Down the Dirt Roads

by Rachael Treasure

  Possums and wallabies were being massacred by their thousands as 1080 poison-baited carrots were cast about the landscape to take pressure off recently planted genetically enhanced trees. I couldn’t even run my kelpies and collies in the crisp morning dawn without worrying they’d eat a carcass of some poor thick-furred creature that had managed to squeeze through the fence to the sanctuary of our bush runs, only to die in agony, laced with deadly poisons. We foreshadow the devastation that will certainly come when fires take hold of the plantations, now seven years on and as tall as two-storey buildings, and as neglected as derelict housing-commission suburbs since the tree companies went bust and pulled out all their workers.

  On the television in my lounge room, which thankfully faced away from the plantations, I’d catch advertising on the benefits of tree growing and how ‘green’ a person could be by investing their money there. It was not so much rage I felt as I watched such untruths, but a fear – that we had got so off track with our inner guidance and that economics all around the world was destroying soils: the stuff that sustained us. I tried to apply the ‘look for the positives and find a way forward’ approach, but the tree companies kept coming at us. To add to the grief of what was going on around me, my darling friend down the road had birthed a little girl, who died after just five short days of living, with a rare physical defect. Later via internet research the heartbroken first-time mum discovered that the particular physical defect in her little baby was linked specifically to that same chemical, which has been banned in the European Union. What I was witnessing in my world was terrifying.

  At the information night, I sat my exhausted arse down in the moulded plastic chair and crossed my arms, preparing to have a meditative kind of snooze, to escape for a while, whilst the guest speaker took to the front of the footy club rooms beneath the shields of winning teams and names of past cricket club presidents. Behind him was a pull-up screen and a projector beamed the NRM South logo. Before me I saw a grey–blond-haired man, with kindly blue eyes and a quiet, gentle voice. As he began to speak, I was jolted awake. The more Colin Seis spoke, the more I felt as if he were an answer to my prayers. An angel dressed in tidy farmer clothes, yet there he was, as normal as any other farmer in the room really, but his concepts and story were something altogether revolutionary to me. The crowd was mostly there because of the beers and because we all found it hard to say no to Janice, but within minutes he was winning them over as ‘a good bloke’ and ‘one of us’.

  ‘We’ve got it wrong,’ Colin said. ‘It takes months and even years to sequester carbon out of the air into trees. Don’t think I’m knocking trees. I’m a Landcare member, I’ve planted thousands of trees on my place, and tree planting is good, but with trees the carbon is stored in the wood. We need it in the soil.

  ‘In six months, a farmer can sequester more carbon via growing long grasses than a tree plantation can in six years . . . and what’s more, the carbon is stabilised in the soil. If every farmer in Australia did it, we’d soon fix this climate change problem. And the ecology would be balanced too.’

  As I listened I wondered why more people didn’t know this. Why was so much farmland being bought up and put into trees as if it were a good thing? If long grasses on farms were the answer, why weren’t governments advising and assisting farmers to grow grasslands so we could address climate change and keep people on the land and in rural communities?

  As a journalist for Rural Press and ABC rural radio I’d been to plenty of farmer meetings over the years – field days, lectures in country halls, conferences in hotels and information days at universities. I’d heard speakers address farmer groups many, many times. Most of the speakers were not farmers. Most had something to sell or promote. They were giving scientific results, information or guidance on data that had been funded by fertiliser companies, chemical companies or academics wanting to secure their salaries and research funding. Some were failed farmers who had joined consulting companies. The practising farmers who did speak at these events were usually roped in to help sell whatever idea or product that profited not him but the company or university organising the event. Now here was Colin Seis ‘speaking our lingo’. Not the stuff of academics or agri-corporates . . . but ‘our speak’. Farmer speak. In his gentle laid-back manner he drew me in and lit me up. My entire life changed that night – more than I could ever know at the time. I glanced over to my then-husband leaning on the bar with the other men, hoping he was hearing it too and would want to travel with me along Colin’s road of thought.

  That night Colin introduced us to the term ‘regenerative agriculture’.

