ODPG conference & Regenerative Farming

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Before coronavirus, people were worried about other things. Like the state of New Zealand farming, and climate change. So why were policy makers suddenly getting interested in regenerative agriculture? John McCrone reports.

Wait, are those sunflowers poking their yellow faces above the waist high tangle? Did he just say he loves thistles too? All biodiversity is good?

No wonder Peter Barrett – former campervan entrepreneur and now manager of Central Otago's 9300 hectare Linnburn Station – has had neighbouring farmers looking askance.

At the regenerative farming conference at Lincoln University, Barrett stands chest out, jaw jutting. Gruff and combative. A Kiwi going his own way.

On the screen behind is a giant photo of his version of a beef and lamb pasture. A seed catalogue run riot.

Barrett says his philosophy is just to throw a bit of everything edible at his fields and discover what will grow lushly in the harsh climate of the Maniototo Plain.

Lucerne, fescue and a bunch of different clovers of course. But also chicory, cornflowers, peas, lentils, linseed, ryecorn, faba beans, buckwheat, vetch, radish, mustard, millet, oats, beet, rape, turnip, sorghum, kale.

You name it. A confection of greenery, twisting and climbing over itself in its bid to reach the sun.

It sounds like chaos theory. But Barrett says he wants the land to produce its own instant ecosystem. "You just put pinches of everything in the ground and then nature will define what grows."

If the soil is stony, salty, compacted or acid in spots, it doesn't matter. Whatever takes, takes.

Then over this cottage border assortment, Barrett runs a mixed mob of 4000 cattle and sheep – a single gang that is kept bunched and moving through the day.

"The staff love it because they're using their dogs all the time to shift, shift, shift," he exclaims.

The animals stay only long enough to graze the jungle down to shin height. Because the pasture isn't nibbled to bare dirt, because it has a deep root structure, it springs back surprisingly fast, Barrett says.

Any trampling of the field is also part of the story as that helps armour the earth, keeping the ground underneath hidden and moist. A haven for slugs and bugs.

And it is such a relief to be farming this way, says Barrett. That is the message he wants to get across.

Forget the usual rigmarole of ploughing, fertilising, spraying, measuring, obsessing over systems and inputs.

The key is creating an above ground biodiversity which in turn nurtures a thriving sub-soil ecology – a rich, damp world of earthworms, fungus and microbes – on the otherwise barren Otago landscape.

Feed the dirt with variety and design your farm system around that, Barrett says. Yes, this regenerative agriculture thing is the farming revolution New Zealand has been waiting for.

LESS CHEMISTRY, MORE ECOLOGY

It is pretty evangelical stuff. Much like how a hardcore of fed-up farmers were urging the country to go sustainable and organic in the 1990s.

So does regenerative farming have any chance of being a mainstream movement, an actual change of national direction?

The March AGM of the Organic Dairy & Pastoral Group (ODPG) brought together farming experts from all over New Zealand to talk about regenerative soil practices.

It was of course in the weeks when Covid-19 was still the looming storm cloud, not yet a crisis. Although subsequent events also mean that agriculture – the country's bread and butter – matter all the more because of it.

But anyway, the regenerative argument is that standard industrial farming, dependent on over-powering the land with tractors and chemistry, is coming under threat for two good market reasons.

A demand for "real nutrition". And a world that needs to take its carbon seriously.

One of the conference's old hands at "soil first" farming, Waikato dairy farmer Max Purnell, says for New Zealand especially, as a premium foods exporter, this has to force a change.

And surprising even him, the politicians and industry leaders are now suddenly talking about it, he says.

Last year, Agriculture Minister Damien O'Connor set up the Primary Sector Council to figure out the long-term direction for farming. Its report in December, "Fit for a Better World", broadly endorsed the regenerative approach.

"After years of no policy, at last we've had someone come out with an actual national vision to get behind," says Purnell.

Just as significantly, industry lobbies like Beef+Lamb New Zealand are clambering aboard too.

In February, Beef+Lamb announced it would spend 2020 doing a global study of regenerative agriculture – a move bound to anger traditionalists, but a sign of where things are headed, Purnell says.

John King, a Christchurch-based regenerative consultant, says it feels New Zealand could be at a tipping point.

Right at the moment, many farmers are looking for radical change, having become disillusioned with the road the industry has been on.

