With the Industrial Revolution and the development of a mechanistic mindset, we have come to view ourselves as entities separate from the earth. This attitude has led to industrial farming practices that destroy the land and an industrial food complex that strips the nutrients from the foods we consume. What if we adopted—on a large scale—the regenerative agricultural practices that produce nutrient-rich foods, restore the soil, and remove carbon from the atmosphere?
Full Transcript
Alexsandra Guerra: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by Nori, the world’s first carbon removal marketplace. Here are your hosts, Ross Kenyon and Christophe Jospe.
Christophe Jospe: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. My name is Christophe Jospe. I’m here with my co-host Ross Kenyon and producer Paul Gamble. We’re here in the Nori office. If you’re just listening to the podcast for the first time, please subscribe. Give us a review. Give us great ratings if you like what we have to say. Also, there’s not that much time left to invest in Nori, and you can do that on republic.co slash Nori, and you’ll find out all the details there. I’m going to pass it over to Ross here.
Ross Kenyon: Yes, we are very excited to have our first Australian podcast guest.
Christophe Jospe: Oh, right. I actually completely forgot what I was supposed to say. Oh, yeah.
Ross Kenyon: We have to give a shout out to our friends down under over there.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, we were checking it out this morning on Libsyn, which is where you can see all the stats of who’s actually listening to what we have to say. And surprisingly, 3. 5% of our listeners are in Australia. So to all you down under, good day. Right. And also out of his system, I got it out of my system. There’s a podcast that you should check out if you like what we’re doing and you’re into the Reversing Climate Change podcast theme. Check out Climactic. That’s C-L-I-M-A-C-T-I-C.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I listened to an episode the other day. They reached out because we have with us Charles Massy, who is a self-described author, farmer, and shitster. Uh-oh. We’re going to have to label this as not safe for work now, but it was well worth it. His book, Call of the Reed Warbler, A New Agriculture, A New Earth is great. I read it the last few weeks. It’s a really important book. It has a lot of interesting questions. I’ve read a Yeah, absolutely. And Bill Bryson’s in a sunburned country. I had to just make sure I was on track for this.
So thank you for joining us. And I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about how you got to where you are today. Your story is quite interesting and seems like you’ve had a number of slaps in the face of farming and you had to learn the hard way why it is important to be regenerative.
Charles Massy: Yes, look, and first, huge thanks for you guys getting me in today. And that sense of humour, obviously you’ve been watching the Australian programs that we have a good sense of humour like you guys.
Ross Kenyon: Chris Lilly, I think, is just brilliant. I love him, yeah.
Charles Massy: And when we’re faced with such big issues, it’s just we’ve still got to be able to laugh. And I think it’s fantastic what you guys are doing about carbon, the state of our earth, Key component of which is too much carbon dioxide in the air. But there’s another eight integrated earth systems that are also destabilised. And that whole issue, as we move into the Anthropocene, there’s never been a crisis like it for humanity. It makes world wars look like storms in teacups. So how did I get here? And when I use the word stir, it’s only because along with many others, I am presenting a view that takes on the hugely dominant paradigm of modern society, which is economic rationalism, neoliberalism, which is what’s driving the earth to destruction, greed and endless growth.
So the stir is in that context of providing alternate solutions and worldviews that are absolutely fundamental. So I grew up on a farm in what we call the Snowy Mountains area, another cause for laughter here because our biggest mountain is only 7,000 feet compared to you guys. But it’s high temperate grassland, beautiful landscape. And I became a keen naturalist as an only child. Lost my mother when I was very young, so I spent a lot of time in the bush. Became keen on ornithology. Went to university, did the first course in Australia on holistic thinking, human ecology.
And then at the age of 22, had to come home and take over a 5,000 acre farm because my father got ill. And that’s where the problem started because at 22, you know, what we would call bugger all about how to manage a farm. So I asked the best advice in inverted brackets, which was industrial farming approaches, whether it was the scientists, the Department of Agriculture, the best local farmers. In the next 15 years, I proceeded to do great damage to our lovely landscape and its functions. And that all came to a head when we had a five-year drought in the early 1980s.
I ended up with a huge debt and belted the landscape. And I came out of that and said, as someone who’s biophilic, who loves nature, this is crazy. I then started to search. And the 80s was still a bit early before a lot of the big moves in modern regenerative ag, but there was enough going on. And I was reading the likes of Aldo Leopold, Wendell Berry and their antecedents, you know, Muir and Thoreau and Emerson and those guys, as well as Australian nature poets. So by the time I was ready to really do things, the modern regenerative agriculture movement globally was really starting to take off.
I mean, the practices of regenerative ag have been around for millennia. Healthy soils by peasant farmers and all that sort of thing and composting. But the new shift post-90s is quite extraordinary in the way it’s diversifying. It’s based on good science and it’s now covering huge areas, tens of millions of hectares. So that’s what led me into it. And for my sins, after sort of nearly 35 years farming, including getting into modern molecular genetics, developing a new Merino sheep for superb fibre that was animal welfare friendly, I ended up going back to university in my late 50s and doing a PhD looking at both the practices of regenerative agriculture and asking the key question, why had these farmers made a transformative shift in their thinking?
