[Retrospective] Drought Special #3: Fighting A Drought: Levers for the Public Sector

EPISODE SUMMARY

While we will continue to make new episodes, there are times when we feel the urge to highlight a past episode – because the topic it covers becomes news and the show shares some great insights, or because it is content that our newer listeners might have missed out on. Since last year was the International Year of Soils, we will be republishing a few of our best episodes about soil and soil health to get a fresh perspective in light of all the progress that has been made on the issue.

Today’s retro episode is all about policy, and the Australian experience.

Our guests are former Governor General of Australia and Advocate for Soil Health, Major General Michael Jeffery, and co-founder of Ylad Living Soils Rhonda Daly. In this episode we discover the crucial elements needed to build a comprehensive policy framework that will protect not only our soils but our landscapes. We look at the current Australian system, soil health, incentives for compost production, farm management practices, and the need to change our systems in order to better reward and support our land managers – the stewards of the earth. We then link this back to the current recommendations made in the FAO’s report Status of the World’s Soil Resources.

Links to other episodes in the Series:

Episode 1

Episode 2

Episode 3

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LINKS:

Episode 2: Drought Special #3: Fighting A Drought: Levers for the Public Sector.

Status of the World’s Soil Resources 2015, Technical Summary. FAO Report.

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FEATURED EVENT

International Compost Awareness Week Australia. May 2nd – 8th. New South Wales, Australia. Organised by the Centre for Organic Research & Education (CORE).

International Composting Awareness Week Australia (ICAW), is a week of activities, events and publicity to improve awareness of the importance of compost, a valuable organic resource and to promote compost use, knowledge and products. We can compost to help scrap carbon pollution by avoiding landfilling organic materials and helping to build healthier soils.

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Photo by suburbanbloke / CC BY

Transcript:

When it comes to drought, it seems that up until now, the drought relief packages were based on Exceptional Circumstances programs and included mostly financial support for farmers already in dire circumstances, with very little attention given to actual prevention of drought or preparing for drought before hand. However, there are some changes occurring now with the National Drought Program Reform that is starting in July, which recognises that drought no longer fits in the exceptional circumstances category, and will focus more on drought preparedness through providing training programs for land managers on risk assessment and financial planning and so on. But General Jeffery and Rhonda Daly, you both agree that a lot more has to be done. So General Jeffery, maybe you can tell us what you think is necessary for the public sector to do in order to actually prepare for drought and minimise the effects of drought on the Australian landscape?

General Jeffery: Well I think the first thing to do is recognise that at the present time, Australia doesn’t have a real national policy in terms of how it wants to look after the Australian landscape as a totality; that is, its river systems, its flood plains, its wetlands, its riparian zones; agriculture areas, grazing areas, mining areas and so on. And I think until we get a policy that spells out the need to have, perhaps as a light on the hill, to restore and maintain an Australian landscape that is fit for purpose – that is fit for all the things I just mentioned – we’re all going to be stuck doing itty, bitty things (and some of them quite important and quite good), but until we get an over-arching aim of what we want to do, with total state and local people all singing from the same sheet of music, I think we will be struggling, particularly when it comes to drought.

It’s getting that policy agreed to restore and maintain an Australian landscape fit for purpose; it has been knocked around a bit. And you can’t blame people, that’s the way people were taught and trained at the time, but –

Rhonda Daly: Don’t you think also that because they’re using water as a commodity – as an economic commodity – and so we’ve got this false economy coming in where we think we’re a rich country, but we’re actually deteriorating the landscape really badly. Short-term it appears that we’re not doing so much damage because economically we’re doing so well, but ultimately, the wheels are going to fall off that analogy for sure.

So Rhonda you’re saying that people involved have a very myopic view of the situation and focus only on the short term economic results, rather than the bigger picture, which I think is definitely the case in many other countries as well. And General Jeffery, you’re saying that we need to get all levels of public sector – local, national and state, to come together and agree on a national policy for restoring and maintaining the landscape. How would you propose we start?

GJ: Well part of the issue has got to be that, if we want to restore and maintain this landscape so that it is fit for various purposes, you’ve got to ask yourself, “What are the three key ingredients that will enable us to do that?” And it’s really about the integrated management of your soil, your water (that is, the hydrology), and the biodiversity – the plants and so on that you’re growing, whether crops or grasses, or what have you. So, good farming practice and land management practice, mining practice and everything else, depends on the stakeholders having a very clear understanding of the need for that integration, and understanding the art and science of doing it properly. And that’s where good farming practices and land management practices come into play.

My next question here was to ask you if you think soil is the most important factor for healing the landscape and therefore protecting against drought, but what you’re saying is that all three aspects, soil, water and vegetation, are all important?

GJ: Yes, I think we’ve got to talk about landscape rather than soil. Although I’m the National Soil Advocate, I think that’s a misnomer to a degree because it gets everybody focused on just looking at soil, when we should be looking at water and biodiversity. And Rhonda raised a very good point specifically on the water, where I think our focus in this country for many years has been in the wrong direction. We’ve always looked at how much water we’ve got in our rivers and streams and dams, and we then issued licenses, and so on, to users of that water. But the total amount of water falling on our landscape every year, if you take it as a hundred drops: only ten drops end up in the rivers, two drops end up in the dams, and another two drops end up as run-off off the roads and roofs – that’s only fourteen percent.

But that’s what we all look at – we focus on that because that’s what we can see. Where we’re missing is the other eighty-six percent that falls on the landscape, of which only about thirty-six actually gets into the soil where you want it, and the other fifty percent evaporates into the atmosphere because it can’t infiltrate.

And holding water in soils is a very important of drought management as well, which we’ve mentioned quite a few times in previous episodes. Rhonda, would you agree with that?

RD: I would agree. I would agree that there’s a huge amount of land that, as you say, needs hydrating – the wetlands and… But you know, truly and really I think that it’s quite sad that I don’t know whether they see that as the most important thing that they have to do at the moment. I think so much energy is going in other places. I truly don’t believe they know the workings of our environment and landscape, and what is the best way of getting it back – and spending the dollars to get it back into a healthy condition again.

GJ: I think that you really need political decisions at the senior level of federal and state to ensure a proper implementation of an appropriate process. So, I think it gets back again to this lack of an over-arching policy where we need to look after the landscape, and then the various ingredients that’ll make it work, and we discussed two or three of them earlier on.

Indeed. And what you’re saying is that it really is important for senior levels in government to take an active role in this, because there are big decisions to be made, and they need to steer the ship. But in terms of getting the research right, there are already wheels in motion, because just recently the Australian Department of Agriculture, Food and Forestry recently launched the National Soil Research, Development and Extension Strategy, which aims to secure Australia’s soil for profitable industries and healthy landscapes, and among its many goals, it aims to “improve communication and sharing of soil knowledge”, and “to adopt a national approach to building future skills and capacities”. SO this is definitely a step in the right direction and perhaps it will achieve some of what you are calling for?

GJ: Yes, I think that is a good step in the right direction, and as the National Soil Advocate, we were able to bring together an expert advisory panel of four of the nation’s top land management scientists, backed by another twenty or so scientists who support them, and we were able to input into that strategy, which was really about doing four things: quantifying our soil asset in respect to data and mapping, and what are our soil types, and how healthy is it. And then, how do we go about securing our soil by identifying and evaluating best practice by looking at soil structure improvement, soil biology, carbon and so on. And the third bit was to look at understanding our soils, which is the technical level: the training of our ag scientists, soil carbon sampling, understanding the hydrology of our soils, understanding the soil biology and so on. Then there was soil at the interface, which was really looking at the search on environmental impacts: understanding water capture and storage in soil. So I think that the RD&E (the Research Development and Extension policy) that was launched by the minister a couple of weeks ago is very much a step in the right direction and I’m pleased that we were able to have at least a little bit of an input into it.