  ‘What’s the point of aiming to be sustainable,’ Col had said, ‘when what we’re doing now is not sustainable? Agriculture is in big trouble. For the last sixty years agriculture has lost the plot. Monoculture crops, high rates of fertiliser and pesticides are the norm around the world and it’s been an ecological disaster. The recommended solutions are often to use more fertiliser, herbicide, insecticide, but we never address why more are required.’

  At this point Col paused to make sure his fellow farmers were coming with him.

  ‘I’m not an organic producer,’ he stressed. Colin must’ve known these old-school blokes were not ready for any of that hairy-armpit, knit-your-own-undies-from-alpaca-hair, bongo-drum kinda stuff which organics had previously been labelled by the more conservatives.

  ‘I’m not promoting anything tonight. I’ve got nothing to sell you. I’m just showing you what I’ve done on my place, because many of the things we do in agriculture make someone else wealthy, not us. We’re the silly buggers on the end of the line and we’re the losers. But we don’t seem to ask the question, “Why do we need to use all those high input products?” The usual answer is to achieve good production, but why do we need high inputs to achieve good production?’

  Col pressed a button and on the screen flashed an image of a farm in black and white.

  ‘My father in the 1930s grew good crops with no pesticide and very little superphosphate. He didn’t have insect or fungal attack. So why can’t we grow crops like that now? Why do our crops suffer from attacks?’ Col paused and looked about the room. ‘Because we’ve stuffed our soil. We need to ask why are our farms crashing? It’s not to do with lack of fertiliser. It’s not to do with the lack of rain. It’s because our farms don’t function in an ecologically sound way. Carbon in soils is dropping so we put on more fertiliser; insect attack is happening so we put on more pesticides; weeds come so we put on more herbicides. We put more and more product on. I call it “the moron principle”. We don’t need those things. We can get off them. It’s all related to ecology.’

  There was a scattering of nervous laughter, but there was an uncomfortable truth in what Col was uncovering for those of us in the room. I wished my father was there to hear this, but he never came to these things. Col wasn’t here to muck about. He literally has a planet to save and he was trying to reach the blokes who owned not only the land, but also often closed and traditional mindsets. The men in the room were also in love with their farm machinery, so when Colin dropped the next bomb I almost cringed on his behalf.

  ‘Ploughing began in Mesopotamia about 10 000 years ago,’ he said in his gentle Aussie voice. ‘We’ve been cropping the same way since the Egyptians or the Sumarians. We haven’t changed agriculture since then. Maybe we got agriculture wrong in the first place? Now, that’s a good question to throw at you. Really all that I’ve done is find a different way of practising agriculture.’

  I could feel the tension in the room grow. In my district ploughing was almost a recreation and a religion, and some blokes were yet to wake up to the fact that it compacts soils and kills the life within it. There was something the blokes loved about kicking up dust behind tractors. It was a social faux pas to tell a fella to ditch his plough and let it rust away out the back of the machinery shed.

  ‘Why do we plough?’ Colin asked. ‘We kill everything to grow the crop. But
really ploughing is a disaster. I’d like to see every plough in this country buried. Ploughing leaves the soil with no carbon and gives you hard, compacted, lifeless soil. Herbicides used in the process affect human health and, what’s more, kills perennial pasture.’ Just when I thought Colin was losing the audience, he drew them back by showing slides of his farm and the first tractor that the Seis family bought. A proud moment in their history.

  ‘Industrialised agriculture started in the 1930s and my grandfather and father were early adopters. It was very profitable for my father and he carried on with it for twenty years straight and stuffed the farm.’ To prove his point, Colin showed photos in the 1930s of a suited man standing in shoulder-high grain crops, then by the 1950s that same bit of land was photographed. It was bare and there were gullies of 10–12-foot-deep erosion sites.

  ‘The soil would no longer grow crops,’ Col said. ‘We describe that kind of country as “farmed out”. It was “microbically” dead so my father decided he’d fix the problem. He was one of the first pioneers of the pasture improvement phase and was an innovative farmer. So I grew up in high-input agriculture where Dad used introduced grass species like clover and rye, high levels of fertiliser and set stock grazing. The system worked well in that era and Dad was using the best science at the time. But eventually the place became weedy and unproductive. On today’s figures I worked out it would cost us over $80 000 a year to maintain what he was doing.’

