On Earth Matters radio program, broadcast on 3CR on Jan 11, David Holmgren discussed the merit of tree crops and supplementing grain fields with tree crops, with fellow tree crops enthusiasts Darren Doherty and Byron Joel. They shared their thoughts on the benefits of this system and the work of making it a reality. You can hear the podcast of the program here:
Watch Holmgren’s video review of the Permaculture classic book, Tree Crops: a permanent agriculture by J Russell Smith.
Interview Transcript
(0m0s) Introductions: David Holmgren and Byron Joel
Earth Matters Host: Alright, so we’ll just start. Can you introduce yourself, David?
David Holmgren: I’m David Holmgren. I was co-originator of the permaculture concept with Bill Mollison back in the 1970s and have been an environmental educator and practitioner in many forms since that time.
Earth Matters Host: And, Byron?
Byron Joel: Good day. My name’s Byron Joel. I’m from Western Australia. I am a permaculture and now agrarian designer. I’ve been a horticulturalist for some years. And I’m mostly interested in exploring and developing regenerative cultural and agricultural techniques for the southern latitudes of Australia.
(0m44s) Byron Joel: Why Tree Crops are Important
Earth Matters Host: So, Byron, you have plans to tour with a presentation about tree crops as a permanent agriculture in Australia. Why is this topic important to you?
Byron Joel: I think you spend long enough reading the literature and looking through the stats and all the rest and it just makes sense once you appreciate the kind of ecological realities of what broad scale monocultural, conventional agriculture is doing to ecological function around the world and to our health and so on. You just appreciate how much more sense a permanent agriculture based on tree crops makes. So, and I’m not sure how many people have a good understanding of that. How much of the public really appreciate what monocultural agriculture is doing to the planet. I don’t think they have a really good understanding of what kind of viable alternatives there are. And I saw a local southwest Australian politician on the news about a year ago. The word food security was said, and it pricked my ears up and I listened to what he had to say and he went on listing things like, we’ve got all these grapevines and we’ve got all these fields of wheat and there’s lots of sheep. Don’t worry about it. We’re doing fine. So it made me realise that there isn’t really an appreciation for what a stable regenerative agricultural system would look like, and in my opinion, that is based on tree crops largely. So I wanted to design a bit of a 90-minute talk to just go and kind of spread the gospel, so to speak.
(2m27s) David Holmgren: Origins of Permaculture & Russell Smith’s Influence
Earth Matters Host: And, David, you said that the 1929 book, Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture was what started you off on the journey of developing your well-known permaculture ideas.
David Holmgren: Well, that book was one of the big things we discovered as we looked back from the core idea of permaculture. In 1973 when I met Bill Mollison, the idea was if most of the planet is actually covered by some sort of forest, if that’s what nature’s optimum system is for most places, why doesn’t our agriculture, if not look directly like some sort of natural forest then is ecologically analogous to that. And what that meant is that it’s dominated by trees and essentially perennial plants, whereas our agriculture was dominated by annual crops, especially the grain crops. Russell Smith’s Tree Crops, of course, were published in a period when there was an earlier wave of interest in what we might call sustainability today in the 1920s and thirties in response to the devastations of monocultural, especially corn agriculture in the US the huge soil erosion, nutrient depletion. And Russell Smith went round the world looking at traditional tree crop systems from the Mediterranean to China, and saw that not only were the systems more sustainable in the sense that they didn’t have the erosion and fertility loss of annual cropping systems, but they could also grow on much poorer soil on mountain sides, on stony land where it wasn’t possible to grow what we call arable crops, where you have to plough the land in some way.
Earth Matters Host: And dry land too.
David Holmgren: Yeah. The ability to access groundwater reserves that annual crops, their shallow roots can’t reach. I think the development, especially of tree crop systems in arid and semi-arid areas based on trees that have deep tap roots, very deep tap roots is something that from Russell Smith to the new generation of people who are looking at this today, can recognise that there’s this huge biological potential in trees that can just tick over through drought conditions. Of course, there are reasons why these systems haven’t been taken up so politically, and one of those is that some of the best tree crops are actually because they’re taproot, they’re actually hard to transplant. They’re relatively hard to establish. They tend to be slow growing. They’re not like your eucalypt trees or your poplar trees that you stick something in the ground and they take off. So it’s that sort of, from a sort of horticultural point of view that they’re not often the first easiest trees to establish, but once established, they’re incredibly resilient.
(5m56s) Byron Joel & David Holmgren: Establishing Tree Crops – Seeding, Grafting & Heritage
Byron Joel: Well, I was just going to add to that with a couple of jobs I’m doing now where the client is kind of open-minded and insightful enough to appreciate those points that David just made. We established particularly oaks and carobs. Now we’ve been seeding the acorn or the carob seed in the ground and not growing it up in a pot like normal nursery conditions in order to honour those tap roots going as far into the ground as possible, especially with carobs and the dry land. Evergreen oaks, like your Holm oak and your Cork oak, that’s exactly what we’re looking for in Southern Australian latitudes, or the Mediterranean to kind of semi-arid Australia is that drought hardiness that drought resistance. So we really wanna honour those tap roots and it’s quite successful what we’ve been doing. And in lots of cases with the oaks we’re after those specific species, but the carobs as varieties that we want to graft onto. But we’ve just been doing grafting onto the saplings that have come up from the seed in situ, which is pretty successful.
David Holmgren: It’s interesting that that grafting natural seedlings or direct seeded seed is a technique that Mediterranean peasant farmers often did naturally with stands of wild bitter almond or something they would just sort of graft on. And the idea that a grafted tree is something raised in a nursery and with its roots cut and then transplanted is actually quite a modern idea. A lot of the early tree crop systems evolved out of wild stands where people rework them. Of course, when you graft a tree, you are grafting on an identical piece from some improved variety or collected, particularly good example. And then the tree, of course, becomes that type. Whereas when you grow from seed, you get a very wide variety of wild types, which may produce some very interesting results. And that’s of course another method in developing tree crops is to start off with very broad scale, seeded material. And wait the time and see what the results are when those trees start producing sugar pods or nuts. And then to be able to do that second generation thing where you say, ah, there’s the best one. We can take that and rework those old trees even at a stage of maturity. And I suppose that emphasises the other aspect that has restricted people’s interest in the past in this aspect is that it’s actually more of a long-term project, both in the sense of waiting maybe years for yields, but in some cases generations to do the selection work, to take something from a wild species to an improved one. And of course, we would say, this is the work that governments and research agencies should have been doing, but consistently haven’t. And it’s actually through the 20th century. It’s been individual tree crop enthusiasts and farmers who’ve done this work and passed down some of that heritage and the mention of carobs. Well, in Australia we have the world’s varietal collection of carobs, which was a result of one of those earlier phases of enthusiasm about tree crops. The Tree Crops Institute in California saved a varietal collection that was gonna be destroyed as a result of a supermarket development. And it was the world’s collection of carob varieties. And they recognised that Australia was the place where that had the greatest amount of land suited to Carob and that was brought out here and established. So we do have in the country a huge variety of genetic material for some of these tree crops.
(10m8s) Introduction: Darren Doherty & Regenerative Agriculture
Earth Matters Host: So we’ve just been joined by Darren Doherty, I assume.