It was a transformational process and basically it was a good excuse to get a government scholarship and go and visit the best farmers all over Australia and then later internationally. So that’s the prolonged background of your questions.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, there’s a lot there. And reading this book, a lot of what struck me was how unique it pertains to Australia, which as a continent, its geology and its Aboriginal and human history generally is quite different from where the paradigms of modern farming originated, the temperate climes of Northern Europe. They don’t necessarily translate super well to Australia. And you think that has caused quite a lot of devastation.
Charles Massy: That’s a really key question. Unlike the States, you know, you have prairie soils that are post-glacial, deep, chock full of nutrients. We have two thirds of Australia is up to 3. 8 billion years old, you know, three quarters of the age of the earth.
Ross Kenyon: You’re talking about the, it’s called the Laurentide Glacier, is that what it was that covered the whole Midwest?
Charles Massy: Yes, exactly, yeah. So where a modern Western agriculture that was brought to both Australia and Europe, it came out of, in your case, a similar climate, Northwestern Europe, a humid climate, soils rich with nutrients, heavy soils, so they had technologies for that. They come to our continent and Highly leached soils, we don’t have big Mississippi River, we don’t have big mountain chains, we don’t have nutrients coming off as aerosols off the ocean like other continents, all sorts of things. And so you’ve got this extraordinary continent with millions of years of subtle co-evolution, both under the ground, microbial and above the ground, of recycling scarce nutrients very rapidly, very efficiently.
And what comes in is this brutal, you know, prototype industrial technology that’s suited to a totally different climate. And the results were rapid and devastating across the whole landscape. In pre-empting, I suspect, what’s the next question? What was that mind that came to Australia?
Ross Kenyon: Hey, stay in your lane, Charles. This is my job over here. No, no, go ahead. It bleeds very naturally into this.
Charles Massy: Well, if you go back and look at human history... You’re American Indians, Inuits, all those different peoples and nations here. And Australia is probably even more remarkable in one sense that we have the world’s oldest indigenous culture outside the Bushmen in Africa and the oldest DNA that left Africa. So we have at least 65,000 years of settlement by indigenous nations in Australia. And over time, including through that extraordinary period of the Ice Ages, Over 260 individual nations with distinct languages and in distinct countries, they call it countries, evolved with extraordinary practices.
Now the assumption by the white settlers was these are just primitive people wandering around scavenging a bit of food. We now know from more and more research that it’s quite the opposite. They had extraordinary landscape management skills, whether it was fire, proto-agriculture and propagating yam daisies, that sort of thing. But the critical points in that question I’ve preempted on you, the mind of those indigenous peoples is what some of your excellent environmental historians like Caroline Merchant talk about, an organic mind. And even with a medieval peasant, as Bruegel and those people will paint at Harvest, for example, that mind is where they saw themselves as indivisible to Mother Earth.
Whatever you do to Mother Earth, you do to yourselves. You can’t step outside that indivisibility. And we then went through this extraordinary phase post the renaissance of the scientific revolution. Industrial Revolution, Capitalist Revolution, and then into the absolute crazy stupidity of economic rationalism today. The process of all those great thinkers, and it was wonderful stuff, of the scientific revolution, you know, Bacon and Descartes and Newton’s and John Locke and Adam Smith and all those guys who developed all the modern theories of both science and economics, was that they saw the world as mechanistic.
So the shift to the mechanical mind It was one where they began to see Earth and its systems as totally separate. It’s a substrate from which you extract profits. That is a huge shift. And that really, if we really go back to fundamentals, and that’s why I’ve focused in my book on easily understood story, because we are a species made for story. And the great narrative we are now telling us as a species is this suicidal, endless growth, economic, rationalist growth. The organic mind, its narrative was... To preserve Mother Earth.
And that’s where we now have to shift if we’re going to save this Earth. So it’s really about the great narrative. So that probably is enough there.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, there’s a lot there to move on. This is one of the questions I had in your book, which was interesting for us to confront at Nori because we want to help people get paid for pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. And we don’t We don’t want to necessarily rely on their biophilia or a spiritual change that causes worship of Gaia. Many of us hold those beliefs personally, but we think that appealing to those sort of self-interested motives is maybe how you scale. I don’t see regenerative agriculture as being in conflict as much with capitalism.
I think many big agriculture companies are going to make the switch because it is actually more profitable because there’s less economic inputs. You’re not destroying the capital that’s in your soil. Am I thinking about this the wrong sort of way? Because it makes sense to me when I think that. But then in your book, you have a number of statements that show opposition to this sort of synthesis.
Charles Massy: No, I think you’re absolutely spot on. I mean, whether we like it or not, we are living within a capitalist society. And it’s how well we live and work within its parameters. And if you like, as an act of insurgency, turn that around is a key question. Otherwise, we can go and sort of lie on a beach in a loincloth. And as a farmer, many of us have got debts. You still have to function in a capitalist society market economy. You still have to sell our wool and meat and grains and stuff.
