Dr Shane Simonsen chats with David Holmgren about the potential synergies between modern permaculture practice and the breeding of plants and livestock.

You can explore Shane's work here: https://zeroinputagriculture.substack.com

Interview Transcript

(00:00:08) Introduction: Selective Breeding and Permaculture's Roots

Shane Simonsen: Welcome to the Zero Input Agriculture Podcast. Today I managed to land the biggest fish that I could ever possibly hope to get a chance to talk to. I'm joined by none other than David Holmgren, co-founder of Permaculture. I've managed to lure David in here today to talk a bit more deeply about the potential synergies between selective breeding, particularly of plants and crops, and permaculture. I wanted to quickly start with a quote that I found from Permaculture One. I just reread it recently as a primer to get a sense of where the movement started with regards to this whole topic. There's a quote, "Rural and urban permacultures will need an increase in the importation, generation, and dispersal of selected plant species." It was there right in the very early days. I'm curious if you have more to say about the potential synergy between permaculture and all of the techniques we have for breeding new crops.

David Holmgren: It's great to join you, Shane, and maybe the fish and lured is appropriate because I am a Piscean.

Shane Simonsen: Oh.

(01:24) Permaculture and the Resurgence of Economic Botany

David Holmgren: One way of looking at permaculture and its emergence was that it was part of the resurgence of interest in the applied scientific field of economic botany.

David Holmgren: What are all the plants and for that matter animals that are potentially useful to people that could be the basis of economies, and not just monetary economies, but non-monetary household economies. And that there's these phases, the 1970s was a phase of resurgence of interest in those sorts of things. There was an earlier phase very strong in the 1930s and an earlier phase again in the 1870s to 1890s. Not just in Australia, but that 19th-century phase was really part of what was being driven out of Kew Gardens at the centre of the British Empire that what are all these useful plants? Because of course Europeans had experienced the massive increase in food productivity in gaining from the Americas corn and potatoes amongst other things. And then things like rubber trees being introduced to Malaya and creating benefits the whole recognition of tree crops.

David Holmgren: So there's a whole aspect there that I think tends to come up when there's uncertainty about society sustainability.

David Holmgren: So the big parallel with permaculture was the best book on useful plants of Australia. That was the title more or less, Maiden's 1872 republished a facsimile edition in 1972 and that was our best reference. A book from 100 years before. So that interest in economic botany tends to move interest away from how do we breed a better variety of apple or a better variety of wheat to what about all the things that we're barely growing or we only have in completely unselected form?

(03:49) Early Permaculture Strategy: Diversifying with Unselected Species

David Holmgren: And so that immediately sort of that strategic starting point of permaculture, let's try a lot of species.

David Holmgren: Not be too concerned about initially what's the ideal selection. And then early on in my journey with permaculture, a very influential time in New Zealand in 1979, one year after Permaculture One was published was working with someone who I regard as my second mentor in permaculture, Hakai Tane, and then going back in 84 and working with him on chestnuts in the high country of New Zealand and being a speaker doing a presentation with him at the Tree Crops conference.

David Holmgren: And so New Zealand had a Tree Crops Association of people who are really into this stuff there that we had no real parallel to that in Australia at that time. And one of the things that came out of what they found with looking at chestnuts is that when they asked members of the Tree Crops Association all over New Zealand, what were the best bearing and vigorous chestnuts in their district? Just wild trees that have been planted trees, not grafted trees.

David Holmgren: And they took the best 100 seed from the best 100 trees and then grew them alongside elite varieties brought in like the American variety Paragon.

(05:29) Macadamia Breeding: Lessons from Naturalisation and Local Adaptation

David Holmgren: And what they found with trials done at Lincoln University is that the local trees were actually better. And that I think is part of a subset that if you're actually going to introduce something completely new, it's actually better to start with seedling unselected stuff and then breed for the local environment. Which I suppose relates to that sort of landrace idea. And the same thing happened in my understanding with macadamia because the modern macadamia industry came from seedlings planted in Hawaii that proliferated and grew everywhere and then went wild, they naturalised. And then in the 1930s horticulturists went through and gained elite trees from those. And then those were brought back into Australia, but we had the natural pests and diseases of macadamia and in the end those varieties weren't that great here. And I don't know what happened, but my understanding there was then sort of some further breeding. And of course we still had some remnants of the original Queensland nut or Popple nut, the unselected seedlings that had been spread. So I think there's some lessons there about something going wild is a first basis of nature doing the job of selecting,

David Holmgren: and then drawing from that.

