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bookboglin's review
3.0
I was certain this would be a 5 star read until I reached the penultimate chapter and was finally in territory where I have enough background knowledge to judge the author's claims. He repeatedly states that poor quality produce is linked to an increase in autism, among other things - this is blatantly false, and his references for these claims did not appear to mention autism, from what I could access online. With this one detail, he completely lost credibility in my eyes, and what I had otherwise regarded as an exceptional book suddenly became an untrustworthy source.
I remain deeply conflicted on this book, as it was beautifully written and, until that point, incredibly compelling. But I am left questioning how many of his other claims I can trust.
I remain deeply conflicted on this book, as it was beautifully written and, until that point, incredibly compelling. But I am left questioning how many of his other claims I can trust.
cathepsut's review against another edition
hopeful
informative
reflective
slow-paced
3.0
This book popped up when I was researching some details about regenerative farming. It sounded like a good grounding on the topic. I learned a surprising amount of things about Australia. Well, considering how little I really know about Australia, maybe not so surprising after all.
In the early chapters it gives good and detailed explanations of the key principles of regenerative agriculture (see below). This unfortunately is bogged down by too many anecdotes, superficial case studies, quotes and repetition. Later chapters are also really drawn out and seem to endlessly go through the same material, without adding anything to the overall picture. Ultimately it’s too dry, too long and boring. I started skimming at some point and put it down for long stretches of time. Endless stories of other farmers, their biographies and his relationship with them. I enjoyed some and initially they were a great vehicle to explain general and regenerative farming principles, but the name dropping gets boring, as it doesn‘t add anything substantial to the topic.
I would have preferred a cleaner structure with more to the point writing, less repetition leading to a shorter book and definitely fewer anecdotes.
I find it curious that the author does not talk about animal welfare in more depth, being a sheep farmer himself. Especially in Australia with its mulesing practices he must be willfully tuning out that topic. I think I heard the word „mulesing“ once, but he did not elaborate at all, besides saying that so-and-do didn‘t need to do it, as they have more resilient sheep.
Overview of Part II of the book, aka the key principles of regenerative farming:
(Regenerating the Five Landscape Functions)
Regenerating the Solar-Energy Function
Regenerating the Water Cycle
Regenerating the Soil-Mineral Cycle
Regenerating Dynamic Ecosystems
Regenerating the Landscape: Role of the Human–Social
In the early chapters it gives good and detailed explanations of the key principles of regenerative agriculture (see below). This unfortunately is bogged down by too many anecdotes, superficial case studies, quotes and repetition. Later chapters are also really drawn out and seem to endlessly go through the same material, without adding anything to the overall picture. Ultimately it’s too dry, too long and boring. I started skimming at some point and put it down for long stretches of time. Endless stories of other farmers, their biographies and his relationship with them. I enjoyed some and initially they were a great vehicle to explain general and regenerative farming principles, but the name dropping gets boring, as it doesn‘t add anything substantial to the topic.
I would have preferred a cleaner structure with more to the point writing, less repetition leading to a shorter book and definitely fewer anecdotes.
I find it curious that the author does not talk about animal welfare in more depth, being a sheep farmer himself. Especially in Australia with its mulesing practices he must be willfully tuning out that topic. I think I heard the word „mulesing“ once, but he did not elaborate at all, besides saying that so-and-do didn‘t need to do it, as they have more resilient sheep.
Overview of Part II of the book, aka the key principles of regenerative farming:
(Regenerating the Five Landscape Functions)
Regenerating the Solar-Energy Function
Regenerating the Water Cycle
Regenerating the Soil-Mineral Cycle
Regenerating Dynamic Ecosystems
Regenerating the Landscape: Role of the Human–Social
numbat's review
challenging
informative
inspiring
sad
slow-paced
3.0
A very important book about ecology and transitioning to the Anthropocene.
Unfortunately there is some ableism and miss-information about conditions such as autism and ADHD particularly in the final chapters about environmental toxins. For example the 300% increase in Autism diagnosis he quotes is actually a result of changes to the diagnostics rather than, as he argues, a rise in cases. This is a common medical model oversimplification of these conditions.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Ableism
boyblue's review
2.0
I should preface this by saying I enjoyed the book a lot and it certainly gave me some anecdotal evidence of sustainable agriculture in Australia.
