(This article is written by New Zealand environmental journalist
Dave Hansford and first appeared in Issue 2 of Good Magazine
(www.good.net.nz). Photos: © Dave Hansford)
David and Ailsa Miller's dairy herd takes the gate at a run. If
cows can exhibit joie de vivre, these Friesian crosses are a
picture of it, swishing through a swathe of verdant pasture with
the sort of relish a hot sunbather reserves for a cool sea.
Big, black bovine heads plunge into a thicket of cocksfoot,
clover and chicory. Cows are strictly hierarchical, Ailsa tells me,
but here there's no pecking, only munching. A few years ago, she
says, they'd have fought for the best fodder. Now, there's plenty
to go around.
With 80 years of milking cows between them, David and Ailsa
Miller say biological farming has made farming exciting again. "If
I can add to the quality of life of town people by producing a
nutritious product," says David, "that makes my job worthwhile"
David and Ailsa have milked cows for some 40 years on these
graceful, green hectares outside Otorohanga. They've always loved
it "despite some tight spots" but of late, like their cows, they've
got a whole new spring in their step.
"We enjoy getting up and working on the farm. We wake up in the
morning, and we think 'today is a new day'," says Ailsa, 57. David
is 60, and most dairy farmers their age would have taken on
sharemilkers years ago. Not the Millers; "we enjoy milking-we work
together as a team."
Heifers and humans are both getting their new-found vigour from
a step-change called 'biological farming'-managing a farm on
ecological principles as opposed to production ones. It stops short
of organic, though you might call it permaculture. The Millers have
joined a small (fewer than 100) but growing group of farmers who
have turned their backs on the production-obsessed,
fertiliser-intensive, input-heavy ways of mainstream
agriculture.
Instead, they're growing soils, not grass. They've renounced
conventional wisdom and some of its most potent symbols: chemical
fertilisers and, almost heretically, rye grass. Not for them the
one-solution-fits-all marketing of agri-business; biological
farmers are getting back in touch with their farms, their animals,
their soil.
Look back, step forward
It's new, but it's old; it's farming the way their
great-grandparents did it.
"Farmers have lost the art of thinking," says David. "The
experts came along; the vet would make his sales pitch, the
fertiliser company, the drench company, would make theirs ... do
what you're told, and you'll get good results. And the majority of
farmers went down that path, not understanding why.
"We were doing more to make less," he says. "We became jacks of
all trades and masters of none."
So David and Ailsa stopped applying nitrogen and superphosphate
three years ago, substituting it with organic fertiliser. Now, says
David, the cows are happily gorging on species they wouldn't have
touched had they been grown with nitrogen. "Grass this high would
have been toxic to them if it were full of chemicals," he tells
me.
"We've learned how to look after our soils, how we can farm our
worms. If you look after the stock below the ground, they'll look
after the stock above the ground"
"We're not fighting our grasses. Rather than calling them weeds,
which is good for the chemical spray companies, we now see them for
what they really are.
"And we've learned how to look after our soils, how we can farm
our worms. If you look after the stock below the ground, they'll
look after the stock above the ground."
Jeff and Fiona Graham. Biological farming will take off "within
the next eight to ten years," says Jeff, "because the emissions
trading scheme will enforce it. What would we sooner be doing?
Getting $1000 a hectare back for carbon sequestration, or paying
$1000 a hectare?
David Miller checks his cows for mastitis. He's noticed an
improvement in the herd's health since abandoning chemical
fertilisers. "They've put more condition on, so they're under less
stress. We had no lameness at all last year"
They certainly did last summer, when the Waikato wilted under the
worst drought in living memory. "We've never farmed in conditions
like it," says David.
The plantain and chicory in the couple's paddocks had by then
put its roots down deep. "They hung on much longer than the other
pasture plants, and the huge savings we made on chemical fertiliser
greatly assisted in feeding the cows. If we had been tied into the
traditional patterns of farming, it would have been very much
harder to negotiate our way through."
But what's really turned him onto biological farming is the
opportunity for a new contract between New Zealand farmers and
consumers.