That’s a pretty comprehensive strategy focusing on soils, and I daresay one of the first of its kind. And it will be interesting to see how it plays out in the future. But in the past, has soil and soil health has featured in Australian drought policy in any big way before now, or has it been side-lined?

RD: From y perspective I would think that in all of the drought policies that they’re putting into place, soil health is definitely featured, and not only soil health but the management practices as well. So, yes they are incorporating and recognising that soil health is a major player in ensuring that we hold more water in our landscape for plants in these drier times. So, I think they’re recognising that, but there just seems such a huge part, and chunk, that still needs converting. Because, I would say that there’s really only maybe two or three percent of Australian farmers who are actually really practicing regeneration of the landscape, and the rest is going as business as usual. And how do we get the business as usual people to understand the importance of their soil, not just for today’s farming and their productivity and profitability, but for future generations to come?

So, I think Australia’s got a really short term view of their soil health, and we tend to – and that’s because of economic restraints – but we tend to look at just the now. “What do we do now to make us a profit this year that will keep us on the farm next year?” And I think economics, with one in seven farmers owing more than half a million dollars, plays a huge role in farmers up taking these different methods of rebuilding our landscapes back to being healthy again. It’s very much on just paying the bills.

GJ: One of our policy drives in restoring and maintaining this landscape fit for purpose is to reward farmers fairly not just for their product, which is another subject in itself, but also as primary carers of the agricultural landscape, because they look after about sixty percent of the continent. And I believe that we need to reward farmers for looking after the landscape on behalf of twenty-two million urban Australians. Now as to what sort of thing you might do to do that, it can be varied: it might be designating part of the new land army that the Government is going to establish to plant trees on the ridges where a farmer wants it, or to get a cheaper bank loan if he’s going to fix his riparian zone, or a whole range of measures that are not hand-outs, but are provided with a definite outcome in view, which relates to restoring and maintaining that landscape so that it’s in the best possible condition. And I think if we’re clever we’ll be able to do that, and in part overcome the problem that Rhonda’s just raised, that so many of our farmers are in very, very heavy debt.

Right, which definitely won’t help. And on that note, would you say, General Jeffery, that if the new carbon sequestration methodology gets approved, that this would encourage farmers to change their practices? And for our audience, this new methodology is part of the Carbon Farming Initiative, which is a Federal Government initiative to enable people in the land sector to generate revenue through the reduction of carbon emissions by using approved methodologies. So, would this be a potential help for them?

GJ: Yes, I think that if we’ve got a climate change problem – and I believe we have – that’s going to exacerbate our ability to produce more food, and the only way we can help to adjust to that is by sequestering carbon into the soils. The big issue for Australia is going to be in the complexity of the legislation – all the criteria upon which farmers can gain access to that money. And I think we really have to have measuring systems for carbon that are set to business standards, not to scientific standards, so your means of measuring don’t have to be quite so accurate when you’re talking about commercial operations, and therefore can be a bit simpler in terms of a farmer then being able to access what could be a very important source of revenue; and also a very, very important source of helping to adjust to climate change, and perhaps to control it to a degree.

And touching on what you said before, about support payments not being hand-outs: I wonder about citizens in general, particularly urban dwellers, are they sympathetic towards farmers and their situation, or is there work to be done there to get them on board?

GJ: Yes, well another of our policy drivers, and I think it may almost be the most important, is to reconnect urban Australia with its rural roots. That is, reconnect twenty-two and a half million people living in cities and towns with a hundred and thirty thousand farmers and perhaps a hundred thousand miners, or something like that. Now, unless we do that we’re going to find an even greater gap and lack of understanding between the two. And of course, you’ll never get the political support that’s needed to look after our farmers and landscapes properly unless you’ve got voter support. So we have to have that reconnection.

And to do that I think there are several ways. The first is that we’ve got to get to the young people, and I would do this by setting up, for example, a school garden in every school in the country. Something that can  show a six year old, and then a ten year old, and then a thirteen year old, just exactly what the soil does, and how it’s composed, and how photosynthesis and transpiration works; and how you produce healthy food from healthy soil that leads to healthier animals and healthier people. So I think that is one simple way in which we can get urban Australia over time connected; and hopefully the kids will take these messages home to mum and dad, and that would help us get through to the adults at the same time.

But getting the adults on side, I think we’re going to have to use a little bit of stick and a little bit of carrot. The stick is going to be the global food imperative, because in my view we’re going to be pushing it, and I think we’re going to see a lot of social disruption and probably conflict impacting on hundreds of millions of people – and Australia will not be isolated from that. So what we have to say to our own people is that there are going to be big, big problems overseas, and whilst we have some problems in how we’re looking after our landscape here, we’ve also got the answers. And if we’re clever enough and fast enough, we’ll get those answers implemented pretty quickly. And not only will it ensure our own food-water security, but we’ll also be able to export some more food – but even more importantly, export knowledge, because even if we double food export, we’d only feed a hundred million, but if we exported knowledge we might be able to feed a billion.

I’d really like to stress the school garden idea myself as one of the best ways to get the urban population interested in nature. There are also things like community gardens and urban farms that can really help forge a connection. School compost schemes and education can play a huge part too, and I’d like to speak more about compost now, because we’ve heard a lot in previous episodes about the benefits of compost for soil health and drought protection. And Rhonda, you have a wealth of experience in the industry, and as a compost producer yourself, can you tell me what type of incentives exist for you that encourage compost production and use?

RD: That’s a really good question, and I’ve had to search my mind. On a smaller level, the council is starting to introduce green bins to collect compostable waste, and there’s recycling bins and things like that. But from a primary producer’s perspective, I don’t really know of too many incentives or initiatives where people will come – unless there’s a trial being done by Landcare or CSIRO, where they want to get the compost – for them to get into using compost or other biological fertilisers that are a little bit softer on the land and create healthier plants at the same time.

AORA is an industry body – the Australian Organics Recycling Association, which used to be the old Compost Australia – they are promoting it as much as they can, but I do feel as though there’s got to be more policy in there that is going to give farmers the incentive – and possibly there’s going to be a dollar incentive. However, I do believe that there’s going to be people who want to do it because they know intuitively that that’s what they need to do while they’re here on earth. However, the ones who still haven’t reached that calling yet, that maybe the Soil Carbon Methodology, or policies, will see them change over to something new.

So there may need to be financial incentives for some farmers to get them to start composting. And often compost producers will tell us about roadblocks or regulations that actually hinder their ability to run their businesses. Can you tell me about the situation regarding this where you are?

RD: Yeah, sure. It appears that our government supports recycling organic waste – so, reducing landfill, rebuilding soils and… However, the cost of complying with many of these regulations make it not worthwhile for a lot of companies to pursue. And I actually phoned Paul Coffey from AORA  today and asked him what’s going on, because he’s right on the ground level: and the EPA are at present trying to impose a new regulation that is going to put a huge financial burden on compost operations, where they have to have a bank guarantee, and it has to be supplied to the EPA saying that if the operation for some reason goes insolvent, then the money [is used] to cover the clean up of the site. Inevitably this is one situation where this happened. It’s going to cost some operations as much as one-point-five million dollars to have a bank guarantee sitting there, and, as Paul was saying, it will close down many, many operations. And the thing that they’re forgetting to see is that levies are paid to the EPA that could be used for these clean-ups.

So, this is just one of those regulations made in their ivory tower, they’re not really in touch with what’s out there, and it could cost the industry very, very dearly because less people will be wanting to go into composting and recycling these seventeen million tonnes of organic waste that we have.

I guess it just comes back again to having a clear and coordinated strategy so these things won’t happen.