Darren Doherty: Yeah, that’s me. Yeah. Hello mate. Hello. Nice to meet you. I’m Cory. Hi Cory. Happy New Year.
Earth Matters Host: So would you mind introducing yourself, Darren?
Darren Doherty: My name’s Darren Doherty and I’m from Bendigo. And we’ve got a non-profit called Regrarians Limited. Agrarian is a portmanteau of regenerative agrarian, whatever that means.
Earth Matters Host: So, I understand that that’s to do with, instead of talking about sustainability, you’re talking about actually making the land better with time. Is that right?
Darren Doherty: Oh, we’d love to be able to talk about sustainability. ’cause that’s the first step above atrophy. And so if we can get to a sustainable state, that’d be great. But then after that, our aim is to have things regenerate. I think that’s the ultimate aim.
(11m5s) Managing Risks in Tree Crop Systems (Fire, Drought)
Earth Matters Host: Alright. So as you know, we’re talking about tree crops. So yeah, we’re talking about the relatively long life cycle and how that affects the uptake. I have a question. It seems like one of the problems with tree crops is the risk factor. So say with a bunya pine, it takes 20 years to get from seedling to fruiting, but it’s vulnerable to fire. So you might lose the whole crop in a fire and then you’d have another 20 years of work ahead of you. How would you deal with those sort of risks?
Darren Doherty: Yep. Look, I think a lot of these things come down to how you place things in a design in the first place. So, design is as much about risk management as anything else. So you go into a site and you look at all of the risks that are ahead of you, and one of those might be something like fire, it might be wildlife. It might be a lot of other things. So you’ll choose your defenses. And ultimately, we know when we, just as a sort of a semantic sidetrack, the root of the word dehesa, which is, dehesa is the great systems in Spain is actually in defense. And the defense that they were generating was a defense of sustainability in that if you created a tree crops based culture well end. That in itself was a defense against risk. Particularly when it comes to Mediterranean landscapes where the big risk is ongoing drought. And so if you’ve got a tree crop species, well then drought or no drought, they’ll still tend to produce a yield, which then you can obtain. Whereas annual based systems, whichever sort of, if you like, the underpinning system in, or the underlying system or ecology in Mediterranean systems particularly, they are quite risky because they are completely reliant on reliable rainfall. And if you don’t have that, then so there is a sort of a flip to it. You can certainly buy good design and this is where good permaculture design or keyline design comes in, in that you have water as being right up there in the hierarchy of decision making. And so if you’ve got a good water design, well that will aid in the way that you might develop a sound and less risky forestry system, which is ultimately a tree crop system. So you got those things that you’ll put in there.
(13m42s) Long-Term Investment vs. Short-Term Gain & Fossil Fuel Opportunity
David Holmgren: Yeah. So the way I would say that problem of risk is around short term and long term benefits. And it’s like cost upfront too, that that’s actually structural to sustainability issues where you do something and get a short term benefit from it, but you’ve got a progressive degeneration and to break out of that cycle and get onto a cycle, which is regenerative, sometimes, almost always requires this investment going backwards at first type of situation. And that’s why these things don’t, in stress environments as traditional peoples got poorer on poorer land didn’t manage to break out of those systems. And the crazy thing, of course in the modern era is that fossil fuel wealth has allowed us the potential to stand back and take the longer term view because of this enormous wealth and capacity in society to support that. And we’ve done the exact opposite, apart from the small minority of people who’ve recognised this huge opportunity. And tree crops is one of those really big opportunities for creatively using the inheritance of fossil fuel to allow us to take that longer term view.
Darren Doherty: Especially if we’re going to establish ’em on mass. Which is where you really need fossil fuels. I mean, people have established tree crops forever without the aid of fossil fuels per se. But now I think the three people on this who you’re interviewing here would suggest that we need to get a bit bigger on this. And that extends too to the greater landscape. I mean, a lot of this Australian landscape has been recently highlighted by people like Bill Gammage in The Biggest Estate on Earth have sort of contended that as did the early explorers, that this was like an English gentleman’s field or whatever. And Parkland and a lot of the Australian landscape was a tree crop landscape, Savannah. It’s just that a lot of the species that we have didn’t produce a pod or a fruit or something that was necessarily edible to livestock or humans.
(16m12s) The Australian Landscape, Eucalypts, and Analogous Species
Byron Joel: So you see that the biome is already kind of winking at us in terms of kind of what systems would do well on the kind of poorer soil of the Australian continent with the climate that it does. They’re already for Savannah systems. It’s just about finding analogous species that lend themselves a bit better to hungry Europeans than eucalypts do.
Earth Matters Host: Well, one of the interesting things about eucalypts is that they shape the landscape like humans, they encourage fire, right?
Earth Matters Host: So would you be talking about clearing eucalypts to protect these sort of tree crops?
David Holmgren: Well, mostly we are talking about reforestation of cleared lands that are in grain agriculture or pasture systems. Currently dry land systems where they’re relying on the rain when it comes. It’s not intensive irrigated agriculture, but also blending in with the more intensive landscape of what we might call irrigated tree crop agriculture. And you know, we have a good example not far from us here, organic farmer. Pioneer Rod May, he’s out on the red volcanic potato country. And instead of just sort of vast fields of potatoes alternating with pasture, there’s a whole framework of tree crops, both in terms of shelter trees like oaks and eucalypts used as shelter. And then between his irrigated vegetables and irrigated potatoes, there’s rows of tree crops, traditional tree crops for which there’s an immediate market like apples right through to chestnuts and also the wide spaced sugar pod trees like honey locusts and black walnut and other trees through those systems. And it’s a smaller scale in the sense of the great Australian landscape, but tree crops fit into those sort of systems. As well as what people interested in permaculture would mostly think of as very small scale systems like where we are here at Melliodora, more of a garden agriculture scale. And that other scale that we’ve been talking about are the great Australian landscapes where you can’t change the landscape dramatically in terms of what the climate is. You’ve gotta work largely with what the rainfall is and design systems that fit into that. But the place of eucalypts of course, vary enormously. The ones we see planted all the time, things like Tasmanian Blue Gums or one end of the spectrum, lots of oils, huge woody biomass, fast growing,
Darren Doherty: antagonistic to other species. Yeah.
David Holmgren: Depleting the soil to some extent. And then you get something like the central Victorian Red Box. A Eucalyptus polyanthemos has a dense canopy, produces a compost under the tree in time, has a tap root that doesn’t so much compete with other things. So even within the eucalypts, there’s actually a big range.
Darren Doherty: Spotted Gum is another one. Yes, Corymbia maculata. I think it’s the, again, the devil is in the detail with things like eucalypts, that people point a finger broadly at them as a genus, when in actuality there’s an extraordinary variation. Some are better integrated in with agricultural ecosystems than others. That’s a really important point.
(19m58s) Comparing Eucalypts and Oaks; The Role of Agroforestry
David Holmgren: It is interesting actually comparing the eucalypts and the oaks because some Australians are aware that there’s five or 600 species of eucalypt. It’s a huge group covering a huge ecological diversity. And there’s about a similar number of oak species in the world, whereas most people think, oh yeah, there’s English oak, which does surprisingly well in Southern Australian dry conditions.