"I call it the Y chromosome syndrome. Farmers have been rushed down this path of going bigger, faster, harder, all the time. And they just end up crushed under a whole lot of debt."

So even if the regenerative method isn't pushed as official policy, King says he thinks a grassroots revolt is brewing. Purnell adds New Zealand is well-positioned for it. It is not like the US where agriculture is truly industrial – the stock held in barns or pens, the feed trucked to them from genetically-modified wheat and corn lots.

We still have a country of animals in fields, Purnell says. As Barrett's Maniototo experiment demonstrates, you just have to run the land a little differently.

Stop with the fertilisers, herbicides, insecticides and other chemicals killing the life of the soil. Then rethink your production system so it starts working with nature again.

THE SOIL CARBON SPONGE

Regenerative agriculture is all about the hidden health of the soil says Phyllis Tichinin, a Californian nutritionist who now consults with kiwi fruit growers and dairy farmers in Hawkes Bay.

Modern industrial farming is not much different from hydroponics in its mentality, Tichinin says. The soil is just a convenient growing matrix, the sun a giant lightbulb. The farmer tips on water and inputs as necessary.

The focus is on getting speedy above ground growth. Who cares if the plant roots are vestigial and nothing much else can survive in dirt that surrounds them?

To demonstrate what real soil is about, Tichinin starts the conference by flourishing two plates. One holds a small dusty mound of flour, the other a slice of bread.

This flour represents the industrial farmer, Tichinin says, sprinkling the plate with water from a paper cup.

The water puddles on the surface and runs off, scouring tracks. Just like a typical compacted paddock when caught in a heavy burst of rain, she says. It has no porous soil structure and so an abysmal absorptive capacity.

But the same cup of water poured on the bread is immediately sucked out of sight. "The difference is the biology," says Tichinin. With its yeast reaction, the bread is a carbon sponge.

Real soil is the same. Bound into an absorbent crumb by its carbon. "Gazillions of microbes, when they pee, poop, bonk and die, release this nutrient rich cytoplasm that ultimately forms the glue holding the silt, sand and clay together."

Tichinin says plants with healthy root systems then become a symbiotic partner to these microbes.Not only do the roots drill deep to break up the compaction, they also exude sugars and other nutrients to feed the soil organisms in exchange for the minerals they can release from the rock and clay. The cycle of life is producing its own fertiliser.

And when it rains, this "soil carbon sponge" has the pores to capture it. Rich earth is a reservoir that can store any surplus for days or weeks.

So regenerative agriculture boils down to knowing how to nurture the life of the soil, says Tichinin. Everything else on the farm follows from first taking care of that.

Tichinin lists the principles.

▪ Minimise soil disturbance. Quit with the excessive tillage, the dousing with biocides, and all the other practices that stress the life of the soil.

▪ Maximise biodiversity. Do what Barrett is doing and plant a riot of foliage species, not the standard boring Kiwi pasture of ryegrass and clover.

▪ Keep the earth armoured. There needs to be a living root in the soil at all times – some kind of cover crop. Or at least a thick trampling of mulch. The ground should never be bare.

▪ And add animals. Their waste is part of the formula for feeding the ground – at least in a soil with the deep biology to absorb it.

"These are the core ecosystem principles we've know for decades. But we've continued the 60 years of 'better living through chemistry' that has delivered markedly worse human health and environmental degradation."

NEW MARKET DRIVERS

Tichinin says the organics revolution never happened because the world continued to demand cheap and high yield agriculture.

However regenerative farming will be a response to two new market drivers in particular – health and climate change.

Health is her speciality, she says. And we know how industrial farming strips out most of the nutrient complexity of what makes it onto our supermarket shelves.

Our bodies evolved to take a wide range of micronutrients – all sorts of obscure vitamins and plant hormones – for granted in our diets.

Tichinin says industrial farming becomes a false economy when stacked up against the world's soaring bill for chronic diseases – diabetes, cancer, heart attacks, immune disorders. And governments are now coming to realise that. Time to switch back to food with a proper nutritional density.

The other telling argument for regenerative agriculture is climate change. Biologically-active soil is a huge carbon sink.Soil microbiologist Dr Walter Jehne of Healthy Soils Australia steps up to provide this side of the story.

A regular participant at world climate conferences, Jehne says the current emissions trading scheme is based on shonky carbon accounting.

There is ten times more carbon sequestered in healthy soils than in the vegetation above it, Jehne says.

