“Once
the soil is exhausted, you’re on an ash heap. You don’t know what’s missing
except that nothing grows. The mysteries of creation haven’t all been put under
button pushing technology”. — William Albrecht
Having
discussed some of the many factors affecting farm production systems, it
remains to provide some pointers to how to implement them. Many farmers have
found the hardest part to using more organic techniques in their farming is the
hostility from agricultural extension officers, consultants, fertiliser
salesmen, spray salesmen and their farming colleagues. Some farmers prefer to
keep their organic practises a secret to avoid this. Equal ranking is often
given to maintaining self-confidence. The conversion phase from conventional to
fully organic can take several years while the soil biology restabilises. This
appears to be more of a problem in annual cropping than with perennial crops.
There
are few sources of information, one of the main reasons for writing this book.
There is considerable literature of overseas origin, but this was written for
quite different agricultural conditions than those experienced in Australia.
There is often an assumption that organic farming, because it originated
overseas, is not practised so well here. This is untrue and there are many fine
examples of organic farms unequalled in Europe, or North America.
Unfortunately, the numbers are smaller than overseas and this is probably why
there are less books written here. As well, little of the literature takes the
middle ground as we have attempted to do in this volume. Most writers are
ideologically committed to an all or nothing approach. This can also be a
problem when approaching organic farmers and farm advisers. When my friend
Wesley Hazell started a 20 acre Bio Dynamic pasture trial, a BD farmer objected
“because he doesn’t have the right consciousness”. Wesley’s family owns several
properties, each farm having its own manager, and it was this, the fact that
Wesley doesn’t personally operate the farm in question, that the Bio Dynamic
farmer was referring to. As well, the workers on the farm where the trial is
taking place objected, “because you can’t grow grass without super”.
Wesley
could not be said to be a typical farmer; his family owns several farms and a
major earthmoving business. But he is typical of the new generation of forward
thinking farmers. About a decade ago, the Tasmanian Rural Youth organisation
invited a speaker to one of their meetings to talk about organics. The speaker
was a backyard organic gardener, who obviously knew little about farming. When
some of the audience jeered the poor chap, Wesley stood up and chastised them,
saying “in ten years time we’ll all want to know about organic farming. This
guy’s talking about what our customers will all be wanting”.
I
have heard many variations on this theme from farmers all around Australia.
They are aware that their income is dependent on customers buying their
produce. To remain viable, farmers must provide what the customer demands. While
it will be pointed out that farmers have been doing this, what the customers
want is continually moving target. One example of this is the dramatic
reduction in demand for potatoes. Much of this is due to changed food habits,
such as the increased consumption of rice, but some of the blame must lie with
the appalling quality of potatoes proffered for sale. A typical bag of potatoes
from the local supermarket recently revealed all of the potatoes had bruises, several were green and several
infested with potato grub. Peeling wastage was around 20%.
Another
example came from some Tasmanian Department of Primary Industry research into
consumer preferences for apricots. They were presented for tasting as
under-ripe, ripe and over-ripe. The customers overwhelmingly preferred the ripe
fruit. The stores only stock under-ripe, because it lasts longer. It lasts
longer because the customers don’t want to buy it! They buy other fruit
instead. This situation is likely to persist while farmers continue to accept
what happens to their fruit after it leaves the farm gate.
One
perennial problem in this regard is farmers who pick early fruit while it is
unripe in order to obtain the premium prices offered for being first in the
market. This has the effect of lowering demand for a considerable period until
the customers forget their disgust at the lack of flavour in their purchases.
One group of plum growers who were persuaded by a colleague to hold off until
their fruit was truly ripe, found shoppers reluctant to buy their fruit. They
had been put off by the under-ripe early fruit in the previous fortnight. These
farmers overcame the problem by going into the supermarkets and fruit dealers
to give away samples of their fruit as a promotion. Within a week, they were
selling all of their fruit for top prices.
It
should be clear that customers have a number of criteria that they apply when
parting with their money to buy produce. The more of these criteria that are
met, the higher the price they are willing to pay. The quality issues are
flavour, appearance and residue status. While until recently, appearance was
the only criterion, all are now important. One exporter received a severe shock
when a consignment of shallots was rejected for import into the United States.