And I think the exciting story here is that as we shift back, and we’re not talking about organic and mechanical mine. They’re not either or. We need the best of the mechanical modern science. We need to blend that with that attitude of nurturing Mother Earth. So it’s a blend, this new mind, which I expectatively call an emergent mind. So that’s, I think what’s exciting is the better we start to regenerate our landscapes and our ecosystems and our landscape functions. The more profitable it becomes. For example, I was talking to friends of mine who I write about in a book, Ian and Die Haggerty, farming in country that you guys would laugh at.
It’s basically beach sand in Western Australia, 3. 8 billion years old. And the industrial cropping centre, it’s one of the biggest cropping states in Australia. It’s about a third of Australia, which is roughly mainland Australia, excluding Australia. Your Alaska is similar to all your main states across here. So it’s similar size. So it’s a third of the US states is how big West Australia is. Huge cropping belts. Traditional industrial agriculture is about 6 million hectares, say 14 million acres, lying exposed to the sun six months through the hot summer, killing all the soil biology.
Huge debt because once you pump up industrial agriculture, Cereals and other plants with nitrogen and stuff, they’re hugely susceptible to frost, to rain damage, et cetera, et cetera, to disease. And these guys, the Haggerty’s, have totally eliminated industrial inputs and they’re using biological inputs, specifically The vermi juice from worms and compost extract and using the same big machinery. Ian won’t help in a tractor unless he can do 300 acres a day. So they converted the same big industrial machinery. They’ve now been going long enough so they plant their crops without chemical, without industrial fertilizers, holistically graze, ecologically graze animals through it to stimulate the biology.
And just now they’re getting to the stage, I had an email from them before I flew over, they have doubled the yield in barley, they had three tonnes an acre in that tough country of barley versus a neighbour with one and a half tonnes. But their cost inputs were one-sixth. That’s huge profitability at a time when the big cropping lands in Western Australia had gone into huge debt levels. So this is profound. Same with holistic grazing. A lot of the other practices were eliminating things like costs because nature’s pretty good at doing what she does if you empower her to do it and don’t have the inputs, et cetera.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, it sounds very smart. Even if you are a ruthless, mean capitalist farmer, it seems like a pretty smart thing to do. I mean, we don’t want to be paying giant fertilizer companies and seed growers all these fees if you could reasonably avoid it. And if your soil health provides the fertility that you need, that’s a smart move. I want to talk more about this economic rationalism idea today. Man, how would you even style us, Kristoff? Sometimes we can be a little hard-nosed. So sometimes the gushier parts of the environmental scene can rub us the wrong way.
And we all tend to have, Paul and I especially, have a strong market-based economic background. And that’s sort of what we...
Christophe Jospe: Oh, yeah. I mean, yesterday I was at a conference in Miami, Companies vs. Climate Change, and I was talking to someone who’s a forester, and I said, we’re effectively commoditizing carbon removal. And a couple more sentences were exchanged, and she basically wanted to stop talking to me. She said, no, it’s good for you. That’s great. But we’re all about the co-benefits. And it’s interesting because, well, you need both. And we love co-benefits. And we love that reed warblers are coming back and that you have the introduction of nature and biology coming into the reintroduction of when you have the proxy of increasing carbon that all these other good things happen.
But I totally agree, Ross. We’re I agree. I think we are hard-nosed capitalists with a certain hippie slant, perhaps.
Ross Kenyon: And so far as you pose in your book, a dialectic between the organic mechanical mind and the synthesis is this emergent mind. I feel that tension within me too. Many of the philosophers you named that comprise post-Renaissance and Enlightenment philosophy, especially the Scots. I’m a big fan of and learned a lot from. But I also, I feel a lot of biophilia too. And I sometimes when pushed on this have compared it to the films of Terry Gilliam, or the book by Dorno and Horkheimer called Dialectic of Enlightenment. Which is this process of trying to codify and quantify everything and turn everything into a set of discrete numbers has removed the magic of the world.
And if you read any of those ecological writers that you name, like Alda Leopold, read A Sand County Almanac, or you read Mary Oliver, like we come back to on the show every now and again, like there’s something that’s so magical that escapes that hard economic logic. Despite it, in order to make the world work and change in a way that you want, you almost have to appeal to people on those terms to get it. But I have both of these things inside of me. Do you reject it outright or do you also face this inside of you too?
Charles Massy: Well, look, I’m running a farm in a commercial world, so you’re naive if you think you’re operating outside the dominant system. It’s how we can revolutionise that system from within and still be paid because I can’t see – we’re not going to get into a barter exchange economy globally and, for example, in our case, we’re producing – Through a lot of good science and genetics, a superb fiber for the Italian market and animal welfare-friendly, chemical-free meat, that sort of stuff. And we’re being rewarded for it.
Ross Kenyon: Those are premium products, too. Merino wool in Italy.