Shane Simonsen: Macadamia is such an interesting example, then hybridisation kick starts this process of accelerated evolution. And if people are there at that right time to get involved in that selection, you can end up with an organism that can be brought into symbiosis with human culture.

Shane Simonsen: That's probably kind of my broad theory. And if that happened within living memory for macadamia, how many other species out there waiting to be brought into a harmonious relationship with humans? Not that industrial macadamia farms are the ultimate interpretation of that relationship, but there's something there so profound and so powerful. But stimulating a culture that recognises that pattern and reproduces it, that's kind of the big challenge. If I can inspire other people to have a go with all of these wild species hanging on in the margins and mostly ignored. That's what I would really love to do.

(08:52) The Power of Naturalisation: Wild Apples and Genetic Diversity

David Holmgren: There are so many threads in all that. I suppose one of the things is to deconstruct the idea that the domestic productivity has all been bred in research stations. And so the big example I give is of course when apples were taken to North America, they went wild. European apples, they're Kazakhstan apples moved by the Romans. But in my understanding, apples never really went wild in Western Europe to any significant degree.

David Holmgren: So new diversity, really huge explosive diversity didn't really emerge that much or that fast. Whereas when they were taken to North America, they went wild. And then a century or so later, that created this horticultural gold rush, buying the land that had the Golden Delicious on it. And we've had the same thing happen in Southern Australia. In the last 60 years in Southern Australia, there are wild apples everywhere. And of course, as a result of that, it's not long before you actually find something that's pretty interesting.

David Holmgren: So that explosive unleashed diversity that happens when something naturalises and has exotic vigour, what people conventionally call become an environmental weed is actually where new diversity comes about. So I've argued that there's probably more genetic diversity in Radiata Pine (outside its native range) than all its original biodiversity in coastal California.

David Holmgren: Whereas the conventional view is that that origin point will always have the greatest diversity. But I think when things really go wild in a big way, it's like every hopeful monster gets a guernsey. Every half sort of maladapted thing gets a chance to maybe prove that it's actually adapted to some other selection criteria including human utility that's not initially present.

(11:55) Hybridisation, Invasive Species, and Punctuated Equilibrium

Shane Simonsen: It reminds me of the history of Lantana in Australia. Species that go on to become invasive. They're in the environment for often hundreds of years, and then suddenly something happens and they just spread everywhere. And it's often tied back to a hybridisation event. They cross over their genetics, and it gives them this sudden boost. It's like a punctuated equilibrium phenomenon.

David Holmgren: Yes. And that relates to the pulsing dynamic balance between diversity and productivity in nature. By things being separate, going their own path, it allows divergent possibilities, but then when those things come back together and hybridise, there's a power flush. Generally in nature that hybridisation process creates new possibilities even though it is potentially diminishing if that is really powerful, the presence of the precursor species or strains.

(13:32) Humans as Potential Universal Symbionts in Evolution

Shane Simonsen: That brings me to an idea that humans have the potential to be the universal symbiont on planet Earth. And the model I use is when insects started pollinating plants, there was this massive explosion in diversity. But humans are unusual that one nominal species has the potential to influence the pollination and reproduction of pretty much anything else. I go into the garden with my little flexible human fingers and I can adjust them to pollinate anything. I don't need to be a different species of bird to reach into the flower and pollinate it.

David Holmgren: Animal behaviour is the leading fast-moving edge of evolution, especially higher longer-lived large brain animals are the absolute pinnacle of how for things to adapt and change. And we see that of course in native animals even extremely conservative ones like kangaroos, very conservative in their food habits, and then in a drought stress suddenly discover that these fruit trees are edible that they've ignored forever. So this change in animal behaviour will surely that's our role preeminently is to say, how can we creatively use living from whatever there's too much of in nature. So that that's our calling role of okay, there's a lot of this, can we sustain ourselves with that and flex our behaviour to effectively what mother nature needs at that time? She has to wait for something to come along to fill that niche or suppress back that thing that there's too much of. So I think that is a larger role.