Darren Doherty: Yeah, over a very wide range, more of a Mediterranean oak. And the other thing that people don’t realise about the Quercus genus is that the greatest diversity actually is within Mexico. When I work in southeastern Queensland and up in that sort of area, and even over in WA in similar latitudes and climates to what they have in Mexico. No one’s planting oaks. It’s not even on the register.
Byron Joel: The biggest fruiting oak is a Mexican oak as well, I believe.
Darren Doherty: Yeah. So yeah, there’s still a lot of scope, but I’ve had the experience of trying to import new material into Australia and let’s just say quarantine authorities and not very helpful
David Holmgren: part of this issue of restriction or encouragement of tree crops relates to the fact that research and development is really closed down around supporting the global crop systems that are dominated by the large corporations and feed the global logistics right through to the supermarket chains of the same foods, all concentrated on those systems. So really since the eighties, there’s been this progressive giving up on serious economic botany research of like, oh, there’s a lot of plants in the world, maybe we shouldn’t put all our eggs in the basket of corn, wheat, soybeans and rice type of approach. And so consequently, the authorities only see threats from introduction of material for developing tree crop.
Darren Doherty: In other parts of the world or in the tropical world. Agroforestry is seen as best practice in the temperate and Mediterranean parts of the world. It’s not even on the table. It’s had its sort of moments here and there according to different champions and authors here in Australia, with the likes of Rowan Reid, David’s work, others. But you know, it’s really oscillated and it’s really gone off the page. Best practice in agriculture now doesn’t include the integration of trees in temperate and Mediterranean systems, but when you go to the tropics it’s quite different. And you’ve got the Agroforestry centre in Kenya and others who are sort of pushing agroforestry all of the time. So it does come down to what David said, but it’s also something a lot broader as well, in terms that people are in different climates are really not even talking about these things.
(22m54s) Tree Crops in Tropical vs. Temperate Climates
David Holmgren: Yeah. That does get back to the recognition that if you look at agricultural systems in tropical areas, all the ones that are sustainable. And even in fact, most of the agricultural systems were, if not completely tree crop based garden agriculture systems, where they did involve grains like rice growing in the intensive Southeast Asian systems. The whole framework of the system of rice paddies is with tree crops, coconuts and huge range of different legume tree species.
Darren Doherty: Yeah.
David Holmgren: That sustain those integrated systems. I think there’s definitely some biological reasons for a stronger role for tree crops in the tropics because you’ve got this incredible problem of leeching of nutrients that you can’t even really store nutrients even in the soil. It’s gotta be in the living biomass. So having multiple layers of vegetation constantly growing is an absolute prerequisite. Whereas in temperate climates, it is possible to have a substantial amount of the fertility actually stored in soil. And also the lower temperatures mean that you often don’t have as many capacities to intercept light at multiple levels in that you do in tropical areas. But that being said, the climates we have here in the temperate climates where we have this summer drought, the severe summer drought, when you’ve got the best temperatures for growing, and you’ve also got this intense light, which is to an extent damaging for plants and damaging for animals and people that living in a tree crop system, at least a savanna system is a much more habitable space for people and more crops, animals and crops. Yeah. Than these vast sort of sun bleached landscapes that we have in this country.
Byron Joel: Which is suggestive of the further function of these tree crop systems. Not just wiser food production, but all the whole suite of ecological benefits you get, like just general moderating of climate microclimate and minimised soil erosion, et cetera. So it’s a whole kind of suite of ecological benefits.
(25m32s) Water Usage: Grains vs. Trees
Earth Matters Host: So the subject of water keeps coming up obviously. Can one of you three talk me through the difference in water usage for the lifecycle of grains as compared to trees?
Darren Doherty: The annual crops that people grow basically only function when there is water. Most of the crops, at least in this part of the world are C3s. The use of water in photosynthesis is actually quite inefficient compared to summer active plants or warm season plants, which are known as C4s. So their water use efficiency is actually quite low. And they demand to generate a reasonable or an economic yield, sufficient rainfall. Like this year, I was just talking with some friends in the Wimmera and a lot of them did not, or in the southern Mallee did not obtain a yield this year.
Earth Matters Host: Right.
Darren Doherty: Because most of them are just cereal growers. They don’t have any livestock. And so once upon a time, if you crop didn’t yield a cereal yield. Well, at least you had your livestock, you could go and put them on there and clean the crop up, right? So now were those people, those same friends to have taken my advice and grown more than one or two trees that I gave them back in the day across their vast acreages. They would’ve found that often in drought years, a lot of tree crop species that we grow in this part of the world actually perform better in dry years, largely because of a response by those plants to thinking, well, gee, I might die. I’m gonna put out a lot of pods. I’m gonna put out a lot of fruit, or acorns or whatever it’ll be. And so you’ll often find that as a response in these parts of the world. So it was really telling in the drought that we had that ended on June the fourth, 2010. I remember it quite well that day. So I finished my earthworks on our property. Got outta there just in time at the start of the last canonical La Niña. That right up until about that time we saw one of the biggest tests that we’d had since European settlement of this part of the world, of the tree crop species that had been planted around here because we’d had the droughts of the 1980s, 1990s and then the two thousands and they were pretty strong. And that all, in a tree’s memory, a decade is a minute. And we got up to that point and we sort of started to see what was gonna be able to endure the anomalies and the variations that occur in climate in this part of the world just naturally. And it was pretty amazing. There was a lot of stuff out there that didn’t survive or was teetering. And then there was a lot that thrived. And so I thought, well, that’s pretty interesting because it sort of gives us some solace that we’ve got a range of species that haven’t evolved in this part of the world that will survive in this part of the world. And let’s not forget, the Southeast Australian and southwestern Australian climates are some of the most variable climates, unreliably or reliably unreliable as I call ’em, climates on the planet. And so it’s a tough place for a perennial to persist.
(28m49s) Establishing Trees: Water Needs & Ground Preparation
Earth Matters Host: So do trees require more water than grains to establish?
Darren Doherty: I would suggest in our experience, it’s a ground preparation point of view. I mean, certainly we take a view that it’s best to improve the soil and get the situation ready for a long-term tree crop rather than expect success by just going banging in something in the ground. You can do that to an extent with eucalypt and Acacia because effectively in ecological terms, they’re pioneers. So they can get up and going pretty quickly. But when you’re talking about a lot of the stuff we are talking about, they’re not species that I’ve witnessed in nature in parts of the world where they’ve evolved to just appear. There’s a lot of other species that have to come before them and lay the groundwork as pioneers before these guys ultimately come along. Like an oak. An oak tree just doesn’t appear in Spain. There’s a whole phase of short-lived leguminous shrubs that come along and they go through their process and then ultimately that lays the groundwork for the oak to come along and so on. And same with carobs that I’ve witnessed growing out of their own volition, et cetera. So we use nature as our guide. And so if you look at those systems and you go, okay, well that’s what we need to do here. So we’ll take two or three years to prepare a site in order for it to be ready to accept and welcome one of these species and then we won’t need to use as much water because there’ll be David’s point before about humus retention in temperate soils is much greater. So we sort of go through a humus building process first. That then increases the water holding capacity of those soils such that when you do establish the tree crop, you do have an inherent water efficiency there. That means you don’t have to mollycoddle this species. We certainly still mulch them and we still give ’em a bit of water to start with, just the same as we do with Eucalypts. But beyond that point, they’re pretty good.
