2 August

The farmers we need to support most, I think, are the ones who recognise that a lot of our agriculture hasn’t been farming at all, it’s been soil mining. Stripping the land of vegetation and using whatever nutrients are already in the soil to grow for forage or cropping. And then adding super and other nutrient supplements to make up for the gap. The whole idea of ‘drought’ is part of that view, the idea that water in the landscape falls from the sky, and/or comes from underground or rivers, dams etc. To survive in Australia I think we need to urgently understand again that water should be stored in the soil. And to do that you need vegetation. That vegetation will in turn actually produce rain, if we have enough of it. (Rainforests for example generate most of their own rain, they don’t wait for it to fall from the sky.) Drive through farmland in this current drought and look at just how many properties have barely a single plant growing on them. That’s disastrous, this is another chicken and egg thing we have backwards. We don’t need to wait for rain to grow plants, we need plants to produce rain and hold it in the soil. Whole civilisations have been destroyed by the wrong sort of agriculture.