"Small farms are part of the New Zealand culture, whereas I
believe the mega-farming that is starting to appear in New Zealand
now is not. [Biological farming] is an opportunity to bring the
pendulum back; to give people choices."
He believes many of New Zealand's health problems stem from
sub-par, mass-produced food. "At our age, we're going to more and
more funerals, and we're seeing people who could have had choices
as to what they ate.
"But there's a growing group of farmers who do have consciences;
who are committed to adding value, adding health, extending the
quality of life for people. And they take pride in the knowledge
that the food they are producing is the best they can do. That's
what I'm excited about."
The Millers also believe that the industrialisation of farming,
particularly dairying in this day of record payouts, is
responsible for many of the negative impacts of agriculture on the
environment: erosion, fertiliser run-off, pollution of waterways,
nitrous oxide emissions.
They are not alone.
ECogent's argument
"Farming's gone very high-tech, but not necessarily in a good
way," says Kathi Harris. "You get a consultant in to fix your soil
and grass problems, and they're all paid by the big companies to
sell their products ... it's very tied up."
Kathi and her husband David run a small dairy farm at Pokuru,
not far out of Te Awamutu. Three years ago, the couple abandoned
mainstream farming practice. "We were working harder just to stand
still," says David. "We weren't gaining profitability, production
or anything. We were just spending more and more money on
supplements, animal health, fertilisers-all our costs were going
up."
Demoralised, he was ready to give up on dairying when the couple
won a scholarship to follow a farming management programme run by
Cambridge company eCogent.
Under the eCogent system, farmers record all key inputs,
financial transactions and stock data for the month, then file it
to the company. It all ends up on the desk of Peter Floyd,
eCogent's mastermind and director. He and his staff put the numbers
under critical scrutiny, check performance against forecasts, live
weights against dry matter consumed, and a dozen other arcane
agri-concepts, then point out the strengths and weaknesses of the
clients' operations.
In other words, eCogent is a profitability exercise, but with a
difference-it's based on biological principles. Peter also has his
clients digging holes in their pasture every month and measuring
topsoil depth, root mass, soil colour, friability, and counting
earthworms.
Peter's life has been about farming. By his own admission, he
was part of the drive towards more productivity, more stock, more
of everything, "but I stuffed up. By the time the 1980s came round,
we had been stretching those figures to the limit. Putting on more
dollops of superphosphate; urea was coming in by the trainload.
"The wake-up call came for me in the 1990s," he says. "We had
[fungal] toxins in a lot of crops, we had a whole bundle of
problems and environmental impacts.
Kathi and David's farm still suffers symptoms of potash
poisoning from those days of excess. Today, only calcium and
organic manure go onto the land. "As soon as we stopped
conventional fertiliser, we saw an impact, certainly in the soil
health, and even animal health," says David.
There's no more strip-grazing-corralling cows in tight with
portable electric fencing to graze paddocks down to the nub;
instead, it's all about residuals, the amount of feed left behind
after the stock have been moved out. "Grass grows grass," says
Kathi. "If you eat it right down to soil, it takes longer to
recover."
They can tell when they're getting it right by a greenish glow
and a scale of numbers. David hands me a Brix meter; a small device
which, held up to the light, reveals the sugar content of a sample
of crushed pasture plants. Today it's wet and overcast, not the
best for the photosynthesis activity the meter is reading, but the
Brix level-12-is still higher than for a 'nitrogen farm', which
might score a three on a day like today, Kathi reckons.
No more set menu of rye grass for the couple's cows, either; now
they browse from a salad bar of different species-chicory,
plantain, Timothy, cocksfoot.
"Watch cows go into a paddock with low-Brix, urea-rich grass,"
says Kathi, "and they'll walk right to the back of the paddock,
then slowly walk back again. They're looking for the best food.
When they get to the end of the paddock, there is nowhere else to
go, so they just start to eat.
"When our cows walk into a paddock, they just start eating
straight away. Cows are very onto it; they know what they need. If
they were left to roam, they would be foraging animals; they'd seek
out what they needed in the vegetation. Now, we're giving them that
opportunity."