RD: Yes. Well, it’s fortunate that we do have AORA there, and Paul spends a lot of time doing policies, and going to the EPA and working it out for members such as myself. So, definitely, these bodies are very, very important for the ordinary person like myself, because they’re there to ensure we don’t get so many restrictions and conditions on us that it makes it basically impossible do composting.

It’s definitely is an issue I’ve heard before, which once again seems to show that more coordination across different interests could really help. And what I’d like to focus on now is farmers and land management strategies. Because one of the key ways to make change happen is to demonstrate how it can be done, and General Jeffery, you’re Chairman of the non-profit organisation Soils For Life, which is doing great work to support farmers in changing to better practices and advocate for a change in how land is managed generally. And you have been researching case studies of farms that are using sustainable practices in order to spread the word, and the case studies are available online. But through your work with Soils for Life, could you see ways in which incentives and policies could encourage farm managers to change their practices and adopt more drought-resisting practices?

GJ: Well, thanks for those comments on Soils For Life, and of course, Bill and Rhonda are a very important component of the nineteen case studies. We just did nineteen initially because that’s what we were able to raise the money for, and we wanted to actually prove the concept, and well I think we’ve done that, and now we want to roll-out another forty or fifty – and then hopefully hundreds and then some in clusters. I suspect the encouragement to do that will be in showing those who are looking to make a change that, first of all, it’s economically viable. They’re not going to commit unless they can see a dollar in it. And to get that dollar I think we certainly have to do things in terms of how we’re looking at food in terms of pricing, and how we’re looking at rewarding farmers in how they’re rewarding the land.

But, maybe we’ve also got to look at a new definition of productivity, because so often, I’ll think you’ll find the bank saying to a farmer, “Well, to meet your debt obligation, you’re going to have to lift your productivity [muffled] by five percent next year, or whatever. And therefore the farmer then either has to put in a bit more superphosphate, or clear a bit more land, or put a bit more land under crop when he probably hasn’t even got it. And so, false pressure is put on him to lift his productivity, and the same might be true of pressures that may be imposed or implied by the two big chain stores that buy sixty or seventy percent of the produce.

So perhaps we’ve got to look at productivity again nationally in a different way. And if a farmer operating to ninety percent of what he saw as the traditional productivity, which was also degrading his landscape, but ninety percent productivity by his old measure keeps him in permanently good health and good shape, it is far better to look at a system that relates that sort of equation than a farmer whose been striving to do one hundred and two or one hundred and three percent – which he might do for twelve months or two years, and then his soils collapse on him and he goes broke, and the bank has to foreclose, and doesn’t get anything out of it either. Perhaps you see where I’m coming from – that we have to look at productivity in a slightly different way?

Yes, I think I get you, that the notion of productivity should also look at if the land is better managed and can sustain at the same level of productivity for a long period of time, rather than purely looking at the percentage of crop yield. But then, how would you envision we tackle situation with productivity, or protect our farmers from bank pressures and supermarket pressures and the likes?

GJ: Well again, I think it gets back to the policy, and about the rewards.  You see, unless we have these policy parameters in place, we’re going to have the same arguments – they’ll just continue. And the same problems will continue. So you’ve really got to get the aim right for what you want to do: you’ve got to get the soil -water strategic assets declared as such and managed as such; you’ve got to get farmers properly rewarded (and we’ve been through that); you’ve got to get urban Australia really understanding the importance of soil, water and biodiversity, and therefore the importance of farmers, so that if, for example, we might have to pay another half a cent for a kilo of carrots, or another two cents for a litre of milk to ensure that a farmer is properly rewarded for his product, then we pay it gladly. And if there are people that are disadvantaged, then there’s a welfare net to deal with that. But we cannot have farmers being knocked over with unfair prices simply because companies are competing to reduce, reduce, reduce; which is fair enough in principle, but why should the poor old farmer have to deal with that?

And then, we’ve got to refocus the science, so that the science properly supports the farmer in terms of measuring soil fertility, carbon sequestration…if we get all these things in place, then I think we will solve the problem very quickly. But until we do, along with our soils program, which is the practical and proven application on the ground, we won’t maximise the benefit.

I think that sums it up very nicely. And then, final question to both of you: how long do you think it will take for this coordinated approach and solid policy to come about and transform the landscape? Is there much more to be done?

GJ: I think in terms of what I’m trying to do and what Rhonda’s trying to do, I think we’re looking at about a ten to fifteen year programme. There is no magic light switch – you can’t just transform the whole of the agricultural society overnight, because you’re dealing with a hundred and thirty thousand very independent people with their own ideas, et cetera. But the big thing is that we do have the answers, and I think the global imperative…in terms of the opportunities that it provides for our farmers for, perhaps the first time in many, many years, to become sustainably profitable and environmentally sound is going to be there for us to take advantage of – if we can get the proper policy, and fixing the paddock policies in place.

RD: I totally agree with what Michael just said. And in particular, influential people like General Jeffery, who has so many doors he can open – we need people like that to open many more doors, and in time there will be more doors that will open, and people will be coming to us, and far more farmers will be wanting to change.

[Retrospective] Soil Crisis #2: Soil & The Circular Economy: Building A Movement

EPISODE SUMMARY

While we will continue to make new episodes, there are times when we feel the urge to highlight a past episode – because the topic it covers becomes news and the show shares some great insights, or because it is content that our newer listeners might have missed out on. Since last year was the International Year of Soils, we will be republishing a few of our best episodes about soil and soil health to get a fresh perspective in light of all the progress that has been made on the issue.

Today’s retro episode is about the circular economy, and how it can benefit our soils. Our guest is industrial and environmental economist Robin Murray. As a zero waste pioneer and a leader in the fair trade and environmental movements for many years, Robin Murray had an excellent perspective to give on our current efforts in making soil health a priority and the circular economy a reality. We discuss the opportunities we have for building a movement to change our current economic model to a more sustainable one, including existing models that we can learn from, the importance of education and centers of learning for the movement, and the roadblocks we might face along the way.

Links to other episodes in the Series:

Episode 1

Episode 2

Episode 3

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LINKS:

Episode 1: Soil Crisis #1: A Need For Economic and Political Change.

Status of the World’s Soil Resources 2015, FAO Report

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Photo by Joe Mabel / CC BY.

Transcript:

We talked in part one about the importance of soil health in human economies, and also about the potential for a shift to a more circular, distributed economy, and you were listing a few ways people have started to reconnect themselves with the soil with the slow food movement, community gardens and farms being opened up to the urban population and so on. But in relation to forming a different system, a different model of production and distribution, how important is education and knowledge sharing for fostering or encouraging these kinds of changes?

Robin Murray: What I would say is that the movements – both of people pressing on policy, but also the people who are actually doing it – tend to be global. So we established a Zero Waste movement here more than a decade ago, but it was part of an international Zero Waste International movement, and it was established in a number of different countries. And the internet has allowed a wide sharing of practices. And in the arguments in this country, the experiences of Canada and Australia – let alone elsewhere – have been very influential in saying “Look, this actually happens. This isn’t just a utopia, this is a different model”. And particularly as it develops, you then have new technologies coming in; light technologies, small distributed technologies, not great big centralised ones. These can be imported and then developed on your own here.

So, I think there’s a continuous process of self education, but one which is within a collective. If you look at organic farming, it is social knowledge, and people are not privatising this knowledge. They are sharing, and of course, this is what happened when we grew up; people would discuss particular problems. We had, believe it or not, an actual farmer’s discussion group, which my father used to go to, where people would come once a month from these hill farms to discuss common problems. Well now with the modern internet, you go much further and you can share. Having said that, I think there is a great need, and a role, for some formal structure of specialist education. Many countries have inherited this on the agricultural side, and in America that’s very important: those colleges have been absolutely central, and changing the approaches in those colleges, or opening up these colleges to these new systems is an important part.