The reason was an unacceptable level of fungicide residue. Not only was that
sale lost, but other orders were cancelled as a result of the incident. The
fungicide in question was only used pre-plant under special permit, as it was
not a registered material. This left the exporter with the problem of finding
an alternative strategy for white root rot control and new markets in the
meantime.
This
is the era of specialisation. From one point of view, this has resulted in
enormous progress. We can now place fresh raspberries on markets thousands of
miles away, plough a thousand times as many acres in a day as we could fifty
years ago, accurately forecast crop yield halfway through the growing season,
make telephone calls from the tractor, measure the exact amount of irrigation
to apply and when, determine the harvest date for obtaining optimum quality of
produce when it reaches the market and many other wonderful things. Without
specialists, these things could not be.
There
is, however, a downside to specialisation. In order to become an effective
specialist, a person learns from a teacher experienced in a particular
discipline. This entails ignoring almost everything else that could reduce the
time needed to take on board all the information accumulated by the profession.
Each profession has developed its own language to communicate its ideas quickly
and efficiently. Unfortunately, it also means that the ideas of one discipline
cannot be effectively communicated to a person specialising in another. The
languages are different.
This
would not be such a great problem except that an unimportant discovery in one
area of research can be of world shattering importance in another. Since there
is no communication between the disciplines, it is a long time before some
heretic makes the connection.
Tolstoy
wrote, “I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the
greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth
if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which
they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught
to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of
their lives”. James Gleik puts it only a little less elegantly. “Shallow ideas
can be assimilated; ideas that require people to reorganise their picture of
the world provoke hostility”.
Bringing
this back to farming, we have agricultural scientists split into numerous
disciplines. A soil scientist might develop a fertiliser program that increases
grass production. The stock grazing the grass become prone to disease. The soil
scientist, if he becomes aware of the problem that has arisen, would say
“that’s not my problem. That’s an animal physiology problem”. Apprising an
animal physiologist of the effects of the fertiliser program on animal health
elicits the response, “That’s not an animal physiology problem; it’s a soil
science problem”.
The
person most likely to have made the connection between the fertiliser program
and animal health problem would be the farmer. If he tells the soil scientist,
the soil scientist will likely tell him he doesn’t understand soil science. The
response from the animal physiologist will in all probability be similar.
The
manufacturer of Vitec fertilisers, Ted Sloan, has degrees in Agricultural
Science and Agricultural Engineering and spent several years as an agricultural
extension officer in New Zealand. He says that it is his “lasting shame” that
he ignored the observations that his farmer clientele communicated to him. “The
observations I was trained to
ignore have turned out to be of immense and lasting value”. Ted also had the
ignominy of becoming a farmer and attempting to put into practice the ideas he
had been taught. They did not work. What did work was applying ideas that
farmers had observed worked best.
There
is no doubt that our agricultural scientists have done an excellent job within
the confines of their respective fields. What we need is for that work to be
integrated by imaginative non-specialists in order to create a new agriculture.
One that satisfies the needs of farmers and the wider community. Miguel Altieri
illustrated this with the following diagram.
The
diagram illustrates the three main facets of society. Only pursuits that take
account of all three are truly sustainable. For instance, our food production
system might produce economic profit, but if it damages the health of farm
workers (a social issue) or destroys the riverine system (an environmental
issue) it will fail.
So
how do we better integrate the results of the many specialised disciplines,
farmer observations and the needs of the wider public in order to create a new
agriculture? There is no simple answer to this question, the most important
raised in this book. However, the author was involved in a discussion forum
held to allow the greenies, forestry workers and general public to discuss
their concerns.35 The finale to
this forum, held over several weekends, was a forest walk to look at the source
of the debate. During the barbecue lunch that followed the walk, the most
typical comment heard was “I never really understood their point of view
before”. From a hostile beginning, the outcome was, as hoped, one of healthy
debate where fresh information from outside the confines of the interest group
led to deeper understanding.
We
all to some degree or other work and live within the confines of our interests,
unaware of the wider ramifications of what we are doing. It is only when we can
take a step back away from this limited arena that we can gain the wider
perspective needed to perceive that what we do affects us all. How many critics
of farming have walked a farm and discussed the farmer’s problems with the
farmer? How many farmers who criticise the poor outcome of applying an
agricultural scientist’s advice have bothered to query the researcher to
discover exactly what went wrong?
[To
be concluded. L8r.]