The deepest summer dry in parts of the Northern Rivers, particularly near Lismore, has exposed landscapes that retain resilience, along with those where they have succumbed.
Subscribe now for unlimited access to all our agricultural news
across the nation
or signup to continue reading
Sub-tropical Kikuyu paddocks grazed heavily are now the colour of cardboard but at The Channon, within the boundaries of Geoff Lawton's Permaculture Institute, on Zaytuna Farm, there are examples of well watered landscapes that continue to produce in excess.
This 27 hectare property, on ancient sand that pre-dates the 23 million year old Mount Warning volcano, was once grazed by Hereford cattle with pastures burnt every year as part of traditional management - intended to clean up bracken fern and bladey grass.
Now, the property is providing an example to enthusiastic students from around the globe with proof that there are other ways of farming. These lessons are often dismissed by traditional producers as too radical but in this year's drought they are showing off real opportunities for sustainable growth.
Mr Lawton, an Englishman by birth, was himself a student of Permaculture, enthralled by the late Bill Mollison's unorthodox style of hard-core teaching whose practical lessons have spread to 140 countries, endorsed by more than three million people.
Mr Lawton was invited to take up Mr Mollisons' mantle and has not looked back, but rather forward, keenly interested to prove the point that sustainable agriculture gives much more energy than it takes.
The proof is in the small property, where tens of thousands of meals are produced every year from a dizzyingly diverse array of plants with a strong reliance on livestock like ducks, chickens and cattle which not only supply protein but to continue the critical lifecycle of soil microbiology.
Central to Mr Lawton's property is water and to that end he has established a network of small dams connected by swales that channel flood water during rain events.
While he does not advocate dams along the central trunks of rivers, he says the idea of creating dams at the head of tributaries - like the veins on a leaf - only add to the resilience of a landscape. At Zaytuna Farm food production is blessed with gravity fed reticulation with enough head in the lines to drive sprinklers with only the energy of falling water.
Here weeds are not worrisome pests but rather resilient pathways to carbon sequestration and re-mineralisation. For instance, that troublesome bladey grass and bracken fern are actually signs of potassium imbalance with the weeds doing the job of fixing the lacking nutrient.
Mr Lawton has taken the concept of Permaculture on a world tour, working with aid organisations from the Amazonian rainforests to the deserts of Jordan, showing how marginal country can turn productive by capturing what water may fall to nourish the right plants.
The working property at the Channon espouses simple practical ideas like coppicing the young branches of tree legumes such as the Pride of Bolivia, or Tipuana Tipu, at the start of the rainy season. Those leafy branches are laid out on the soil surface to break down into mulch and thereby contribute more to the "local economy" than just fixing nitrogen through root nodules.
In fact, Permaculture doesn't discriminate between species - an attitude which puts it in juxtaposition with groups that promote native species over introduced ones. Mr Lawton often quotes the notion that today we are blessed with a plant diversity 800 times greater than that of the middle ages and some of the strange weed-like species carry a market value well in excess of what might be grown in a traditional enterprise.
He points to a Mate tree that refuses to die in spite of neglect, noting that its caffeine rich leaves sell for $80 a kilogram. Then there's Galangal, a ginger- like plant whose roots give flavour to traditional Indonesian cooking and which sells for $28/kg. It has apparently failed to realise that there is a drought just outside the boundaries of Zaytuna Farm. And what about St John's Wort that sells for $50/kg and might prevent farmers' depression from worsening?
Prickly pear, the scourge of the black soil plains, comes in a number of varieties that include fewer needles and more flavour. Everyone knows it grows.
"We would be silly to ignore the benefits of invasive species that work hard in this environment," he says.
Another example is the propensity of the Tamarisk tree to grow in salty sub-desert environments, like on one Permaculture student's property at Cameron's Corner in the far north-west, where trials based on results from the middle east are helping to speed-up carbon pathways in the soil. True Tamarisk is regarded as invasive but at a time when seasons are expanding boundaries of western deserts perhaps now is the time to look outside the box for solutions.
"We should not be prejudiced about what carbon pathways we use," Mr Lawton says, noting the role Camphor Laurel has played on the Northern Rivers in keeping alive vast populations of native pigeons that would have lost their traditional food supply when the great subtropical rainforest was cleared last century for farming. We can read landscapes in the plants they grow," he says. "The problem is not the weed."
