Welcome to the 100 Climate Conversations. The series presents 100 visionary Australians that are taking positive action to respond to the most critical issue of our time, climate change. We are broadcasting today in the Boiler Hall of the Powerhouse museum. Before it was home to the museum, it was the Ultimo Power Station. Built in 1899, it supplied coal powered electricity to Sydney’s tram system into the 1960s. If you look around the hall, unique industrial features remain, including the imposing chimneys you entered between and the coal cart rail tracks that run underneath this stage. Celebrated as a great period of technological innovation, the Industrial Revolution resulted in the release of billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the air, causing the climate crisis. In the context of this architectural artefact, we shift our focus forward to the innovations of the net zero revolution.

My name’s Gabrielle Chan. I’m a journalist and rural editor at Guardian Australia. I’d like to acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the land on which we’re speaking today, the Gadigal People of the Eora Nation. I’ve been following Charlie Massy’s work for quite some time, and so it’s a great honour to talk to Charlie today. Charlie is a leading researcher and advocate for regenerative agriculture. Massy is the author of Call of the Reed Warbler in 2018 and a 2011 recipient of the Order of Australia Medal in recognition of his service to the Australian wool industry. So, we’re thrilled to have you here today, Charlie. Your family has been on the farm in the Monaro region for five generations. What’s being farmed there?

Primarily sheep and cattle and the occasional bit of cropping with industrial machinery. And recently, since about the late 1980s, I was involved in using molecular genetics and different biology, a new type of merino wool, which has led to a great relationship with the Italian textile designers.

And how has that land changed over that time?

Well, initially I had to take over the farm when I was 22. My father had a heart attack and I didn’t really know much about farming, finished uni part time. And so, I sought the advice of the best, in inverted brackets, farmers in the district who were full on industrial farmers, I guess. And I thought I became a really good industrial farmer, putting on fertiliser and ploughing paddocks, ancient grasslands, some of them we destroyed. And then I walked into the big five-year drought of the late 70s, early 80s and ended up creating a desert, big debt. And at the end of that, I said, ‘No, it’s got to be a different way.’ And I guess, in my book I talk about why farmers have shifted and it’s a cracking of their mind and that was my head cracking event that said, you can’t keep doing this.

So after farming for decades, you returned to academia in 2009 to complete your PhD. Was that crisis the thing that drove that decision?

I had a merino stud, so I had a lot of clients in six states across Australia and I was seeing what was happening to the landscapes, increasing salinity, ongoing degradation of biodiversity, dust storms every time we ran into a drought. And it was just the start of new thinking in how we could have broad scale agriculture, grazing and cropping that wasn’t damaging the landscape but was healing it. And so, I went back to uni and I interviewed 80 leading farmers across Australia that had shifted practices, which is a major thing to change your paradigm.

And the question I asked was, why did they change? And the answer was similar to my experience in 60 per cent of the cases that they’d had a head cracking experience, poisoned with chemicals, big drought, disease in their animals, marriage break ups, that sort of thing that shocked their mind. And the other 40 per cent is a little series of things that shifted. But it does take some pretty major events to cause a shift in an entrenched paradigm. And that’s pretty much the challenge we’re facing. But behind it also was the recognition that we were moving into the Anthropocene, that our planetary systems have been destabilised and that farming was one of the worst causes of release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

So that large scale mismanagement of land in Australia really started with the European invasion in 1788. What particular farming practices were degrading the land? How much damage was done? Can we quantify it?

Yeah, we can. Around about 60 per cent of the Australian landmass is suitable for agriculture and I know globally, since the inception of Western agriculture, ten or 12,000 years ago in the Middle East where our agriculture came from, globally we’ve destroyed pretty much 40 per cent of all land suitable for agriculture. I can’t quantify the exact Australian stuff, I know the stats are there, but if you drive around Australia, you’ll realise that it’s at least 40 per cent of the mass clearing of the Mallee country and the forests and the degradation of native grasses, it’s probably more than 40 per cent.

