You may remember my blog post on rewilding Britain and my review of Isabella Tree’s book Wilding about setting free a British farm to revert back to in-yo-face nature.
Here’s a New Zealand story in that spirit.
It’s a story about Mark, a dairy farmer down in the south of the South Island.
“In mid 2017, dairy farmer Mark Anderson sat down at his South Otago kitchen table with a rep from a chemical fertiliser company for a regular scheduled catch up, as he did every month or so. But this time the conversation went a little different than usual.”
After being diagnosed with an auto-immune disease, he took a deep dive into healthy living, agricultural systems, and organic regenerative agriculture.
He was also bothered by the need to put more and more synthetic products on to the land, not to mention the human costs of working in intensive agriculture, like burn-out and marriage break-ups.
As you can imagine, with all this stuff swishing around in his brain, the fire-side chat with the rep went spiffingly.
“As a trusted source of information about how to run his farm, he asked the rep about how chemical fertilisers interact with the healthy biological functioning of soils, and what he thought about those interactions. After that conversation Anderson never heard from the fertiliser rep again.”
“Don't blame the reps, they're just telling you what they've learned from the industry. But it woke me up to how at the end of the day, they're just running a business.”
He then took the cow(s) by the horns, so to speak.
“He took the recommendations of his friend and neighbour Hamish Bielski who had begun practising the five soil health principles and sent him YouTube videos on regenerative agriculture and holistic grazing. He read books written by agroecologist Nicole Masters and microbiologist David Montgomery and Soil Food Web founder Elaine Ingham. He started following the research of highly influential regenerative farmer Gabe Brown in North Dakota, attended a seminar with soil ecologist and soil carbon expert Dr Christine Jones, and went to a woolshed session with humble Australian regenerative sheep and cropping extraordinaire Colin Seis.“
“He has learned a lot from his mentor Siobhan Griffin - an American dairy farmer who successfully transitioned her dairy farm in New York state from being one of the first certified organic dairy farms in the state in 1997, to using regenerative grazing to sequester carbon. She has since moved to South Otago to become a regenerative farming coach.”
Good to see the word “YouTube” not associated with the phrase “conspiracy theory” from time to time.
In practice his farming is still full-on, but the processes around it are changing, month by month, year by year.
“Anderson has split his herd of 750 dairy cows in two, and cut down to once a day milking to focus on regenerative grazing techniques. He has put in place a longer grazing rotation on his paddocks to maximise solar energy harvesting (photosynthesis), moving the herd up to five times a day. The cows eat the top third or so of the plants, which contain the highest levels of energy, they trample about another third of the pasture into the ground which helps feed the soil biology and create a circular system, and they leave about one third which may be soiled to regrow rapidly.”
In the spirit of Isabella Tree’s Knepp Estate with its large grazing stomping digging ecosystem-building animals:
“Anderson explains his approach aims to mimic the grazing patterns of large herds of ruminant animals across the pre-colonial American prairies and Eastern European and Mongolian steppes.”
It’s a long path to regenerative farming though. You have to be pretty pig-headed:
“While Anderson thinks it will take another five years of transition to have a truly regenerative system, early results are promising within a short space of time. Recent soil tests taken to 15cm have seen levels of both potassium and mineralisable nitrogen double. Other soil nutrients such as calcium, magnesium, sodium and organic sulphur have increased between 5-10 percent, a consequence of improved plant diversity and grazing management alone.”
Other great developments:
“Within the past year, organic matter in the soil has increased by 1 percent. Given that a 1 percent increase in organic matter can boost the soil's water holding capacity by anywhere from 144,000 to upwards of 180,000 litres of water per hectare, Anderson's farm is now becoming considerably more resistant to periods of drought.”
I say good on him.
The elephant in the room is that animal farming in New Zealand is a fully-fledged environmental catastrophe.
The belching and farting of New Zealand’s cows and sheep (methane) works out to 28 million tonnes a year in CO2-equivalent emissions.
This is already 5.6 tonnes of CO2 per capita! And that’s without even getting to any other emissions (of which there are shitloads).
Most of the result of this sheep and dairy farming is exported overseas (beef, lamb, milk) because cold hard cash is currently valued much higher than decreasing CO2 emissions in New Zealand.
So Mark’s farm is a fantastic step for the planet’s biodiversity and the soil’s health as a whole, but if the number of belches and farts stays the same, we’re still accelerating towards the wall.
I’m sure Mark realises this and has plans afoot to continue to be part of the solution, not part of the problem.