(15:45) Advances in Tree Crop Breeding: Hybrid Swarms and Clonal Selection

David Holmgren: But your interview got me thinking about the whole tree crop breeding thing because a lot of the selection that we understood with trees of course was not seed selection but actually clonal reproduction by grafting or cutting, producing a genetically identical thing. Mostly when we're growing from seed, we've got that diversity, but we don't have necessarily the true prize. So to get something really useful in the tree crop, it's got to be clonal. And what I think we didn't understand originally is that there was work happening around hybrid swarm populations in trees. People in the Midwest of the United States took this idea of can we breed hazelnuts, chestnuts and pecans at what became the Badgersett Research Centre.

David Holmgren: And they now have hazel and chestnut, I think that rivals corn and soybeans for protein and starch production on the best Midwest land. So they've actually proven it's possible to have the super high productivity associated with annual crops and yet have all of the ecosystem service benefits and biomass accumulation of a tree crop system.

David Holmgren: Now, that's taken them quite a while. They got all the hazelnut species, grew them as seed together and they got natural hybridisation and then they just selected for precociousness, what came into seed bearing early. And then just constantly selecting for that. So they have something which actually has the selection and productivity we associate with clonal things, but still having actual genetic diversity of a seedling population. It can be done. It can be done. And so I sometimes say, well, if Mollison and Holmgren had just stuck to that first core issue and spent our whole lives on that rather than permaculture spreading off and becoming a theory of everything. Maybe we would have got somewhere whether it was with Bunya pines or in Oaks. Because it is a long task, and governments and corporations don't seem interested in that work at all. So it does appear to be up to committed people.

(19:40) Balancing Productivity and Low-Input Systems in Tree Crops

Shane Simonsen: Tree crops in particular, when you've got suitable genetics, they should be a case of all you have to do is get them started and then come back to harvest. If they're well adapted, they should do most of the work themselves.

David Holmgren: Well I mean obviously the Badgersett Research station is at the other end of the spectrum of including fertility input and management to machine harvest, pushing that okay, what are the biological limits of tree crops. But yes, that other end that has also been a major theme in permaculture of how do we have very low input systems that are less productive but on balance turn out to be better for the environment, better for people, allow things to tick over more like a natural ecosystem and still hopefully, very substantial yields and productivity.

(20:54) The Unique Domestication of Maize

Shane Simonsen: Well, in my little corner of the woods, Bunya nuts fit that category. They're so well suited to this location. And a big chunk of my diet every year comes from Bunya nuts now that I've figured out how to process them. It's a process to learn how to do that, but you get there with persistence. But before we move on to some other things, I have been knocking around a thought lately that maize is the only fully domesticated plant.

David Holmgren: Ah.

David Holmgren: Right.

David Holmgren: So because it's been so transformed and doesn't really revert back. It has almost zero potential to go feral. It's kind of locked in at this stage.

David Holmgren: Yes. Well, I think that there's elements of that in symbiosis generally. You can think of the lichen from algae and fungi where things are so locked together, they actually no longer exist as independent lives. I don't know whether that's true for us and our dependence on corn, but maybe the dependence of corn on us.

(22:32) Exploring Oak Breeding: Tannins, Hybrids, and Leaf Retention

David Holmgren: There's been various things said about putting down the idea of potential new tree crop breeding too. Jared Diamond suggested almonds were selected from bitter almonds, but Oaks have never been selected for low tannin content, and yet there's 500 species of oaks. And in our part of the world, Oak is sort of the tough equivalent of Bunya. A lot of oaks are pretty slow to get going, but we've seen them to be consistently as drought hardy or more drought hardy than eucalypt species. And of course, they produce this large starch nut, but it's got varying amounts of tannin which of course can be leached out. But the potential for hybridisation between oaks and we're sort of like at the kindergarten level with oaks still. One of my obsessions of course is that oaks are naturally fire retardant. But we're also have the benefits from trees that are deciduous, and then we get winter rain and grass can grow. And of course, there's evergreen oak species, and ones that are semi-evergreen. But there's these other oak species that hold their dry leaves over the winter and then shed them with the first flush of buds.

