Words by Melissa Howard

Photos thanks to Amy Browne, whose documentary 'From the Ground Up' explores regenerative farming practices in Australia.

This story was originally published in Issue 3.

In an increasingly hot, hungry and displaced world, farmers are leading one of the world’s largest land restoration movements. By stepping out of the way of Mother Nature, they’re regenerating barren landscapes – and reaping the rewards.

During the 1982 drought, New South Wales farmer Martin Royds watched in horror as parched topsoil blew off his farm like sand from a dune. The few trees on his Braidwood farm, Jillamatong, were dying, while he and his neighbours struggled with debt, weeds and unhappiness. When the rains came – too late and too hard – they washed away the remaining ground cover, leaving a barren landscape. Something had to change. After what Royds describes as a period of “poisoning [him]self” trying out spray systems, he decided to embrace a holistic approach to farming.

“I got rid of my spray rig and the tractor,” he says. Instead, he began to focus on building soil carbon and biodiversity.

Since then, Royds has restored Jillamatong to flourishing health. The soil no longer blows away, and when the showers come his “rain ready” soil can absorb them. He has also tripled his farm profits.

And he’s not alone.

Across the world, farmers are embracing regenerative agriculture as a way to not only boost their income, but to increase the resilience and health of their land, and to improve their quality of life. Regenerative agriculture is a series of holistic land management practices aimed at restoring land health by avoiding artificial chemicals and fertilisers, carefully managing stock levels and water tables, restoring carbon to the soil and promoting biodiversity. Holistic farming practices like these can also help remedy climate change. Studies at the Rodale Institute, a US non-profit that researches organic farming, have found that regenerative farming on grazing land – which covers 38 percent of the world’s land – could offset 71 percent of global emissions by storing carbon in the soil.

In New Zealand, Greenpeace is advocating to transform the country’s dairy industry using holistic farming practices. “Industrial dairying is failing,” it states. “We are not saying ‘stop farming’; rather we’re advocating a win-win way forward. It’s called regenerative farming.”

In parts of Africa, farmers are using trees to double crop yields and help alleviate poverty. Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration (FMNR) is a low-cost, or no-cost, farmer-led movement that uses the simple art of pruning to regrow trees, restore land and revitalise poor subsistence communities. FMNR began in the Niger Republic in the 1980s. World Vision was conducting a tree planting project in the Maradi region to try address desertification and poverty in the area. Villagers were unenthusiastic, and barely 10 percent of the trees planted survived. FMNR pioneer and Australian agronomist Tony Rinaudo was working on the project at the time, and knew in his heart that it would never work.

His epiphany came while driving across the desert. The ‘insignificant’ desert bushes growing over the farmland weren’t bushes at all, he realised, but regrowth from felled native trees that had been seasonally slashed and burned in preparation for sowing.

“When you chop a tree down, for most species the tree doesn’t die, it has the ability to reshoot,” he says.

Rinaudo realised this ‘underground forest’ could be the solution he was looking for.

Thirty years later, ‘degraded’ Niger farmland is being restored by farmers simply regrowing and managing trees that are already there. But hang on – wouldn’t there be more room for crops if the trees were cleared?

“On the surface it doesn’t make sense,” agrees Rinaudo, who is known fondly as ‘the Forest Maker’. “Probably 90 per cent of what I do is trying to convince people that it’s in their own interests, and the interests of their children, to work with nature instead of fighting it.”

In Niger, farmers were replanting crops six or seven times “because the seed would simply get buried in sand or sand-blasted and the seedlings would die”. But when trees are returned to the landscape, Rinaudo says, air temperature drops, the wind is blocked, organic matter is fed back into the soil, nitrogen levels increase and the soils become fertile. “[Trees] also act as magnet, attracting birds and livestock in the dry season [that] fertilise the fields.”

Some native trees act as “water pumps” by using their deep tap roots to access water deep in the ground then leak it into the shallow soil. “This allows the crops to survive – and even thrive – in a drought year,” says Rinaudo. “It’s quite amazing.”