Banking on grass
Peter Floyd wants to do the same for human consumers. In the
early 90s, he flew to the US to address the restaurateurs and
foodies of the San Francisco Food Society. They listened politely,
then told him that actually, New Zealand produce wasn't that
crash-hot.
"That's because we were going for mass production; we were just
chucking meat into boxes and hoping somebody would buy it. We
weren't taking the best opportunities going in the world at that
stage, and we probably still aren't."
TOP: Waikato dairy farmer David Harris makes a check of his
pasture through a Brix meter. Biological farmers use Brix levels as
a proxy indicator of nutrition value
Waikato dairy farmer David Harris makes a check of his pasture
through a Brix meter. Biological farmers use Brix levels as a proxy
indicator of nutrition value
Fiona Graham in the milking shed. Fed grass with a sunny-day
Brix level of eight, her goats will produce an extra 300 litres of
milk over a rainy day low of four. "That can make a difference of
$40,000 worth of milk produced annually"
He calls it "production-ology; an obsession with the production of
grass, meat, milk and wool. So eCogent was born, out of the mindset
that we had to do things better." That belief rings true with
another pair of eCogent clients, Jeff and Fiona Graham. They run
330 goats in the shadow of Maungatautari, the Waikato's celebrated
ecological restoration project, producing high-quality milk for
export as infant formula.
"We're all part of a food chain," says Fiona, "from the grass,
to the animal, to the consumer-and in our case, people's
babies.
"Ultimately, we're aiming for a balance in the whole system; by
producing healthy soil, you then produce healthy [pasture] plants,
which then provide your animals with a high-Brix, highly
mineralised feed of great nutritional value.
"If you feed your animals well, they produce good milk, and we
want to be sure that we're producing a product that is
environmentally sustainable, that you would want to feed to your
own children."
Their goats live indoors most of the time, keeping intestinal
parasite infections to a minimum. But they still follow biological
principles to grow their pasture, which they then "cut and carry"
to the barn. Three times a year, they muck out the goat manure and
add it to untreated wood shavings to turn into 1500 tonnes of
certified organic compost. Some of it they sell to other farmers,
the rest goes back onto their own paddocks. The soil, says Jeff, is
the farm's "engine room"; the grass, "your bank".
"[Farmers] got themselves into a downward spiral of putting 30%
potassic super on since Adam was a boy, because that was what you
did. But … it became a vicious cycle. The fertiliser companies
absolutely love it, because they get to sell more product.
"What we're trying to do is break that cycle."
The goats turn out a high-value product, but there's no premium,
as yet, for it having been biologically produced. Peter says he's
got the marketers working on ways to realise a financial bonus from
all this greenery, and what's more, "it will be carbon-positive
branded, both meat and milk".
Healthier soils, he claims, lock up more carbon. So much more,
that eCogent will soon apply for carbon credits on the Chicago
Stock Exchange. He's even on the record as saying "growing soils as
a carbon sink in New Zealand will … greatly benefit farmers by
totally eliminating the need for any emissions tax."
The claim seems to make no distinction between and carbon and
methane. When I press him for details of his carbon accounting and
certification, he will only say, "We've got our laboratories, we've
got our measurements, we've got our systems in place. In September,
every farmer in the eCogent process will have their farm measured
for carbon."
Whatever you make of eCogent's carbon claims (see box, page 61),
biological farming passes any measure of sustainability.
Economically, farmers report better profits. Environmentally, it
addresses run-off into waterways by doing away with chemical
fertilisers. Deeper roots mean less erosion. Socially, it could
provide good, healthy food with fewer demands on land and
livestock. And by helping small farms become economic again, it
could not only counter the headlong rush to mega-farming, but also
help small rural communities stay together.
"There are now something like 8000 farmers, and 11,000 farms,"
says David Miller. That's a lot of missing farmers: around 3000
farms run by absentee investors.
"That's a challenge, but it opens up an opportunity. Rather than
the corporates cashing in on the food crisis, families can do their
bit. Which, I think, sits well with our culture and with our
history. I'm 60, and I have a second wind. I'm excited that now we
have a chance to do that."