  Colin said because his dad began the high-input methods of modern farming early, the farm’s soils crashed so by the 1970s the stalling health of the soils and the costs began to beat his father.

  ‘The soils were acidic, there were salinity outbreaks, trees were dying and we were going broke.’ Col then explained to his audience he wasn’t there to prove his father wrong, but it was a fact. He said he hears a similar story wherever he goes in Australia and around the world. I thought back to when I was little and the mini-mountains of superphosphate that were dumped in piles ready to be scooped up and spread on those Runnymede paddocks sown down to ‘improved’ pasture species. It was the same story.

  The emphasis of what Colin was saying was on the big screen before us. Country that was oh-so tragically familiar. Barren, short-grassed, dead.

  ‘What’s changed? Bloody nothing! If we’re not ploughing, we’re still nuking the country with pesticides. We’ve just got bigger machinery and we stuff the place more effectively. That’s about the main change.’

  Again I felt the collective prickle of the audience. But there was no escaping the fact that Colin was telling us we had a desperate need to change because agricultural techniques were failing all over the world and we were propping it up with genetically modified plants and manmade inputs. People in the Western world are getting sicker and sicker from the monoculture mass-produced food that is grown and processed into something that looks like it comes out of a science lab. With the current ‘drought’ people in this district innately knew it was all struggle, so how could they change? Again Colin provided an answer by next showing what he’d achieved on his own property.

  ‘It’s not the answer,’ he said. ‘But it’s one answer that has got me off the treadmill of ineffective farming. Change means we have to admit we’ve been doing it wrong for the past thirty years, but we know change is not that simple. The advice of science has not been correct, and we can only work with what we know.’

  The way Colin did change to become profitable is the most extraordinary story, and as he told it to the room, everyone came on board to listen. The beers stopped getting bought at the bar, and gradually the body language of the resistant farmers began to alter.

  ‘My incentive to change was not by choice but by necessity. We had a major fire in 1979. We lost everything. It was a million-dollar fire and in one day we lost machinery, sheds, fences, houses and livestock. I was what’s termed “instant broke”. I knew I had to find another way of doing it. I couldn’t switch to “low-input agriculture”. I had to change to “no-input agriculture”. We had no money. It was a survival thing.’

  I hadn’t known when Colin delivered this story for the first time the depth of the horror and the scarring from that fire that he’d endured both physically and emotionally. Everyone in the room lived with the threat of fire, so the empathy levels and admiration for Colin suddenly escalated. He told us his neighbour had been in the same boat being burnt out too so, as most Aussie blokes do when they’ve had a bit of trouble, they sat down to have a few beers. Together the two of them came up with the amazing concept that is now known as ‘pasture cropping’ – where annual crops such as oats or wheat are sown directly into dormant or ‘sleeping’ perennial pastures. No need for ploughing and no need to destroy the perennial plants to crop. And so much cheaper than the traditional way.

  ‘You gotta be drunk to think of something that stupid,’ Colin said of their decision to give it a go.

  ‘In the early nineties Australia had begun direct-drilling crops into soil but it meant nuking everything with Roundup,’ Col continued. ‘My neighbour and I wondered why we had to kill the plants just to sow a crop. Why not drill when the plants are dormant?’ Colin looked at his audience with his elfish, cheeky grin. ‘Why haven’t crops been planted into grass before? No one’s been drunk enough to think of it,’ he joked.

  ‘No one was more surprised than us when the first crops we sowed bloody well worked! But no one before had really looked at how nature worked in a grassland and how She runs it so warm-season and cool-season plants are compatible. No one had taken much notice of what Mother Nature did.

  ‘We think the lack of rain is the problem, but it’s the humans who are managing the soils and the animals that are the problem. Grass plants have a big root system if left long. Most of our pastures are grazed short so the soil structure crashes and we’re not accessing nutrients, so the whole food system crashes. On my place, we wanted to run the animals just like Mother Nature runs them on African grasslands in the wild, and run the cropping just like you’d manage a vegie patch. Mulch for moisture and to control weeds, and feed the soil and control temperature with lots of organic matter and ground cover. We thought, Why don’t we do that out in the paddock?’