There’s been nothing similar on waste. Waste is being treated as part of a technical college, but it’s done in a very old fashioned way and it needs a quite different approach. And I think now we must look to make it global, because many of the ways of looking at the thing are global, [even though] every place has it’s own specificity. But, I think this is where this new extraordinary development of Massive Online Open Courses, which are free, but you can also link into local discussion groups all taking these courses – and there are five million students on them. If one replicated that in terms of soils and in terms of nutrient management (in relation to biowaste)…knowledge is absolutely central – distributed knowledge is absolutely central, and I think probably this is going to be the key to a major change in the way in which we both think about our agriculture, and think about reconnecting it up.

I’m very glad you say that because that’s the whole idea being Compostory.org, and I agree that in the areas of waste or nutrient management,  we really need to start working together and finding connections between groups of people all around the world. And from the work that we’re doing, we’ve come across so many different stories of people and groups doing unique and very interesting work…

RM: One of the examples which I found particularly inspiring in our work has been in Japan which, starting in the nineteen-sixties but really gathered in the nineteen-seventies, was a movement led almost entirely by women. And they had become concerned after a range of food scares, particularly around milk and the quality of milk, and its impact on their children – it was children who led the concern. And so what they did is they said, “Look, we’re not going to buy our milk from the supermarkets; we will go out and we will find farmers who we can talk to about how they produce their milk, and we can ask them to produce organic milk and we will then find a way of bringing it directly to us.

Well, they started with milk and then they expanded to other food items to begin with. And they were one of the very early developers of box schemes; and because quite a few of them, I suspect, before they were married worked in these Japanese factories, which were all electronic – not perhaps in the late sixties, but certainly in the late seventies and eighties – and were very well managed; they established this box scheme whereby the producers who they picked out and who they partnered with would bring what had been ordered to the central collection point. They’d all work – as mums – they’d go in there and they would sort the boxes out, and then they would distribute them to their own houses. They organised themselves in groups of six to ten households, which were called Han. Now, I’ve been involved in some box schemes, but my word, this is brilliantly done.

And they now – in the Seikatsu co-ops – have three hundred and thirty thousand households in their schemes. Three hundred and thirty thousand. And they’ve reached right back to the farmers, so that they completely side-step the supermarkets. And they’re doing it much more cheaply, so some of the supermarkets are going out of business. And what they do is, they take one product after another, they study it and do the testing, and they then work with the farmers on standards, and they jointly discuss why some standards are more difficult than others. And then they open it out and say “does anyone have any ideas about this farmer’s problems?” etc. So they act as almost crowd intelligence on this. Their aim is explicitly to show that these higher standards are possible, and then press politically for these to be adopted nationally. And so, they’ve formed local political parties, and they have a large number of local councillors who then press for these things within their local council, to change the standards. And then they combine, and press it nationally. This has changed the food economy, in terms of farming and its quality, but it has also changed the way food is thought about and then used and cooked in the home. And I think this is a model of how soil economy and the human economy have been brought back together.

That is fascinating, so essentially these communities have bypassed the middleman and gone straight to the source, taking control of the distribution and being directly involved with the producers. And do you think this model, this co-op model should be replicated, or would be the main way to go forward in the future?

RM: Well, I think that is one way. We should all say to ourselves, “Right, what can we do about this?” You quickly find that there are other people doing something about it, and some are better at it than others. But what is amazing is that the Seikatsu started in 1972, so that’s forty-two years, and they are still enormously strong. They’ve kept the principles very much to the centre. Whenever they have problems, they discuss it openly, and in terms of cooperatives – this is a very important point – what they’ve tried to do is always to retain a sense that you’re in control of the thing, and you’re not just voting for people to do it for you. So they’ve purposefully broken up some of their bigger organisations so that people feel that it is close to them. And if you don’t do that, very quickly you get experts and they start running it, and it becomes more like the old system.

Now this model: recently in South Korea, they’ve been copying the Japanese one. And they, within fifteen years have got four major food cooperative systems linking farmers and consumers. They’ve now got over half a million people involved, almost from a standing start. Now, it’s led in – as the Japanese put it: it’s not just “how to get nice food”, it is “how to live a different life.” How not to be what I think they call “the robotic consumer”. The role of the human being is not to be a robot or to be the prey of advertising and so on; it is to take this under your own control, and think about it, and participate in it, because that is actually what creating life is about. That’s their approach, so it’s not just the co-op – the co-op is an aspect of this. It is about a whole approach to the way we live our lives, in whatever we’re doing.

Yes, that’s incredible, and I can easily imagine that such a co-op system, since there is such a link between households and farms, could work to ensure that household organic materials like food scraps and so on, be properly disposed of and brought back to the farm for composting, because the consumers then understand the need for having a clean stream of organic materials for composters.

RM: Yes.

But then as a larger social movement, and we talked about the ways governments are sometimes slow to react to this kind of thing in part one, but when it comes to transitioning our current paradigm or economy into a circular economy – do you see any other opportunities, or ways to build the movement so that it can move up to the government level and make a real impact perhaps?

RM: Well, the political issue: I was referring to it in the way new paradigms are introduced, and I think the first thing is that it’s not done just from the top – it’s usually top-down and bottom-up going on at the same time. And in our cultures, you have to have people who have some kind of connection to this, and some experience of it, which is why I mentioned gardening and getting people involved. It means that they become interested in the new way of thinking. It’s almost like speaking a language.

One of the things we found in recycling is that if you introduce a scheme of boxes for recycling, that the interest in the environment – which in one borough in London was at about twenty-three percent before the scheme started – after people started recycling, within a year it had gone up to something like sixty-eight percent. What that taught me is that then people have a reason not to screen out difficult things. If there’s nothing you can do about something…like these terrible events in Sudan, for example: if you had a brother or sister working there you would be extremely worried, but otherwise it’s somewhere far away, and there are so many of these things going on, you’ve got to live a life. Now, in the environment, if you can be actively involved in a way which fits in with life, then you become more open to this, and then you are interested in it; and if someone stands up and says “I believe x, y and z”, you think, “Yes!”. I think the same is true of soil: the more people are involved (either in gardening, or community gardens, or whatever it would be), the more open they would be.

And then You’ve got to have the social movements, who are barefoot experts: people whose lives are this – thinking about it and explaining it, being the people to animate the movement. So you’ve got that. And out of that, incidentally (if we look at it in the long-term, and we have to), some people will say “Well, why don’t I go for the local council?” And some might even say, “Why don’t I go for Parliament?” You’re growing the crop like that.

At the same time, any social movement will then link-in with universities and link in with specialists, who themselves may be worried. I don’t personally know people who spend their lives on soils, but I am sure that many of them have real worries, they’re thinking: “How am I going to influence this?” So they become part of it, and you then can reach out to ministers – particularly if we have this wider sense of representation, and if there are events or constituencies which mean that people have to listen, and this is what politicians have to do. Then the politician is open to these different expertise – because there’s always contesting expertise. So, it’s partly a question of expertise and it’s party a question of what the political punch is behind it, and you can never do it with just one or the other.

Part of the great battles we’ve had in waste is actually in public enquiries. What I would call the old interests, they fund so-called science and consultants purely negatively in order to try and destroy the new arguments. And I spend a lot of my life in University, and coming from the University we were amazed that people are so instrumental about science; that they’re actually only looking for something which will argue a particular case – lead is a very good example; it took forty years to get lead finally banned from petrol. But, you know, what was then revealed (and it happens with drug companies as well), which is people who are financed don’t have to prove anything, just disprove whatever the argument is that they’re opposing.

So there is that part of the battle, and therefore people who are informed and who are able to relate to the new movement and the new paradigm (but also with the expertise necessary for that), they are part of the important mixture.

