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archytas's review
4.25
Friends: "How was your weekend?"
Me: "Great! I read a 700-page book on agriculture"
Friends: …..
Don't be fooled: this book is long, winding, often technical and sometimes silly but it is a thoroughly pleasurable read. Massy uses his own theory of regenerative agriculture to introduce a range of practitioners of different techniques. He has structured the book in a way highly accessible to non-farmers, by grouping around basic concepts of sun, water, soil etc. He has a gift for telling the stories of the dozens of farmers whose successes he features, covering both why their innovations matter, and what they might tell us about possible futures. The book brims with optimism and enthusiasm, one which is grounded in the accessibility of techniques towards self-sustaining, or regenerative, agriculture.
There was plenty I disagreed with - Massy's attempts to weave so many approaches into a single consistent theory for starters, and the integration of subtle energy and biodynamic ideas not based in the scientific method with practices which are clearly based in science for another. These elements are both particularly present in the final section of the book, in which Massy gets passionate about how human culture needs to shift to support a different approach to the land (not a proposition I disagree with, but I don't think geomancy is the right direction). He's also a strong follower of Tim Flannery's ideas about the extinction of the megafauna, which have been increasingly challenged by evidence, and uses this to argue for wide-scale grazing. However, because there is so much here, disagreements with some elements don't devalue the whole. And all up the author's irrepressible passion for good food made in harmony with the landscape just makes all the idiosyncrasies matter less.
Me: "Great! I read a 700-page book on agriculture"
Friends: …..
Don't be fooled: this book is long, winding, often technical and sometimes silly but it is a thoroughly pleasurable read. Massy uses his own theory of regenerative agriculture to introduce a range of practitioners of different techniques. He has structured the book in a way highly accessible to non-farmers, by grouping around basic concepts of sun, water, soil etc. He has a gift for telling the stories of the dozens of farmers whose successes he features, covering both why their innovations matter, and what they might tell us about possible futures. The book brims with optimism and enthusiasm, one which is grounded in the accessibility of techniques towards self-sustaining, or regenerative, agriculture.
There was plenty I disagreed with - Massy's attempts to weave so many approaches into a single consistent theory for starters, and the integration of subtle energy and biodynamic ideas not based in the scientific method with practices which are clearly based in science for another. These elements are both particularly present in the final section of the book, in which Massy gets passionate about how human culture needs to shift to support a different approach to the land (not a proposition I disagree with, but I don't think geomancy is the right direction). He's also a strong follower of Tim Flannery's ideas about the extinction of the megafauna, which have been increasingly challenged by evidence, and uses this to argue for wide-scale grazing. However, because there is so much here, disagreements with some elements don't devalue the whole. And all up the author's irrepressible passion for good food made in harmony with the landscape just makes all the idiosyncrasies matter less.
stefanieh's review
5.0
I thought this was going to be nature writing and when it turned out to be about regenerative agriculture in Australia I almost quit. I am so glad I didn't! Because agriculture is also about nature and I learned quite a lot about ways farmers are regenerating land that has been destroyed by mechanical agriculture that kills the soil and requires gallons of synthetic fertilizer and pesticides both of which degrade the soil even more. The writing is great. There are pages of resources and book for further reading and I am totally diving down the rabbit hole with this. If you care about farming, food and our relationship with the land, this is definitely a must read.
pjrochester's review
5.0
Call of the Reed Warbler is absolutely breathtaking. In scope. In detail. In its vision of a new form of agriculture, a new world.
An article I read recently dovetails neatly with Charles Massy's vision—it included the important observation that climate change is a symptom, and should be treated as such. Efforts to address climate change, therefore, are likely to often be misguided, even counter-productive at times (see REDD++ schemes), and any initiatives which don't address the underlying causes of climate change are most likely doomed to fail.