An inconvenient truth is world agriculture has been releasing massive quantities of carbon with its intensive farming methods, digging over the ground, swamping it with artificial fertilisers.

Jehne says impoverished soil is left holding just 0.3 per cent carbon when it should be 3 per cent. Or better yet, 6 or 8 per cent.

"We can naturally cool the planet. And we can do this through rebuilding, through regenerating, the Earth's soil carbon sponge."

A QUESTION OF IMAGINATION

The theme of the conference was that farming has become trapped into a system of production by a particular set of economic forces. But a change has to be coming.

Jehne says the world turned to intensive farming in the 1950s as an answer to global hunger. Chemistry had to replace biology just to feed a fast growing population of mouths.

That then created a powerful lobby of vested interests – the fertiliser companies, pesticide manufacturers, machinery suppliers, even the bank lenders – dependent on keeping farmers on that treadmill.

Now the damage, in terms of the ecosystem and environmental damage, is all too apparent.

King, the Christchurch regenerative consultant, says New Zealand farmers have been trained to make the equation that they need high inputs to maximise their yields, and thus their profits. Squeeze every dollar out of the ground that they can, while they can. They chase each year's harvest by throwing more weed suppressor or urea at their land, spending on another irrigation pivot or importing animal feed.

However too often they get hit by a drought or disease outbreak anyway. So the outlay that was going to amplify their gain instead increases their loss.

"There's more ups and downs farming like that," King says. The regenerative approach is more about the steady average. It cuts out the highs, but also the lows, so comes out ahead in the long run.

The issue is imagining things being different. Barrett's Linnburn Station is an example of something that immediately smacks you in the eye. Sheep and cattle wading through tangles of peas, millet and bobbing sunflower heads.

Other regenerative enthusiasts, like Southland farmer Hamish Bielski, had brought their photo albums to the conference too.

Bielski, who started converting a 300ha spread near Balclutha six years ago, says he used to love his bare muddy winter cropping fields. The neat furrows marching up hillsides. It was how farms were meant to look.

Now they seem horrid and naked without a natural plant cover to keep the soil going.

Bielski says he is still learning, but regenerative farming also appears to be paying its own way. That is not a problem.

His fertiliser use has plummeted from 125 tonnes a year to about 2. Diesel has gone from 50,000 litres a year to 5000l. Big savings from not tilling the ground or planting out separate fodder crops.

And with the animals being moved as a mob through the fields year round, he has even managed to increase his stock numbers from 2600 to 3500 units.Everyday, the decisions are about what is best for his soil. That keeps life simple, Bielski says. Rebuilding its nutrient and water cycles are now his main job.

"Once I started understanding our farm was one big solar panel, things started to click. We just happen to run sheep and beef."

EXPECT THE UNEXPECTED

The sales pitch has been prepared. There is a life beyond dairying for New Zealand. Even the policy-makers can see the sense in going a whole foods and carbon-friendly approach.

Yet the regenerative conference also heard warnings of why not to get too carried away.

Peter Fraser, a Wellington economist and former top government dairy industry advisor, says other revolutions are happening in world agriculture and New Zealand may be about to get side-swiped by those.

Fraser says regenerative agriculture is promoting itself as the ethical and sustainable alternative. The game plan for NZ Inc should be to fade out its dirty dairying and concentrate on producing nutrient dense food for discerning international consumers.

"The argument is pretty simple. We don't need to feed the world. We just need to feed 40m rich folks."

But many have been reading a "future of agriculture" report from Silicon Valley forecaster, RethinkX, which looks at the coming economic impact of "fake" milk and meat – the Impossible Burgers and other high tech, factory-synthesised, protein replacement products.

That study should be sending shivers down farming's spine, Fraser says.

Artificial meat is on an exponentially dropping price curve. Soon enough, it will taste as good as real meat for a fraction of the price.

So it will win on cost. There is the world commodity market gone.Yet also, for both climate change and animal welfare reasons, even wealthy consumers may view it as the more ethical alternative.

Fraser asks how long will it be before sending animals to abattoirs becomes a socially unacceptable practice?

It won't matter how eco-sustainably the animals are reared. The reality is New Zealand will still be sending its frolicking lambs off to an industrial slaughter process. So attitudes to eating real meat may change fast.

"Poor folk won't be able to afford it. But rich folks won't want to buy it."

