As well as planting trees, we embarked on a pasture-improvement program at Lanark soon after I took over. As a result, the property’s carrying capacity rose steadily. In the 1950s we used to shear around 4000 sheep on average each year. In 1966, we managed to shear around 10 000, which was almost six to the acre. (I should point out that we did not shear as many as this regularly. We hit the 10 000 peak in one year only.) Being young and eager to learn I was always open to advice on how to make the property more productive. In the early 1960s I accepted one bit of ‘expert’ advice that I wish now I had ignored. I was told I could fix Lanark’s insect problem by spraying the place with DDT.
Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane or DDT has long been regarded as one of the most harmful of farm chemicals. Not only was it judged to be carcinogenic, but it was found to accumulate over time in greater and greater concentrations in the environment. Accordingly, it has been banned in Australia since 1987. In the 1950s, though, it was considered an indispensable weapon in the battle against insect pests. Many heavily stocked graziers, like me, used DDT to kill grubs that killed grass. One of my neighbours dosed the whole of his property with DDT by spraying it from a plane. I doubt if a single insect, good or bad, was left alive on the place. Suburban gardeners used DDT, too. I do know that various rose societies used to urge rose growers to use it. I have a booklet, Introduction to Rose Growing, published in 1954 by the National Rose Society of Victoria, which recommends the use of DDT to kill aphids.
In 1963 I read Rachel Carson’s recently published Silent Spring. Carson was an American biologist and author who was years ahead of contemporaries in her understanding of how various pollutants could have serious harmful effects throughout the wider environment. Indeed, she has been credited by some with starting the environmental movement that was to sweep through the Western world in the 1970s. In Silent Spring, Carson focused on the damaging effects of DDT. Her essential message was that DDT did not merely harm the insects it was intended to kill; she provided evidence to show that it harmed the entire environment, bird life especially. This explained the title of the book: without birds, spring was silent.
Carson’s book made a big impression on me. As it happened, I had been feeling unwell for several weeks, and when I read the book I began to wonder if the diazinon that I used in my new sheep spray race might be the cause. I certainly did not use a mask, glasses or other protective gear while handling chemicals like this. Few farmers at that time did. I was also under fairly severe pressure of work, trying to cope with the huge number of sheep we were running. About that time I attended a short how-to course for young farmers organised by the Marcus Oldham Agricultural College at Geelong. During one class the lecturer got onto the subject of stocking rates. He asked, ‘Who here is carrying three sheep to the acre?’—and a lot of hands went up. ‘Who’s carrying four to the acre?’ A few hands went up. ‘Is anyone carrying five to the acre?’ Only one or two hands went up, so the lecturer said, ‘I’m sure nobody is carrying more than that.’ I then put up my hand and said I was carrying six. ‘I’m sure you are,’ the lecturer said with a smile. He obviously did not believe me. But it was true: we were carrying six sheep to the acre, and it was a considerable strain for all concerned.
I tell this story to demonstrate again that, contrary to what a lot of people think, I did not come from a ‘green’ background. As a young farmer I sprayed parts of the property with pesticides and other chemicals, including DDT, and I was quite prepared to stock the property with six sheep or more to the acre in the hope of making more money, even though this was obviously to the detriment of the land—and the detriment of my family, too. At the same time I was doing all this, though, I was also planting shelter belts of trees. So on one hand I was over-taxing the land, and on the other I was doing my best to restore it. The truth is I was still feeling my way. I had yet to work out a consistent approach to managing the land.
At that time, of course, the science of farming was relatively primitive. Farmers were still using remedies from the dark ages to treat sick animals, as an entry in my farm journal in 1956 shows. It records the fact that a twelve-month-old steer of ours was suffering from impaction, a serious condition that develops when cattle eat certain types of feed, especially onion grass, that form a ball inside their gut. I had treated the steer twice with an off-the-shelf drench, but this had not worked. Lanark’s manager, Keith Fort, then administered what I described in my journal as his ‘cure-or-kill’ drench. It consisted of mineral turps, kerosene, soap and fat. This did not work either, so I consulted the manager of a rural supplies store in Hamilton. He suggested another recipe: mixing two pounds of Epsom salts with two ounces of ground ginger, then adding two parts of boiling water and one cup of treacle. We tried his concoction, again without success. As my journal notes without comment, the steer died two weeks later.
I stopped using pesticides at Lanark in the second half of the 1960s—either 1967 or 1968, as best as I can recall. Pesticides became unnecessary when bird numbers multiplied. Birds are insect predators, after all, and there were enough of them now to keep insect numbers in check. I stopped using superphosphate at Lanark about the same time. It had become clear to me that I needed to pull back from the mad quest for greater and greater production that I had been engaged in. It was not doing me, the farm or the environment any good.
True, superphosphate and other chemical fertilizers made the grass grow, but it appeared to me that things at Lanark were generally in a downwards spiral. Our sheep-farming operation was becoming more intensive in every respect: more drench, more fertilizers, more costs, and more and more work. Cicely was now doing a lot of farm work. She had been ever since Jack Childs left. It amazes me still that she managed to do as much work as she did while remaining an attentive and nurturing mother for our four small children.
I sensed that I needed to take the pressure off everything and everyone. On the one hand, this meant reducing stock numbers. On the other, it meant cutting right back on fertilizers and chemicals. Other farmers who heard I had given up using artificial fertilizers like superphosphate viewed me as a kind of heretic. It was accepted as gospel then (as, generally speaking, it still is today) that to farm productively without using super, potash and similar products was impossible. All the experts— government agronomists and the like—took this for granted. I found it impossible to obtain advice about the pros and cons of supering, because nobody accepted there were any cons. I used to speak every so often to a local Department of Agriculture agronomist. When I asked him, as I sometimes did, about the feasibility of farming without superphosphate, he had a standard reply: ‘John, just spread a few bags of super around and you may manage to earn enough money to plant more trees.’
In fact, Lanark’s level of production held up after I stopped supering, thanks to the residual effect of the super previously spread there, but then slowly declined. Against that, I was satisfied the environment at Lanark was healthier and, of course, I no longer bore the financial burden of having to buy the super. Since my son David took over the running of the property he has begun supering again, although in a strategic, controlled way. David believes he has got the balance right—the balance between the need to maximise production and the need to keep the environment healthy. In other words, he believes he has developed a sustainable agricultural system. I agree with him.
This is not to deny, of course, that there are plenty of organic farmers and others who are running successful farming operations without super. Most Australian farmers, though, are farming their land today as they have always farmed it. Only one thing has really changed: farmers are working their land today even harder than farmers did, say, half a century ago when I got into the business. Farmers feel they have no alternative if they are to have any hope of covering costs. In the end, though, it is a self-defeating cycle. Because you are struggling to make ends meet, you start to farm more intensively—more stock, more fertilizers, more chemicals—to try to earn more. And so the cycle goes on. All the while, the base resources of your land are being steadily exhausted.
As I write this, the Wimmera district, one of Victoria’s main cropping areas, has again been experiencing dust storms. Farmers are seeing countless tonnes of their soil blown away. In my view, dust storms in an area like the Wimmera are a direct consequence of farmers working the land too hard. It is hard to blame them for that, though. In Australia’s fickle climate, and against a background of ever-rising production costs, theirs is a tough, ongoing battle: to obtain a financial return that is at least big enough to allow them to stay on their land and in their homes.