CHAPTER 3

An Indivisible,
Dynamic Whole

The true problem of agriculture, and all other land-use, is to achieve

both utility and beauty, and thus permanence. A farmer has the
same obligation to help, within reason, to preserve the biotic integ-
rity of his community as he has, within reason, to preserve the
culture which rests on it. As a member of the community, he is the
ultimate beneficiary of both.
Aldo Leopold , ‘The Land-Health
Concept and Conservation’1

O ver recent years, I have been refining a teaching model on ecological

literacy; testing and developing it through talks to farming groups
and through teaching university students. I call this the five landscape
functions model, which is part-based on the work of Allan Savory.
From his ranch Dimbangombe near Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe, wildlife
ecologist Allan Savory has sparked a revolutionary grazing management
system that regenerates landscape functions and complex ecological sys-
tems. He calls it holistic planned grazing, and it is having remarkable
impact across many millions of acres of the world’s degraded landscapes,
including on our own farm. The approach constitutes one of the greatest
forward leaps in agriculture since domestication 10,000 years ago. This is
because it combines ecological systems-thinking with modern

47
) )
 Call of the Reed Warbler

management and scientific knowledge. As a result, it has turned domesti-

cated pastoral agriculture into a new system of regeneration that can
combat climate change, land degradation and desertification while deliv-
ering nutrient-dense, health-giving food.
However, holistic planned grazing is not the only form of regenerative
agriculture, as we will see in subsequent chapters. What is central to gain-
ing ecological literacy and thereby enabling landscape regeneration is that
all the different forms of regenerative agriculture have four essential eco-
system processes at their heart. In this book, I have added a fifth: the social
or human factor. Thus, the five crucial landscape functions or processes
described here are: (1) the solar-energy function (focused on maximising
the capture of solar energy by fixing as many plant sugars, via photosyn-
thesis, as possible); (2) the water cycle (focused on the maximisation of
water infiltration, storage and recycling in the soil); (3) the soil-mineral
cycle (focused on inculcating biologically alive and healthy soils that con-
tain and recycle a rich lode of diverse minerals and chemicals); (4) dynamic
ecosystems (focused on maximum biodiversity and health of integrated
ecosystems at all levels); and (5) the human–social aspect (focused on
human agency triggering landscape regeneration by working in harmony
with natural systems).
The different sections of Part II are structured around these functions
and how they contribute to the health and long-term productivity of our
farmed landscapes. A crucial point is that all functions are dynamically
intertwined and indivisibly connected via reciprocal causal links. That is,
none can act alone, for all are dependent on, or linked to, the others. Never-
theless, for clarity, I will go through them one by one, in each case providing
stories of some of the remarkable farmers who have thrived through work-
ing in harmony with them, before bringing them all together. In doing so, I
hope to extend and promote  this platform of ecological literacy.

In 1830, Scotsman John G. Robertson left his homeland for Australia with
‘a light purse’ – one half crown and sixpence in his pocket. He landed in
Van Diemen’s Land (later named Tasmania) in 1831. After working as an
overseer for nine years for local farmers, he had saved £3000, and this
enabled him to seek cheap land and stock across Bass Strait in the new
colony of Portland in 1840. ‘I had no difficulty in finding a run,’ he said

48
) )
 An Indivisible, Dynamic Whole

later, and he took up land near the present town of Casterton. He then
placed 1000 ewes on the initial 11,000-acre farm he named Wando Vale.
Within weeks, all the land around Robertson had been gobbled up by other
squatters, each one looking for permanent water and scared to go further
out ‘from fear of the natives’.2
In a buried theme that still runs deep across the subconscious of this
nation and its occupied landscapes, though Robertson professed sympathy
for ‘the natives’, he nevertheless ‘took up’ the ‘vacant’ land they were still
living on and which they had managed for millennia. This occupation was
courtesy of the dirty work of others. Robertson noted:

the first day I went over the Wando Vale Station to look at
the ground I found old Maggie (that Sir Thomas Mitchell
gave the tomahawk to) fishing for muscles [sic] with her toes,
in a waterhole up to her middle, near where the Major
crossed the stream … nearly all her male relatives were killed
three days before I arrived on the Wando by Whyte Brothers
[because the natives had stolen some sheep] … the Whyte
Brothers’ party, seven in number, surrounded and shot them
all but one. Fifty-one men were killed, and the bones of the
men and sheep lay mingled together bleaching in the sun at
the Fighting Hills.3