When you see ancient co-evolved grasslands and forests that are cleared and you see bare ground, that all means aside from loss of biodiversity, it means carbon’s gone into the atmosphere, you’ve interfered with all the connected cycles like water and biodiversity, etc, etc. As we moved from about later on in the 1950s to broader acre cropping, you had your herbicides and the pesticides came with us to control insects, both largely in cropping but also in animals. So, they were yet a further factor in simplifying biodiversity and enabling, while a lot of the herbicides instead of ploughing, you can just spray out whole swathes of country and kill everything. But we now know that those sort of practices, and the loss of carbon and healthy soils is directly related to major human health epidemic, which parallels the exponential rise in what’s happening to our planetary systems.

I just want to talk about the farming mindset for a minute. You quote Carolyn Merchant regarding the tension between man as nature’s guardian and caretaker or as its manager under the interpretation of the doctrine of Dominion. Talking about this kind of long line of philosophical thought about whether humans are part of nature or separate from nature. Can you just explain the difference between the organic mind and the mechanical mind?

It’s a great question and it’s critical. So, if you look at Indigenous peoples around the world, including our own First Nations people. When they’re not in a compromised state like we’re seeing widely today, but in their natural environments where it hasn’t been interfered with, they don’t see themselves as separate to their environment. They’re part of it, what they do is to enhance and gently manage elements, even cultural burning, which I’ve practiced with an Indigenous Elder at home. It actually has a regenerative aspect and that is a vast gulf to what really arose in the 20th century. And that came about from the rise of modern science, the so-called Enlightenment period, which was wonderful, all those scientific discoveries. But what it did was take us away from, even medieval society in Europe, where the peasants and agriculture were still close to the land.

It took us to the stage where we started to see ourselves – this is Western civilisation I’m talking about – as separate to the land, as apart and above which put us in a position not to empathise with it, but to dominate, to start ploughing and other regressive practices. With the rise of 20th century science, I mean a lot of industrial agriculture already began in the 1800s in Europe, but with the rise of modern science and the development of modern chemicals and industrial fertilisers, that escalation of the hubris of the mechanical mind to think that we’re above and better than nature is what exponentially took off. And the result is we’re now into this Anthropocene epoch where if you look at the nine planetary systems that sustain our planet, at least six of them, industrial agriculture, it’s a key factor in destabilising those systems.

And unless we turn it around, we’re talking about climate particularly, if we don’t start pulling carbon dioxide back out of the atmosphere, which is what regenerative farming and traditional practices have done, instead of continually releasing carbon through bad practices, we’re into a really dangerous phase. And if we’re not careful, you’ll be talking to leading climate scientists, we don’t know when that tipping point might occur but you can get a runaway event that we can’t prevent. So, we’ve really only got this next decade and a bit more to start turning this around. And what excites me about regenerative agriculture, it has the greatest potential of all practices on Earth, aside from forestry, to pull down carbon dioxide and put it in the ground. That’s really sums it up. You get green plants photosynthesising, they’re pulling down the carbon, putting it in the soil, and then that in turn nourishes the soil biology and it’s the soil biology that accesses a diversity in nutrients for our food.

So, the exponential rise of what we’re doing to the planet, if you look at the delayed factors of industrial agriculture from the 1950s and look at the modern human health diseases, which we didn’t see in the early 20th century, they’re all showing a similar exponential curve, and it’s related to what we’ve done to the planet, mainly through industrial ag and deforestation.

Is it a stretch too far to say that the Anthropocene, that man made climate change is, as you say, mechanical mind gone rogue?

Absolutely, it’s not a stretch. It’s directly the result of our divorcement from nature, the hubris that goes with the power and the big machines and the chemical. And let’s be frank, an economic rationalist philosophy to how we should approach things, extraction and profit at all costs, that sort of thing.

So regenerative agriculture, you say, sets out to transform these kinds of industrial practices. So just take us through the key principles of regenerative agriculture at a practical level. How does the conventional farmer change what he or she is doing?