David Holmgren: Now, they are typically in my observation, continental species like Pin Oak, but I've never seen any literature about the fact that this leaf retention occurs in English oak. And the second generation, we've had nursery rows of oaks where we go along in winter, there's one that's fully shed, one that's got semi-evergreen characteristics and there's one that's a leaf retainer.

David Holmgren: And we want the ones that shed their leaves fully or are semi-evergreen because the trees that shed their leaves in the spring is leaving dry leaves for the fire season.

David Holmgren: And no one is talking about this stuff. And of course, if you're a landscape architect and selecting trees for sun access for passive solar buildings, this thing of when trees drop their leaves is critically important, but even in that ornamental horticultural field, no one seems to have any clue or almost any interest. And yet these things are so significant because we know a lot of the oaks are actually quite promiscuous acrossing. And then in addition to that, we know that the English oak is really the same thing as Lusitanica, they're just separated by the English channel. But those same characteristics in English oak immediately show up grown second generation in Australia. So this tree that supposedly comes from this cool, damp climate actually is really, really tough in Southern Australia because hidden within it has all these other genetics. And I think that's the same with Bunya because Bunya once covered the whole continent. Yes, there's a little remnant population (Bunya in Cairns). But pretty much so the eastern half of Queensland was covered in forests that were fire sensitive. Well, in 1975, going to the Hobart Botanic Gardens and seeing the grove of Bunyas and there's Bunyas bearing. Oh, these trees don't actually require all that heat units that they have in Queensland. The potential for the crop (Bunya) is at least an order of magnitude bigger than macadamia, particularly for permaculture style situations because grazing animals around them on marginal land, so many stacked uses. And mixing in the genetics from the South American relatives, the monkey puzzle for more cold tolerance, the Parana pine for faster maturation. Oh, the potential is just jaw dropping.

(28:45) The Untapped Potential of Araucaria Species: Bunya, Monkey Puzzle, and Parana Pine

David Holmgren: Well, I don't know where the place is where the three could go together because I don't know whether there's other people, but I might be the only person who's eaten all three species (Araucaria). It's too warm here for monkey puzzle, but the Paranas do very well.

David Holmgren: Yes, well, I've been to those forests in Southern Brazil. But I've also been to visit the monkey puzzles and I had no idea how high up the mountains they are. They are the tree line species. Wow, these trees are growing at 2,000 m above sea level. What the other vegetation surrounding them is various species of Southern Beech, Nothofagus, little deciduous shrubs essentially at 2,000 m. And these things stand up as these huge sentinels. And the year we were there, in 2007, it's been one of the heaviest snowfall seasons. And as we went up the mountains through the Tasmanian Blue Gum and Radiata Pine plantations, they were all smashed by the snow. And then we went up into the bigger Nothofagus, and they were all broken by the snow. And we get out at this plateau going across to the Argentinian border, huge stand of those monkey puzzles, totally unaffected by the snow. And then behind them is an active volcano. But these things come from a pretty cool place (origin), which probably explains why people manage to grow them in Scotland. But they're not as common and they're not as vigorous or hardy as Bunyas in our area.

David Holmgren: But those three are the great species of Araucaria that all have the big nut. It's interesting that both the monkey puzzle and the Parana pine, the shell is a lot thinner and easier to break apart than the Bunya. The nuts are not actually quite as big.

David Holmgren: But they're very similar taste wise. And they hybridise if you can line them up in time and space.

David Holmgren: So I'm sure. There's an explosion waiting to happen, but it's like 60 million years in the making that they've been separated. All right.

David Holmgren: So. And it takes an improbable enough creature like humans to bring them back together again in the blink of an eye.

(32:02) Current State of Plant Breeding within the Permaculture Movement

Shane Simonsen: Moving on. How much plant breeding is already happening in permaculture? Because I'm a little bit of a loner hermit. I'm exploring kind of boundary topics. Are there many people doing crop and tree breeding to any extent that you know of?