Interestingly the first of Massy's companions in New England says he believes the Aboriginals may have overburnt the land. This small passing comment sits there completely ignored and unexplored. Massy early on stated that Bill Gammage's firestick theory from "The Greatest Estate" is correct and was the ideal way to manage the Australian ecosystem at the time and then he seeks to confirm his theories and never looks to disprove them. He also refuses to accept that introduced ruminant farming means that aboriginal land management doesn't encompass a complete solution.
The 5 land dynamics make pretty good sense, unfortunately Massy doesn't stick to the sections he puts so much effort into creating. I found the Solar dynamic which was the first one the least relatable to the topic and arguably all about water not sunlight. Perhaps the book would have been better structured as a quick review of the 5 dynamics and then each case study showing the examples. This may have been more boring for some but certainly would have stopped me trying to constantly figure out how it tied back to the main point, even knowing that it's all linked.
1. The Solar:
This section boiled down to two major things, the first being the need to constantly move animals across the land and not allow them to overgraze, with a subtext of keeping the herd large and closely clustered so as to get beneficial turnover and breakup of the ground. This was done several ways, one was to cut the land up into smaller sections and rotate more rapidly. Another was to move the cattle through herding and a temporary shelter errected each night, The idea of mimicking the predator led migrations that happened on the plains of Africa (Allan Savory's theories, you've probably seen that TED talk of his). This theory certainly makes sense from the land perspective and especially in Africa, but would have been interesting to see how it might be different in Australia where historically no large hoofed animals have conducted herding behaviour. I don't think the prehistoric megafauna were hoofed (certainly Diprotodons weren't) though they may have lived in herds. I got annoyed Massy didn't pay attention to the difference between countries. The second part of this section oddly dealt with the creation of a vast water system that created watering holes across an enormous Northern Territory farm. Mention was made of the Brahman cattle being used because the bulls don't mind herding and they don't mind an alpha, but I would have liked to hear more about their other adaptations to the drier land. This second part didn't really deal with solar but rather water.
2. The Water
The disagreements between Peter Andrews Natural Sequence Farming and Yeoman's Keyline Plan seem quite moot. Andrews Chain of ponds clearly breaks down on big estates particularly in more arid climates and his water lens seems to act the same way as Yeoman's water shedding from contoured earthworks.
Keyline - essentially about finding the keyline on a farm where convex becomes concave and all the water catches, the system is built around that point. Dams and irrigation channels are all related to that keyline and used to distribute it across the land. Water is the principle planning medium according to Percival Yeomans.
I feel there needed to be more exploration of how we know so little about water underground and how it makes sense to focus on that in Australia because the chance for evaporation is nil. He could have linked the above theories that way but didn't.
3. Soil
No Kill Cropping
1. Sewing dry. You have to sew seed when the soil is dry. If you do it when wet you give the upper hand to weeds
2. Straight disc implement (coulter disc). Less disturbance for the soil.
3. No fertiliser. Doesn't advantage introduced annuals
4. No chemicals or pesticides. Don't want to simplify the grassland
5. Don't change your grazing. Sew directly into grassland.
You can choose to graze a crop, go for a grain yield, or do both. Best year for a grain yield is when there's lots of rain. You always need to maintain complete ground cover at all time to stop erosion.
4. Dynamic Ecosystems
Then we meet the farmers of Connewarren. Only they aren't farmers. There's no talk of them actually farming the land. It seems to just be a landscape recovery program. No talk at all of the yields or returns as a financially viable farm.
Steiner's Biodynamicism - This is where things start to fray a little bit. I understand Massy's desire to consider every theory and idea with the same weight but when he gives the same credence to the Steiner theory of laying things in spirals to match the cosmos as he does to other theories it starts to get a bit silly. This would be the same as a medical text giving homeopathy the same credence as the use of penicillin.
5. Social-Human
The Machageartty's
- Use industrial style machinery but with organic fertiliser. Worm castings are turned into a fertiliser which is sprayed with seed, increasing growth and yield significantly.
- Unfortunately the cavalier way Massy talks of one family member using a dowsing pendant undermines his narrative.
- I was waiting for him to say that the Machageartty's drove past a paddock and knew it was healthy because of experience and having all that information compressed into a microsecond they can still see whether something is right or wrong. I wanted him to explore instincts and The "Blink" concept as such. But alas he just leaves it as is and believes they can read the cosmos in a blade of grass. I think instincts would have been great to explore, heading into the subconscious mind, and I was surprised he didn't.