Charles Massy: Exactly. So what’s behind this is the arrogance. And, you know, I trained as a scientist, too. Not just a holistic thinker. I did a Bachelor of Science in zoology, et cetera, and done a fair bit of reading. So... I have a lot of friends there, including I chaired a company of molecular geneticists once, and I’ve worked with some GM scientists, etc. So I can understand the wonder of science, of peeling back the mystery and starting to understand it. But with it goes this degree of arrogance. If we think we can find all the explanations for the extraordinary way that Mother Nature has co-evolved over millions of years, That’s the supreme arrogance because we keep getting caught out.
And this recent example in the States where I think it was Simplot, the GM potato company, the lead guy walked out and said, this is just super dangerous. It’s full of toxins and it’s not performing. I happen to I was going to be on stage with your wonderful soil scientist Don Huber in Brisbane, Australia. We were talking and I’d been working with one of the GM scientists that had switched camps because he was getting so alarmed. And he was given, a guy called Jonathan Latham, he was given tens of thousands of papers now colloquially called poison papers from Whistleblowers, Freedom of Information, which exposed what Kerry Gillum’s written about in Whitewash, for example, the cover-ups by the big companies, the capture of the regulatory authorities, etc.
And he sent me this letter through With this GM potato manager saying, this is just super dangerous. And it took him half an hour to explain the subtleties of what was going on. And the more we learn, the more we learn we don’t know about the complexity of nature. And the emergence recently of knowledge about epigenetics, that you can have genetic heritable expression that’s due to switching on and off a gene, not the changing of the DNA. It’s a never-ending discovery. We do not know it all. We never will. And we should respect and revere that.
Otherwise, we’re going to make some bad decisions.
Christophe Jospe: So you bring up a lot of very interesting points. And as a non-farmer, which is 99% of the population, which is shockingly large, like we need more farmers. But I consume information that I think is accurate. I don’t know if all of it is accurate. I’d like to think I’m savvier than average consumer, but most consumers are not. They read something and there are all of these conflicting narratives. And so as a farmer who has, in a way, started in one place and moved to another place, and also you’re a communicator going around and sort of spreading knowledge, what do you think are some of the largest myths that need to be dispelled?
Or if consumers who genuinely want to say, I’d like food that is better for the earth and advancing a more sort of holistic way of doing things... What are some of the key drivers that consumers might want to be aware of? You guys are full of easy questions today, aren’t you?
Charles Massy: That’s a really key one.
Christophe Jospe: We know you’re jet lagged too, so we’re just going to throw some more zingers.
Charles Massy: That’s why I’m croaking like a frog. The first point is that this regenerative ag revolution won’t occur just with farmers. It has to be an indivisible partnership with the urban consumer sector. Not just the urban consumer, the urban person getting involved in CSAs and getting involved in community gardens, etc. , etc.
Christophe Jospe: CSA, that’s Community Supported Agriculture?
Charles Massy: Yeah. Getting fully informed about what food is like that comes off healthy landscapes full of nutrient density, micronutrients, phytochemicals. Now, what’s missing... Which is behind the assumptions of the average consumer buying out of the big supermarkets. And this is due to the power of the big transnational companies and the big chemical companies. There is a total ignorance that the food that comes through the industrial process is bereft of most of the major nutrients and micronutrients and phytochemicals absolutely integral to our health, mental and physical. Which we co-evolved for, you know, over a million years in Africa.
We’re both food and meat and phytochemicals off shrubs. We were becoming hardwired for their use for both our physiological and our immune function. So, I mean, you can go to buy white goods that can sit on a shelf for 12 months. But they have got, not only have they got bugger all in them, to use a highly technical term. But what’s lacking and sometimes what’s there, because this is another issue maybe for later, we now know that the world’s most widely used herbicide, glyphosate Roundup, which is a variant, is now getting in most of our industrial foods with a shocking impact.
So as I said, the huge companies that are driving industrial agriculture are preying on this total ignorance and trust by the average consumer. And you can’t blame the average consumer. They’re not across the issues that you guys have been researching that I have. But the emptiness of our foods, our modern industrial foods, due to the industrial process, both in what’s done in agriculture, what the food processes do to it, what the additives that are put in do to it, is what’s poisoning humanity. And if you look at the graphs of post-Second World War when industrial agriculture really took off, but particularly In the 1990s, with the rise of GM on your broad-based crops, there’s an incredibly high correlation between the rise of mental and modern mental and physical diseases with the rise of industrial agriculture and its big inputs.
And that’s not a coincidence.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah. So how do we fix it, Charles?
Charles Massy: Well, that’s what my book’s about. The solutions are there. The book’s really about lots of wonderful stories right across the spectrum of regenerative ag. And, you know, let’s bear in mind the big end of town tells us that we need them to feed the world’s population. Well, that’s absolute crap. If you look at the latest United Nations FAO stats, Food and Agricultural Organization, 70% of the world’s food comes off peasant farms, five acres and less. And the majority of that is grown by women in an organic process. If you took that acreage out a bit more, it’s probably up to 75, 80%.
