25 November

One of the great Australians most have never heard of. Tony Rinaudo, an agronomist i.e. an expert in agriculture. Rinaudo looked at degraded landscapes, particularly in Africa, and like many others helped with projects to plant millions of trees. Nearly all of those projects fail, the trees die. Then one day he noticed in these landscapes what looked like small shrubs. But when he looked more closely, they weren’t shrubs. They were trees growing out of the ground, from established roots where old trees used to be before land clearing. (Western colonial powers had earlier been the cause of much of this land clearing). Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration (FMNR) was the result. Rinaudo taught people how to tend to this emergent new growth by pruning all but a dominant new stem. This led to the trees regrowing entirely by themselves, out of the ground. Whole landscapes are restored with minimal effort, in barren deserts, from these pre-existing forests underground. In Niger alone local farmers have regenerated over 6 million hectares of barren land, without planting a single tree. It’s doubled their crop yields and income. It’s a genuine revolution.