What Massy has given us here is firstly a powerful recognition of those underlying causes, the break between industrial and post-industrial society, and the natural world in which society exists. Secondly, it is repository of stories. Of farmers (not conservationists, not greenies or urban intellectuals) who have thrown off the industrial structures and 'wisdoms' which have been ravaging the Earth for decades. Thirdly, it is a way forward (or, probably better, he has communicated a onward path which many farmers have been treading for many hard years). Finally, for me at least, it is a meticulous and thorough research, a gold mine of references, readings, and ideas, which will be warming many a cold night over the months and years to come.
I've come to a little patch of land in middle-age. Daunted by learning new skills, new ideas, the land itself a mystery, grass simply grass, without natives, perennials, annuals, exotics. I don't even have the language yet to talk about this plot, but I've come here inspired by ideas like Food Sovereignty, La Via Campesina, regenerative agriculture. Massy's descriptions of the land to which he is custodian is familiar and also strange. The country is different, sure. A couple of hundred kilometres and a thousand feet or more of altitude different. But the strangeness comes in the familiarity of wildlife, trees, grasses, but told in a much richer language. I look out at the land I'm writing this on, and I don't (yet) see that richness, that life.
But it's seeing the world, the land, through those eyes which is the most powerful element of Call of the Reed Warbler. Massy's key message is that everything in the landscape is linked. Co-evolved. Forming a vast network, which organises itself, supports itself, and all the life which lives within it. That vision, that ability to see and evoke the complex, healthy life of the land, really brings everything else in the book to life.
This is one of those "everyone should read it" books. At times, it's a little dense. It's clearly written for farmers, by a farmer, and so there's occasionally some jargon which is a bit more difficult to understand. But for the most part the reading is rewarding, the stories are fascinating, and the picture Massy draws of our existing food and agriculture systems, alongside something we might strive to achieve, is compelling.
An article I read recently dovetails neatly with Charles Massy's vision—it included the important observation that climate change is a symptom, and should be treated as such. Efforts to address climate change, therefore, are likely to often be misguided, even counter-productive at times (see REDD++ schemes), and any initiatives which don't address the underlying causes of climate change are most likely doomed to fail.
What Massy has given us here is firstly a powerful recognition of those underlying causes, the break between industrial and post-industrial society, and the natural world in which society exists. Secondly, it is repository of stories. Of farmers (not conservationists, not greenies or urban intellectuals) who have thrown off the industrial structures and 'wisdoms' which have been ravaging the Earth for decades. Thirdly, it is a way forward (or, probably better, he has communicated a onward path which many farmers have been treading for many hard years). Finally, for me at least, it is a meticulous and thorough research, a gold mine of references, readings, and ideas, which will be warming many a cold night over the months and years to come.
I've come to a little patch of land in middle-age. Daunted by learning new skills, new ideas, the land itself a mystery, grass simply grass, without natives, perennials, annuals, exotics. I don't even have the language yet to talk about this plot, but I've come here inspired by ideas like Food Sovereignty, La Via Campesina, regenerative agriculture. Massy's descriptions of the land to which he is custodian is familiar and also strange. The country is different, sure. A couple of hundred kilometres and a thousand feet or more of altitude different. But the strangeness comes in the familiarity of wildlife, trees, grasses, but told in a much richer language. I look out at the land I'm writing this on, and I don't (yet) see that richness, that life.
But it's seeing the world, the land, through those eyes which is the most powerful element of Call of the Reed Warbler. Massy's key message is that everything in the landscape is linked. Co-evolved. Forming a vast network, which organises itself, supports itself, and all the life which lives within it. That vision, that ability to see and evoke the complex, healthy life of the land, really brings everything else in the book to life.
This is one of those "everyone should read it" books. At times, it's a little dense. It's clearly written for farmers, by a farmer, and so there's occasionally some jargon which is a bit more difficult to understand. But for the most part the reading is rewarding, the stories are fascinating, and the picture Massy draws of our existing food and agriculture systems, alongside something we might strive to achieve, is compelling.
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