We’re wasting another 30 to 40% of food. And there’s a lot of wasteland, you know, green space in cities and stuff we can use. So the research shows we could feed 11 billion today. And the solutions are there, not just with the peasant farms, but the regenerative farms in broader acres that are now doing stuff in agroforestry, what’s called silvopastoral systems, which is trees with food underneath, things like permaculture, biodynamics. There’s a whole range all doing the same thing, which is regenerating landscape function. We have the solutions. It’s now... Bridging the knowledge gap of letting urban people see why they’re being poisoned, how they’re captured by the big end of town and their message, how dangerous it is to go into some of the fast food networks which suits multinational profits but destroys human health.
You know, there’s a huge space of misinformation and lack of information and you can’t blame anyone for that. But if we can bridge that gap and get more and more people in the urban areas involved, the revolution will accelerate. Which includes pulling down carbon dioxide just through information and this partnership we need.
Christophe Jospe: Now that all sounds good and well and we can sit here in our ivory tower and say I want to eat better food and I don’t want to eat fast food. And we’re fortunate to be able to do that. Many people cannot afford to do that. They are potentially stuck in a cycle of poverty. You’ve got a very convenient drive-thru. You drive right up to the window. You get your number seven Happy Meal with fries, supersized. And that is endemic to our culture. I think we’ve probably influenced – I haven’t been to Australia, but I would imagine you have – Same fast food restaurants, and that’s stuck.
And I don’t see that going away, per se. Or do you? Or do you think that is something that you’d like to see shift? I guess I’m throwing a lot of questions at you, but how does this become something that’s available for everyone, not just those who can afford to demand that they have healthier food?
Charles Massy: Yeah, no, that’s a key question. And no, it’s not going to go away. The power of the marketing, the physical power, financial power, these big companies are huge. And they’re actually preying on weakness. If you go back to the Great Depression and the Second World War, where people were strapped for money, supplies were short. People went back to the old knowledge of growing their own food or having community gardens or whatever. That’s just a knowledge poverty, nothing else. It doesn’t cost much and collaborating and sort of community gardens and all that sort of stuff.
And so that’s point one. That’s not going to cost any more than what a Big Mac is going to cost you. But there’s another side to cost and that’s opportunity cost. Imagine if we... And they’re coming, but they’re not there yet. Imagine if we had nutrient density or variety meters that we could run across food in the big supermarket shelves or some of the fast food stores. The readings would be close to zero in many cases with all the crucial nutrients. If you ran those meters across food off healthy soils and landscapes, the numbers are up through the roof.
So the cost to human health long-term, et cetera, et cetera, versus health, Boosting your immune and physiological function through food we were designed and co-evolved for is huge. Now, I know that’s a glib answer in this day and age, but the health cost to society, I mean, the cost, for example, in 30 years of, say, obesity, autism, are going to break modern economies. So there’s two different costs here. And I think the shift can be made. Without it being expensive, they don’t have to go down and get a $25 steak.
There’s other ways of getting healthy food, both either growing or having community box schemes or sharing, etc. So it’s a mental educational issue as much as anything.
Paul Gambill: Can I add, we briefly mentioned earlier that we expect that large agricultural industry to make a shift over to this regenerative agriculture movement when it makes financial sense for them to do so. And that’s really the way that this becomes available to larger populations. It’s not like these companies that are developing these GM species or herbicides, fungicides, whatever. It’s not like they want to be harming people. That’s not their end goal. They just see these as the way to maximize the amount of money that they’re able to extract from the resources that they have.
And so if we are able to offer them a better way that still incentivizes them to take action, Then this stuff becomes more available. So it really does have to go through this larger industrial machine, I think.
Ross Kenyon: I’ve seen that soil fertility is dropping something like 3% a year on many of these big monocultural farms. And regenerative is just looking better and better. Maybe that doesn’t fix everything. I don’t think we’re going to get rid of concentrated animal feeding operations, CAFOs, from regenerative becoming the new dominant paradigm for all ag. But I definitely think it puts us on the right track, at least.
Charles Massy: Look, the previous point about the big multinationals, nothing’s black and white. But they’ve seen the potential and the opportunity with organics. So they’re now starting to, if you like, prostitute or damage the organic label because they’re growing monocultures of organics. And anyone who knows healthy soil biology and complex systems will know monocultures long-term don’t work. You need this diversity of root and plant function and microbial diversity to really make it work. I... And so that’s why it’s just been certified in the States, because I’ve just spent time with people like Patagonia and others, that’s why they’re now calling the new label Regenerative Organic to disempower the big retailers who want to move in that space.
If you want my opinion... I see the big organizations, their lack of responsiveness. They’re not evil quite absolutely right. There’s human beings doing their job in a giant structure. But they’re like dinosaurs. It is so big. There’s no way they’re going to be rapidly responsive, intimately related with a consumer because of the profit motive. So in time, I’m hoping they go the way of dinosaurs.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. I know what you want to say. You just do the innovator’s dilemma. Yeah.