  Why didn’t we? It all made perfect sense to me. Colin had encapsulated in words what my gut had been telling me for years. I’d been pushing the men on our farm to stop spraying thistles and other weeds with chemicals. I’d been trying to convince them to apply alternative fertilisers to our increasingly rock-hard paddocks. The soils beneath my boots always felt compact and resistant, and the stock seemed to have a tail end of unhealthy animals in the mob, and I just didn’t agree with what the men did with landscape. Not resting it long enough, choosing grasses that died in summer, and clearing and burning too frequently. I could see lack of rain was not the problem. Dad ran the farm as if it were a parkland. The tidiness of it had sat at odds with me for a very long time, having watched animals graze and their preference for diversity whenever they escaped the confines of their paddocks.

  Here was Col about to deliver the explanation about our continent and our false belief in ‘drought’ that I had innately suspected all along. I thought of the cynical fertiliser reps, contract spreaders and agricultural product traders I’d tackled in vain to help me find another source of fertiliser. I hadn’t understood why the fellas in my life insisted on buying in the fancy seeds that had been advertised in glossy brochures and when they went to the trouble and expense of sowing them, they turned up their toes in the dry. Even when the grass was at its best, the sheep only wanted to get out of the paddock into my garden or onto the road to nibble at just about every plant on offer there. The glossy-brochure green-lab plants in the paddock just weren’t what my sheep and cattle were after, no matter how much science and expense went into creating them.

  I went home that night with a light bulb switched on in my heart and head. As a last-ditch effort to spark change, I invited Colin to visit our farm on his next trip
to Tasmania. He generously gave me half a day of his time, toured our farm, viewed our livestock and pastures, offered advice. Being a kelpie breeder and trainer himself, he even spent time watching my dogs work sheep in those portable Mothers’ Day yards outside my farmhouse. He had a lovely gentle drift to him and offered such wisdom and insight. But oddly, from my perspective, the men in my family didn’t seem to see they were in the presence of someone who would become one of the most significant agricultural change-agents this country has seen. And he was right there on our farm . . . offering us advice! What a blessing! But on the day Col came to see us, I remember feeling embarrassed that I was the only one listening to him intently. I couldn’t understand why.

  Against the grumbles of the fellas, I began to implement some of Colin’s recommendations, by mobbing up sheep to rest more paddocks, and planning a better grazing rotation to encourage native grasses to return. But before I made much progress in the change of our management, my marriage went belly-up and the kids and I had to leave the farm.

  In the months that followed, as I tried to find a home for us, I remembered Col’s words from that very first night I heard him speak. I clung to his statement like a life buoy: ‘Agriculture needs more women in it,’ Col had said matter-of-factly. ‘Women are nurturers. We blokes, we fix things with bulldozers. We need more of that nurturing influence in agriculture.’

  This one statement gave me such hope. Hope that there were men out there in the world, the ones who hold the power, who were brave enough to say it. Brave enough to take a stance and pave a way forward for the recognition of women’s wisdom and for the protection of Mother Earth.

  It was the first day of spring 2010 when I got the keys to our new ‘home’, and as I stood holding them in my hands, I knew a miracle had occurred. We authors have the dodgiest of incomes so I bless the kind broker who put his trust in me to set me up with a mortgage – albeit a small one, compared to the grand ‘mainland’ prices people endure. Despite the prospect of a new house, a coldness came to me in the fact it wasn’t my home. The bite of winter hadn’t been as keenly felt in my friend’s spare room. Warmed by her love, she and I would make jokes about her husband having two wives as he trundled downstairs in the mornings. One was stacking the dishwasher and the other making school lunches – what a lucky man! With the kids despatched on the school bus, I would go back to writing and she would head outside to argue with a ute that routinely wouldn’t start. During that dark time, I’d always had my friend’s light. I’ll never forget the grace and generosity of my lifelong soul sister. She ran me baths, lit candles, made me song mixes and kept me exercising. It was scary to be leaving her support, but I knew we had to get out from under her family’s feet.