Subsequent to their ‘conquest’ of this country, all of Robertson’s neigh-

bours were broken and dispersed like chaff in the strong wind of Australia’s
first major recession, of 1841 – except for Robertson. By 1845, he had
expanded Wando Vale to nearly 12,000 acres, running 7300 sheep, and
after this he kept from 8000 to 10,000 sheep ‘when full stocked’ on his
‘pretty little station, well-watered’.4
At the end of his tenure, before he returned to his homeland in 1854,
Robertson boasted, ‘there is not a station in the Portland District better
managed for its size, both as regards economy and care of man and beast on
it’.5 And yet, despite his self-proclaimed excellent management, the land-
scape and its functioning had dramatically collapsed around him.
We know this because in a record he wrote in 1853 for the lieutenant
governor of Victoria, Charles La Trobe, Robertson laid out one of

49
) )
 Call of the Reed Warbler

Australia’s first clear descriptions of rapid ecological collapse due to set-

stocked pastoralism (the practice of grazing livestock continuously in a
particular paddock) and ignorance about how landscapes functioned.
‘When I arrived through the thick forest-land from Portland to the
edge of the Wannon country, I cannot express the joy I felt at seeing such a
splendid country before me,’ he stated concerning his arrival in 1840. ‘I
looked amongst the 37 grasses that formed the pasture of my run. There
was no silk-grass which had been destroying our V.D.L. pastures … The
sheep thrived admirably.’ 6
On such terrain, all remained well for a while. ‘The few sheep at first
made little impression on the face of the country for three or four years,’
said Robertson, as ‘… all the landscape looked like a park with shade for
sheep and cattle’. But then came the transformation:

Many of our herbaceous plants began to disappear from the

pasture land; the silk-grass began to show itself … The
patches have grown larger every year; herbaceous plants and
grasses give way for the silk-grass and the little annuals,
beneath which are annual peas, and die in our deep clay soil
with a few hot days in spring, and nothing returns to supply
their place until later in the winter following. The conse-
quence is that the long deep-rooted grasses that hold our
strong clay hill together have died out; the ground is now
exposed to the sun, and it has cracked in all directions, and
the clay hills are slipping in all directions; also the sides of
precipitous creeks – long slips, taking trees and all with
them. When I first came here, I knew of but two landslips,
both of which I went to see; now there are hundreds found
within the last three years …
One day all the creeks and little watercourses were cov-
ered with a large tussocky grass, with other grasses and
plants, to the middle of every watercourse but the Glenelg
and Wannon, and in many places of these rivers; now that
the only soil is getting trodden hard with stock, springs of
salt water are bursting out in every hollow or watercourse,
and as it trickles down the watercourse in summer, the

50
) )
 An Indivisible, Dynamic Whole

strong tussocky grasses die before it, with all others. The
clay is left perfectly bare in summer. The strong clay cracks;
the winter rain washes out the clay; now mostly every little
gully has a deep rut; when rain falls it runs off the hard
ground, rushes down these ruts, runs into the larger creeks,
and is carrying earth, trees, and all before it. Over Wannon
country is now as difficult a ride as if it were fenced. Ruts,
seven, eight, and ten feet deep, and as wide, are found for
miles, where two years ago it was covered with tussocky grass
like a land marsh. I find from the rapid strides the silk-grass
has made over my run, I will not be able to keep the number
of sheep the run did three years ago, and as a cattle station it
will be still worse; it requires no great prophetic knowledge
to see that this part of the country will not carry stock that is
in at present – I mean the open downs, and every year it will
get worse, as it did in V.D.L.; and after all the experiments I
worked with English grasses, I have never found any of them
that will replace our native sward. The day the soil is turned
up, that day the pasture is gone for ever as far as I know.7

