It’s only the end of March, but I am rugged up in thermals and a down jacket, my Blundstones pulled over thick woollen socks. Clouds and mist drag sleepily across the surrounding mountains, hunching like great blue shoulders. I turn off the main road and bump along a gravel driveway, a sloping, winding track that snakes between lush paddocks.
I am about to meet Peter Podolinsky who, with his wife Judy, runs Demeter Biodynamic Marketing Company. Peter greets me with a cheerful smile and leads inside me to his big wooden kitchen table.
Peter’s late father, Alex Podolinsky, is well known for his work developing the biodynamic farming method in Australia. Alex’s name has consistently cropped up in my research on soil and regenerative practices, and I knew that I were to do the subject justice, I needed to visit the Podolinsky’s.
In all regenerative farming systems, maintaining and improving the fertility and health of the soil is at the forefront of farmers’ practices. And rightly so for it is soil that grows our food, feeds our livestock, provides our nutrients and sustains our ecosystems. However, it is believed that 70 percent of the earth’s top soil has disappeared and the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations reported in 2017 that if current industrial farming methods continue, the planet only has sixty years of top soil left. It’s dire news, but biodynamic farming proves to be a practical solution. “Biodynamics is all based on how the farm is farmed and how they are bettering the soil”, says Peter.
Understanding soil and how it works is vital when applying biodynamic practices. Although many traditional cultures around the globe have respected the importance of soil to their health and landscapes, Western science is only just beginning to explain the complexities of this wonder. Contrary to the messages spread by the industrial agricultural industries, research is now showing that holistic soil management results in not only the most nutritious produce, but in resilient, fertile soil that can support more biodiversity and sequester more carbon from the atmosphere than that of conventional farms.
These management practices are a combination between traditional ecological farming methods and modern science. By harnessing the power of natural processes and working with the five vital components of soil - air, water, organic matter, microbial life and minerals - true ecological balance can be achieved on our agricultural landscapes.
Air, Water and the Spreading Desert
Despite being commonly referred to as “dirt”, a seemly abiotic resident in the natural world, soil is a biosphere in its own right and, like much of life on earth, requires oxygen to survive. Healthy soil has an open porous structure that allows air, along with water, roots and bacteria to interact with each other. Plant roots require oxygen and water in order to access the nutrients released by microbial life.
Similarly, oxygen and water are also vital to the microbial life to process resident minerals as well as the sugars released by plant roots. Compact soil, as a result of overgrazing, lack of plant activity, or poor soil management, is essentially devoid of sufficient air pockets. This causes not only a lack of microbial life but an inability to retain moisture or sustain plant life.
The compaction of soil and the process in which soil becomes water retardant and lifeless is suitably called desertification. Desertification is one of the most pressing yet unaddressed issues of the modern era, with 40-60% of the earth’s land believed to have undergone desertification, Australia, Asia and Africa being the worst affected continents. A recent United Nations report has found that 12 million hectares of fertile soil is lost to drought and desertification each year.
Although desertification occurs primarily as a consequence of industrial agriculture, mining and urbanisation, it is the disruption of the local water cycle that damages the landscape so severely. A common misconception is that climate change is exclusively a result of excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This is true, but it is not the whole story. 60-70% of the greenhouse gases in our atmosphere are in fact water vapour. It is the increasing desertification of our agricultural landscapes that is resulting in the drying of our soil and contributing to global warming.
Naturally, water vapour from the air meets the vapour that comes off the ground as a product of plants’ respiration. Upon meeting, these vapours form clouds which in turn produce rain. Bare soil, from large scale agricultural tillage, mining areas or concreted areas hold no moisture so does not produce water vapour, therefore clouds do not form and the land receives no rain. Therefore, the water cannot return to the landscape remains in the atmosphere.
Desertification also results in top soil loss. Top soil is uppermost layer of soil that supports plant life, it is what feeds us and sustains ecosystems all over the world. The disappearing of soil from our agricultural landscapes should be acknowledged as a serious warning sign. Soil that has been tilled and then left without a cover crop or mulch cover dries out and dies. Heavy rainfall or winds can then wash and blow away the deadened soil leaving the hard, cracked underbelly of the earth. Reports of the mountain peaks and glaciers of New Zealand turning red from a layer of dust can be attributed the loss of top soil from agricultural lands in Australia.
