When the early settlers took up land in Australia, the first task for many was to remove the Aborigines. Then, the land itself had to be wrestled into production. Forests needed to be felled, ‘vermin’ like kangaroos shot out, and vast flocks pastured and watered. Stocking rates were far in excess of what the land could sustain, and the subsequent collapse of ecosystems all too often brought about hardship and poverty, as well as triggering a pitiless struggle against ‘nature’ that continues to consume far too many Australian farmers today.

Dorothea MacKellar spoke of Australia’s most crushing threats, droughts and flooding rain. Yet these are, Massy illustrates, all too often the result of bad land management. Insect plagues are also, he contends, frequently a human creation. By way of illustration, he tells of a vast colony of straw-necked ibis that bred in the Riverina in 1926. Examination of the stomachs of some of the birds revealed that the flock was eating around 480 million grasshoppers per day. Such great aggregations of birds don’t happen nowadays, and grasshopper plagues, which are sprayed with insecticides to kill them, are frequent. Combine such pestilences with dying soils, rural isolation, economic deprivation, and illnesses caused by pesticide exposure, and the farmer’s lot is often grim indeed, as Massy knows from personal experience. Towards the end of his epic work, he quietly tells us about the day on the farm, when he was just four and a half, when his mother shot herself.

Across the length and breadth of Australia, Massy tracks down pioneering farmers who have broken the mould and found new ways to farm. One such is Colin Seis, who farms Winona, near Gulgong, in New South Wales. Until around thirty years ago he was a typical Australian farmer, working tough country and barely scratching a living from merino and kelpie breeding. Then in January 1979 a bushfire destroyed his home, farm buildings, and fences, killed three quarters of his stock, and severely burned Colin himself. As he lay in hospital recovering, he wondered how, lacking even the cash to fertilise his crop of improved pasture (which would have cost the equivalent of $50,000 today), he would start again. With no alternative, he sowed without fertilisers, and production crashed. For an agonisingly impoverished seven or eight years Colin barely managed to hang on. But slowly, a mixed native and introduced grassland became established, and these mostly perennial grasses formed the basis for grazing his flocks. Breaking with tradition, the flock was moved swiftly around the farm, allowing for long intervals when the pasture was rested.

Colin Seis demonstrating his pasture cropping technique (image courtesy of Colin Seis)

Colin’s system slowly evolved, becoming centred on a series of complex interactions between animals, the soil, perennial grasses, and sowed crops that maintain fertility and allow for high productivity without the use of fertilisers or herbicides. And the new system is fantastic for biodiversity. Colin’s farm today harbours more than 200 species of plants, 125 per cent more insect species, and 600 per cent more biomass than before. He has no soil erosion, his salinity is disappearing, and his soil moisture levels are double those on his brother’s farm next door. His soil depth is building, and despite having used no superphosphate for thirty-five years, his phosphorus, trace element, and soil mineral levels have all risen substantially. Summing it up, Colin says that the more closely he works with nature, ‘the more profitable it becomes, and there’s less costs, a lot less risk, and certainly a lot less work’. To achieve all of this, all a farmer has to do, he says, is ‘get out of the bloody way and stop interfering and it’ll fix itself’.

For Bruce Maynard, who farms at Willydah 140 kilometres north-west of Winona, the crisis that precipitated change was the drought of 1994–95. Bruce had already been experimenting with more sustainable farming practices, but with just thirty cattle remaining on his property he knew that his response had to be drastic. In a move he calls shedding his ‘European DNA’, he sold all his farm machinery – which for a farmer is akin to burning your ships – and built a device that would cut fine slits into the soil of his native grass paddock, into which he sowed his crop. Against tradition, Bruce sowed into dry earth, causing his father to stomp off, muttering ‘don’t be so damn stupid’. Yet the experiment was a success, and by 1996 his system had transformed into the now world-famous ‘no kill’ farming technique, which is characterised by using no fertilisers or pesticides, minimising soil disturbance, sowing into dry soil, and managing livestock by keeping them on the move. Today, Bruce’s highly profitable farm supports 200,000 trees, 300,000 saltbush shrubs, 1,500 cattle, and crops of oats.

Charles MassyAs Massy was completing his inspection of Bruce’s farm, Maynard remarked ‘I call myself “the lazy farmer”.’ That’s because nature does most of the work on his farm, leaving Bruce time to enjoy himself – and to think. For Massy, who had farmed traditionally all his life, hearing and seeing such things was a huge challenge. Indeed, he describes it as ‘mental torture’, because what he saw and heard went against a lifetime of practice, as well as against the teachings of his father. Yet it was clearly working. He realised that, along with many other farmers, he had been manufacturing his own misery. How would any of us react, I wonder, to indisputable proof that our life’s work had been destroying, rather than creating, the well-being and prosperity we sought?

The impact of traditional farming practices extends well beyond the farm gate, into the nation’s ecology and food chain. So there are good reasons for all of us to take an interest in Massy’s story and to become involved in the struggle for better farm outcomes, by altering our food purchasing and through activism. Yet the opposing forces are daunting. From the National Party, which continues to support land clearing, through to the multinational agrochemical industries and the local townsfolk who fear the closure of businesses due to the abandonment of fertiliser and pesticide use, the pushback is sure to be intense. So resistant to change are some farmers that neighbours, and even close relatives, dismiss farmers like Seis as crazy, refusing to see the evidence over the fence, or in the home paddock. Some, indeed, such as Moree farmer Ian Turnbull, who in 2014 shot a conservation officer investigating land clearing, cling so doggedly to the old ways that they will murder in order to avoid change.

But hope for a better future lies in the fact that Massy himself was a late and reluctant convert to sustainable farming – an old dog learning new tricks. We can only hope that, just as Rian Malan’s My Traitor’s Heart helped lead his country out of the iniquity that was apartheid, so will Massy’s book, whose title evokes the delicate call of a tiny native bird, lead Australians out of their continent-destroying ways.