Conclusion
This could have been a five star book. To get there it needed 150 pages chopped out and a serious restructure. The ideas in it are life-changing, world-changing even, unfortunately they are buried deep in the sediment of repetition, poor nature writing, and endless quotes. The worst part of the book is actually the end. Massy seems to have decided that every quote he's ever read needs to be jammed into the book. Unfortunately, it's not until page 450 when realises he's still got most of these quotes left and so starts chucking them in willy nilly. Just when we need a distillation and refinement of ideas, a conclusion, we get bombarded with more angles and views of the same material.
There are three main bugbears I have with this book. The first is the way Massy doesn't apply the same rigorous analysis to dowsing, biodynamicism, and come to Jesus moments as he does to industrial agriculture.
The second is the unexplored weaknesses of the new regenerative strategies.
The last is his construct of the organic, mechanical, and emergent mind. It seems to be a schema that suits him but isn't particularly well-defined. He deliberately uses mechanical instead of scientific to engender it as some sort of unfeeling and unnatural mind. It should also be pointed out that the mechanical mind can act in the same way as the emergent one, provided it's given the right data and information. It seems merely that this scientific mind is running in the wrong direction with incorrect information. It's incapable of looking at long-term data sources. For example, phosphates, nitrogen etc work on the short-term to increase yield on a paddock. That is scientifically proven and hence applied globally. If we increase the time scale to 10, 30 or 100 years the effects are drastically different. Certainly big business may try to cover this up but the seeking of the truth by the scientific mind will eventually figure it out. I don't disagree it may be too late by then but I think if you're going to claim weakness in the scientific approach then do it properly, attack the time scale that is needed to accurately test the outcomes and the inability to wait for these results e.g. glyphosates.
He's not a geneticist and so his various attempts at discussing epigenetics are monotonous and shallow.
Lastly, this idea of restoring the landscape to its natural state is a pretty tenuous concept when the whole purpose is to run introduced ruminant animals on it. There's no discussion of how introduced plant species are not the original landscape, nor are sheep or cows. I wouldn't have minded if he hadn't made such a deal out of imagining diprotodons roaming the land. I can see why he went light on Aboriginal material too because it doesn't fit with this cobbled together view of restoring function.
Interestingly the first of Massy's companions in New England says he believes the Aboriginals may have overburnt the land. This small passing comment sits there completely ignored and unexplored. Massy early on stated that Bill Gammage's firestick theory from "The Greatest Estate" is correct and was the ideal way to manage the Australian ecosystem at the time and then he seeks to confirm his theories and never looks to disprove them. He also refuses to accept that introduced ruminant farming means that aboriginal land management doesn't encompass a complete solution.
The 5 land dynamics make pretty good sense, unfortunately Massy doesn't stick to the sections he puts so much effort into creating. I found the Solar dynamic which was the first one the least relatable to the topic and arguably all about water not sunlight. Perhaps the book would have been better structured as a quick review of the 5 dynamics and then each case study showing the examples. This may have been more boring for some but certainly would have stopped me trying to constantly figure out how it tied back to the main point, even knowing that it's all linked.
1. The Solar:
This section boiled down to two major things, the first being the need to constantly move animals across the land and not allow them to overgraze, with a subtext of keeping the herd large and closely clustered so as to get beneficial turnover and breakup of the ground. This was done several ways, one was to cut the land up into smaller sections and rotate more rapidly. Another was to move the cattle through herding and a temporary shelter errected each night, The idea of mimicking the predator led migrations that happened on the plains of Africa (Allan Savory's theories, you've probably seen that TED talk of his). This theory certainly makes sense from the land perspective and especially in Africa, but would have been interesting to see how it might be different in Australia where historically no large hoofed animals have conducted herding behaviour. I don't think the prehistoric megafauna were hoofed (certainly Diprotodons weren't) though they may have lived in herds. I got annoyed Massy didn't pay attention to the difference between countries. The second part of this section oddly dealt with the creation of a vast water system that created watering holes across an enormous Northern Territory farm. Mention was made of the Brahman cattle being used because the bulls don't mind herding and they don't mind an alpha, but I would have liked to hear more about their other adaptations to the drier land. This second part didn't really deal with solar but rather water.
2. The Water
The disagreements between Peter Andrews Natural Sequence Farming and Yeoman's Keyline Plan seem quite moot. Andrews Chain of ponds clearly breaks down on big estates particularly in more arid climates and his water lens seems to act the same way as Yeoman's water shedding from contoured earthworks.