Paul Gambill: Oh, well, yeah, I can go there. Paul’s Greatest Hits, Volume 2. Yeah, I mean, I totally agree with you on that. When you get large bureaucratic organizations, they get stuck because they have, this is the innovator’s dilemma, the Clay Christensen theory in a very popular business book, that when they grow to a certain size, they have these huge labor forces and they have capital tied up in expensive assets. And The only thing that they can really do is just keep moving forward. It’s very, very difficult for them to pivot. It’s like trying to very rapidly turn a cruise liner around or something.
So yeah, I totally agree with you. And I do like the approach of trying to outflank them and come up with this new, better standard of regenerative organic. That makes a lot of sense.
Charles Massy: And there’s another side to this too, and we’re talking about stuff longer term here. You can bet the big multinationals and the big giant corporations aren’t going to go away tomorrow. The important thing about reintegrating with healthy food, healthy earth, that organic approach, is the relationship. Well, first of all, if you’re growing it yourself or in community gardens, you’re starting to rebuild the human contact and those sort of meaningful issues that we’ve There’s something intangible about that, yeah. Yeah, there is. And in an increasingly siloed culture where we’re isolated. And if you start forming a relationship with your organic growers who are providing food boxes with community-supported agriculture and stuff, you’re starting to talk about a whole increasing sweep of human interaction and your learning.
In the process, you’ll find that most really well-run CSAs and other organic chains, there’s a lot of education and people are shifting, not just for the food, but for the whole re-engagement with nature and all that sort of stuff. So it’s quite multi-dimensional.
Ross Kenyon: If you were to offer advice to someone like myself or the rest of us at this table, what exactly is the emergent mind and how do we actually take the best from the mechanical and the best from the organic? How do we find this better way? How do we enact it? What is different about the way of thinking?
Charles Massy: Another easy question.
Ross Kenyon: Are you being droll? Is this actually difficult?
Charles Massy: How do we change the world? Yeah, exactly. In one sentence. Yeah. One of the exciting things about going back to university after over 35 years away doing other things was I had to do a big catch-up on what had happened in ecological systems, landscape, but also all the other stuff. You know, the rise of computers had led to hard and then soft systems thinking and a lot of new physics in chaos theory, string theory. All of that led to a pretty good understanding of what are called complex adaptive systems, which are these...
I mean, a complex adaptive system can be the World Wide Web, Or it can be a landscape or an individual catchment or the earth with its nine integrated earth systems. I had to teach this to masters in third years and there’s roughly about 12 characteristics of a complex adaptive system and a couple of them really hit me between the eye. And one of them is this capacity. If we step back and stop dominating our landscapes or an ecosystem and let nature get on with what she’s good at, there’s a capacity to self-organize back to healthy function.
And she does that. With properties that reside within the system, which are now allowed to operate, and they’re called your emergent properties. So that’s where the idea of emergent mind came from. And to get to the guts of your question, we don’t want to ditch science. We need to know a lot more about soil, its microorganisms. And all those other things and how ecosystems work and how our global cycles, heat exchange, all that. We don’t want to ditch any of that. But we have to put it within a context of the prime thing here is caring for the earth which sustains us all.
And the current reductionist mechanical approach is what is destroying it. So the emergent mind I see as a mind with great humility combines the best of science and the mechanical with the Best of that, empathic, organic mind, but is constantly open because of that humility to what will emerge and pop up so we can adjust. And I’m not saying that’s going to be the next mind. It’s probably just an evolving stage of the mind. But if we don’t move, I mean, this is big picture stuff, but if we don’t collectively move to another mind, we’re history as we’re driving the planet to destruction.
Maybe at some stage we need to focus, yeah, number one issue is carbon dioxide, global warming, but gee, the other eight integrated earth systems are also destabilised and one of the major destabilisers, if not number one in a lot of them, is industrial ag. And that’s why I am so keen on getting this message across because regenerative ag gets the capacity to pull out carbon dioxide and address things like biodiversity and those other systems. Offer some of the very best solutions. And if that’s not a great story, I don’t know what is.
Ross Kenyon: Okay, I’m going to run through a scenario. And if you could tell me if this is a way of thinking emergently or not, maybe that would help me get my mind around this entirely. So if I’m a farmer, at this present time, I can look backwards and say I can become far more primitivist. And that’s one way to go. Or I can keep trying to dominate nature, see myself as a part of separate from it. Till the soil, release all the soil carbon, not care about soil biology or any of the major advances of the last couple of decades when it’s come to this.
And not just thinking about profit in this, I don’t know, in some ways it’s almost like a caricature. It’s like a cartoon, like Scrooge McDuck kind of thing. Not thinking like that because when you think about how your personal self-interest is actually tied up with the ecological health of what land you are managing... Then you see that your self-interest is oftentimes quite closely aligned with the interest of the earth and the land. And is that the synthesis when you’re able to see those interests as coinciding? When you see potential ability to profit from good behavior as opposed to the way it is now under the mechanical mind paradigm where you’re profiting off of something being extracted from the soil?
