our society is blinded by science that supports corporate agriculture and masculinised economics. Mankind is now mass-producing product for markets based on profits, instead of humankind growing food for people based on love and need.

  These days, Susie and Colin’s small multi-layered family farm may be considered ‘quaint’ by some, but as a Tasmanian I would describe my uncle and aunt’s farm system as ‘balanced’, and that in turn generated recipes for good health for all those who ate the food from it. Their lives were rich beyond measure from the pure food, landscape and simplicity by which they lived. Even though their work was constant, it wasn’t solely about financial gains and status. There always seemed time in summer for family, whether it was waterskiing on the coast with friends, kayaking on the river, bushwalking to stunning views on mountain tops or bike riding through national parks for their four kids. In winter there was skiing, or bonfires. Sometimes I got to tag along, and those were my happiest childhood days. Adventures to town occurred occasionally for my cousins with a load of livestock to sell or a ram to cart home in the back of the stock crate. The long road along the valley to the selling centres meant the farm was relatively isolated, and a lot of their customers would buy produce direct from the farm, including homespun wool that both my aunt and uncle still spin on wheels, fireside. Colin’s wheel is electric and Susie’s has the old-style foot treadle. That simple vignette sums up the difference between the styles of men and women perfectly when it comes to farming! When women are absent from farming systems, it’s all electric. That’s why, I believe, balance between old and new, masculine and feminine, needs to be returned to our agricultural landscape.

  As I sat witness to the changes in farming, I began to think maybe I was becoming idealistic . . . a woman hankering for ‘the good old days’, but during one of my meanderings on the internet, trying to find a way to make the most of the twenty acres I’d moved onto, I came across a family in Virginia, America, called the Salatins from Polyface Farms. What I discovered was a new movement gaining momentum over there, and it seemed like exactly what I was hankering for. I was so elated when I saw the YouTube clips of Joel Salatin that I signed up immediately to go and hear him speak. Of all the places . . . he was coming to my home state of Tasmania! The island at the arse-end of the world. It felt like it was ‘meant to be’.

  Seated in the audience next to my cousin Claire, Susie and Colin’s youngest, we listened to Joel, his son Daniel and daughter-in-law Sheri speak about their booming business on Polyface Farm . . . ‘Poly’ meaning ‘many’. It was refreshing to be hearing the story of a farm made up of not just one crusty old farmer in a field but many faces, young and old, male and female. The increasingly famous Salatins were leading the charge in meeting the demands of more and more consumers seeking food grown with ecological integrity. Thanks to new thought leader and best-selling author Michael Pollan, Polyface Farm received wide exposure via his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Since then, Joel Salatin has been dished up to mainstream media and has gone from being a relatively unknown visionary pig farmer to a Time magazine cover boy.r />
  On hearing Joel speak, I suddenly realised I didn’t need my 2000 acres to be a farmer. He told us of a thriving flower business on just a quarter of an acre. Joel offered example after example of people thinking outside the square and bringing innovation to their land and their lives. My heart bloomed that day. The innovation he spoke of spurred me on more than ever to aim for a farming life again . . . on my terms . . . or should I say, on Mother Nature’s terms. What Joel and his family have created on Polyface Farm is far from a nostalgic step backwards to the ‘good old days’. Instead it’s a whole new movement, one that attracts hundreds of people seeking internships on Polyface each year or, as Joel calls them, ‘young stewards of the land’, as they search for a way forward into a new wave of food production. Pure enthusiasm can be felt just being in the presence of Joel and his family.

  The Salatins are very progressive, using technology for social media, marketing and management, yet they are stringent in their respect of Mother Nature’s processes. Because of the spray-free food that is grown with faith and love, their business is in a rapid growth phase, with about 5000 health-hungry families buying directly from them. Not only are diverse species of animals run on the farm, but the way the animals are run enhances the soil and ecology in vertically stacked, compatible enterprises. Also they are inspiring a grassroots global revolution of value-adding and direct selling to customers . . . one that has seen Joel tangle with the red tape of bureaucracy. He’s amusing and compelling when he speaks of the top-heavy corruption in corporate food systems that we are now suffering from and experience each time we shop for untampered food or even sip our water.

  Joel rejects the notion that farmers need to concern themselves with the problem of feeding six billion people on the planet soon. He reckons a farmer only needs to wake up, get out of bed and love what they do, then focus on feeding their local village. It sounds simplistic, but Joel is right. If we ate in season, bought local from farmers who farm regeneratively, and did away with the giant companies who feed us with crap masquerading as food, then I believe the world would eventually right itself.

  During my childhood my brother and I helped feed our local village. We would pedal about our neighbourhood selling surplus vegetables that we’d cultivated on the Runnymede farm, making not only a tidy profit to spend at the shop – in my case on cricket and horse magazines – but also providing our neighbours with fresh, nutritious food. One older lonely widow also seemed to like visits from cheerfully grubby kids on bikes, and many times we were given the additional bonus of a Tic Toc biscuit.

  It’s only relatively recently that we Tasmanians have been subjected to corporate farming. I’m witness to our land and rural enterprises being sold to offshore buyers. Family farms have been moved aside due to the supermarket stranglehold on vegetable, grain, meat, fish and milk production, and those farmers who do remain are generally using the high-input systems of fertiliser, pesticides and herbicides that are destroying not just the land but their businesses.