And Fraser says even if there continues to be a world market for premium regeneratively-farmed foods, there will be other fall out for Kiwi producers.

The RethinkX report predicts synthetic protein will replace 70 per cent of US stock farming by 2030. Virtually all the commodity producers. In just 10 years.But then all that associated farm land is suddenly going to come free, points out Fraser.

"That will mean there's something shy of 200 million hectares of land currently in animal agriculture up for grabs." Or about seven times New Zealand's total land mass. "It's quite a big chunk."

Fraser pauses for the obvious to sink in. If the future does offer a top end market for regenerative products, there will be no shortage of others, with their provenance stories and "happy farm" pictures, fighting tooth and nail over it.

Within a decade, New Zealand agriculture could be caught between an ethics-driven collapse in animal protein demand and a stampede of overseas farmers all rushing to go planet-friendly and organic, Fraser warns.Can the conference imagine a worse scenario?

Well, as it happens, about a week later, coronavirus arrived to show life's disruptions take many forms. Regenerative farming would have to be one of numerous national conversations pushed onto the back burner for the moment.

Yet with tourism trashed, the global food supply chain a matter of concern, New Zealand's agriculture will emerge at the end of it even more at the centre of some necessary long-term policy decisions.

So sheep among the sunflowers might still become the new season look.

"We couldn't manage our farms without Kelp".

"We couldn't manage our farms without Kelp".

Roger & Nicki Beattie farm 5,500su organically to the highest level with zero chemical inputs. “We couldn’t manage our farms without kelp”.

It’s essential for the health of the animals along with rock salt. The Zelp kibble is like loose tea and they lick it like sherbert. The Beattie’s put small amounts in the paddock in wooden containers near the troughs with a lump of salt beside too, top up weekly or as required.

The Zelp kelp is very high in iodine compared with other kelp varieties and for maintenance amounts sheep only require 1g/ week and beef cattle 10g/week. They don’t drench at all so this is an easy stress free option.

They carried out an experiment with free choice minerals a few years ago and these two supplements were all the livestock wanted. We do have high magnesium in our soils and of course every farming situation is different. However if the livestock need kelp, especially for the iodine, they will lick it.

The most effective use for the livestock and your budget is to give them kelp 1 month prior to mating and the month after. Then again pre- lambing and lambing. So that’s about 4 months per year. It will also help your calves & lambs after weaning.

If you require any further information or wish to discuss, please don’t hesitate to contact Roger.

On Farm Story - Farmers Weekly July 2019

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The nation’s least worst farmers

by  Luke Chivers

Banks Peninsula farmer and self-confessed radical Roger Beattie is never short of new ideas for the primary sector. Luke Chivers visited him to hear about some of the maverick’s pet projects.

On the south side of Banks Peninsula, where the wind gives the tussocks a permanent bend and the next stop is Antarctica, Roger Beattie is mustering his next big plan.

The wild sheep breeder, blue pearl and kelp harvester and would-be weka farmer wants to explain how unique foods and fibres can be produced by combining the diversity of nature with Kiwi can-do ingenuity.

He takes a bite of seeded slice, sips a freshly brewed tea and for a moment there’s silence.

“How do I put it? If someone says something’s black, I’ll say it’s white. 

“I’ve long been a contrarian,” he laughs.

Not far from us, on the slopes of Kowhai Vale, one of three farms that Beattie owns in rolling-to-steep hill country across the water from Akaroa, live Pitt Island wild sheep. 

It’s a breed he so admired while working on the Chathams he brought some home. 

And now he has his clever scheme, one that pulls together the wild sheep and another of his great, slow-burning projects, wekas.

Beanies, scarves, gloves, socks as well as throws and blankets, a new category of high-end woollen products, are exploiting the unique properties of the Pitt Island fleece, which has a helical crimp and a twist that gives it great bounce and stretch.

“It’s amazing wool.

“It’s very light, it traps a lot of air, it’s so cosy, it doesn’t itch and it has a luxurious feel.

“We get it organically scoured at Washdyke, spun by Wild Earth Yarns in Christchurch and then knitted in Dunedin and the socks done in the North Island.”

They weigh two-thirds of Merino knitwear but they’re far warmer, made from 50% Pitt Island fleece, 30% Bohepe mid-micron wool, 20% possum fir and a small amount of nylon for strength, he says.

