I was kicked out of home at 16 for building
compost heaps in our backyard in the Melbourne suburb of Mt Waverley. Earlier,
Dad had taken me to a psychiatrist in an attempt to rid me of what he thought
was a rare personality disorder, but the composting obsession proved incurable.
Now I’m 57, and a steaming hot compost
heap still enthralls me: the way it takes stinky waste products and turns them
into black gold ( humus). I love that a mass of red wriggler worms
can demolish a cow pat in half a day and that a throng of soldier fly larvae
can devour a sheep’s hide and guts just
48 hours, and be themselves returned to the soil (via some chooks )soon after.
And that out of all this decay comes another generation of healthy plants, and another joy of my
life, food! I wanted to be an
organic farmer from the age of 10.
I arrived in Nannup as a very young, mung bean- eating hippie in the early 80’s
and after a foray in a commune which
promised cheap land upon which to follow
my dream ( but delivered lots of hassles) , me and my first husband moved on to 27 acres in Nannup,
inspired by Bill Mollison to start a Permaculture. I am still here, having raised a family of 5
children. That, and working for a living
, meant Permaculture was on the back burner for many years. Near the end of
that 17 year marriage I constructed
a passive solar mudbrick house out of recycled materials. The house
is still standing and the permaculture
surrounding it has grown upwards and outwards: magnificent now with
towering bamboos and pine nut trees, spreading oaks, chestnuts and hundreds of
other species of fruit, nut , timber and native
plant. I met my darling Stewart 12 years ago and we
suddenly became full time organic farmers, ditching our outside jobs
pronto, thanks to the rise and
rise of farmers markets. Our Permaculture yields
building materials , all our food and an income year ‘round.
We would be living the dream by now, but no man is
an island and climate change hit us in about 2007. Terrible climate
change. Our usual winter efforts to extend the food forest were now beset by failure due to
drought and heat . Things just died even though we spent 8 hours a day hand
watering over prolonged summers. It is so hard to watch this formerly lush
district turning to desert.
It became clear we needed to work on our
soil. In 2013 we invested heavily in learning the latest in
soil science from Dr Elaine Ingham ( eminent soil microbiologist) In 2014
we re-named the farm “Merri Bee Organic Farmacy” because whole food grown biologically
is the best preventative medicine. Like
canaries in the coal mine our children are reflecting our impoverished and toxic environment and have a lower life expectancy than ours. This is obviously unprecedented and tragic and
the cause is diet . Teaming with local Naturopaths we’ve been joyed
to supply parents with good food to help their ailing children, but really we
want to feed people organic food exclusively 2 years before conception to
prevent problems.
With a degree of compost tea success so far, we now run courses in Permaculture ,
water harvesting , and soil creation , and our
focus is farmers. In the South West of WA, just a few
thousand farmers control 55% of the land area, and thus our local climate! Green plants are the original and
still the best carbon capture and storage mechanism on Earth. They
pump carbon underground whenever the sun is shining, but surprisingly,
this only happens in natural systems where the soil microbes are intact. But
99% of farmers clear most of these carbon -sequestering microbes from their land with chemicals . Peer
reviewed and published science shows GM crops use 15 times more chemical than
usual!
Dr Christine Jones makes a staggering claim that if all farmers in Australia raised their
soil carbon by just 1 per cent, the entire globe’s legacy load of carbon in the
air would cleared away into the soil, and a safe climate would return.
So good soil is powerful. It is key to our
health, wealth, happiness, energy and intelligence for generations of our
family to come, it can uniquely
solve not only the environmental emergency but the health crisis (which
is really an agricultural crisis) .Only good living soil can stem the
pandemic of mental and physical disorders which threatens to bankrupt the
richest nations .
Bill Mollison said it beautifully : “All our problems can
be solved in a garden”.
Permaculture
people know trees make rain and know how to repair ecosystems, we know that you
don’t need fertilizer and pesticides to grow food, (forests show us that)…. but
our voices are not heard above the din of chemical company myths. Farmers have
been subjected to the lies of the 5 companies controlling food and health since
the Green Revolution. Monsanto (‘feeding
the world, one lie at a time”) has been in control of the media, regulators and
governments for 6 decades now. We are proud to follow Dr Elaine
Ingham who courageously “de- programmes” brainwashed farmers the
world over.
We
are in the middle of “6 X” (the sixth mass extinction event on Earth) with species from beneficial soil microbes to the large animals becoming extinct, many we suspect even before discovery . Cloistered in the city or even on the coast, most people have no idea of how
close to extinction WE are. The cause is toxics, and GM crops
use even more chemicals than conventional.
Perhaps you are one of the people who already sees
the need to cook organic, not the planet? If not, I hope my story will be food
for thought for you and yours.