A lot of Australia’s hectares are grazed as we do on our farm. What is the standard practice, is what I was practicing before I woke up, is that you put animals in a paddock, they might stay there for 6 months, 12 months, every time a valuable grass puts its head up, it gets eaten again, eventually it runs out of energy and dies and you’re left with a less desirable species. And slowly you degrade both the ecology and also the ground gets bare and the carbon disappears. So, it’s a radical change in grazing from what’s really a lazy person’s operation of just leaving the stock there, sheep and cattle, to moving them every two or three days and thinking ecologically and holistically.

So, the revolution in regenerative agriculture and grazing has come out of Africa and its now tens, if not hundreds of millions of hectares worldwide in every continent. So, it’s called holistic grazing, it was evolved by a wildlife scientist in Kenya in the 60s, who observed the giant animal herds. So, eventually he worked out the principle. Yes, you had millions of animals trampling and a lot of dung and urine, but they were never there for more than two or three days because you had the big cat predators driving them and then they wouldn’t come back for five, six months. So, what it was, was the ideal situation for those long co-evolved grasslands to thrive.

Now obviously we can’t gang up millions of animals in Australia and rotate them but by heavily dividing our fences into smaller paddocks and increasing mob size, we can replicate those criteria. And when you do that in holistic grazing, you get the most extraordinary response because some of our grasses are very similar to what co-evolved in Africa for ruminant animals. So, once you replicate that you get, keeping the ground covered and you suddenly find this take off, it’s quite remarkable. You get greater diversity, the soil biology gets going and the modern cropping now is going that way as well. Because if you think about where our modern cereals, the wheats and the barleys, for the Western agriculture, they came out of that area of the Middle East, the Fertile Crescent, 8, 9000 years ago, and they’d been used to being grazed, co-evolved to grazing with animals. So even when those plants detect animal saliva, it’ll stimulate propagule formation.

So, what the modern cropping is now doing is rather than creating bare ground with sprays and ploughs, they plant with multi species, including their cereals, graze it with the animals, and at the end of the process, through judicious grazing, they harvest the crops. And people are now switching from industrial fertilisers to using things like worm juice, which is full of biology and compost extract.

A world breakthrough in Australia is by a couple of farmers and some of the oldest soils in the world in Western Australia, who’ve developed a technique called natural intelligence farming. And all they’ve done, starting with a debt on 600 acres, they are now farming 50,000 without a debt. They’d eliminated all their industrial inputs, which is 90 per cent of their costs, and they’re injecting worm juice around their seed and compost extract, which is a food for the biology and grazing it with animals and it’s just a revolutionary development. The ground’s covered, the soil is healthy and the integrity of their crops in terms of frost damage and rain damage at harvest compared to the industrial neighbours is vastly better and higher quality. So, the markers are out there where we can make a shift but it’s this paradigm, mental issue that we discussed before about worldviews and paradigms. It’s the blockage and to be truthful, it’s also the enormous power behind the big multinationals that are promulgating the chemicals and the grain trading and the fertilisers and all that. The shift is starting but it’s, we’re up against enormous entrenched power as well, as well as the paradigm.

Many farmers are multi-generational farmers. That is, they were born on the farm, they were raised by a farmer. Does being born on a farm or being raised by a farmer prepare you for farming? Just talk to me about farmer education, because when I wrote my book about farming, people said that they’d done ag-science and they hadn’t done any ecology in ag-science. What’s the modern farming education now?

Even if you don’t go onto uni, growing up on a traditional farm you’re imbibing the traditional ways of approaching the farm and the beliefs that go with it, which is that soil is a substrate that you can manipulate like a mechanical box, tip something on and it’ll grow. It’s not a living entity, living biodiverse holistic organism, and your animals are treated a bit similarly and the land is just a substrate, like that was my view, ironically, even though I was biophilic. I just learnt from the current attitudes and it’s very powerful that paradigm. But when you then go to uni, if you’re of a farming family that can spare you to go to university and you’ve got the qualifications, what you’re taught, except in one course in Australia, but it’s universal, is you are taught the industrial model to control that landscape and all those mechanical, industrial things we’re talking about now.