The brand, known as Wyld, features a logo of a wild horned ram. It was launched in 2016 targeting the main tourism towns. But the flagship product is the Weka Woo hat, a premium beanie with a feather pinned on it – a weka’s feather, naturally.

The weka is officially an at-risk species, Beattie says.

He has long contended with his antagonist, the Conservation Department, that farming weka commercially can save the species. In the public eye, he became that weka guy, the maverick, business-minded conservationist.

The maverick tag seems inevitable given his background. 

His father, the late Doug Beattie, was another inventor, a Marlborough farmer who developed the first plastic insulator for electric fences and pioneered that industry. 

Beattie and his brother Ivan now co-own the Christchurch business, Beattie Insulators.

Doug, left school early and it was the making of him, Beattie says.

“He had about 50-odd patents in his lifetime.

“We used to sell insulators to Gallagher. Really, we were in the electric fence insulators game before they were. 

“In fact, after three days of trial and error my father developed insulators out of low-density polyethylene. He was the first person in the world to develop thick, sectioned polyethylene moulding.”

If his father set the tone for Beattie’s life of innovation, entrepreneurship and hard graft, the Chatham Islands was his finishing school. 

He moved there after a year of university studies – political science and economics in 1975 – to shear sheep.

From shearing, he went into the freezing works then possum hunting, paua diving, culling for the Wildlife Service and shearing for Pitt Island farmer Jim Moffett, where he was introduced to those wild sheep. In one year Beattie shot more than 1500, mostly from the back of a horse, and shore about 300 Romneys a day.

That was in 1976, the days of subsidies.

The more he culled, however, the more he admired the so-called pest.

“I learned a lot about stock, sheep, animals and nature just by spending a lot of time observing.

“I thought ‘By heck, these sheep are tough. They’re being hunted by man, they’re running on 3500 acres of land competing with bigger Romneys, cattle and pigs, a wild environment, and yet every single hogget has a lamb’. They had no dags, no fly strike, no foot or mouth problems. I decided I really needed to try to farm these sheep.”

Before he could pursue the idea, however, things on the Chathams suddenly went sour. A farming venture with his brother and friends crashed, leaving a pile of debt. So, he returned to paua diving.

“Getting back into paua coincided with the quota system coming back in so I was issued with a whole lot of quota. And because I could see the writing on the wall I bought a whole lot more. At one stage I was the single largest paua quota holder in New Zealand, with 34 tonnes.”

Eventually, he swapped diving for farming paua, exporting the meat to Asia and establishing NZ’s first ocean-based blue pearl farm at Whangamoe Inlet on the Chathams.

So, is he a conservationist or businessman?

Beattie favours the label environpreneur, which describes an entrepreneur who seeks to turn an environmental problem into a profitable venture.

Which brings us back to now.

Beattie and his wife, Nicki, a British doctor-turned-Kiwi farmer, first saw Kowhai Vale, a 322-hectare coastal property, in 1992 while looking for areas in which to establish a mainland-based paua farm. They later bought it as a place to release the wild sheep and do some hunting.

The first 10 wild sheep from the Chathams have, over time, become 3000, the largest Pitt Island wild sheep flock in mainland NZ, spread between Kowhai Vale and a 353ha certified organic property further down the peninsula at Lucas Bay while Bohepe are run on a 296ha block called Ataahua near Lake Ellesmere/Te Waihora.

The couple also own a 13ha inland lifestyle block at Lansdowne, Canterbury, home to the family’s flock of four generations of Pihepe sheep. The property is also used for intensive farming practices and experimental trials.

The Beatties keep their coastal land well-grazed with about 250 Murray Grey cattle, which were introduced to the South Island from Australia’s New South Wales-Victoria border by Doug.

From 1994 onwards they bought any and every Pitt Island wild sheep they saw advertised for sale in mainland NZ.

“Any animal where I had the slightest bit of concern about purity of the genetics was culled. The numbers bred up every year and for the next five years I introduced new rams to the mob.

“We don’t think we know what a good sheep is but we do think we know what a bad sheep is. 

“So, the approach is to get rid of the worst ones. 

“I think we’re the least worst farmers in NZ.

“We’re culling for body score and dags – and we’re finding that harder and harder because we’ve been doing it for so long now and it’s not a very high hereditary trait. We’ve made magnificent progress.”

The wild sheep might have some tricky characteristics – they’re a handful to muster – but they make wonderful eating.

