In November 1980 a conference was held at Melbourne University titled Focus on Farm Trees, which I regarded then, and still regard, as a watershed event. So far as I know, it was the first major conference held in Australia on a subject close to my heart: planting trees on farms to benefit the environment. Unfortunately, the organisers (few of whom, apparently, were farmers themselves) decided to stage the conference in the middle of November when most farmers, at least in southeastern Australia, were flat out shearing and cropping. As a result, there were not many farmers there. I did attend, however, and on the second night of the conference I went for a drink with a few others to a pub across the road from the university. One of the others, Charles Massy, was a young farmer from the Monaro district in New South Wales. I had not heard of him until that evening, but I was to hear a great deal about him later on, for he came to be regarded as one of the world’s leading authorities on merino sheep. Indeed, his book The Australian Merino, a massive volume that runs to almost 1300 pages, is considered a classic—the definitive work on the subject.
I got talking with Massy in the pub and told him about my tree-planting program at Lanark and the various other projects I had undertaken there to try to restore the environment. He listened attentively, which I found encouraging, since most farmers I tried to discuss the matter with in those days had little or no interest in the environment and switched off as soon as I broached the subject. Then he said, ‘Well, what you’ve just told me is quite remarkable, because it’s almost exactly what I’m trying to do on my own place. Everyone tells me I’m mad. The stock agent tells me I’m mad. Even my father tells me I’m mad. So I’m very pleased to meet someone doing much the same thing who’s obviously not mad.’
All this happened nearly 30 years ago, and I have neither seen nor spoken to Massy since that conference ended. I went back to Lanark and he went back to the Monaro district, and no doubt he battled away like me, each of us on our own, both trying to do what was best for the environment. What I missed—and what he must have missed, too—was the comfort of associating regularly with other farmers with similar ideas about how to manage the land. If we could have met as a group from time to time, we would have given each other’s spirits a lift. We would have felt we were not alone. As it was, without some form of mutual encouragement, ours was a decidedly lonely row to hoe.
Farmers who are prepared to do things differently for the sake of the environment tend to feel they are on their own— that all other farmers and most government bureaucrats are against them. This is not true: there are farmers with similar ideas about sustainable farming all over Australia—farmers who are striving to achieve an ecological balance on their land and, at the same time, earn enough money to keep their farm going.
The trouble is, you never find them gathered in one place. They never have the comfort and reassurance of being part of a group. I knew of a few other farmers in the Western District who had a special concern for the environment and, like me, were trying to run their farms in a way that would be sustainable in the long term. But none of them lived within 50 kilometres of Lanark, so I would run into them only occasionally, maybe every couple of months. Often, we would meet at a sheep sale, but then the sheep would be uppermost in our minds, so we would not get down to exchanging views on how each of us was faring in our attempts to achieve long-term sustainability.
Take the case of farmers who grow trees for timber, which is certainly one way to achieve sustainability. In Australia, such farmers have little or no contact with each other. In New Zealand, by contrast, farmers who belong to the New Zealand Farm Forestry Association are a closely bonded group. They meet every month in the North and South Islands and once a year they all get together for a big national conference. They are able to do this because none of them has to travel very far. In Australia, distance beats us. Getting together is simply not practicable. The fact that young people are still leaving the bush and that, accordingly, the rural population is falling means that the isolation problem is unlikely to improve any time soon.
I used the term ‘long-term sustainability’ before. In fact, by definition sustainability needs to be long term. Just about any farmer is capable of running a sustainable operation in the short term, in the sense of keeping a lid on the farm’s input bills. But what is the use of that? In an environment as fragile as ours—and there are few environments in the world as fragile as Australia’s—it is essential that farmers do things in such a way that their land is at least as healthy 50 years from now as it is today.
Notwithstanding the tyranny of distance that tends to keep us apart, farmers with a deep interest in the environment do cross each other’s paths from time to time. In 1999, for instance, I came into contact with a remarkable farming couple from Western Australia, Dale and Terri Lloyd. Their family farm, Eden Valley, is near Dumbleyung in the state’s southwest. After Dale Lloyd took over the management of the property from his father, he and Terri set about restoring the land to good health by adopting biodynamic farming methods. Cicely and I have visited Eden Valley twice in the past four years, and we have seen for ourselves the extraordinary success the Lloyds have had in achieving an ecological balance. Environmentally, theirs is the best farm I know.
Let me quote what the Lloyds themselves had to say about their farm in a paper they prepared a few years ago, because I think it sums up the matter perfectly. They wrote:
Biodynamic farming will not suit every farmer . . . income is forgone from not continually cropping farmland while grain prices are inflated and wool prices depressed, but the advantages are that the farm has never looked more alive, beautiful or stable. It is a pleasure to work and live at Eden Valley and all family members enjoy good health and abundant energy. For the Lloyd family the benefits far outweigh the costs, with all members wishing to continue farming without the use of chemicals and without further degrading the environment or losing more of Western Australia’s unique flora and fauna.