Is it a return to the organic mind? And also, is it sometimes people have a perception it’s a return to kind of old-fashioned farming? What’s the nuance for modern farmers?

Whatever we want to call it, it’s a return to having empathy with the systems that you work and live in, rather than trying to dominate and simplify and poison and kill. I think I’ve call it the neo-organic, which is going to that next level of truly holistic thought where you do not see yourself separate and what you do takes account of A: how ancient co-evolved nature works, but B: how we can therefore enhance planetary and human health systems.

Population projections for 2050 are 10 billion. Can regenerative agriculture, if every farmer changed, feed that many people?

To be brutally honest, I would say probably not. But I suspect there might be some cruder Malthusian issues that are going to emerge, like widespread famine and disease and those sorts of things and it wouldn’t surprise me if COVID is one of the sorts of early warning signs that there could be some unpleasantness around about a species that’s really become a rogue species and is over populating and destroying its own substrate. I mean, this is tough talk, but it’s a reality.

So do you think population is a problem?

Overpopulation is certainly a problem and it’s connected to ongoing destruction of the sustaining environment. The tragedy is that those of us that are best equipped with wealth and knowledge in the Western big agriculture companies, American, Canadian prairies, Australian and African and South American grasslands and cropping lands, we’re taking the wrong channel, it’s exacerbating it all.

How widespread is regenerative agriculture now in Australia?

It’s certainly escalating, judging by, I mean the leading grazing courses have put through well over 12,000 farmers and there’s only about 80,000 farmers in Australia. So that’s a significant number and that’s just grazing and there’s the cropping and then there’s things like permaculture and probably at least a third of farmers have been exposed, if not educated in it, to identify and people are fiddling or fully committed.

Do you ever envisage a time where it will be the dominant farming system?

Well I can. However, we can deflect the power of the big multinationals and their profit drive and the truth comes out about what we’re doing to the planet. What are the real causes behind the Anthropocene and planetary destabilisation and the human health issue? I think there could be a shift, we could get to a tipping point, but maybe not a huge majority. But I mean, it’s already starting, we’re on that track. So, if you think about the Anthropocene and the destabilisation of the systems and in addition not just to the planetary but the human health crisis, agriculture has some of the best solutions. And so that’s what really drives me, I think it’s a very exciting field.

How does the average consumer, not involved in farming, how do they support uptake of farming systems that will improve the planet?

Supporting organic farming, farming co-ops, market gardens, the whole box and dice, etc, that’s a huge way. There, consumer decision is crucial. I’ll give an example. Australia would be similar to America, in America the green suburban lawn, a monoculture, highly fertilised, watered and pesticides on it and weedicides. If you look at the inputs that go into it, it’s about number six in the whole cropping regime. Imagine if we turned our urban gardens to either veggie gardens or in combination with biodiverse plantings for insects and birds and stuff and getting involved in your local down the street market garden or community gardens or any similar movements that all our cities are now getting, which is really exciting. I mean, I think that’s a huge way.

And even in buying your clothes, if you can try and source fibres that are grown naturally. If you take the dominant fibre in the fast fashion industry, which is polyester, but they aim for 25 cycles within a year, it’s a throw away waste, most of the big waste piles around the world are full of mainly polyester type garments, and they’re the garments that break down into microfibres, which are now starting to poison our entire marine and physical environment. So just those sorts of decisions, to shift to healthy, if it’s cotton or if it’s wool, that in itself can have a profound effect, let alone the food decisions you’re making.

One of the things about regenerative agriculture, I think, is this incredible connection that has developed between regenerative farmers and their end market. Can you see, as a critic of the big chemical companies, the Bayers, the big input makers, they’re going to have to move to biological solutions, aren’t they? Because if consumers are pushing farmers, farmers have to respond to their markets ultimately, whether they like it or not. Will we see the big chemical companies making worm juice next?