(30m51s) Natural Regeneration Cycles & Spreading Risk
David Holmgren: The other aspect of that is to recognise that in natural systems, and we’ve seen this around here, both with local indigenous species and with virtually all the naturalised species that are around that it is the good years, the wet years where regeneration occurs. So that means that while we are providing extra conditions to sort of approximate that in getting things established, we’re also spreading risk in having a program spread over more years rather than just like a wheat crop. We’re establishing the whole farm type of thing in one hit. Apart from the logistics being very difficult to do that, you’re actually hedging your bets against it being very bad season and having to do a lot more to stop losing a lot of trees in those conditions and then you’re spreading the risks over more years. So programs that typically involve a regular tree planting program also fit in with the establishment of a farm nurseries to often actually produce these trees if they’re being planted on reasonably large scale and want what you want. And especially if you’re in an area where you’re pioneering this work and there aren’t established commercial nurseries generating those trees, then you’re producing some each year and you’re planting some each year as well. So it varies of course with the situation. Yeah. With long lived trees, regeneration in nature doesn’t happen just in the poorer years. And we’ve seen with Yellow Box, our local indigenous tree, there is zero regeneration most years. It actually takes a wet summer for the local tree to regenerate those La Niña events.
Darren Doherty: Like we just had. Yep. That was,
David Holmgren: And that’s when you get seedling regeneration. Red Gums the same. And you think, well that’s strange because we mostly don’t get summer rain. But if the tree can live for several hundred years, it actually doesn’t need to regenerate from seed very often. No. So yeah, a lot of these long lived, slow growing things are sort of queued to wait.
(33m18s) Soil Erosion: Grains vs. Trees & Pasture Cropping Alternative
Earth Matters Host: Can you also go over the basics of comparing soil erosion between grains and trees?
David Holmgren: Part of the issue is the need to prepare the ground. Now, there may be some soil disturbance in preparing the ground for trees, though it’s actually minor compared with doing that for grains. But then once you’ve done that, you are not disturbing the ground. And the great difficulty with grains is that cultivation of the soil is basically been the necessary step to prepare the ground. And once you’ve cultivated the ground, it’s exposed to wind erosion in dry areas, especially. And of course to water erosion. And again, those events you might not get significant water erosion for many, many years. And then an event happens and you’ve lost hundreds of tons of soil from a paddock in often in 24 hours. And that’s the way, that’s the way actually landscapes work. Whole river systems form over primordial time, not gradually. They actually form in catastrophic pulses events. Yeah. Yeah. So, similarly with wind erosion, when the landscape is completely bare due to crop failure and grazing animals eating it down, and there’s those dust storms blowing, like Melbourne got in the 82-83 drought, that’s when 90, 95% of the wind erosion is occurring. But because you are making that disturbance to the landscape more or less every year, you are gonna be hit by those events. The other great hope, which conventional agriculture is invested in for dealing with that problem has been direct tillage. And there are some examples of that being done organically, in particular places with particular conditions. But the vast majority of it is dependent on herbicide. And the herbicide dependence is not really a sustainability.
Darren Doherty: I should add there, I mean, one thing in, we can’t have this conversation without mentioning Darryl Cluff and Colin Seis’ work with pasture cropping and also Bruce Maynard’s work with no-kill cropping because their systems that, I mean, as I’ve often said, I think if those guys were around at the Roman conquest of North Africa, North Africa wouldn’t look like it does now because they cracked that code that we had never cracked of being able to grow economic yields of cereals without cultivation or with absolute minimum cultivation such that you are still able to have an underlying perennial grassland base at the same time as still obtain a cereal yield. Now that’s never been done before, and so it’s been our sort of dream, if you like to have, if we’re gonna grow cereals, then we have that as the way we do it because we know now that from the longitudinal studies on those systems that they’ve been able to get something like 30 plus tons of carbon dioxide equivalent sequestered per hectare per year for over 10 years. And they’ve been able to grow their soil rhizosphere, their root depth down to 60, 70 centimetres. Right? So that’s never happened before in cereal culture. So yes, cereal culture is traditionally and in herbicide based. No tillage I don’t think is sustainable at all. One is, the no-till has been almost completely reliant on the use of herbicides, which has a pretty dramatic effect on soil biology and still maintains a relatively bare soil surface and doesn’t allow for other species to actually persist alongside the crop. Tillage, well tillage just knocks everything out. So both of those methods are not what I would call best practice. Pasture cropping, no kill cropping are. So we do have another model that’s emerged in the last 15 years, fortunately, that allows us to sort of get outta jail on that one if we want to keep producing annual cereals.
(37m49s) Problems with Herbicides and Industrial Inputs (Phosphorus)
David Holmgren: The prime problem with herbicide is not the toxic effects that may actually be really quite substantial and longer term. The main problem is the enormous embodied energy in manufacturing herbicides. So they’re really part of the fossil fuel, cheap energy era. Farmers, 500 years from now are not gonna be using herbicides if they actually exist, they would be so expensive that they couldn’t really be used on any sort of large scale, maybe in very high value horticulture. It might be possible, but it’s not gonna be possible in the future because of that inherent embodied energy. And it’s not just an efficiency thing, it’s inherent to the manufacturer. So like the problems of phosphate fertiliser and the energy involved in making nitrogen fertilisers, these hard limits, that food production on the planet using the industrial model will progressively run into. If we are thinking about sustainability, it’s not just minimising adverse impacts on the biological system, it’s actually not being dependent on those inputs that can only be produced at a reasonable cost with abundant fossil fuel.
Darren Doherty: Mm-hmm. The shifting around of minerals around the planet, like phosphorus in particular phosphorus, is people really need to start talking about phosphorus because we can talk about peak oil and all that, but we can still make oil from something else, but you can’t just go and make phosphorus. It’s critical. And the last big deposits of it are on the, in a disputed area, Morocco and Algeria, and they’re fighting like hell over it. So, there’s no more Nauru. There’s no more phosphorus mountains left there
(39m44s) Tree Crops, Nutrient Cycling, and Forest Ecosystems
David Holmgren: so that if we look at tree crop systems and we say, well, the carobs or oaks or chestnuts that are producing something that might be fed to animals or fed to people, that’s analogous to grains. There’s still that need for phosphorus. But the inherent efficiency of trees and the minimising that loss of soil because the greatest nutrient density is in that top layer that gets lost in wind and water erosion.
Darren Doherty: And you’ve got a high, you’ve got, well, you’ve got a high concentration of mycorrhizal fungi as well, which are phosphorous feeders and et cetera. So, you’ve got all of these organisms which are helping to cycle these minerals very effectively.