David Holmgren: I don't think so. I think there's many people who've established Arboreta that may have potential for emergent stuff for another generation. And at the garden level with annuals, there's people doing various things. I think there's been an interesting move of focus beyond heirloom species to landrace breeding. And I was actually talking about that with local colleague Speedy Ward, who's an extraordinary plant collector and breeder. And he was telling me about other people very interested in the landrace idea of getting all different seed of say pumpkins, letting them all cross and then selecting from that. So you actually get something adapted to your soils, your climate, which is really how heirloom varieties originated. But like anything, those can become inbred in the same way that animal breeding needs renewal of the wild.

(33:38) Landrace Breeding, Poultry, and Wide Genetic Crosses

David Holmgren: So my writing and teaching partner Beck Low, who is very much an animal person, she's done that with poultry, of having a semi-wild flock. Tough, hardy, they raise chicks themselves, but she culls eating birds out of that flock and she has all different colours and shapes and sizes progressively developed almost her own strain. It's interesting to point out that chickens have a hybrid origin, three different jungle fowl were mixed together. And you may not know about this, in Gympie in the 80s, somebody artificially crossed brush turkeys with Australorp chickens. And the resulting offspring, the small Turks were completely fertile. I tried to figure out what happened to that material. But that is a really wide cross. I think they're in different families. They can come together that easily. The only issue they had is the chicks had a bit of a hard time getting out of the eggshells because they were so thick, but with a little bit of assistance, that's all it took.

David Holmgren: Wow. So the idea of a poultry that is robust enough to free range. That could be a potential route to create something completely new.

(36:03) Beyond Domestication: Symbiotic Relationships with Australian Wildlife

David Holmgren: I wanted to ask that somewhere in Permaculture One it mentions that Wallabies could potentially be domesticated. Do you have any further thoughts on that or other Australian species?

David Holmgren: Well, it's interesting that I can remember talking with colleague Peter Brew. And we were speculating in the late 70s about Brush Turkey, could this actually be domesticated and be a sort of a forest fuel composting bird? But clearly the brush Turkeys seem to be colonising human habitat everywhere. And he was talking about the reintroduction of Brush Turkey as a wild component to as a fuel reducing bird. I think a lot of the macropods including Tasmanian Wallabies are certainly able to be tamed to an amazing degree. And I think there's been a bit of a cultural and even legal framework in Australia around wildlife conservation to keep humans and wildlife separated.

David Holmgren: So that having pets has been discouraged. But I think also there's a case that I've argued in relation to kangaroos that we should consider them as part of a common wild, but that they should be managed as part of the whole system rather than can we breed these down to a fully domestic controlled animal. And I think there's some similar relationships with another difficult flighty animal is deer. They're naturally flighty difficult animals and really a managed wild harvesting, I think can move to the point where you develop relationships between people and the older breeding animals where they know that you're not after them, but that you sort of have some harvesting role, but essentially the animals are still wild and free in the landscape. Now, obviously people are gritting their teeth about the gradual or not so gradual expansion of deer. And the change those changes in behaviour that animals have as they adapt to human systems, but I think that is more akin to the management that indigenous people did. They burnt areas and knew that when they came back would have sweet grass on it and the kangaroos would be gathered there. And of course from an ecological hunting point of view, it makes sense never kill the large breeding animals, take the young ones, especially the surplus males. So that possibility of not domestication, but some sort of symbiotic influence over populations is probably where mostly I would see those options.

(40:23) The Domestication Spectrum: Lessons from Sami Reindeer Herding

Shane Simonsen: The relationship between the Sami and their reindeer is probably a really good example showing that domestication isn't a binary. There's a spectrum exists in how you interact with different species.

David Holmgren: Yes, well, it's interesting the elephants logging in Burma for centuries and yet these are not strictly domesticated animals. And yet there's this intimate relationship between the person and the elephant. He is the servant of the elephant, partly because they've been replaced by fossil fuel and are no longer valuable. But that sort of quite strong relationships can occur without actually domestication.

(41:44) Radical Idea: Domesticating Elephants for Sustainable Forest Management

Shane Simonsen: It's actually one of the most radical suggestions in my book Taming the Apocalypse that we have a limited window to properly domesticate elephants by hybridising African and Asian elephants. And they can cross, produced perfectly healthy young that were actually killed to maintain the purity of the lines.