In Australia, colonial farmers have been battling with desertification since the 1800s. A notoriously dry and fragile landscape, poor soil management has had devastating affects across the country. Records from the early European settlers and explorers reveal that Australian landscapes have undergone a startling transformation. “If we can walk ourselves back to 1788 [and] walked or rode a horse through our native grasslands and forests, you probably couldn’t canter a horse, because [the soils] were so spongy and rough with tussocks and different grasses,” explained farmer and author, Charles Massy during our conversation earlier in the year. “Part of the reason for that was that we had our little marsupial species scattered right through every environment in Australia from the deserts to the grasslands to the forests. They all love fungus, it’s their best tucker, and they spread the spores of the fungus that are so critical in water retention and retaining nutrients [in the soil].” The importance of marsupials in Australian ecosystems shows the significance even the smallest creature can have on the health of a landscape, stressing the need for worldwide biodiversity conservation, not only for the sake of our soils future, but the future of all life on earth.
Although the story of soil reads grim, Peter Podolinsky shares how through careful land management and soil care, desertification can be reversed: “An old guy up in Albury started doing biodynamics and there was a little place on his property that started having a little brook again. And one of his older neighbours came over and said: “What are you doing here? That creek hasn’t run for 20 years!”” Regeneration stories such as these are not uncommon within the regenerative farming community, providing much needed hope and inspiration to the global community in a time of environmental tragedy.
Leaves and Roots
Plants and trees have long been recognised as a healing force on earth, but the role of healthy soil is often forgotten. Plants above ground are vital in encouraging good health below. Understanding symbiotic relationship between microbes and plants is fundamental to biodynamics and any regenerative farming method, but it is also the key to addressing climate change. Through photosynthesis, plants capture carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and draw it down into their root systems where it is stored in the soil.
The key to storing carbon in the soil is for plants to remain in the ground for as long as possible. Regenerative farmers around the world are looking to perennial crops, for not only are they the most effective way to sequester carbon in an agricultural system, but as there is no need to till or cultivate the land, the soil remains unbroken, therefore preserving the life and carbon stored below as well as reducing the need for costly machinery.
Healthy soil is rich in nutrients, microbial life and carbon and like all ecosystems, relies on a complex circularity, where both abiotic and biotic components of the system ensure that there is no waste and continuous fertility. On the other hand, industrial agricultural practices extract more from the soil than it can replace. In fact, 50% of the carbon in the soil has been released into the atmosphere over the last couple of hundreds of years. “Once we start to expose soil: ploughing, overgrazing, over-clearing, we are releasing vast amounts of carbon,” explains Charles.
While ecological farmers rely on cover crops to protect soil, support microbial life and reduce the need for artificial inputs, conventional agricultural methods bypass the need for healthy functioning soil. The vital microbes starve when excessive use of artificial fertilizers are applied to crops, for artificial fertilisers supply crops with a readily absorbable solution, leaving the microbes with no role in supporting plants’ life, and therefore cutting the microbes off from their food source. Moreover, the relentless tillage on industrial farms is not only destroying soil fertility and health on a huge scale, but fast tracking climate change and the widespread death of the Earth’s soils. And where soil dies, deserts form.
Desertification cannot be reversed by removing agriculture from the landscape. The solution is not about leaving the land; it’s about returning. The most effective remedy to desertification is a most unlikely and commonly criticised practice: livestock grazing. Holistic grazing was developed by the ecologist, Allan Savory, in the 1980s. Tasked with explaining why the plains of Zimbabwe were becoming desertified, he discovered that it was not the large herbivores that were causing the landscape to deteriorate, but the extractive practices of the surrounding farms. Realising that animals play a vital role in maintaining the health of grasslands and soils, he devised a livestock management practice that mimicked the natural grazing patterns of wild herbivores, think buffalo, wildebeest and caribou, where humans play the role of the lions and cheetahs in moving animals swiftly over landscapes. As Charles Massy articulates in his acclaimed 2017 book, Call of the Reed Warbler: A New Agriculture, A New Earth: “Holistic planned grazing should incorporate practices that caused livestock to bunch together as a herd, so their concentrated dung, urine and hooves could help to break up hard soil surfaces while laying soil-covering plant material or litter… grazing should occur in only in short periods, combined with long rest periods.”