Charles Massy: Another really good question. The very best are the regenerative farmers and some of them running, you know, Millions of acres are really top business people as well as thinking ecologically because they know there’s a win-win with two. If you don’t, first of all to answer your question, going back to primitivism, whatever that means, running around in a loincloth thinking that you can just do a bit of gathering or something, that’s what I would, you know, that’s not on the cards. What the best of the regenerative farmers are doing and what we’re finding in Australia and in the States and worldwide now, there are some excellent social learning organisations that people do courses, they’re supported through change and it’s an ongoing learning thing and through both regular courses, through mentors, through support because it’s an uncomfortable thing to shift from a mechanical industrial farming across, usually isolated in your environment initially, in your district or whatever.
But the top operators are really good business people. So they’re working within the economic framework, which we can’t escape. But the number one parameter and question is, is this going to do any long-term damage to the very ecosystems that’s driving that profitability? And they’re getting very good at pruning off costs and all those sorts of things. But it’s all driven by enhancing the ecology. So there is a win-win there when it’s done well. It’s very sophisticated. And that sophistication is growing and it’s bringing in modern science, et cetera, et cetera.
So, yeah, it’s definitely not either or in those big minds.
Ross Kenyon: So if you’re playing the professor role, did I pass?
Charles Massy: Yes, you’re also a stirrer.
Ross Kenyon: Definitely. Yeah, I feel very much in accordance with that. That’s how we think, too. This is a win-win and an opportunity for professors. Ecology and the environment to win out and for companies also to, in many cases, become more profitable and those that cannot adapt to the new paradigm may fail. But that’s how the market works. Those companies that can’t hack it, they should fail. And I think when regenerative comes around, I think that’s going to make a really big stir in this next couple of years.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah. I want to take this in a slightly different direction. So you mentioned earlier, you have a message to get out and we couldn’t agree more. We’re so happy to have you on this podcast to help amplify that message. And in thinking about the message, there are different audiences that you want to hear that message. You mentioned that you’re meeting with Patagonia. Their CEO has written about the importance of regenerative agriculture, very aligned. In a way there, you’re preaching to the choir. That’s sort of table stakes. It’s easy stuff. You’re on the Reversing Climate Change podcast.
Here in the US, I don’t know what it’s like in Australia, but here in the US, if we’re in the middle of the United States and we say the words climate change, well, suddenly we’ve lost the interest of a farmer. And I just wonder, who do you think are some of the audiences that you need to meet and reach? And what are some of the specific messages that you think most effectively reach them?
Ross Kenyon: You missed the chance to say Bogan.
Charles Massy: Didn’t you want to throw in the Australian slang? Or a certain president, but I won’t go there. Yeah. Yeah, a really serious question. It’s interesting. There’s a lot of us now, both American and British, but particularly Australians involved in this scene. We’re doing lots of talks now to farming groups and wider. There’s a real hunger, certainly in our country, and as I’m understanding here as well, because I’ll be talking at some conferences over at Kentucky soon, people like us. And there’s lots of organisations that are really starting to move into this space.
In the last five years, your average audience of a farmer group, and what we have over there is a government-sponsored, part-sponsored organisation called Landcare that initially was just about growing trees, but now it’s moving subtly into regenerative agriculture. Five, eight years ago, if you got 25, 30 people, you were doing well, and that was great. Now, 150, 200, 250 plus. There’s a ground swell now happening at that level. I think, and you’re not going to change that highly sceptical, right-wing, politically aligned group. That mind has got so many political and other psychological issues.
I don’t think you waste time on that. We work on... On the better informed people say in the urban and the farmers that are sympathetic who are unaware of some of this stuff. Let’s just look at what you guys are on about, pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere to address what is now levels of carbon dioxide that’s sort of so far outside the square it’s incredibly dangerous. We haven’t seen it in two or three million years. I’ve recently interacted with Paul Hawken, who initiated it. And I’ve admired Paul for a long while, the last three decades, as you know, as a social and environmental change agent.
He’s a wonderful adjunct to the world.
Ross Kenyon: We’re fans too, yeah, he’s great.
Charles Massy: And he got sick of asking climate scientists, what do we do about it? And they said, I don’t know, we’re crunching the numbers. So 15 odd years ago, he got set out and hired analysts and scientists to crunch, to examine the 100 best methods. And they’ve costed 80 of them. It’s a beautiful book that he’s put out. And when I looked at it, there’s seven or eight methods that are all in regenerative act, doing the same thing. And I said, put them together, let’s look at the numbers. And by about 240% better than the next method, regenerative agriculture is the best way of pulling out carbon dioxide and burying it in the ground.
I would have thought, instead of big picture stuff and frightening, here’s some really concrete data we can start putting out. And people can see that, wow. If I move to regenerative agriculture, I can have a huge impact on this current crisis that’s emerging. And I guess an issue that tends to get overlooked, and I think it’s absolutely important that the number one big one, especially in the context of these recent fires, et cetera, in California, that you guys focus on carbon dioxide. But it’s interrelated with the other integrated earth systems, all of which in a self-organising fashion have maintained conditions for life on earth.