David Holmgren: And another way to think about tree crops is also just within forests that are more common biomass forests. We think of eucalypt forests, pine forests, even those systems, there are trees that will actually grow under those canopies that have those beneficial mycorrhizal relationships that end up producing food in some form or another. Now, one of those that’s native is the Cherry Ballard or Native Cherry that is a partial parasite off the eucalypt or other trees, grows on in very dry, harsh conditions and is producing a berry. Now whether we get to eat that berry, there’s birds eating it, it’s actually part of a more productive biological cycle, and the tree itself is palatable to grazing animals. All the ones in the bush are pruned up by the kangaroos, and we can see similar examples out in the pine forests here at Creswick that were established on the worst soils in Central Victoria after the gold rush where none of the bush regenerated. And under those pine forests there’s what’s commonly known as Irish Strawberry Tree, which is a relative of blueberry that produces an edible berry, but it’s producing that berry because it’s got mycorrhizal fungi on its roots that can jackhammer out the unavailable iron and aluminum phosphate that is in those soils in tiny quantities and is then putting that phosphorus into the system via birds that are eating it, which is then dropping that back on the ground as nutrients and is supporting a whole fungal system that include a whole lot of edible fungi. So there’s, as well as tree crops, we can see how there’s these trees that fit into the sort of tough biomass forests that we have on vast scale, that we are not gonna wave a magic wand and turn them all into food forests, but that we can work with those systems and make them both more productive for human needs, but also constantly build their fertility rather than being stuck in a cycle where they grow rapidly, then they burn in a bush fire and there’s a setback in the system, and then they grow rapidly again. And we see this degradation cycle in a lot of our native forests, so there’s ways of using trees to also address that issue.
(43m7s) Disseminating the Idea: Marketing, Culture & the Dehesa Analogy
Byron Joel: I’m just sitting here thinking to myself, to me, I just wanna disseminate this discussion more and more. Like then, that’s what I’ve been thinking about lately is how do I broadcast this more and more, because it’s actually it’s quite a charming subject matter that I found a lot of people find really, really interesting, even if they don’t have a really thorough grasp of it. So that’s what I’ve been doing lately, is putting my head together with a few friends. And I live in Southwestern Australia, an area called Margaret River, where it’s a bit of a tourism dollar area, lots of wineries, lots of bigger estates, and we’re designing up a little program to talk to landowners and winery owners and whatnot around here to try and make planting these tree crop systems, in particular analogs of the Dehesa system of Spain on their properties. So trying to make it kind of hip and a little bit kind of sexy and like all the, this is where it’s at, this is the future.
Darren Doherty: Don’t you say to them, like a client said to me once, Byron, bring me Tuscany, Darren.
Byron Joel: Well, I don’t mean to reduce this to a matter of marketing. It’s actually making a little bit of a dent in the discussion down here. Like, people are starting to talk about it now. Out of the woodwork, there’s two or three landowners who have kind of come out and said, yeah, well, I’m already running pigs on the ropes. 15-year-old French oaks that they’ve put in and using the term that’s been coined the Dessa, just to further foster this discussion, you know, nitpick through the ins and outs and nuts and bolts of how do you design these things? What are the best species, the best varieties of species? Where are they located in Australia? I would love to see some sort of a collection or arboretum of the best species, the best oaks, the best carob varieties, et cetera, et cetera.
(44m58s) Culinary Adoption: From Enthusiasts to Staple Foods
David Holmgren: Well, another take of how this is adopted is at the other end, at the culinary end. Because one of the things we found over the years, in the early days in the seventies and even more recently, that as there was some enthusiasm for planting trees, even sort of well-known nut trees, for example, we had a nut growing conference here in the early nineties, and I was shocked to realise that some of those people who were interested in planting chestnuts hadn’t actually ever eaten a chestnut and food habits sort of shift slowly, and it’s the difficulty of moving from a grain-based diet to a tree crop based diet is something that we’ve been actually modeling here at Melliodora. And it’s something that has happened to a small degree round Australia through the permaculture networks over the years. So there’s a heap of people who collect bunya pines from trees planted in their local old church or cemetery or yeah, cemetery or in the wild and roast them up in the autumn. And they’re absolutely fantastic. And there’s now sort of second generation people who’ve been raised eating these things because it becomes a little bit academic if, so well what do you do with this? Or it’s just some sort of. There’s some buyer that’ll come along and buy it from us and they’ll sell it to somewhere or other, I dunno where. That’s that old industrial globalist model of agriculture. Whereas the other way is to embed it as a sort of a peasant culture of the land. Like we do this for ourselves and oh, we’ve actually got really quite good at this particular tree crop and it actually becomes an enterprise. So a lot of it is those enterprise development models that say, rather than research the market, be the market, do something for yourself and through that, become enthusiastic about it. And it also emphasizes the way that’s actually a multi-generational process. So here at Melliodora in the chestnut season, we have chestnuts for breakfast. Each morning roasted. They’re not some sort of twee thing that we just sort of buy and eat. Oh, isn’t that nice? No, it’s actually a staple food. It’s breakfast.
Darren Doherty: Or like Dan and Amanda were doing with Oaks. They had a big Bur oak tree around the corner and Oak just every meal had something oak in it. So, yeah. So they’re making coffee and they were doing all sorts of innovative things.
David Holmgren: Yeah. So there’s these various levels, even these tree crops that have been traditional and well established like chestnut. There’s these impediments to them becoming adopted at that level that we need to overcome. And then we’ve things like oaks. Yes. Well, these have in most places, being seen as something that animals can eat. And they are very valuable at that level, but generally because of the tannin content, the bitterness that tannin has gotta be removed. Now, in terms of food processing, things we do in the food industry these days, we do far more complicated things than tannin removal. It’s not actually that difficult to leach the tannin out of acorns.
Darren Doherty: And we do far more difficult things than oak harvesting too. Yeah.
David Holmgren: Yeah. So of course you can look at it as an individual and say, oh, how do you eat that? Or Gee, it doesn’t taste very good, or, oh, it’s a bit like people just going up to an olive tree and picking an olive off the tree and going, oh, that doesn’t taste any good. Well send them out into a wheat field or a corn field. And they basically have a similar experience. So there is work to do in that regard, but we need to do it to some extent at the cultural level as well as at the, if you like, the enterprise level.