Shane Simonsen: And one of the reasons is for humans to successfully manage forest ecosystems, we either need chainsaws and axes to balance that vegetation growth. But without all of that technology, the only thing that could be potentially sustainable would be something like an elephant. And in the same way that cattle made managed grassland ecosystems possible, maybe we need something like an elephant to make forest ecosystems manageable by humans without technology. Well, that's a wild out there idea, Shane. But yes.

(42:55) Holistic Perspectives: Integrating Conservation and Production

David Holmgren: And all of these thoughts about those interconnections and potentials are important. I mean, I think there's still so much work, and it does seem to me that these things are down to what individuals and wealthy people can support projects. But we don't see much of philanthropy in the environment scene that addresses these questions. There's mostly around how can we urgently save what we're losing. And then anything to do with productivity is somehow the opposite thing. Whereas so much of permaculture is actually about seeing all these things in flow from a holistic perspective rather than this binary. And that was that more holistic view was there in the origins of Landcare in Australia, but it then divided into conservation and production, two different realities or attempt to compromise one another, by the classic, Oh, well, there's the indigenous revegetation along the creek corridor, and here's the super productive farm that moves towards intensive monoculture, which is of course a nonsense because one starts to mix with the other. Nature's going to mix those things up. So how to see that those things are actually an important part of not just human futures, but nature's future. I mean within forestry, our most valuable timber tree, the even more threatened Cupressus macrocarpa, Monterey Cypress, the timber house is built of, very stable timber, naturally durable, beautiful figure, but it's a rough tree with huge branches and ingrown bark and it grows on the salt spray zone. But in Britain in the 19th century, an intergeneric cross between Cupressus Macrocarpa and Nootka spruce created the Leyland Cypress, ornamental horticultural selections planted as shelter belts. And us timber workers are looking greedily at those. We want to know whether those nice cylindrical round trunks actually have the beautiful wood quality of the Cupressus macrocarpa because there's an improvement in timber genetics that came about by these trees just being grown together and created that relatively rare intergeneric cross. And so I think lots of examples more of these things must be there waiting to happen or be found.

(47:15) Reflecting on Permaculture's Success and Movement Dynamics

Shane Simonsen: And we definitely can't wait for professional industrial plant breeders to do it because they have their own priorities that are very different to ours.

David Holmgren: Yes and often they take the wonderful solutions of nature and they turn it back into the same old problem. So we have wonderful plants like the tropical palm oil palm that is now has this horrendous reputation because of what industrial corporate monoculture has done with it. Don't blame the plant.

Shane Simonsen: Now, as somebody who's trying to help start the ball rolling, getting more people involved in realising they can breed their own crops. Could you help me reflect on why permaculture was so successful as a movement?

Shane Simonsen: As you said, there were similar attempts that came and went before, and I think permaculture is the first one that had a lingering impact. So I'm trying to do some sheer total utter neglect mass selection on social engineering on this front.

David Holmgren: Well, that's a complex one, but I think to some extent things there's a thing of timing and I think permaculture caught the first big wave of modern environmentalism triggered around the oil crisis of the 1970s where there was this huge interest. And the forces that allowed permaculture to develop as a movement with the very much the charismatic leadership of Mollison. And so the PDC, the permaculture design course was definitely a part of that mechanism that allowed it to survive the dark days of the 80s until the late 80s when a second wave of modern environmentalism hit. Even if that wave mostly ignored the food and agriculture side. So then the second wave became much more focused on tech and greenhouse gas emissions, which then came back in another wave in the 2000s, so this resurgence. So I think there's some of those things are luck and I think there's always this balance between the novel, the attraction of a new idea or a recast idea. And of course people say, oh, that's just Russell Smith's tree crops idea, a permanent agriculture from the 1930s wave. And yes, permaculture was more than that, but it was definitely reframing a lot of those ideas. So there's reframing of things to suit a particular time, I think. And I think those possibilities. I think within the practical sense, the getting highly productive food gardens with seed saving and kindred networks of community gardens and all that idea of seed saving and the incredible book, the Seed Savers Handbook. Even though a lot of that focus has been on saving what already exists. I think people's experience with realising the genetic run down that can occur with heirlooms and then also just the stuff up. Oh well, I was trying to keep that pure and it's actually crossed with that. This freeing up of Oh, maybe we can deliberately go that way of throwing a lot of things together because annuals that are really productive and useful and getting that feedback, the idea that you can create a bit of a strain in less than a whole lifetime. It's surprisingly fast. It's surprisingly fast and surprisingly powerful. The change in performance within a few generations is quite astonishing. If you haven't seen it yourself, you wouldn't believe it's possible.