Yes, that is definitely true because there are a lot of interests at play here and as you say, not all of them fight fairly. That is definitely a challenge and leads into my last question, which is about the challenges that might crop up. We’ve talked a lot about campaigning and policies, and with your wealth of experience, I’m sure you’re well aware of the roadblocks that can crop up along the way. Can you tell me what kind of roadblocks are in our way, and is it something we can overcome easily, or is there still a way to go?

RM: I think there are many roadblocks along the way. One of them, if you work at all levels of government, will be financial. Mainly the Treasurer comes along and says, “Oh no, we’re not going to have that because we’ve got no money.” That is a constant, and particularly when you’re early on in the new disruptive technology. How to deal with this fact? Even if you say, “Look, in the long run it’s going to be better”, and so on, he or she is interested in the actual pound signs at the end – immediate, and during this years budget. So that will always be a factor. Very often, once things are established, then suddenly it actually becomes….And the same with waste – when we started off, it was more expensive to do our systems, but once we’d adopted the Italian system (which was based on food waste collection first, and then followed by the others and you needn’t have so much residual waste collection), suddenly we were able to save money and the finance officers became your friends, not your enemies.

Then the second lot are the lawyers, because laws will have been constructed and regulated around the old way of doing things, and then they may get worried. And there is also an issue, for example, the question of how you treat organic food waste – whether it’s heated to seventy degrees, or whether we need to put it up to eighty-four degrees. What are we losing through this? Can we think through that so that we don’t lose some of the micro-organisms as a result of this? what is going to be the effect? How does that come about? Well, the regulators just say, “Well that’s what it is”. So those negative forces come it, and you have to think through them positively, you know: “That is an issue, how do we deal with that issue?”

Then you have the interests, which may be both professional interests (that’s how we’ve always done it and how we’ve always organised it as well), and then you have the commercial interests, which are also strong. The organisational interests, I find, has been one of the big ones – which is government, and in this area in particular it’s local government – because they don’t want to have complexity. Simplicity – particularly now with contracting out, they don’t want to have to deal with a hundred different small contracts, they would love a simple contract, and then they monitor it.

So, how to actually have the interface between the government at any level, and those who are doing the work, in such a way that allows for that complexity – this is one of the very interesting aspects of modern public administration. But without it, what has happened in waste is that the big waste companies have effectively side-lined the community sector. In Canada, USA, Germany, I believe, and certainly in the UK it’s dominated by I think only four major companies now. They say they’re doing recycling, but they are certainly not upcyclers. They are profit maximisers who are used to dealing with residual waste, and who want large facilities the equivalent of the nuclear power plant (though not quite as dangerous as that). But that’s what they’re used to dealing with, and that’s what their large organisations can handle, whereas we want a much more complex ecology in order to do that.

So, those are some of the roadblocks, and I never like to think of them as barriers, because any creative process always finds a block or problem. The question is how to get round it – and in this case – what kind of alliances and coalitions you can build to get in between them, or to win some of them over and get them on your side? How do we do this? That, I think, is the art of what we might call transition – the politics of transition.

The art of transition – that’s a really nice way of putting it. And yes as you say, we need to be creative and open minded in order to succeed in what we’re doing. And I’m sure we’ve only scratched the surface of this topic now, but unfortunately Robin, that’s all we have time for today. Thanks a million for coming on, it was wonderful to have you on the show.

Organics Recycling in France: How New Compost Standards & Incoming Laws will Change the Landscape

This episode corresponds to Lesson 5 of our online course.

EPISODE SUMMARY

On today’s episode, we’re taking a look at the new compost label and quality assurance system designed by the French national network for the collection and recycling of biowaste, Compost Plus. We’re joined by Thomas Colin of Compost Plus who gives us a detailed look at the new system and what it will mean for organics recycling in France. We examine how strict the standards are and how they will be enforced, the reasons for creating them and the issues with the pre-existing standards, how the new system will benefit the French compost industry and the agricultural sector, and the challenges they faced in creating these standards.

We also get an update from Thomas on source separation in France, the new guidance manual developed by Compost Plus and what it will do, and about the new Energy Transition Law – which is currently being reviewed in the Senate and, if passed, will greatly impact the landscape for sustainable organics collection in France.

 

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ecovio® is a high-quality and versatile bioplastic of BASF. It is certified compostable and contains biobased content. The main areas of use are plastic films such as organic waste bags, dual-use bags or agricultural films. Furthermore, compostable packaging solutions such as paper-coating and injection molding products can be produced with ecovio®. To find more information, visit their website.

 

FEATURED EVENTS

Save The Planet 2015 Waste Management & Recycling Exhibition. March 11-13, 2015. Sofia, Bulgaria. Organiser: Via Expo.

Responding to the growing demand of eco-technologies and an interest in wider implementation of advanced know-how In South-East Europe, ‘Save the Planet’ is a timely event. It will help business and municipalities to increase their investment activities in resource efficiency, landfill rehabilitation, construction of new modern facilities and infrastructure.

 

EPISODE SLIDESHOW

 

Transcript coming soon.

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TRANSCRIPT

 

Compost Plus and the French Situation

 

Q: Can you tell me about Compost Plus and what you are up to in France at the moment?

Thomas Colin: Compost Plus is a network of local authorities all involved in composting and separate collection of biowaste in France. There were six members at the beginning in 2009, and now we are sixteen members, which represent around 1.3 million inhabitants. It is important to notice that Compost Plus is a fully independent association and there is no money from private companies.

All our resources are from members’ fees and the goal of the association is to promote the collection and develop separate collection of biowaste in France. We use different methods, like communication. We communicate on separate collection of biowaste in many conferences and meetings all over France, and we organise every two years specific working days on that field, inviting councillors and technical agents.  We also do a little bit of lobbying; we’re involved in different regulation working groups, and we’re also members of the European Compost Network – which is a lobbying group of European experts with who we share the same vision about the way to recycle biowaste.

And finally we have a few projects – two of them are finished this year. First is a quality assurance system for composting plants, and compost from biodegradable waste. The second one is a guidebook on separate collection of biowaste, giving the reasons why it should be developed and aiming to spread the best practices. There is one project still in progress; it’s an observatory of local policy, aiming to evaluate the economic and environmental impacts of separate collection of biowaste.

Q: Just to clarify – you work solely with municipalities that source separate their organics?

TC: Yes that’s correct, they are all involved in separated collection of biowaste – all involved in source separation.

Q: Can you give me an overview of the situation in France regarding source separation, and composting standards, before your system came in?

TC: In France the separate collection of biowaste is really unpopular at the moment. There is only maybe three to five percent of the population involved in this type of collection. So it was essential for us to write this guidebook in order to demonstrate the feasibility of this industry.

And in terms of the compost context in France: the French quality standards were not sufficient enough for the agriculture industry. They were asking for stronger external control, more traceability, and clearer specification. For instance, there was no clear difference on packaging requirements biowaste compost and municipal solid waste compost, so this was a fear for operators that the user would be mistaken and would lose confidence in the industry, and finally would prefer not to use compost anymore on their farms. So that’s why Compost Plus found it necessary to build this new quality assurance system. It’s called ASQA – the translation in English would be Soil Improvers Selected and Quality Certified.

 

Introducing the New Compost Quality Assurance System

 

Q:  When did the work on the quality assurance system start?

TC: The work started two years ago. It was a big collaborative work. All the stakeholders were involved in the project: Compost Plus with its members, but also the ADEME (the National Agency of Energy and Environment) from which we received some funding as well. The Agricultural Chamber of France, which represents all the local agricultural chambers, was also involved. The FNAD, which is the federation representing private companies. A few other associations, like the European Compost Network, and the Composting Farmers of France, and the certification bodies were also involved.