Keyline - essentially about finding the keyline on a farm where convex becomes concave and all the water catches, the system is built around that point. Dams and irrigation channels are all related to that keyline and used to distribute it across the land. Water is the principle planning medium according to Percival Yeomans.
I feel there needed to be more exploration of how we know so little about water underground and how it makes sense to focus on that in Australia because the chance for evaporation is nil. He could have linked the above theories that way but didn't.
3. Soil
No Kill Cropping
1. Sewing dry. You have to sew seed when the soil is dry. If you do it when wet you give the upper hand to weeds
2. Straight disc implement (coulter disc). Less disturbance for the soil.
3. No fertiliser. Doesn't advantage introduced annuals
4. No chemicals or pesticides. Don't want to simplify the grassland
5. Don't change your grazing. Sew directly into grassland.
You can choose to graze a crop, go for a grain yield, or do both. Best year for a grain yield is when there's lots of rain. You always need to maintain complete ground cover at all time to stop erosion.
4. Dynamic Ecosystems
Then we meet the farmers of Connewarren. Only they aren't farmers. There's no talk of them actually farming the land. It seems to just be a landscape recovery program. No talk at all of the yields or returns as a financially viable farm.
Steiner's Biodynamicism - This is where things start to fray a little bit. I understand Massy's desire to consider every theory and idea with the same weight but when he gives the same credence to the Steiner theory of laying things in spirals to match the cosmos as he does to other theories it starts to get a bit silly. This would be the same as a medical text giving homeopathy the same credence as the use of penicillin.
5. Social-Human
The Machageartty's
- Use industrial style machinery but with organic fertiliser. Worm castings are turned into a fertiliser which is sprayed with seed, increasing growth and yield significantly.
- Unfortunately the cavalier way Massy talks of one family member using a dowsing pendant undermines his narrative.
- I was waiting for him to say that the Machageartty's drove past a paddock and knew it was healthy because of experience and having all that information compressed into a microsecond they can still see whether something is right or wrong. I wanted him to explore instincts and The "Blink" concept as such. But alas he just leaves it as is and believes they can read the cosmos in a blade of grass. I think instincts would have been great to explore, heading into the subconscious mind, and I was surprised he didn't.
Conclusion
This could have been a five star book. To get there it needed 150 pages chopped out and a serious restructure. The ideas in it are life-changing, world-changing even, unfortunately they are buried deep in the sediment of repetition, poor nature writing, and endless quotes. The worst part of the book is actually the end. Massy seems to have decided that every quote he's ever read needs to be jammed into the book. Unfortunately, it's not until page 450 when realises he's still got most of these quotes left and so starts chucking them in willy nilly. Just when we need a distillation and refinement of ideas, a conclusion, we get bombarded with more angles and views of the same material.
There are three main bugbears I have with this book. The first is the way Massy doesn't apply the same rigorous analysis to dowsing, biodynamicism, and come to Jesus moments as he does to industrial agriculture.
The second is the unexplored weaknesses of the new regenerative strategies.
The last is his construct of the organic, mechanical, and emergent mind. It seems to be a schema that suits him but isn't particularly well-defined. He deliberately uses mechanical instead of scientific to engender it as some sort of unfeeling and unnatural mind. It should also be pointed out that the mechanical mind can act in the same way as the emergent one, provided it's given the right data and information. It seems merely that this scientific mind is running in the wrong direction with incorrect information. It's incapable of looking at long-term data sources. For example, phosphates, nitrogen etc work on the short-term to increase yield on a paddock. That is scientifically proven and hence applied globally. If we increase the time scale to 10, 30 or 100 years the effects are drastically different. Certainly big business may try to cover this up but the seeking of the truth by the scientific mind will eventually figure it out. I don't disagree it may be too late by then but I think if you're going to claim weakness in the scientific approach then do it properly, attack the time scale that is needed to accurately test the outcomes and the inability to wait for these results e.g. glyphosates.
He's not a geneticist and so his various attempts at discussing epigenetics are monotonous and shallow.
Lastly, this idea of restoring the landscape to its natural state is a pretty tenuous concept when the whole purpose is to run introduced ruminant animals on it. There's no discussion of how introduced plant species are not the original landscape, nor are sheep or cows. I wouldn't have minded if he hadn't made such a deal out of imagining diprotodons roaming the land. I can see why he went light on Aboriginal material too because it doesn't fit with this cobbled together view of restoring function.