Whether it’s biodiversity, we’re in the sixth greatest extinction event the Earth’s ever seen, this time caused by humans. As land systems change, as use of fresh water, I won’t go through them all. But industrial agriculture is one of the, if not the major player in disturbing those. And a regenerative agriculture has the capacity to turn them around if it’s going to be widely applied. So it’s a terrific news story. And I would think that terrific news You know, what’s happening now is we’re hearing more about climate and for the average punter, what we call the average punter, the average Joe Blow down in the city, it’s just all too much and you switch off.
But if they can start seeing some concrete solutions, if I go along to the local organic shop or start joining a community garden, I’m going to have an impact in my own backyard. And that I see is the cut through. We’ve got to have that partnership now with informed urban people.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, everyone eats, right, after all.
Ross Kenyon: I love all the lingo here because I’m reminded of, I think Samuel Johnson said about the UK and America, there are two people divided by a common language. I was taking a picture of one of the pages in your book. I’m like, I don’t know what half of these words are. There’s all sorts of Australian species and slang. There’s some very funny, I assume, Bush slang in here that made me laugh. Some that are not even repeatable. Maybe a little A little bit silly. I wanted to quote you here, though, you quoting Wes Jackson.
He said in becoming native to this place, since our break with nature came with agriculture, it seems fitting that the healing of culture begin with agriculture, fitting that agriculture take the lead. It’s like land use change caused a great amount of emissions and harm in industrial agriculture. And you’re thinking that it is regenerative agriculture’s role to lead this transition in drawdown.
Charles Massy: And that’s why I put that quote right at the front of the book. And if you really look at the word, put a hyphen between agri and culture. It’s all about our mind, how we go about farming or foresting or whatever you want to call it.
Ross Kenyon: It’s like a Wendell Berry thing.
Charles Massy: Yeah, yeah. And that’s why it’s so important. It’s the cultural worldviews we’ve imbibed, the dominant one being economic nationalism or industrial ag. It all comes back to that mind and if we can shift that and let the urban consumer who wants to be an activist and growing food and getting involved, getting a small acres, etc. And that’s why I’m so excited and emphasising I think the best solution to the global crisis are going to come from a regenerative agriculture approach. There’s going to be others, but if you go through drawdown, et cetera, some of them are high-tech, et cetera, et cetera, some of them are really excellent.
But immediately, and it’s now being ground-proofed and spreading, agriculture is going to be a key player.
Ross Kenyon: We definitely think so. That’s why we’ve started with regenerative agriculture as our first methodology. I love all of that. I want to ask you a concluding question. We can cut this if you don’t like it, if it’s a little too personal, but I noticed reading your book, the beginning of most every chapter has a sort of, I mean, one of your blurbs in the book describes it as lyrical writing, but you clearly have Great connection to your land, biophilia. You love what you do. You love nature. How much of what you do has a very strong spiritual connection?
A lot.
Charles Massy: Yeah, and I think that’s a dimension that we rationalist humans have illuminated and you can cut the cake on whichever way you want. I happen to have some spiritual beliefs and it’s not the simplistic necessarily things that you see but there’s a greater connection, whatever you want to call God. I get something when I walk my, and I like to walk my landscapes, even on foot if I’m mustering or love fencing even through a winter. Seeing the arrival of migratory birds, which are sort of talisman markers of an evolving season.
All the things I’ve written about, it just so doubles the meaning for me of life. It’s not fashionable to talk about something deeper that touches us spiritually, but I think a spiritual element to whatever you want to call this organic emergent mind is crucial. That’s one of the key reasons. That’s one of the reasons why in eliminating that and being purely reductionist and mechanistic is why we’ve got ourselves into trouble. We’re made for something deeper and people will cut that cake however they want but let’s not ignore it and to me it has great significance.
Ross Kenyon: Great. Thanks for doing that. It inspires me too as an urban dweller. And my wife is very biophilic and I’m a lagging biophilic person relative to her. But I think it’s important for people to have that kind of connection. And farmers oftentimes have such a I don’t know. They’re able to see the results of their labors very personally and feel connected to the earth. And sometimes we don’t get as much like that. So whenever we go visit farms, we have a little bit of lifestyle envy is a recurring theme on the show.
That all sounds great, though. Is there anything else you want to add?
Christophe Jospe: No, this has been excellent, Charles. If you have any final words you’d like to say.
Charles Massy: Oh, you’ve probably heard enough from me. But look, I just think this whole space for both regenerative farmers and the urban connection really offers an exciting pathway for all of us instead of feeling powerless and disempowered and disillusioned. Here is an opportunity to really roll the sleeves up and get in and start doing something collaboratively and that’s a great story. As I keep saying, we’re a species made for stories so let’s run with this exciting story of regenerating and saving a planet.
Ross Kenyon: Definitely. We would love to be a part of that as much as we can. I would wholeheartedly recommend called The Reed Warbler. I really liked it. I think it’s a beautiful book. If you’d like to learn more about regenerative agriculture, especially the ontology, the Thank you. Thanks.