(49m12s) International Examples & Marketing Narratives (US, Spain)
Darren Doherty: If I could look at other parts of the world, coming back to Byron’s question, about what other people are doing, particularly in cultures, I’d hone in on the US. The US is going through, I won’t say a renaissance completely, but there is somewhat of a place now for the people like Dave Jacke, particularly people like Mark Shepherd, his restoration agriculture business, which he’s been working on for as long as I’ve been working in this space. And Mark has been really fostering what he sees as these Pleistocene savannas that previously existed in the US and trying to move again away from the broad scale planting of this meso American crop corn, and an Asian crop soybean from just basically being the crop from coast to coast. At least in the summer rainfall parts of the US. So now the way that they’ve really marketed that has been interesting in that they’ve marketed as being basically, let’s move from one model to another. And in many ways it’s been a lot easier sell than what it has been here because you’re dealing in mostly humid landscapes with quite nutrient rich soils and all that. I’m making excuses for us. But it does make it a heck of a lot easier when one, you are using a lot of native plants, which they have. Yeah, I mean, they array. I mean, I just go over there and they’re whinging about something. I say, you guys have got it. So unbelievably. I go to Virginia and they’re saying, oh, we haven’t got this, we haven’t got that. I say, you’ve got nine oak species in your forest and four hickories, and you’ve got pawpaws and blah, blah, blah. All growing in your forest. It’s where the term Virginian ham came from. Right. And so when people understand that story, which is what people like Mark Shepherd and others are now doing, they go, oh, okay. I think I want that. And then what we do to add to that is say, well, I’ve got a couple of slides of when I go into a delicatessen in Spain and you’ve got a leg of Jamón de Bellota, which is acorn finished pork from the Dehesa systems and it’s 150 euros a kilogram. And people look at that and they go, I didn’t realise pork could be so dark and purple and blah, blah, blah. And it’s served in these, you can’t slither it any, it’s almost like an art to just slither it. And people go, wow, you can get that much. So they go, oh, there’s a market here. But also that there’s all of these flavor essences that really attract them. And so there’s all of those narratives that people. And I know in Spain they are doing that really well. I mean, they with some legitimacy, have a picture of a Dehesa scene, which actually represents the production system that these animals are produced in. It’s not like the milk carton that depicts a sort of an idyllic dairy scene, which is far from what exists in reality. This is the real thing. And so people really buy into that whole narrative. It’s a very interesting thing and I think, Byron, you can tap into a lot of those narratives that others have worked with in the development of your own one That’s peculiar to the Australian circumstance. I think the work that Annemarie and Graham Brookman are doing in at the Food Forest in South Australia, I mean, they’re one couple who’ve done a lot on this front. There’s the big carob plantation. It’s not Andrew Gerlach, but there’s another one just near Phil and Michelle Loffler in the Clare Valley. And they’ve developed this whole narrative around their carob production. So they even sell Carob pods, which have always been viewed again as a animal or peasant food or wartime food, food of attrition. But we never had that in Australia. So people, now you go to the Adelaide Show Grounds Market and you can buy enormous quantities of, or the Willunga market of carob pods and people are using them instead of Mars bars, and that’s fantastic, right? So that by and large, the narrative hasn’t been very well developed, and I think you’ve picked a really good point to play with there, Byron.
Byron Joel: Yeah, well that’s exactly, I mean, I’m in a big foodie area and I’ve had to talk to a chef who’s one of my neighbors, who’s a head chef at one of the very popular wineries here. And I just got talking to him about the ham from the Dehesa and showed him visuals of the Dehesa. And just the whole bit. It’s quite an easy sell to someone who appreciates that cultural narrative,
Darren Doherty: Except when they say, when will it be available? That’s,
Byron Joel: That’s right. But then you’ve gotta soften them to the idea of the multi-generational aspect to it, which is actually the hardest part so far, because they don’t like anything pending like that.
(54m9s) Long-Term Vision & Community Involvement (Mackay Farm Foods Example)
Darren Doherty: Well, that’s why we’ve got a few poor clients, as you know, and we’ve been looking at them starting to market. I’ll give you one example. We’ve got Mackay Farm Foods at Turrumberry and they’ve been on that property for five generations. They’re probably the best pastured pig producers I know of in the world. I mean, they do a fantastic job. They’re a serious producer. They turn off something like 2000 pigs a year, 40 sow operation. They’re not playing around and they are establishing their whole property to a tree crop system. Right now they’re doing that because they know that, I mean, they’re about my age, sort of, well, Belinda’s not, but Jason’s about my age, mid forties. He knows that it’s gonna be 20, 30, 40 years before these trees are at a stage where they’re really influencing the production system. But when it comes to his children, they’re gonna be in this absolute 250 acre tree crop paradise, which is gonna not only set the tone for, or set the space for that whole landscape, but it’s also going to be an investment in the development of their food product. That’ll go on for effectively forever. And I think that that’s a, like what we are doing narrative wise is that we are building that in. So for example, when the trees needed to be planted this year, I said to, well, how am we gonna plant ’em? I said, well look how many people do you sell your pork to put a newsletter out and invite them to come up and participate in the tree planting? And they got 40 people in a snap. They just said, we’ll put on a roast. People will run for miles to get a bit of crackling, especially if it’s seemingly for free. And they came up and they planted a few thousand oak trees and carobs and honey locusts, et cetera, et cetera, and tagasaste, et cetera. So people came and participated in that. That’s just one example of how in their case we dealt with that. But the reality is the yields are gonna take a time. But narratives are interesting things. You can get a yield from a narrative extremely quickly. You don’t have to wait for as long as the acorn to fall off the tree.
Byron Joel: Exactly.
(56m26s) Livestock Integration & Future Resilience
Earth Matters Host: So we’re talking about pigs eating these crops. How much of this tree cropping do you think that would go to livestock?
David Holmgren: It depends where you are in the landscape and where you are in the scale. And also in the economic cycle, because what’s happened over time is that affluence leads to people consuming more animal products. And there’s also a way in which animals do the work for you in concentrating that into higher value products. So if we move into a poorer cycle in the future, a whole lot of things that in the current economic cycle, realistically we would just feed to animals because you’re not gonna go and pay people to pick ’em up and people, oh no, I don’t want to eat that. There’s not a market. But in a world where we’re actually living in a much tougher world, tree crops are this fantastic hedge because a lot of these things, yeah, you can directly eat them and the, if you like, the labor cost of doing that is less of an issue because people are actually keen to do those things. And whether that’s in a form of something picked in a commercial system and marketed, or whether it’s the local kids coming and stealing stuff off your trees to supplement the crap diet of ration food they’re getting from the renationalised coal supermart that the living in a really tough world. Because we see those sort of things in here at Melliodora in the Spring Creek Community Forest Project, which is all the adjoining land running along the creek. We are planting a lot of these sort of trees because they’re low fire hazard because they do all the ecosystem service functions that we need in an urban creek system. But in terms of the long-term vision, it’s a food security system for the descendants, whether they’re ours or others who live here. And some of that work, we are already harvesting black walnuts from the trees down on the creek. But a lot of them just sit on the ground or get eaten by rodents, but that resource is there, so that work’s been done. And if it’s needed in the future, it’s available. And that’s the key thing about trees.
Byron Joel: There’s two things that motivate me in this work, and one is the vision of what just a almost paradise we could create for future generations, but also it’s as much about running toward a beautiful thing as it is running away from the orbit inevitable. Well, I would say absolutely inevitable, decrease in energy, buffering the discomfort that we could feel as a culture in the event of this kind of energy crisis or a socioeconomic collapse or downturn of some sort. And it’s just like the, if we went and established these systems in now. The benefits it would have on the next generation who are very, very, very likely gonna have a lot less kind of cheap energy at disposal. You can barely quantify it. Like it’s just make the world of difference to them.
(59m54s) Broadacre Integration & Buffering Climate Variability
Darren Doherty: I think the question around livestock, there’s, early on when I started out doing this, I had a big vision that, especially in broad acre systems, that we would integrate a lot of these tree crop species in to, again, not so much to, there’re always gonna be a supplement because it’s difficult in this environment to have a yield from all of these species at all times of the year. So you’ve always got this, you’ve always got a grassland system that’s, if you’re talking livestock that sort of underpins all of this, but that these,
David Holmgren: And that’s what most of Australia is. That’s what often a lot of people don’t realise in the city that the vast majority of Australia is grazing land in some form or another.
Darren Doherty: Exactly.
David Holmgren: From just actually natural, vast areas of the interior right through to improved pasture. Just drive around the landscape in Australia far enough, you don’t actually see a lot of crops and they’re concentrated in some limited areas grass.