I hope not. I think you’re right, they’re already doing their homework, they’ve got to maintain their profit lines to satisfy shareholders and all that sort of stuff. But the thinking that goes with that big end of town, the reductionist thinking, if you like the mechanical mind, it’s quite counter to this more general movement that empowers farmers, it empowers local communities, it empowers urban people and their choice to go down to the local farmers market or grow their own vegies, run their own chooks, all those sorts of things.

But I fear they’re going to try and muscle in and they’re going to make sexy some of their green additives but there’s only one process that really does it with integrity and that’s nature. And it’s not that hard to, through good grazing and good cropping using good organic inputs, like you can’t get any better than the complexity of worm juice, which is full of biology. And the compost extract that comes out of good compost and other natural processes is just full of so many nutrients, you can’t beat those systems and if you combine it with grazing, in my view, you’ve got a win-win.

If we can get out of the way the sort of extremist emotional beliefs that all meat is bad for you, I don’t know how I can get around people understanding that we came out of Africa over millions of years to eat those thousands of phytochemicals that the animals have been browsing, both in the grasses and the shrubs. In vertical shrub layers in Australia and landscapes around the world there’s thousands of phenols and terpenes and tannins and stuff which animals have been self-medicating with and they just know what’s good for them and we get that into those diverse foods. If we lean on the big boys, we’re going to simplify that down and get all the old health problems that we’re getting now.

You visited a lot of regenerative farms during the process of writing your Call of the Reed Warbler. Farms are so particular and so individual because they’re the creations of the individual or the family that manages them. What were some of the examples that you saw?

Well, I guess one of the first things is a human aspect, which is not just more open mindedness, but greater involvement of women. It’s from the mothers that the health of the family comes. So, there’s a greater involvement of women to start with and things like Landcare that I’ve been involved with, a lot of young mothers right across Australia seem to be the drivers of that whole Landcare movement.

I mean I mentioned that family in Western Australia, the Haggertys, I believe with what they call natural intelligence agriculture, worm juice and compost extract with the same modern machinery but growing food chock full of nutrients and now at the same production per hectare levels as industrial food. And then there’s the Wright family up in New England where they’ve fenced off lots of corridors with native tree plantings and preserving bush. They’ve got koalas, they’ve got bird species counts through the roof, they’ve got a huge amount of predatory insects that are now controlling everything and shelter and shade. And look, there’s so many wonderful examples, but A: it’s inspirational; B: it’s profitable and C: it’s helping the planet, so it’s a pretty good trifecta.

What do we buy? Is organic buying re-gen, is re-gen buying organic? How do you sift your way through that? And is it cheap enough given the price rises? I went into my local supermarket at home in a small town of 2000 people and we had zucchinis for sale at $17 a kilo. I thought that was a lot until I posted it on social media and people were sending me pictures of beans for $33 a kilo. How do you sort the wheat from the chaff when you go into a supermarket? Because I think people are really confused.

Yeah, and understandable because there’s a bit of greenwashing going on. That’s about to be broken open because there’s now some new instruments coming onto the market about to be commercialised that will measure nutrient density and variety. The secret of regenerative ag, if we’re talking about cropping now with foods, is the healthy soil biology. If you have a healthy soil, it’s actually the biology that accesses the nutrients for the plants, the things like a root fungus, a mycorrhizal fungi in the soil, they have a partnership with the plants.

The plants release root sugars when they photosynthesise, that’s the food for the fungus and then they have these microtubules go off and access to nutrients as their part of the bargain. And in a healthy cubic metre of soil these microtubules, there might be 20,000 kilometres of these microtubules, the hyphae, working for that plant because of that bargain. You go and spray, fertilise or otherwise destroy that industrially, you’ve really got the industrial crops that are drug addicts waiting for what you’re putting into the fertiliser and we’ve lost that plethora of tens of thousands of different healthy chemicals that are coming in.