(52:55) Nurturing Future Breeders: The Role of Homeschooling and Childhood Curiosity

David Holmgren: So we certainly have elements of that that show up in our permaculture teaching and people like Speedy Ward who I mentioned, classic of that experimenter, person always doing trials, including he's a great inoculator of trees with beneficial edible fungi. Sounds like the kind of person I need to talk to.

David Holmgren: Oh yes. He would be good to perhaps get on the podcast. Well one instinct, thinking about timing, instincts have started making me think about the growing homeschooling movement. And there's so many plant breeders that I talk to, they refer back to some childhood experience, grew some crop, accidentally hybridised and it excited them and that started a lifetime of crop breeding. And there's so many ever growing numbers of homeschooling children whose parents are sympathetic to these kind of ideas and they're sitting around for 10 years in their early life with all that energy, space and maybe the curiosity that hasn't been beaten out of you. So I'm starting to think a book or program that helps young people in that position learn how to breed a crop, pick an annual and within a few years. And it's interesting for children that young, the standard line is, they don't have the patience. And I think enough of them do because children aren't all the same, some of them that could be very obsessed on particular topics.

David Holmgren: I think there's great potential in that area and certainly the freedom to explore and focus and be persistent in the home education context. And that freedom to do something that the adults actually aren't doing or don't know about because I think children growing up in a diverse or rich environment initially attempt to copy their parents. But then they often start to identify the missing niches, the things that are not being occupied. So it's not necessarily the greatest success would be the children of enthusiastic adults who actually are already in that territory. But that the parents who are familiar and supportive. And it's interesting in our own family, Oliver, when he was a baby, he just osmotically absorbed building skills, but I was very much the wood worker and by the time he was 14, he was a better welder than I was. And he just sort of moved into that niche, that vacant niche. And there's so many vacant niches in a rich diverse self-reliant households that children can do. And I think that's definitely one of them. Often too things that are small and fine like seeds and pollination of flowers is something that's great for kids because I remember when Oliver was very young, he could actually focus at six inches or less from his nose. Children, so much to do with very fine things is a great one.

(57:41) David Holmgren's Recent Work and Online Resources

Shane Simonsen: Oh, you've given me a bit of encouragement to follow that path and do it quickly because the time in the sun comes and goes, if you blink, you'll miss it.

David Holmgren: Yes.

Shane Simonsen: So if people want to catch up with more that you've done recently? Have you got any books or other things that you'd like to mention?

David Holmgren: Oh well, there's a lot of my writings are now on the Holmgren website and I've been fairly prolific recently, but also been starting to write more stories of things from the past, documenting for the first time. And there's a major essay called A Table of Many Stories, which is about my theories about the most fought over of the old growth forests of Southern Australia and my theories about their origins that conflict with orthodoxies and about the age of these largest flowering plants that I believe they actually live for much longer than science has conventionally said. And these are ideas developed back in the 70s but have never written down. So that things of reflecting on those ideas and bringing those to life with storytelling and pictures from the past. Brilliant. Well I'll put all the links to that in the show notes and I'm looking forward to checking it out now when it comes out.

David Holmgren: Okay, well that one's up on the website as is another one called Saving Warner's track, which is about my time in Jackeys Marsh in Tasmania. And there's various resources we're doing more online teaching these days and my partner Su Dennett is the star of a thing called Do with Sue, which is her practical in the kitchen things and so there's a lot of resources there that we're involved with.

Shane Simonsen: Brilliant. Well I'll put links to all of that. You can send them through to me and I'll put them up. And thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me. This has been fascinating and inspiring and I'm eternally grateful.

David Holmgren: Oh keep up the good work Shane.

Shane Simonsen: I'll be doing loads more interviews from this point on. So this is a great start to the new podcast launch. So thank you very much.

David Holmgren: Okay.

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