Here was a well-educated farmer who reckoned himself one of the best
managers in the district applying long-tested British pastoral practices. Yet
his entire landscape collapsed in extraordinarily rapid time under his very
feet and those of the horse he rode. Clearly, even the apparently well-­
watered, higher-rainfall, British climate-like country that the explorer
Thomas Mitchell had labelled ‘Australia Felix’ (‘happy Australia’) in 1836
behaved in a totally unanticipated manner. So, what was going on?
This new land of Australia needed to be handled very differently from
the wet and green country of the Europeans who were trying to settle it.
The destruction of the landscapes around Wando Vale occurred in record
time: less than fourteen years, and this before the rabbit explosion that
originated not far away from Robertson’s farm a decade later. Strikingly,
from an agricultural perspective, even the ‘best’ of these new Australian
landscapes were incredibly fragile if managed the wrong way. Degrade the
deep-rooted perennial grasses and their coevolved plant, animal, insect
and microbial life and be prepared to face the consequences. For, as

51
) )
 Call of the Reed Warbler

Robertson’s soil quality deteriorated, running water carried off the spoils,
and underlying salt reared its ugly head.
Robertson had quickly seen the impact of mismanaged grass–soil–
water interactions, so he decided to bail out. In 1854, just fourteen years
after he developed his ‘pretty little station’, he bolted for home with his
monetary profits courtesy of eroded natural capital.
Since first settlement, Australian farmers have repeatedly found out the
hard way that grazing mismanagement can quickly trigger land degradation
and desertification. This begins with gross interference with the prime
healthy landscape function: that of the solar-energy cycle. Inappropriate
grazing depletes a diverse grassland through first ‘eating out’ the most succu-
lent, broadest-leaved, deeper-rooted perennials, native legumes, small shrubs
and other key species. The less grassland there is, the less solar energy is
captured, converted to carbon and deposited in the soil via photosynthesis.
Further landscape degradation then occurs via the action of another
vital element: water. With no plant life to protect and penetrate the soil, it
becomes more compacted, shallower and less able to retain water. Instead,
rainwater runs off the land instead of being retained, meaning that pre-
cious topsoil is easily washed away. As we shall see, once the solar and water
cycles are disturbed, so is the third key function, that of the soil-mineral
cycle, and then also the fourth: dynamic ecosystems. And all because of the
impact of the fifth landscape function: humans.
 

Dipping his quill in as much vinegar as ink in his poem ‘Australia’, A. D.

Hope memorably portrayed his home nation as ‘a vast parasite robber-­
state/Where second-hand Europeans pullulate/Timidly on the edge of
alien shores’.8
It is hard to disagree. Over ninety per cent of Australians do crowd the
littoral, living there, working there and holidaying there. Moreover, con-
cerning this ‘vast parasite’ country, what shocked me as I set out on the
journey of discovery and awakening I recount in this book is that those
who ostensibly live close to Mother Earth – we farmers – are, with few
exceptions, as illiterate as anyone else when it comes to reading our land-
scapes. Our Mechanical minds have made us landscape dyslexic.
Away from the coastal river valleys or the irrigated areas of the Murray–
Darling Basin, and away from choice volcanic locations such as the

52
) )
 An Indivisible, Dynamic Whole

Liverpool Plains and Darling Downs, Australian landscapes do not match

Western preconceived images of what an agricultural landscape should be.
This ‘should be’, more often than not, involves neatly rectangular, moist,
dark-soiled fields, vineyards, golden crops and verdant green irrigated rows
of vegetation. For this is a far more pleasant and salving image than that of
a dried dam in harsh Australian light, of dust clouds behind vast mobs of
stock in shrub-dotted rangelands, or of beach-white ripened and baked
native grasslands in mid-summer.
Despite some of our modernist painters such as Sidney Nolan, Russell
Drysdale and Fred Williams attempting to present a different, Australian
view, this ‘wet country’ expectation runs deep and powerful. If we then
throw in the fact, as described in Chapter 1, that our ancient Gondwanan
ark is both biogeochemically and functionally quite different from the
young landscapes of England, Western Europe and North America, then
we have a huge problem.
That is, our expectations of landscape create a disjunction between a
culturally inherited ideal and Australian reality. Chapters 1 and 2 revealed
that this has a long and powerful cultural tradition. Tragically, despite us
immigrants having had over 200 years to apprehend this disjunction, it
continues to have devastating impacts on our landscapes today. I believe
this is because, rather than seeking to understand how our landscapes
really function and to regenerate them, our tendency is to either do a John
Robertson – leave a wasteland behind and move on to greener pastures – or
else ‘bodge’ things up by using the short-term approach of industrial-­
agriculture inputs and techniques.
 