The Beatties are chasing the gourmet meat market using the Wyld brand and emphasising the family’s chemical-free approach to farming.

Kowhai Vale is not certified organic because the Beatties spray the gorse but is otherwise run naturally.

A growing number of high-end restaurants – The Sugar Club on the 53rd floor of the Sky Tower, for instance – are using the meat. 

“The head chef was interviewed before Christmas and said Wyld meat was so good he didn’t even have to cook it.

“So, he dry-ages it, slices it thin and then serves it,” Beattie says.

“We have to sell products to people who are as far from rural New Zealand as possible, people who live in cities but want to enjoy that experience of far-flung lands. Give them food and fibre that they can love.”

There are other uses for the sheep. Some are sold to lifestyle blocks. 

But changes are afoot. In 2004 the Beatties bought an experimental flock of fine wool, bare breech sheep from AgResearch, which he named Bohepe and has been vigorously breeding ever since. 

More recently, they’ve taken on larger, coarse-wool sheep called Scobie from another trial. 

“We now have about 350 of them,” Nicki says.

“They’re hard case things that are quite big, have short little tails and have a different personality. They’re going well on the property.”

The common theme is the way they are all farmed. 

The Beatties haven’t tailed a sheep for 18 years. And even on the non-organic properties they don’t use chemicals on their animals. The same applies to the small herd of Murray Grey cattle. Not only is it the right thing to do but it makes commercial sense, Beattie says.

“The false premise here is that chemical farming and unethical farming – that is, doing painful and unnecessary things to animals – are sustainable. They’re not and will eventually be done away with by consumer pressure.”

There’s a link there to their approach to breeding. 

“Our whole operation is based around low-cost, easy-care, ethical farming, the minimum amount of stress for the animals and letting them express genetically whatever it is they want to express, whether that is wildness in the wild sheep or contentedness with the Murray Greys.”

Nicki says most of the diseases sheep and cattle get are stress-related.

“They’re either an imbalance in diet or they’re grazed for too long or they’ve got a worm-burden that’s been management-induced.

“We haven’t drenched an animal in 15 years and you know what, we hardly lose a sheep or cow in the winter. Our death rate would probably be in the top 1% of the country.

“More farmers need to ask themselves ‘Is this animal good enough to eat even though I drenched it just two weeks ago?’

“Why would anyone want to eat animals with chemicals in them?”

She can certainly make a case, having worked in the medical field for more than two decades and farmed for about the same length of time.

“To me, really, the farming sector and the health sector should be absolutely in parallel. We should be in the same field. If it’s not in the soil then you aren’t going to get it in your food. You are what your food eats.”

Meanwhile, in the shadowy waters of the Akaroa Harbour is giant bladder kelp, or Macrocystis pyrifera, one of two species of kelp the Beatties harvest. The other, known as wakame, is commonly used in Japanese cooking and Beattie long ago identified it as a viable export.

Nicki runs the kelp operation, marketing it as a healthy pepper-like condiment high in nutrients. But in recent years the Beatties have shifted their focus to the agriculture, horticulture and animal production markets under a new brand, Zelp.

They also farm paua for their jewellery business, Blue Pearls.

Wild sheep, giant kelp, native birds – what’s the common thread to the Beatties ventures?

“They’re all dealing with native or near-native species, all adding value where none existed before, all creating something unique and marketable and brandable,” Beattie says.

They’re nowhere near finished, either.

“We want to become a more profitable organisation and be a catalyst for changing away from heavy chemical use farming,” he said.

“Farmers can do it,” Nicki says.

“The reason why we can do what we do – and we have a lot of businesses on the go – is because our farming system is so low-cost, easy-care. 

“Really, we have zero inputs apart from buying pink Himalayan salt for using on our kelp.”

The couple feel good about their business and say other farmers should, too.

“We don’t have to put masks on.

“I genuinely feel the way we farm is the right way.”

They believe modern chemical farming is only a blip in the sector’s history.

“Farmers have only been using chemicals for the past 50 years. This is not the norm.”

You can, only for so long sustain a degenerating system, Beattie says.

We pause and reflect. 

Beattie takes another bite of slice and downs his now-cold tea.

“Nature has been around far longer than modern chemical farming practices and has a way of ensuring its own survival. It would be truly remarkable if we thought we had more wisdom than nature,” he says.