It really is: Niger farmers practising FMNR are more than doubling their average crop yields, simply by regrowing an average of 40 trees per hectare. FMNR is now established in 24 countries and, in Niger alone, it has reforested 50,000 square kilometres of land with over 200 million trees. In 2018, Rinaudo won the ‘Alternative Nobel Prize’, the Right Livelihood Award, for his work improving the lives of millions.

The United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) similarly urges the importance of trees in helping alleviate poverty. In 2018 it stated that, “[w]hen sustainably managed, forests and trees are vital safety nets and life-supporting assets that can improve quality of life and livelihoods while acting as buffers that help communities to withstand extreme weather and other shocks.”

Today, 80 percent of the world’s 65.6 million forcibly displaced people are what the UNHCR describes as “forest-dependent” – they rely on forest products “for energy, shelter, fodder, nutrition and cash income”. Regenerating forests, it urges, is imperative to the health of displaced communities.

In 1984, there was a severe drought and famine in Humbo, southern Ethiopia. Rinaudo says World Vision had been working in the area for years but, “despite all the interventions, people could never quite get back on their feet”.

“The missing element was we hadn’t helped them restore the environment: the resource base on which our food security depends!” Within one year of FMNR being established in the area, farmers were harvesting grass and hay and firewood by pruning the regenerated trees – instead of buying it. In six years, the community surrounding that forest harvested such a yield that they were able to sell 106 tonnes of grain to the United Nations World Food Programme.

But isn’t World Vision about children, not the environment? “If you love children, you have to love the environment,” Rinaudo replies.

He’s right, isn’t he? People and their living conditions are not separable. When the earth is healthy, so are the humans – and vice versa. As Australian singer Ben Lee sang, “We’re all in this together.” We can’t separate the health of the earth from the health of ourselves.

Dr Charles Massy, regenerative agriculture expert and author of Call of the Reed Warbler: A New Agriculture, A New Earth, says that while many farmers practising regenerative agriculture don’t understand the complex science stuff, their gut is spot on.

“[T]hey clearly, intuitively knew [that] if given a chance and [provided the land is] not too destroyed, that natural systems have the capacity to self-organise to a greater state of health and resilience.”

A point that comes up as I try to wrap my head around all of this is that most of our conventional farms are “over-grazed and understocked”. Does this mean, I ask Massy, that we need more animals grazing for shorter periods of time before they’re moved on? “Exactly,” he replies.

NSW farmer Martin Royds agrees. The “biggest change I made,” he says, was increasing his paddocks from 12 to 53 and letting 90 percent of his farm “rest” at all times.

Massy advises us to “think about African herds”. Despite grazing in mass numbers, “because they are driven by predators they only hang around for a day or two and they move”. This allows plants to rest and regrow. “Then, the animals come back before the grass gets too dry and oxidises and gets wasted.”

So, the aim is to avoid letting the animals eat too much of the plant?

“There’s a pretty good rule of thumb,” says Massy. “You don’t want to take more than 50 percent of the plant.” Once the plant gets eaten down more than that, the roots die off and the plant struggles to recuperate. “What kills the beautiful Australian grasslands is that your best plants are usually the most tasty.”

Then, a few days later, while the plant is trying to regenerate, the animal comes back to eat its favourite delicious plant again. Because the plant doesn’t get time to recover and regenerate, it dies and the landscape loses its most valuable asset – deep-rooted plants. “Then the system starts to collapse,” says Massy.

“... natural systems have the capacity to self-organise”

“Most of the innovators that have changed? They got sick of the drought debt."

At dinner, I clumsily try and explain to my friend Alice, a cropping farmer’s daughter, what regenerative agriculture means. Grass is mentioned. “Yeah. Dad’s obsessed with grass,” she says.

Biodiversity is key, says Royds. “Before, when I was a chemical farmer, I’d plant five grasses and two clovers and think it was a really good mix. Now I have over 80 types of herbs and grasses.” Grazing animals are intuitive, he says. When offered biodiverse wild feed, they will instinctively seek out plants that balance their health organically. “They self-medicate.”