When I look back from my present perspective, I realise with a jolt that,
over forty years ago, I viewed my landscape as if ‘through a glass darkly’. To
me at that time, it was still an inanimate resource to be used for grazing
sheep and cattle, assisted by the occasional chemical and/or mechanical
intervention with fertiliser, disc-plough and seed drill. Our land then
seemed to hold no patterns nor subtleties beyond the obvious. Concepts
such as ecological succession (let alone self-organising systems), positive,
human-induced ecological change and the fundamental landscape func-
tions were anathema, and I gave little thought to how animals were grazed
beyond some rudimentary rotation on some of our lucerne (alfalfa)

53
) )
 Call of the Reed Warbler

paddocks – a technique I had learnt from my father. At least half of the

place was in paddocks of 150 or more acres, where animals were left at a
deemed appropriate stocking rate for at least half the year, sometimes
more. As a consequence of this set-stocking, thistles and the perennial
exotic grass ‘serrated tussock’ – the so-called ‘weeds’ that thrived under this
system – were demonised and agonised over, especially because they
seemed at best never to diminish, and at worst to perpetually increase.
Our grasslands, in retrospect, had become simplified ecological systems.
They definitely weren’t increasing in diversity, while our monocultures of
lucerne exhibited at least fifty per cent bare ground for much of the year.
Because of this simplification, I wasn’t aware that our original grasslands
had a healthy mix of not just winter/spring-active grasses (of which we had
only a few left) but also a whole raft of summer-­active grasses (such as
kangaroo grass – Themeda australis). These had once covered most of our
and other regions, but because of their palatability, they had quickly been
‘eaten out’ under a constant set-stocking regime. As we will see later, this
diversity of complementary grass types that could provide year-round
green feed – the winter/spring-active grasses (what are now known as C3
grasses) and the summer-active grasses (or C4 grasses)9 – are hugely rele-
vant to this story of regenerative agriculture: whether in new holistic
grazing approaches or in some remarkable regenerative cropping
approaches to emerge out of Australia.
Concerning other native vegetation, I was equally blind because not
only was I ignorant of the diversity we had lost but also what gum trees and
shrubs remained were nearly all geriatrics. And I thought I was running a
good ‘show’.
Managing grazing animals in grasslands, you would think, should be
pretty basic. In developed countries such as Australia and the USA (where
shepherd labour is prohibitively expensive), the fence is the method of
control. Once the straight lines of steel and wire are arbitrarily stamped on
the landscape, managing one’s animals can be done easily and without
much planning, right? Just lock them in a paddock, ensure they have
enough feed and water, and Bob’s your uncle. And then just fiddle a bit
with paddocks and moves through the year, hoping the feed won’t run out
on your traditional fixed number of carried stock, and just buy in the fod-
der to get them through if it does. That’s pretty much how I operated for

54
) )
 An Indivisible, Dynamic Whole

nearly two decades (allowing some sophistication for pregnant animals

and their progeny, along with those lucerne rotations).
Today I realise I had completely overlooked the most important of all
factors, the keystone of the whole operation: that our farm was a complex
and dynamic series of ecological systems, and that our landscape actually
functioned in specific but sensitive ways (and even, if allowed, its key land-
scape functions would constantly self-organise themselves towards resilient
ecological health). The last things I would have considered are that, first,
my decision-making on how I grazed the landscape – like John Robertson
so long ago – was causing ongoing land degradation, and, second, that my
grazing animals could actually be a huge ecological revitalising tool.
It is small comfort that later I realised I was not alone in my initial
thinking. In fact, I shared my outlook with an overwhelming majority of
landscape managers. Indeed, the presence of an alien, contrary view about
managing grazing animals via a totally different approach is still not just an
elephant in the room for most livestock managers, but rather it constitutes
a type of invisible parallel universe. And certainly, in the first decades of
my farming career, this universe was way outside my ken.
 

