Tools for Change
When you are aware of the support that is around you, this enables you to keep moving forward on your journey as the process of regenerative agriculture never ends – it just continues to develop and deepen.
Technology
Often when we think of agricultural tools, we think of technological advances in the way we manage land. From draught animals to the latest tractors, technology is advancing the way we farm. The issue is that we are often so focused on the short term, that we don’t consider the longer-term implication of our actions. For instance, the use of glyphosate is a quick and effective way to reduce weeds on a property, but the build-up of herbicide resistance and the impact on soil diversity can be seen as a costly side effect. Similarly, the ease in which we can know plough a field has led to soil degradation across our landscapes.
Fire
Fire is often detrimental to the environment as it releases carbon, destroys habitat, reduces diversity while baking and exposing soil. Yet, it has been used to alter ecosystems by removing fuel loads through controlled and patch burning by Indigenous Australians for millennia. The benefit of the controlled burning is it helps to manage the accumulation of dangerous levels of flammable materials. This allows land managers to reduce the overall risk of bushfire spread and intensity that have long term negative impacts across out landscapes. It can also be used as a way to increase biodiversity in some heavily degraded landscapes, although this is depended on a variety of factors and not applicable across all degraded landscapes.
Fire use has been the major historical vegetation alteration factor since the elimination of the megafauna approximately 45,000 years ago. Current biodiversity in Australia is a consequence of adaptation to fire regimes (both planned and coincidental) and has co-evolved for that influence to be a larger landscape factor in Australia than other continents.
Grazing and Animal Impact
How we use animals as a tool, as well as providing economic return, can be applied in two ways. Planned, active and adaptive grazing management can increase the biodiversity of pastures and can lead to vigorous growth in plants while promoting greater root mass.
Additionally, using livestock as a tool for their impact on the land, when managed strategically, can help us improve landscape function.
As with all disturbance tools, livestock and their associated impacts can be either positive or negative depending upon the way they are applied. The application of livestock grazing can produce a range of consequences and those effects are subject to the broader circumstances of the area following the application.
These practices affect each of the ecosystem processes discussed previously. If applied well and consistently then a beneficial cycle of expansion can occur by increasing water cycles, improving mineral cycle, changing and influencing community dynamics and impacting the capture of solar energy.
Living Organisms
Increased complexity improves landscape health, and we can see the benefits as farmers. While large scale industrial agriculture needs a variety of insecticides, pesticides, fungicides and herbicides to manage landscapes, regenerative farmers use much lower levels of chemicals and other external inputs. This helps create complexity in our landscapes and adds diversity. Remnants, shelter belts and vegetation strips have all been used to attract beneficial insects to reduce pest species. But there are opportunities to make more fundamental management changes that integrate diversity completely across a farmscape rather than consigning it to separate areas.
As a tool living organisms includes seeds, biological preparations (like composts) and the animals we manage. It can also include us and how we work the land.
First Nations Perspective
From a First Nations Perspective, Country needs people. There are very few landscapes in Australia that were not actively managed by First Nations people. Even rainforests had some level of human influence. For example, Western science has recently verified First Nations oral history by using DNA analysis to show the black bean (Castanospermum australe) was transported from the rainforests of Cape York down the Great Dividing Range into the sub-tropical rainforests of Northern NSW. These same rainforests were not one continuous stand of vegetation but were intersected by grasslands that were maintained by fire. These grasslands were good for drawing in prey like wallaby and pademelon, but also acted as highways for travel, trade, and ceremony.
Today, there are First Nations land management techniques that are finding mainstream acceptance, from cultural burning to the use of native grasses to produce grain for human consumption. However, these practices are generally suited to specific contexts. Cultural burns can be difficult to conduct in some areas due to misconceptions and perceived risks; whilst native grasses can be difficult to restore where invasive feral grass species outcompete and degrade grassland ecosystems.
However, we need to think about why these techniques were used, and what were the desired outcomes. Knowing this, then we can develop our own methodologies, that suit our own context, that replicate the desired outcomes. For example, fire is used to clean up Country and allow for regrowth and restoration. It is also useful for keeping woody vegetation under control. For example, in some regions, unmanaged eucalypt forests will quickly become a tinder box monoculture that exerts an allelopathic effects upon the ground-layer vegetation, thus suppressing diversity. In the place of fire, we can use regenerative grazing practices to clear out senescing grasses, but not to the point where they are overgrazed, and to control woody regrowth. You want your grazing to mimic a restorative cool burn, not a destructive bushfire.
It is important to acknowledge that we can never fully replicate the subtle nuances, the complexity, and the importance of First Nations land management techniques, and nor should we try. It must remain with First Nations people to develop, maintain, and control their Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) and Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property (ICIP).