I would like to say that the support of the Agricultural Chamber of France was really important – they brought us a technical as well as political support. Actually two press releases have been co-written and published together, one of them during the last Paris International Agriculture Show. This collaboration was really strategic for the wide acceptance of the project by users, because four years ago the Ministry of Ecology led a similar project of the National Composting Charter, including altogether the urban compost, biowaste, green waste, municipal solid waste compost, but the project eventually collapsed because they didn’t get the confidence of the agricultural industry.

Q: Did the collapse of the previous project make it more difficult for you then to set up this new system and label?

TC: Yes, well, what was difficult was gathering all the stakeholders around the table – the private companies, the agricultural industry, the local authorities, and technical experts as well.

Q: So there are quite a lot of players involved…

TC: That was a lot of players, yes. That was one of the challenges – to get everybody around the table, and finally, to make sure the final document was fully approved.

Q: And that process took two years.

TC: It was two years of work, yes.

Q:  The quality assurance system has just launched last year in September, so it’s still very new. And we touched on this already, but can you tell me the reasons for making this new label?

TC: There were a few reasons for making this new label. For users, the priority was to give them more traceability, more control, more warranties, and better quality. For operators, the label allows them to secure their outlet, and makes the market more lasting for the future. As I said, it was also a clear way to mark the difference between biowaste compost and other urban compost like municipal solid waste compost.

Let me say one more thing. In relation to the French context, there was a lack of quality assurance systems in France, actually. Most of the plants use ISO Standards, which focus particularly on management, but nothing on the product quality. So the project was to create this integrated system based on both management and product standards.

 

Compost Label Criteria: Just How Strict Is It?

 

Q: How strict is this new system, and the compost label – what criteria did you put in place and what does it cover?

TC: First, the label is open to any plant, public or private, even if it was a public initiative at the beginning, that composts biodegradable waste separately collected. Meaning that municipal solid waste or sewage sludge is not allowed and can’t be part of any product from this label. Compared to what was done before, the label is a lot stricter: there are thirty-six requirements for quality management, environmental management, and product quality.

A big part of the label is inspired by ISO Standards, which means that the quality policy and the procedures are written, the internal communication done, and information is given to operators on the plant. And there are also internal controls done every year to make sure the plant is still in line with the label requirements.

About the product, there is also a threshold for pollutants, in line with the European Eco label for soil improvers, which are stricter than the French national standards, especially on heavy metals content and impurities.

Q: In terms of the operational aspects – what steps will be taken to ensure operational quality in the compost plants, and so on?

TC: Everything has to be recorded: all the composting operations during the process and the composting parameters such as temperature and moisture. Everything has to be recorded and independent certification bodies can ensure that the requirements are respected. At least one external control is done per year, and each product is sampled for external laboratory analysis. There is also internal analysis required, and there is a particular attention given to pollutants that are likely to pass the allowed thresholds. For instance, when a threshold once, the implicated parameters are analysed on all the following batches for one full year. Aside from the agronomic criteria, the organic matter and nitrogen content are analysed on every batch.

Q: Tell me a little bit more about the traceability.

TC: One goal of the label was to bring more traceability, as I said. So, the work on the platform starts by creating input batches. Each batch is followed during the full process from the first stage to the final product, and at every stage of the process, the operators have to know the exact composition of every batch. That means that each kilo of input or output is recorded.

 

Dealing with Costs and Expectations

 

Q: Were there any stumbling blocks or issues you had in relation to designing the quality control aspects of the system?

TC: Well, the main challenge was to create a label complying with farmer’s expectations and operator’s limit in the field. So we had to deal as well with the existing rules and practices that sometimes can be hard to change, even just a little bit. So we tried not to revolutionise everything, and to retain most of the best practices already implemented on the field.

One challenge, as well, was to contain the implementation costs of the label. That is why operators have to do part of the control – I spoke about internal control already. So they are doing that internal control and sampling the product. And as the label has some similar requirements to the ISO Standards, we made it fully compatible with them. Thanks to this the implementation costs are reasonable, I would say. Even more for operators already ISO certified, because when the certification body is at the site, it can control parts of the two systems at the same time.

Q: So it ends up not costing the operator as much in that case…

TC: Exactly, so that is why I call this label an integrated label. When you get a contract with a certification body, this label will cost a lot cheaper for operators already ISO certified.

Q: And how has the reaction been so far?

TC: Well for the moment, five plants are doing the work to be certified. Maybe the first certification could open between April or May, but for the moment we haven’t done any communication – we are waiting for that first certification before making any conclusions.

Q: Can you tell me more about who will benefit from this new label, and how?

TC: Those who benefit will be every stakeholder of the industry. Users will benefit from this label because it gives them more traceability, more control and more quality. Operators will benefit because it secures their outlets. Even, I would say, by extension the consumer who is buying food products grown on farms using certified compost, and finally as well it benefits the national authorities by increasing the quality of the national market.

 

The Question of Biowaste From MBT Plants

 

Q: We mentioned before the trouble you had to bring all the stakeholders together around the table, but you’ve had a few other issues too, like deciding whether or not to include mechanical biological treatment plants (MBT) plants. Would you care to talk a little more about that?

TC: Well that was one of the questions, whether this label should include the municipal solid waste compost from MBT plants and other sludge sewage compost as well or not. In the end we decided to make this label apart, because Compost Plus members are not familiar with those plants, so it was too complicated for us to imagine creating a label integrating all urban compost. We didn’t want to make a label that confused the user, so it was better for us to separate this initiative.

Q:  Was there any pushback on this decision, or did you have any trouble defending it? 

TC: No, actually they understood this position and today they are working on their own certification label as well on their side. So we’re happy because our initiative gave them the same idea and hopefully with their label they will try to increase the quality of their compost.

Q:  Of course our stance is that source-separation is the best way to go for organics recycling, but are MBT plants popular, or gaining popularity, at the moment in France?

TC: I will say that for the moment the local authorities are waiting for a signal from the national authorities. There are no clear national strategies on how to recycle biowaste. Some local authorities chose to do separate collection of biowaste, others chose to do MBT – but there are few of them, and for the moment most of the local authorities haven’t done anything yet.

 

Source Separation of Organics & The Energy Transition Law

 

Q: This is a good transition to talk about what’s happening in France more generally now with organics recycling and source separation. It’s an exciting time at the moment in France – can you tell us more about why?

TC: Well there is a big regulation project called the Energetic Transition Law. In this initial project – supported by the new Minister of Ecology – there is one goal, which is to generalise source separation of biowaste by 2025. So this will be the strong signal I was talking about for local authorities to favour separate collection of biowaste all over the country.

It will also be a really important measure when you think about the international context of climate change and also in contemplation of the next 21COP held in Paris in November (a summit on climate held in Paris at the end of the year), and this measure will be strong contribution from France to reduce our environmental waste impacts. Because we have to know that thirty percent of human methane gas emissions are from landfilling.

So about this Energetic Transition Law – in a few days the Senate will examine the law, and their conclusion should be delivered in the middle of February, so in two weeks, maybe the national situation will totally change.

Q: You’re busy right now talking to the senators and so on about separate collection to spread the word, and this brings me to the source separation guide book (or manual) that you’ve produced (published 5^th February). How long has it been in production?

TC: It was also two years work, actually. It’s a book that gathers many, many successful experiences from all around France about source separation of biowaste. There are more than twenty local authorities that have contributed to this guide. And we will officially publish on the 5^th of February, so then we will widely spread it to local authorities.

Q: Can you tell me why there is so little source separation in France at the moment, is it just a question of economics or is there much opposition to it?

TC: I wouldn’t say that there is many people against source separation of biowaste in France, but there are still the same people and local authorities defending – and that’s normal – their investment and what they have done. So we can’t say that France is MBT, because some of them are, but some of them are in favour of source separation of biowaste.