The ‘five landscape functions’ model is an excellent toolbox for land

managers because it comprises a readily understood pathway to ecologi-
cal literacy. Without such literacy, we cannot regenerate our landscapes.
Now we know ‘literacy’ means the ability to read, and so in this context
ecological literacy means the ability to read a landscape: to appraise the
state of its health and how it is functioning, and thus to know how to
address any issues. David Orr, professor of environmental studies at the
pioneering liberal arts institution of Oberlin College in Ohio, writes
insightfully and passionately about ecological literacy. He states that
capable ecological literacy ‘requires the more demanding capacity to
observe nature with insight, a merger of landscape and mindscape’. To
make his point, he quotes the extraordinary nature writer Barry Lopez,
who once observed, ‘The interior landscape responds to the character
and subtlety of an exterior landscape; the shape of the individual mind is
affected by land as it is by genes.’ 10
My view is that Lopez is correct. Therefore, this shaping of the mind
can have polar-opposite impacts, depending on whether one is used to

55
) )
 Call of the Reed Warbler

farming a heavily controlled and modified industrial landscape or a site

that is re-attaining vibrant diversity under a regenerative approach.
While general literacy is driven by the search for knowledge, Orr quite
rightly notes that ‘ecological literacy is driven by the sense of wonder, the
sheer delight in being alive in a beautiful, mysterious, bountiful world’ – or
what is known as ‘biophilia’ (the innate human affinity with living things).
In short, I believe one cannot gain true ecological literacy without a great
empathy with, and understanding of, nature and how it functions. Thus,
one’s heart also needs to be involved.
Pioneering ecological thinker Garrett Hardin once said of ecological
literacy that it encompassed the ability to ask, ‘What then?’ But one can
only ask such a question with a good knowledge of not just the funda-
mental basics of ecology but also the history and flow of ideas and
historical development of how people and societies relate to each other
and natural systems. This also means a familiarity with the processes of
evolution, coevolution and self-organisation (to be addressed later in
Part III); with the current predicament Earth is in (as Orr describes it,
with ‘the vital signs of the planet and its ecosystems’); and with the
dynamics of the modern world, and thus why we as a species have
become so destructive. This therefore includes questions that arise if a
landscape is diagnosed as ‘unhealthy’. Because ‘What then?’ demands
that we act for renewal and restoration, for regeneration and open-
ended health.11
In the end, David Orr encapsulates what I see as the transformative
process of becoming truly ecologically literate: that an ‘Earth-centered
education … is that quality of mind that seeks out connections’ (not nar-
row specialisation); that ‘the ecologically literate person has the knowledge
necessary to comprehend interrelatedness, and an attitude of care or stew-
ardship’, along with ‘the practical competence to act on the basis of
knowledge and feeling’. Ecological literacy, says Orr, ‘is to know that our
health, well-being, and ultimately our survival depend on working with,
not against, natural forces’. As systems-thinkers Fritjof Capra and Pier
Luisi reaffirm, ‘in the twenty-first century the well-being, and even sur-
vival, of humanity will depend crucially on our “ecological literacy” – our
ability to understand the basic principles of ecology, or principles of sus-
tainability, and to live accordingly’.12

56
) )
 An Indivisible, Dynamic Whole

As I have discovered in my own slow and serendipitous journey towards

some degree of ecological literacy, there are clear reasons for our oblivious-
ness to how landscapes function. The first goes back to deep cultural
training (as discussed in Chapter 2). The second is that ecosystems are hard
to apprehend. Not only are they complex and dynamic but they also com-
prise aspects that are microscopic, underground or invisible. For instance,
while it is obvious that plants grow in the soil and gain nutrients there, what
is not is that much of their substance is derived from either gaseous mole-
cules in the air or else an unimaginably huge zoo of underground micro- and
other organisms that can weigh ten times more than life above ground.
And so the driving systems of the landscape and its interrelated net-
works are invisible until evidence of their functioning or malfunctioning is
physically expressed. Nothing new here, as this is an age-old conundrum
– and one so clearly revealed by John Robertson. Until one’s understanding
and perception changes, and therefore one’s mind changes, we can be blind
to what is all around us. That is why understanding the five landscape
functions is so important to landscape managers and, in turn, everyone on
the planet.

57
) )