Darren Doherty: So that was, yeah, so that was my vision was to buffer, because grasses are much more tied to climate than trees are in terms of the way they yield. So you as a livestock producer and as a human, therefore, if you really buffer yourself against, again, the vagaries of climate, if you integrate these tree crops into your systems. Now, of course. During the years, they may well just provide an ecological yield, a shelter yield, et cetera. But when push comes to shove, you can do that. Now we’ve given lots of, I had a nursery at our place years ago, and I every gift, at every wedding or engagement or birthday or whatever it would be a handful of carob trees or bunya trees or oak trees or whatever to my broadacre friends, that was a loving gift because I could see that if the shit hit the fan, at least you’ve got a bucket full of carobs that you could go and munch on. I mean, they are the locust of the desert that that’s it. They’re there for you to get by on. In the 1992 drought, our property, our cattle were pretty well starving, and they were on rations of oats and oats will only get you so far. I went up to Cohuna, where my sister-in-law lived, and all of the street trees, I won’t say all, but many, many streets in Cohuna are aligned with with carob trees. And they’re magnificent. And so I went up there with a tandem trailer and lots of super phosphate bags and went, did multiple trips. And our cattle, when I brought those pods home, they would run to see me and they actually increased live weight gain even though there was not a blade of grass growing. Now, had our property, had my grandfather integrated Carobs and other species into that property early on, then we wouldn’t have had to drive to Cohuna 200 Ks to get, they would’ve been there in the first place.
David Holmgren: And the animals could have picked them up themselves.
Darren Doherty: Yeah, exactly. I mean, I’m standing, everyone’s looking at me like a weirdo raking off up their nature strip of all of their carob pods. But the transition movement sort of got this, this is one of its philosophy almost that one of the things that you should do is go and plant useful, locally hardy species so that if people do meet hard times, we’ve got this tree crop infrastructure that we can fall back upon. For me living in Bendigo, I mean they did a study years ago. I think we’ve got something like $5 million worth of fruit that falls on the ground unharvested every year they did that and when they were assessing fruit flies, we had a fruit fly outbreak. And so the department went around into every backyard and put a fruit fly trap at the same time as taking data on what fruit trees are in people’s backyards. And so even though we are not in hard times personally, our family has long gone around our suburbs and got the trees that are hanging over the edges, the carobs, the almonds, the apricots, the goodness knows whatever else, and gleaned a yield that now that we’ve got the 500 square metre house on the 520 square metre block. Nobody’s putting these things in, so we’re not landscaping with these species anymore. And so we’re setting ourselves up for a pretty, pretty tough time. I think.
(1h4m15s) Urban & Community Planting (Eco Villages, Street Trees)
Byron Joel: There’s actually a an eco village being designed for my region, Witchcliffe, just south of Margaret River, that is based loosely on Village Homes in Davis, California, and I’m the tree systems guy for it. So I’m actually pushing for these kind of systems to be put in for that.
Darren Doherty: I mean, Davis is extraordinary, Village Homes in Davis. I mean, it’s just, you just wonder what the hell are people thinking when you go to a place like that and you realise, well, why isn’t this ubiquitous? Or why can’t we live like this? Because it’s not as if it looks like a hippie thing or anything like that. It’s just a straightforward community with relatively straightforward housing and people, and the landscape actually provides for human needs now. There’s nothing stopping that actually extending out onto the agricultural landscape as well. My cup of tea has been trying to build that ubiquity into agricultural landscapes as well.
Byron Joel: This particular project, you’ve got urban design that’s very similar to village homes, but on the same property there is actually broad scale agriculture. So I’m gonna be pushing for having the Savannah systems planted into the pasture there.
Darren Doherty: Beautiful.
David Holmgren: Yeah, so one of those aspects about tree crops as part of urban landscapes, of course, if we look at urban agriculture in its intensive form, making use of small spaces or relatively high value land producing perishable food, rather than bringing that in. And we can think of vegetables primarily of the obvious thing, but that is a landscape that you actually can’t walk through. Only the gardeners should really be allowed in. Whereas if we think of tree systems, that’s actually what our parklands are. Higher prune trees, people can walk underneath a robust urban landscape. So tree crop systems fit into that perfectly, and especially of course when we’re talking about deciduous trees, because in Southern Australia it’s crazy to where we need the passive solar gain to fill our cities up completely with evergreen trees. There should be a sort of a high bias towards deciduous anyway, just from an energetic and efficiency point of view. And a lot of our tree crop systems, both fruit and nuts and pods are produced by trees that are essentially deciduous.
Darren Doherty: I was really happy to see a well, I happen to know the nurseryman of the city of Greater Bendigo, and he has a predilection towards Bunya and Carob. And so I’ve just come back from a trip and I saw a whole new street that had been established to carob trees and I thought, you beauty, this is the sort of stuff that you wanna see because those who are in the know will go, okay, I’ll keep that in the back of my mind. I think it’s part of the human condition that you always know where something is for free at some point, you think, oh gee, I’m down on my last 20. I think I might go down and see how those almonds are doing this week.
(1h7m26s) Olives in South Australia: Crop, Weed, and Genetic Goldmine
David Holmgren: Well, before olives became fashionable, was it the Greek community or the Italian community in Adelaide that commandeered the harvesting of the olive plantations that have been planted in the environmental weed infested systems of Adelaide?
Darren Doherty: Well, that’s another story. Of course.
David Holmgren: Now the mayor has all of that olive oil bottled and it’s sort of given out to special visitors to, it’s a great Adelaide.
Darren Doherty: It’s the greatest repository of olive germ plasm on the planet. It is in South Australia. It’s extraordinary.
David Holmgren: So ironically, we have one of the great tree crops of the world. One of the tree crops, which has held its own in the industrial era of broad acre monocultural, annual crops, olive production of course, which only grows in Mediterranean type climates. And Australia, of course has the greatest extent of Mediterranean type climates more than the rest of the world put together almost. And olives are that great, hardy, adaptable tree, and they like it so much. Of course, they’re naturalised all through large areas in South Australia and have been treated in this strange, schizoid way that yes, they’re highly valued crop over here with high status. And then, oh, they’re an environmental weed to be removed. But what’s interesting about that is that once a tree crop species goes wild in a place a new population of genetic diversity develops. And from that is the source for serious new development of new varieties. And so there’s actually a story to this. Back in the, about more than 10 years ago, there was an olive growing conference in Adelaide, and there was an Italian Australian grower from Western Australia who was there and he was interested in the conference, but he mainly wanted to look at all these massive wild stands of olives in the Adelaide Hills,
Darren Doherty: which the governor had allocated like $140 million to remove.
David Holmgren: Yeah. Yeah. And he said, look, I’ve just been back to Italy and got offered a few budwood sticks of some new olive variety for $15,000. And he said it’s all the same genetic material, just back crossed. He says, it’s rubbish. He said, what you’ve got here is a gold mine. Don’t let the Italians know what you’ve got. And because in this country was sort of trying to get rid of it all, whereas out there amongst all those wild trees of the millions of trees, there are, there will be some fantastic new varieties.