So, the background of that is that there are now instruments coming onto the market that you’ll be able to test that are going to show nutrient density or pretty much nutrient empty, pure industrial foods. I think that could be a game changer. I know cost is an issue for some of the organic foods, but good old farmer’s market and I know people are busy or that they’re in an urban flat, but where you can, if you’re in suburbia, get back to the depression and the war year days, if you can grow a bit of your own food in healthy soil, it’s not just a bit of a saving, but it’s bloody good for you.

Bruce Pascoe was interviewed for part of this series and he mentioned his admiration for your work. Is there any crossover between the regenerative agriculture that you’re talking about and traditional Indigenous ways of land management?

Yeah, there is. And Bruce is a friend, but we work with a local Indigenous law man and it’s been a humbling experience. We do cultural burning workshops and if you burn in our country at the right time of the year, in our case it’s autumn, see about 70 per cent of Australia’s vegetation is co-evolved to fire and smoke, there’s about 20 odd chemicals in smoke, and a lot of their propagule and seed and other stimulation comes from fire. So, when we do a cool burn with this Indigenous friend of mine, it has a remarkable stimulatory effect. So just that burning alone and the adoption of that, when we can, is huge, including doing controlled burning that will mitigate future bushfires.

But it’s more what we discussed earlier, that organic mind, that extraordinary integrated view of being part of a landscape and not dominant to it and having respect and that sort of real reverence for it. I mean, some days I think about that and I walk out the back door and say, ‘Gee, I’ve got to be careful here. I could do great damage if I’m not careful’, if I’m a day too late in shifting those sheep or whatever. But just that organic, deep, empathic understanding and love for the land is something that we industrially minded, economically minded, farmers don’t have. It’s about bloody time we started to make the shift because we’re running out of time.

How has your farm changed since your shift in thinking?

It’s changed enormously. My father told me when he got there in the 20s until the early 80s, every seven or eight years we’d be wiped out with wingless grasshopper plague. Once we got groundcover and biodiversity going from the late 80s, early 90s, we haven’t had a wingless grasshopper wipe out, which is an instant drought when that happened. But we’re know neighbours not far away, still get it regularly. So, just economically that’s huge.

But as far as a beautiful landscape and far more biodiversity, we’re up to 150 native plants, about 150 local bird species. Because of the degradation of the woodlands right through New South Wales and Queensland, the most endangered tranche of species is the woodland birds. We’re now getting endangered woodland birds permanently living at home in some of our, we’ve got four or 500 acres now of basically native bush that we’ve either developed or fenced off and it’s now a refuge of great importance to some of them. We’re over a third of the farm now into biodiversity and there are huge economic benefits as well as aesthetic.

And you’re still seeing the Reed Warbler?

No we don’t have reed warblers at home yet, it’s not, no running water. But what lies behind the question? Why did I use that title? I visited a farmer just out of Canberra who had adopted specifically the Peter Andrews regeneration of water. As we drove out to have a look, we went past the neighbour’s place, it was just bared and eroded, overgrazed and a lot of bare ground. Straight through the fence was this green creek with two or 300 metres of beautiful green, and for the first time in 150 years, some reeds had been brought back by waterbirds. And while we were talking and the creek was running, there’s no water above from the neighbour, this reed warbler sang out and I thought, ‘Wow, that’s the first time a reed warbler’s been back in 150 years.’ And I thought, ‘What a metaphor for regeneration.’ If you give nature a chance, she’ll respond.

Well, I think we’ll leave it there Charlie, thank you so much. Your work has been so inspiring and well and truly earned your place up on that wall. To follow the program online you can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and to visit the 100 Climate Conversations exhibition or join us for a live recording go to 100climateconversations.com.

This is a significant new project for the museum and the records of these conversations will form a new climate change archive preserved for future generations in the Powerhouse collection of over 500,000 objects that tell the stories of our time.