  Chatting to Joel during a break at his seminar, I soon found his energy was contagious. His positivity and wonder about farming was to a degree evangelical, but I came away with the flame of my love for farming rekindled, my heart healed a little more and hope flooded my being. Here was a farmer – a male – farming with a seven-point compass that included the four earthly directions, but also the other three directions of above, below and within. He was a man of faith. During my talk with him, I also discovered him to be a man, a husband and a father who nurtured his ‘female’ land, along with his wife, his children and his mother. A noble man with a sense of humour and a quick smile. In his book, Fields of Farmers, Joel explains:

  The miracle of life, whether it’s a chick hatching, cow calving, or seed sprouting, draws us irresistibly to the wonder of our nest. That so many people think this visceral relationship with life’s daily wonders is not attractive or appropriate for technologically advanced sophisticates indicates a profound hubris and lack of understanding. We are all utterly and completely dependent on soil, honeybees, raindrops, sunlight, fungi and bacteria. Neither the greatest scientific discovery nor the highest gain on Wall Street compares to the importance of a functioning carbon cycle or dancing earthworms.

  Reading Joel’s words, I recalled the sun-drenched or rain-sheened paddocks at St Marys, and the farm my uncle and aunt cared for, along with their kids. I became a novelist for the exact reason that Joel expressed. So often farming and the people in it are belittled, simplified, brushed aside as less important. So often within our industry we talk everything down into doom and gloom and depression. I studied agricultural business and communication so I could weave the two together and not just showcase our contemporary industry and its richness, but also to entice young people into a career there. Holistic agriculture has been absent from our educational institutions for far too long, yet farming is a life-affirming vocation. With innovation and vibrant thinking and appreciation, farming can be profitable, emotionally rewarding and a place for abundant living on all levels. It is the foundation of a healthy life for everyone . . . from the farmer through to the customer.

  As I stood amidst the crowd of people at the Salatin event, I saw that thoughts are contagious, and the Salatins had thoughts that were worth catching. On that day, I caught the new wave of farming belief – that we can all prosper in systems like Polyface Farm. ‘All’, including everyone from men and women, to children and microbes.

  In a smoky room in a restaurant called Carnivores in Nairobi, Africa, a cluster of waiters came to stand by me and surprised me by singing ‘Happy Birthday’ in rich, melodic accents. I was turning twenty-five and I’d just experienced a bizarre meat-heavy meal, sliced off giant skewers directly onto the plate.

  ‘Crocodile, madam?’ the waiter had asked. Then later, ‘Antelope?’ It was a vegetarian’s and animal-lover’s nightmare but I found the experience a once-in-a-lifetime Kenyan moment. Touring Africa had challenged me on many levels, but I didn’t realise just how much until after I returned home. It was then I discovered for the first time the tangible link between good food, good thoughts and good health. My almost year-long backpacking trip that took me to twenty-seven countries around the world set me on another long journey – one of illness.

  I found myself once again up on top of the sheer mountains near St Marys, Tasmania, travelling with my Auntie Susie. She was taking me to a little village of Falmouth to go see the vet. After Africa I was like a car with a flat battery and just couldn’t start. No doctor could pinpoint the cause of my illness and after months of being so crook I couldn’t work, my Auntie Susie intervened with Tim McManus, a former Department of Primary Industries veterinary officer. Going to stay with him and his gracious, always grinning wife Elaine was a last-ditch effort in finding out what was keeping me so ill. Tim knew exactly what to look for, and led us to a South African pathologist who was working in Hobart, and was well familiar with water-borne parasites and other nasties offered up in Africa. It turned out that my blistered hands after rafting the giant, wild rapids of the Zambezi River in Zimbabwe is not good for one’s health! I had contracted bilharzia, a type of blood fluke picked up in warm waters that burrow into your skin and then inhabit your bloodstream and liver. Erk! Once I was treated – ironically and hilariously with the same treatment found in dog wormers – I wound up with chronic fatigue. Again it was the vet, Tim, and Auntie Susie who picked me up and set me on the road to recovery with wonderful recipes for restoration.

  A fresh-food diet, exercise and a busy mind were what the vet ordered. At the time, my auntie and uncle had moved out of their St Marys property to make way for their children, all keen on farming. They were now living in a basic cabin on a cheap bit of dirt they called Pebble Plain and were gradually converting it to a grazing property. I spent days on my aunt’s fledgling farm in the hills above the Fingal Valley, eating the food they grew. Then I would ride that wild roller-coaster road down to the sea, where I would walk the beache
s and coastal dunes and boulders with Tim, studying the world around me with his scientific knowledge feeding my mind. I’d breathe in the blast of fresh sea air and forget my worries. On the final day of my boot camp to wellness Tim made me climb a shale mountain called St Patrick’s Head that divides those wild roads in two. It was a mental mountain climb as much as a physical one.

  After that, my life and my body moved on. Tim cured me with an apple a day and barley sugars in my pocket, along with good old-fashioned outdoor rambling and enquiry into the environment around me. Auntie Susie kept me busy too, whether it was restoring old furniture, plonking me on my old faithful pony Tristan, or penning up sheep. They fed me on home-hunted roo from animals who knew no stress and from a garden based on Bill Mollison’s permaculture principles. The brush-tailed possums were so high in population then, Uncle Colin had created a little island in the dam outside their house. They had a possum-proof bridge and gate to it. Because of this ingenious setup and the moist soils on the island, they had vegies aplenty, and with such good food, my body soon found its compass to wellness.

  I was not surprised a few years later when as a rural journalist, still carrying barley sugars in my camera bag as a back-up for flat spots of energy, I came across a famous lecture by a man named Joel D. Wallach. A farm boy from the USA, Joel watched his father treat his livestock cheaply with good nutrition. Calling the vet for drugs was too expensive, so his farming father kept his animals healthy through food and additives of minerals. I pictured all the heavy mineral blocks I’d set down in my time, with the sheep flooding to them with as much excitement as if they were headed to a footy final.