Furthermore, Charles attributes the success of the method to its holistic and intelligent design. “It combines ecological systems-thinking with modern management and scientific knowledge. As a result, it has turned domesticated pastoral agriculture into a new system of regeneration that can combat climate change, land degradation and desertification while delivering nutrient-dense, health-giving food.”
Holistic grazing has produced extraordinary results. “In the five continents where regenerative ag grazing is working, they’re noticing the appearance of plants that no one has seen for a hundred years or so”, Charles tells me, “We now know that the best way to regenerate broad, desertified grassy landscapes is to use grazing animals extremely intelligently because they will stimulate the regeneration.”
Regenerative agriculture is the key to addressing climate change. By practicing farming methods that sequester carbon such as holistic grazing, no- till, biodynamics and permaculture, regenerative agriculture can not only mitigate the effects of the climate crisis but reverse it. Reshaping the way that we view animal farming is a vital step forward, for it is a fundamental part of restoring the health of our agricultural ecosystems.
The Life in the Soil
Regenerative farmers use observation and a deep knowledge of a landscape to help them understand the life in their soils and how to care for it. In biodynamics, 500 is the key to regenerating soil. “It’s to get the microbes in the soil going and then out of that, the soil becomes more of a colloid so it has the ability to hold moisture much more than soil that hasn’t got microbes in it”, Peter tells me. “Biodynamic farmers’ soil has the ability to absorb moisture when there is rain and get less run off. A lot of our farmers in Western Australia in particular, were having trouble getting water into their dams, because there was no run off. All the water was in the soil.”
In a drying continent such as Australia, conserving soil life should be at the forefront to our way of agriculture, even if one is only concerned with the land’s ability to support cash crops and livestock. However, regenerating soil health also plays a major role in the health and resilience of life above the ground, and therefore the nutritional value of the food that humans gather and grow. Human health relies on the symbiotic relationship between plants and microbes to produce the nutrients and vitamins we need to survive. Healthy functioning soils, such as those found on regenerative farms, naturally produce nutrient-dense foods, and therefore better tasting food as a result of the diversity of microbial, plant and animal life it hosts. Contrastingly, conventional crops, typically monocultures, that depend on artificial fertilizers, have been found to have a significantly inferior nutrient profile that can be attributed to the lack of soil health as well as the plant breed (conventional farms commonly choose breeds for their appearance and shelf life over their nutrient profile). Unsurprisingly, it appears that healthy soil equals healthy food. We must regenerate our landscapes, if not for nature’s own intrinsic value and right to thrive, but for the sake of our own health and survival.
Regenerative farming holds the answer to a healthy future, but time is short and if we cannot regenerate our soils, the ecosystems and the food we depend on will disappear within a generation. Back in the 1980s, the film A Winter’s Tale, featured Alex Podolinsky and the biodynamic movement. Alex’s story drew many to farmers to biodynamics and the biodynamic movement in Australia began to grow. It is heartening that the simple act of sharing stories and knowledge can inspire humble living, whilst sparking the catalyst for the kind of transformative change that will give birth to an era of regeneration. But why haven’t all farmers made the change? Why aren’t we all demanding quality, nutritious food and supporting regenerative farms? It is a tricky topic to discuss between conventional and regenerative farmers for no one wants to admit they are destroying the landscape, the soils, the waters nor take the moral high-ground. “It takes courage to make a change like that. To get out of the system that they’re used to”, says Peter.
Perhaps courage is what is needed in such uncertain times, because every single one of us has a role to play, we only must decide whether we have the courage to play it. We are all stakeholders in our agricultural systems, whether as farmers, distributors, cooks or everyday consumers. We can decide where our food comes from and how it is farmed. The future of our landscapes is in our hands, but not for long. As Alex Podolinsky says in A Winter’s Tale: “It is vital that we actually do something about the soil and the way that we farm or I really am desperate as to our future on earth altogether”.