Q: Right so there are just a lot of different voices at the moment.

TC: Yeah, it’s a lot of different voices, but most of the people are just waiting for the conclusion.

Q: But municipalities might gain the confidence to start source separation schemes now thanks to this guidance manual?

TC: Yeah that’s true. That is one of the goals of this manual to show the local authorities that source separation of biowaste works everywhere – in urban areas as in rural areas. And yeah, we want to demonstrate that it is working and it’s feasible technically and economically. Because most of the time the argument is that separate collection of biowaste costs more than, for instance, MBT. But this guidebook shows that the twenty local authorities can contribute to this book haven’t got more costs than the national average.

The Future For Compost Plus and France

 

Q: It will very much depend on what happens with the Energetic Transition Law, but what is the focus for Compost Plus then in the next few years?

TC: Well first of all our next goals will be to make sure the ASQA label is implemented everywhere by local authorities in as many plants as we can. And in relation to the Energetic Transition Law, if the law is in favour of source separation of biowaste, we might have to focus on how we can educate new local authorities in the way of developing source collection of biowaste.

Q: It will be a very busy time, then! And it’s a very busy time for France, too – I’m sure you’re excited for what the future holds.

TC: Yeah, that’s true. The situation can totally change in a few days, and I’m sure this is because of this unclear situation that there is this debate in France. In all other countries in Europe, the national law is clear so there is no debate, and then source separation of biowaste is well developed. As we see in Germany or in Italy, when the national strategy is clear, the local authorities know that they are supported, so it’s easier for them to…to

Q: …to make the change…

TC: To make the change, exactly.

Soil Crisis #2: Soil & The Circular Economy: Building A Movement

This episode corresponds to Lesson 1 and Lesson 5 of our online course.

Episode twenty: part two of the two part special with zero waste pioneer and industrial economist Robin Murray, in which we talk about the importance of soil as a basis for human economy, and the great chasm between what science tells us about soil’s role and the existing inadequate policies for soil management that has led to a soil crisis. In this episode, we will discuss the opportunities we have for building a movement to change our current economic model to a more sustainable one, including existing models that we can learn from, the importance of education and centers of learning for the movement, and the roadblocks we might face along the way.

Thank you to BioCycle for making this episode possible.

BioCycle, the Organics Recycling Authority, is the leading magazine and website on composting, food waste management, anaerobic digestion and renewable energy from organics recycling. Subscribe to BioCycle and get access to every article published over the last 10 years, and sign up for @BioCycle, our free biweekly e-bulletin. For more, visit www.biocycle.net.

Photo by Joe Mabel / CC BY.

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We talked in part one about the importance of soil health in human economies, and also about the potential for a shift to a more circular, distributed economy, and you were listing a few ways people have started to reconnect themselves with the soil with the slow food movement, community gardens and farms being opened up to the urban population and so on. But in relation to forming a different system, a different model of production and distribution, how important is education and knowledge sharing for fostering or encouraging these kinds of changes?

Robin Murray: What I would say is that the movements – both of people pressing on policy, but also the people who are actually doing it – tend to be global. So we established a Zero Waste movement here more than a decade ago, but it was part of an international Zero Waste International movement, and it was established in a number of different countries. And the internet has allowed a wide sharing of practices. And in the arguments in this country, the experiences of Canada and Australia – let alone elsewhere – have been very influential in saying “Look, this actually happens. This isn’t just a utopia, this is a different model”. And particularly as it develops, you then have new technologies coming in; light technologies, small distributed technologies, not great big centralised ones. These can be imported and then developed on your own here.

So, I think there’s a continuous process of self education, but one which is within a collective. If you look at organic farming, it is social knowledge, and people are not privatising this knowledge. They are sharing, and of course, this is what happened when we grew up; people would discuss particular problems. We had, believe it or not, an actual farmer’s discussion group, which my father used to go to, where people would come once a month from these hill farms to discuss common problems. Well now with the modern internet, you go much further and you can share. Having said that, I think there is a great need, and a role, for some formal structure of specialist education. Many countries have inherited this on the agricultural side, and in America that’s very important: those colleges have been absolutely central, and changing the approaches in those colleges, or opening up these colleges to these new systems is an important part.

There’s been nothing similar on waste. Waste is being treated as part of a technical college, but it’s done in a very old fashioned way and it needs a quite different approach. And I think now we must look to make it global, because many of the ways of looking at the thing are global, [even though] every place has it’s own specificity. But, I think this is where this new extraordinary development of Massive Online Open Courses, which are free, but you can also link into local discussion groups all taking these courses – and there are five million students on them. If one replicated that in terms of soils and in terms of nutrient management (in relation to biowaste)…knowledge is absolutely central – distributed knowledge is absolutely central, and I think probably this is going to be the key to a major change in the way in which we both think about our agriculture, and think about reconnecting it up.

I’m very glad you say that because that’s the whole idea being Compostory.org, and I agree that in the areas of waste or nutrient management,  we really need to start working together and finding connections between groups of people all around the world. And from the work that we’re doing, we’ve come across so many different stories of people and groups doing unique and very interesting work…

RM: One of the examples which I found particularly inspiring in our work has been in Japan which, starting in the nineteen-sixties but really gathered in the nineteen-seventies, was a movement led almost entirely by women. And they had become concerned after a range of food scares, particularly around milk and the quality of milk, and its impact on their children – it was children who led the concern. And so what they did is they said, “Look, we’re not going to buy our milk from the supermarkets; we will go out and we will find farmers who we can talk to about how they produce their milk, and we can ask them to produce organic milk and we will then find a way of bringing it directly to us.

Well, they started with milk and then they expanded to other food items to begin with. And they were one of the very early developers of box schemes; and because quite a few of them, I suspect, before they were married worked in these Japanese factories, which were all electronic – not perhaps in the late sixties, but certainly in the late seventies and eighties – and were very well managed; they established this box scheme whereby the producers who they picked out and who they partnered with would bring what had been ordered to the central collection point. They’d all work – as mums – they’d go in there and they would sort the boxes out, and then they would distribute them to their own houses. They organised themselves in groups of six to ten households, which were called Han. Now, I’ve been involved in some box schemes, but my word, this is brilliantly done.

And they now – in the Seikatsu co-ops – have three hundred and thirty thousand households in their schemes. Three hundred and thirty thousand. And they’ve reached right back to the farmers, so that they completely side-step the supermarkets. And they’re doing it much more cheaply, so some of the supermarkets are going out of business. And what they do is, they take one product after another, they study it and do the testing, and they then work with the farmers on standards, and they jointly discuss why some standards are more difficult than others. And then they open it out and say “does anyone have any ideas about this farmer’s problems?” etc. So they act as almost crowd intelligence on this. Their aim is explicitly to show that these higher standards are possible, and then press politically for these to be adopted nationally. And so, they’ve formed local political parties, and they have a large number of local councillors who then press for these things within their local council, to change the standards. And then they combine, and press it nationally. This has changed the food economy, in terms of farming and its quality, but it has also changed the way food is thought about and then used and cooked in the home. And I think this is a model of how soil economy and the human economy have been brought back together.

That is fascinating, so essentially these communities have bypassed the middleman and gone straight to the source, taking control of the distribution and being directly involved with the producers. And do you think this model, this co-op model should be replicated, or would be the main way to go forward in the future?

RM: Well, I think that is one way. We should all say to ourselves, “Right, what can we do about this?” You quickly find that there are other people doing something about it, and some are better at it than others. But what is amazing is that the Seikatsu started in 1972, so that’s forty-two years, and they are still enormously strong. They’ve kept the principles very much to the centre. Whenever they have problems, they discuss it openly, and in terms of cooperatives – this is a very important point – what they’ve tried to do is always to retain a sense that you’re in control of the thing, and you’re not just voting for people to do it for you. So they’ve purposefully broken up some of their bigger organisations so that people feel that it is close to them. And if you don’t do that, very quickly you get experts and they start running it, and it becomes more like the old system.

