Restoring the balance

By Kim Deans

“Imagine a farm where most of the required nutrients are provided free, where workers manage pests and diseases at no cost, and where weeds no longer require the unrelenting program of expensive spraying. “

- Soils Alive! Understanding and managing soil biology on Tasmanian farms. McDonald, D & Rodgers, D, 2010

My Uncle tells an interesting story about farming with my Grandfather in the 1980s when scientists researching insecticide resistance in the cotton industry around Narrabri visited our family’s farm near Delungra in northern NSW every summer to collect heliothis caterpillars from sunflower crops.   The heliothis on Grandpa and Uncle Paul’s sunflowers weren’t resistant to insecticides like the ones found in the cotton because there was no need to use insecticides to control them, every year the starlings would come in and eat the caterpillars.  Why spray them when nature provided pest control for free?

These days free pest control on the scale of the starlings in the sunflowers is a rare occurrence.  The birds and insects that kept pest populations under control have nowhere to live with the loss of biodiversity and habitat in farming areas and we keep killing their food sources with insecticides.  The world wildlife fund estimates that we lose between 0.01 and 0.1% of all species each year, which is between 200 and 2000 species.  These are the species we know about, there are many more we still don’t know about, particularly in the realm of the microscopic creatures that call soils their home. 

When I review cropping plans with farmers contemplating a transition to a more regenerative cropping system I am horrified by the number of chemical applications that are routinely being used to grow a cereal crop these days.   When I grew cereal crops as part of a family farming business in the 1990’s we did not routinely use fungicides or insecticides.  These were occasional inputs and not factored in several times each season even before a crop was planted like they are in many areas now.   There now seems to be a belief that without fungicide and insecticide inputs crops will fail, as though fungal diseases are due to fungicide deficiencies, and insects are due to insecticide deficiencies.  I often ask farmers who were also cropping in the 1990s if they used all these inputs to grow cereals back then and their experiences are the same as mine. 

Restoring the balance starts with us becoming aware of what we have lost through sharing stories that provide us with some perspective.  Stories about soils teeming with earthworms. Stories about pasture ley crops to rest our cropping paddocks.  Stories about profitable crops grown without fertilisers or chemicals.  Asking our farming elders how things have changed over the decades they have been in agriculture can unearth valuable insights.  Our memories are short and every year sees humanity inventing inputs to kill nature to extract agricultural production from more and more degraded ecosystems while more and more of the species we share this Earth with go extinct every year largely unnoticed in the quest for more money.

“Nowadays people know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.”

– Oscar Wilde

When we know better we can do better.  Awareness is the first piece of the restoration puzzle and depends on us taking different actions.  Our actions will look different depending on our context so understanding our individual contexts is key.   

Understand your financial position

Farming businesses are frequently under financial pressure which can be a common excuse for not changing.  Prioritize getting a solid understanding of your financial position and the options available to you.  The number one reason farmers struggle when they transition to more regenerative farming methods is due to a lack of financial literacy and confident budget projections.  Once we see the rewards of farming in tune with nature it can be easy to overlook the risks that a major change to the business entails. Understanding our financial position helps us to make an informed decision about how we can keep our business alive while we restore the ecological balance. 

Cultivate a shared vision

A huge factor in successfully restoring the balance is having people around us that share our vision for vibrantly healthy farming ecosystems.  This can be the most challenging aspect of restoring the balance as some people are attached to business as usual and are not ready to embrace a different way of doing things.  When we change our approach, some people will not come along for the journey.  With interest growing in regenerative approaches to agriculture you may need to look in different circles for your people. 

Take responsibility

Restoring the balance requires us to take responsibility for our actions rather than deferring responsibility to other people.  Consider whether your agronomist is working for you or are you working for them?  Is that chemical application necessary?  Ditch the preventative just in case measures that you throw in because the spray rig is going and make every input decision an informed decision.  Remember this is your business and if you are not clear and committed about where you are going you could end up contributing to someone else’s business at your expense. 

Take a long term view

When we see what we have lost we feel the urgency to change.  When you see it you cant unsee it!  The art in restoring the balance is in combining urgent action with patience.  Managing this tension between urgency and patience requires us to take a long term view and put our trust in nature.  The time to act is yesterday, the second best time is now.   The results will take time to emerge.  How much time?  It depends…. Monitoring sites can help you keep an eye on trends over time to keep you on track. 

Restoring the balance requires that we pay attention to what is valuable, not just what is quantifiable in dollar terms.  The most valuable aspects of any system are often the least visible.  It’s the bits that we don’t see, and are often unaware of, that enable most systems to function.  As humans we tend to focus on the most visible aspects, neglect the rest, and then become surprised when the system breaks down.  What we can measure is not more important than what we can’t measure.  Even though it is not always easy to define and measure, it is vital we pay attention to ecosystem services and biodiversity on all levels.  Our future depends on it.