Like Massy, Royds and Alice’s dad, NSW farmer Charlie Maslin is obsessed with grass. He has run Gunningrah, a grazing farm, for the past 35 years in Southern Monaro. According to non-profit organisation Soils for Life, despite drought declared in 100 percent of NSW in 2018, Gunningrah had “full ground cover, flowing streams and no need to back up the feed-truck”. Soils for Life spokesperson Niree Creed says the aim of the organisation is to collect stories of ‘disruptors’ like Maslin who have “turned the old farming systems on their heads and are doing very well”.

“Our farmers that we talk to regularly have effectively drought-proofed their country. They’ve got tons of water.”

For Maslin and other regenerative farmers, protecting ground cover is vital. During dry periods, they reduce the number of animals grazing – marching their stock to market the instant they calculate the ground cover will start to deteriorate – to preserve the grass and soil.

“If we’d kept our numbers high,” Maslin told Soils for Life, “we’d be losing the ground-cover advantages we’ve gained.” Conventional farming, on the other hand, keeps stock levels on pastures too high for the land to support, leaving it depleted and perpetuating problems. Farmers are forced to handfeed their stock at great cost.

But, as Rinaudo and Massy tell me, mistakes in the beginning are normal. Rinaudo made some in Niger, Royds did in the 80s, and Massy did some early damage to his career.

“I had no ecological literacy. I couldn’t read a landscape.” Creed says that farming disruptors are not only restoring their lands to health, but are financially improving their farms. Massy says he has reduced his costs by over 90 percent by not using chemicals and fertilisers, or the oils and petrol required to power the associated machinery. Creed says these biological approaches also have a positive impact on the quality of the cattle and wool produced. Just as important, Creed tells me, is that disruptor farmers are saner. They have more time, less stress.

Are you saner, I ask Royds? “One hundred percent,” he replies. Farmers deeply and intrinsically want to help and heal the land, he says, but they are told, over and over, to fight it: to cover it in chemicals. This creates a cognitive dissonance that makes them and their lands suffer.

“Farmers were going, ‘I know this is wrong, but I don’t know what’s wrong,’” says Royds. “The more they talk to ‘experts’, the more they’re told [to] put more and more of these chemicals on. Then they come here [to Jillamatong] and you see them just relax their shoulders, and they go, ‘Oh, shit. I knew what I was doing the wrong thing!’”

Why aren’t all farmers embracing this? I ask. Gosh, if it’s the cure for drought, climate change, world hunger, financial stress – I mean, come on.

Massy says “the biggest [challenge] here is the change in paradigm stuff”.

He’s right. We hate change, us humans, don’t we? We don’t want bad things to be our fault, or due to our management. We prefer to blame things outside of our control and double down on our mistakes. Rinaudo agrees. “The biggest hurdle is overcoming resistance to change.”

Often, solutions to complex problems sound counterintuitive – more trees in paddocks equals more crops? It sounds mad, right? – which makes it hard to get across to people. Innovators often tell me that humans and our ways of doing things must be broken before we begin to imagine other ways of existing. Humankind seems to have an innate, blind stubbornness that doesn’t always serve our interests.

“Most of the innovators that have changed?" says Massy. “They got sick of the drought debt – they got jolted, had a shock that made them change. And this drought is another shock factor.”

Soils for Life expects the number of farmers embracing regenerative farming to only increase. Already they receive constant requests from farmers to become case studies for the cause. “This movement is growing,” says Creed.

Rinaudo aims to introduce FMNR to 100 countries by 2030. “I’m sharing an idea that’s very, very powerful. As I share that idea in different countries, these new champions come forward.”

While researching for his book, Massy drove throughout Australia and flew across the world to visit farms. Over and over, he says, farmers told him the same thing: “Our job is to get out of the way of Mother Nature.”

Melissa Howard is a freelance writer passionate about sustainability, smart design and innovative approaches to contemporary life. Melissa's work has been published in The Age, Domain, Going Down Swinging, Overland, Meanjin, Best Australian Essays, The Sleepers Almanac, Island, Untitled Pocketbook and others.