Darren Doherty: Yeah. There will be, there will be a Kalamata, there will be a Granny Smith of Olives out there. And that’s the thing, you throw the baby out with the bath water and you don’t see the forest for the trees. I was gonna say, Byron, one of the interesting observations that I’ve made of South Australia in particular of all of the places in Australia, in the Mediterranean parts of Australia, South Australia’s food culture is probably the strongest. I think outwardly that there’s a nexus of a few reasons for that. One is the way that South Australia was settled, two is by whom? Strong German population, strong Greek and Italian populations laterally. And three, it’s mostly a calcareous soils area soils. So it’s mostly limestones soils. And so the Mediterranean tree crop species that so often we are talking about really find their home there. And there’s a lot of that soil type. So you’ve got this combination between the geology and a particular ethnicity of people coming together. That’s really exactly, it’s really built the great society that we have in South Australia. It’s a great food place. These are the sorts of gold nugget places that you go and have a look at. The Waite Institute places these fig arboretums, the Brookmans themselves and others. Yeah. Down at McLaren, the what they call the Perris down in McLaren Vale, and there’s bound to be others who are unknown to us.
(1h11m57s) Documenting Knowledge & Finding the Pioneers
Byron Joel: Well that’s why, this is why I initiated this discussion because I want it to be louder discussion and I want it to be a bit more catalogued and categorised and documented. So it’s exactly why we were doing this talk.
Darren Doherty: Yeah.
David Holmgren: Well, in terms of finding people, I’ve just been up in the Canberra region, which of course is renowned for its street trees, but I was out visiting farmer, I think of his name in a minute, who’s got the highest producing truffle forest in the world in terms of truffle yield. And he’s possibly the first person I’ve met in Australia who can probably identify all the 80 or so species of oaks at site. ‘Cause oaks are a bit like, they’re all, not many people can actually sort of identify more than a few species. And it was just amazing to see. Yeah, people I didn’t know about who are been doing this pioneering work. And we were looking at other aspects of the water system managements on the property. But we just went past plantations of oaks and Hazel that have been established from seedling and then other ones that were actually direct sown.
Byron Joel: That’s a pattern I’ve spotted David, I’ve initiated a couple of little things in my time, like the transition town in Margaret River and whatnot. And that’s a pattern I’ve noticed is that there’s actually quite a lot of people doing amazing work. They’re just not talking to each other.
David Holmgren: Yeah, well, it’s cranky individuals who’ve sort of got a passion who’ve ignored like you, like all the, all the, you call cranky, all the sort of conventional view on that trip, I was also revisiting friends David Watson and Judith Turley who were sheep graziers at Bungendore in some very tough high altitude dry, cold country where they produced super fine merino wool and they did one of the first permaculture design courses with Bill Mollison in the early eighties. And their place is this great forest around the old homestead of essentially oak trees, but a thousand other things. And out across this very tough landscape, there’s been the progressive revegetation and a lot of that is tough eucalypt and Acacias that grow in those landscapes, but also the tree crops.
Darren Doherty: Was that the Marshalls, Peter and Kate Marshalls?
David Holmgren: Yes. Peter and Kate Marshall at out from Braidwood who are doing incredible work and their tree crop systems. They also very competent farm forestry producers with beautiful high prune pines and poplars and all sorts of rare species of trees. But a great deal of knowledge about not just delectable beneficial fungi that can be inoculated onto roots of trees, the more general understanding of the role of fungi in getting a lot of these tree systems right established. So there’s layers and layers in this field of work that need to be done.
(1h15m28s) Native Tree Crops: Bunya & Macadamia Opportunities
David Holmgren: And of course, we’ve mentioned a lot species from outside of Australia, but we did mention in passing Bunya, which of course comes from the same forests where our other tree crop species that has achieved commercial success. Yes. The macadamia comes from the same forests essentially. And what’s extraordinary about the bunya, as we think of it as a subtropical high rainfall tree, but the experience of the last a hundred years and increasingly in the last 30 years of permaculture, experimental tree crop plantings, is this tree is incredibly hardy and adapted to a much wider range of climates than where it was when Europeans arrived. And maybe that’s not surprising because the Araucarias as a genus are 180 million years old. They were here with the dinosaurs, whereas the eucalypt are only 2 million years old. So once the great bunyas or their ancestors actually covered the whole continent anyway, so we still have a huge amount of sort of rediscovery or opportunity in these projects and I think that’s is something that’s also exciting to a lot of people of is there something valuable that they can do with their spare capital or their spare time that will have some value in the future. Because so much of what we’ve done with our wealth is sort of just gonna end up in the dustbin of history.
Byron Joel: Yes, I’ve seen Bunyas fruiting as far south as the Hobart Arboretum Botanical Gardens, and in Cohuna there’s quite a spread.
David Holmgren: Those ones fruiting in the Hobart Botanic Gardens are the ones I looked at in 1975 when I was researching Permaculture One. And also there used to be a bearing macadamia there, and that broke this idea that, oh, actually these subtropical species need a lot of heat to mature. They just can’t cope with that much in the way of frost. And so there’s so much learning. I often joke about the fact that Melbourne is full of avocado trees, many of which bear fruit basically because people were so ignorant that they didn’t understand that avocados couldn’t grow in Melbourne and so
Darren Doherty: Well, no. Also people are just throwing them out in their garden and stuff.
(1h18m12s) Hobbyists, Heritage, and Preserving Genetic Diversity (Figs Example)
Byron Joel: So, you look at Louis Glowinski’s book on fruit growing in Australia, and he grows just about every subtropical fruit under the sun in his backyard in Melbourne. I was very surprised when I first read that book.
Darren Doherty: Adam Grubb has his Brunswick banana.
David Holmgren: Yes. So the irony is that it’s individuals just at the sort of hobbyist level, like Glowinski is a medical doctor and it’s just his backyard hobby, but he’s made a major contribution to tree crop horticulture in Australia. It was interesting, Darren, you were mentioning the fig arboretum in South Australia. The story behind that is that at the Roseworthy, the agricultural college had that collection and in the economic rationalism of the 1980s, they got rid of all these things and it was actually people coming from that tree crops permaculture fraternity who saved that. And yeah, I met the guy who established that collection on private land.
Byron Joel: He’s since passed and we’re going to go and stay with his widow. I’m going with a friend of mine who’s an organic fig farmer from California who’s been searching for the black mission fig ever since he left California and can’t find it in WA and he just about had a heart attack when he found that it was in Australia. So, yeah, I’m looking forward to that.
David Holmgren: And of course, this is a heritage of all those Greeks and Italians and Maltese who brought out those cuttings in their back pocket when they immigrated from their village. That’s why we have so many of these things because yeah, people fought their traditions
Darren Doherty: and in some places these are still revered. We’ve got a client in, or client associates, I should say, in Majorca in Spain who’s got 150 fig varieties, and that’s a serious repository of germ plasm, which is, you’d argue is just as important as any repository of a serial seed or anything else. But is absolutely, this is a private guy who’s just doing this because he has a peculiar interest. Even people like George down at Geelong, you need people who have peculiar interests sometimes to, and who may be eccentric or otherwise who do this important job for society because if you don’t have them then it just takes a policy change or an administration change as we’ve seen so often when these things have been held by somebody in government. That’s right. That things are lost, like happened in Berkeley. And this happened so many times. I think even at the Waite Institute, they’ve had murmurings of doing this, that and the other.
(1h21m7s) Conclusion
Earth Matters Host: Should we finish up now?
Darren Doherty: Well, there’s cake in front of us, so,
Earth Matters Host: Alright, Byron, it’s been really great talking to you.
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