Now this model: recently in South Korea, they’ve been copying the Japanese one. And they, within fifteen years have got four major food cooperative systems linking farmers and consumers. They’ve now got over half a million people involved, almost from a standing start. Now, it’s led in – as the Japanese put it: it’s not just “how to get nice food”, it is “how to live a different life.” How not to be what I think they call “the robotic consumer”. The role of the human being is not to be a robot or to be the prey of advertising and so on; it is to take this under your own control, and think about it, and participate in it, because that is actually what creating life is about. That’s their approach, so it’s not just the co-op – the co-op is an aspect of this. It is about a whole approach to the way we live our lives, in whatever we’re doing.

Yes, that’s incredible, and I can easily imagine that such a co-op system, since there is such a link between households and farms, could work to ensure that household organic materials like food scraps and so on, be properly disposed of and brought back to the farm for composting, because the consumers then understand the need for having a clean stream of organic materials for composters.

RM: Yes.

But then as a larger social movement, and we talked about the ways governments are sometimes slow to react to this kind of thing in part one, but when it comes to transitioning our current paradigm or economy into a circular economy – do you see any other opportunities, or ways to build the movement so that it can move up to the government level and make a real impact perhaps?

RM: Well, the political issue: I was referring to it in the way new paradigms are introduced, and I think the first thing is that it’s not done just from the top – it’s usually top-down and bottom-up going on at the same time. And in our cultures, you have to have people who have some kind of connection to this, and some experience of it, which is why I mentioned gardening and getting people involved. It means that they become interested in the new way of thinking. It’s almost like speaking a language.

One of the things we found in recycling is that if you introduce a scheme of boxes for recycling, that the interest in the environment – which in one borough in London was at about twenty-three percent before the scheme started – after people started recycling, within a year it had gone up to something like sixty-eight percent. What that taught me is that then people have a reason not to screen out difficult things. If there’s nothing you can do about something…like these terrible events in Sudan, for example: if you had a brother or sister working there you would be extremely worried, but otherwise it’s somewhere far away, and there are so many of these things going on, you’ve got to live a life. Now, in the environment, if you can be actively involved in a way which fits in with life, then you become more open to this, and then you are interested in it; and if someone stands up and says “I believe x, y and z”, you think, “Yes!”. I think the same is true of soil: the more people are involved (either in gardening, or community gardens, or whatever it would be), the more open they would be.

And then You’ve got to have the social movements, who are barefoot experts: people whose lives are this – thinking about it and explaining it, being the people to animate the movement. So you’ve got that. And out of that, incidentally (if we look at it in the long-term, and we have to), some people will say “Well, why don’t I go for the local council?” And some might even say, “Why don’t I go for Parliament?” You’re growing the crop like that.

At the same time, any social movement will then link-in with universities and link in with specialists, who themselves may be worried. I don’t personally know people who spend their lives on soils, but I am sure that many of them have real worries, they’re thinking: “How am I going to influence this?” So they become part of it, and you then can reach out to ministers – particularly if we have this wider sense of representation, and if there are events or constituencies which mean that people have to listen, and this is what politicians have to do. Then the politician is open to these different expertise – because there’s always contesting expertise. So, it’s partly a question of expertise and it’s party a question of what the political punch is behind it, and you can never do it with just one or the other.

Part of the great battles we’ve had in waste is actually in public enquiries. What I would call the old interests, they fund so-called science and consultants purely negatively in order to try and destroy the new arguments. And I spend a lot of my life in University, and coming from the University we were amazed that people are so instrumental about science; that they’re actually only looking for something which will argue a particular case – lead is a very good example; it took forty years to get lead finally banned from petrol. But, you know, what was then revealed (and it happens with drug companies as well), which is people who are financed don’t have to prove anything, just disprove whatever the argument is that they’re opposing.

So there is that part of the battle, and therefore people who are informed and who are able to relate to the new movement and the new paradigm (but also with the expertise necessary for that), they are part of the important mixture.

Yes, that is definitely true because there are a lot of interests at play here and as you say, not all of them fight fairly. That is definitely a challenge and leads into my last question, which is about the challenges that might crop up. We’ve talked a lot about campaigning and policies, and with your wealth of experience, I’m sure you’re well aware of the roadblocks that can crop up along the way. Can you tell me what kind of roadblocks are in our way, and is it something we can overcome easily, or is there still a way to go?

RM: I think there are many roadblocks along the way. One of them, if you work at all levels of government, will be financial. Mainly the Treasurer comes along and says, “Oh no, we’re not going to have that because we’ve got no money.” That is a constant, and particularly when you’re early on in the new disruptive technology. How to deal with this fact? Even if you say, “Look, in the long run it’s going to be better”, and so on, he or she is interested in the actual pound signs at the end – immediate, and during this years budget. So that will always be a factor. Very often, once things are established, then suddenly it actually becomes….And the same with waste – when we started off, it was more expensive to do our systems, but once we’d adopted the Italian system (which was based on food waste collection first, and then followed by the others and you needn’t have so much residual waste collection), suddenly we were able to save money and the finance officers became your friends, not your enemies.

Then the second lot are the lawyers, because laws will have been constructed and regulated around the old way of doing things, and then they may get worried. And there is also an issue, for example, the question of how you treat organic food waste – whether it’s heated to seventy degrees, or whether we need to put it up to eighty-four degrees. What are we losing through this? Can we think through that so that we don’t lose some of the micro-organisms as a result of this? what is going to be the effect? How does that come about? Well, the regulators just say, “Well that’s what it is”. So those negative forces come it, and you have to think through them positively, you know: “That is an issue, how do we deal with that issue?”

Then you have the interests, which may be both professional interests (that’s how we’ve always done it and how we’ve always organised it as well), and then you have the commercial interests, which are also strong. The organisational interests, I find, has been one of the big ones – which is government, and in this area in particular it’s local government – because they don’t want to have complexity. Simplicity – particularly now with contracting out, they don’t want to have to deal with a hundred different small contracts, they would love a simple contract, and then they monitor it.

So, how to actually have the interface between the government at any level, and those who are doing the work, in such a way that allows for that complexity – this is one of the very interesting aspects of modern public administration. But without it, what has happened in waste is that the big waste companies have effectively side-lined the community sector. In Canada, USA, Germany, I believe, and certainly in the UK it’s dominated by I think only four major companies now. They say they’re doing recycling, but they are certainly not upcyclers. They are profit maximisers who are used to dealing with residual waste, and who want large facilities the equivalent of the nuclear power plant (though not quite as dangerous as that). But that’s what they’re used to dealing with, and that’s what their large organisations can handle, whereas we want a much more complex ecology in order to do that.

So, those are some of the roadblocks, and I never like to think of them as barriers, because any creative process always finds a block or problem. The question is how to get round it – and in this case – what kind of alliances and coalitions you can build to get in between them, or to win some of them over and get them on your side? How do we do this? That, I think, is the art of what we might call transition – the politics of transition.

The art of transition – that’s a really nice way of putting it. And yes as you say, we need to be creative and open minded in order to succeed in what we’re doing. And I’m sure we’ve only scratched the surface of this topic now, but unfortunately Robin, that’s all we have time for today. Thanks a million for coming on, it was wonderful to have you on the show.

Drought Special #3: Fighting A Drought: Levers for the Public Sector

This episode corresponds to Lesson 5 of our online course.

In episode three of the drought special, we’re in Australia to learn about the role of the public sector in preparing a country for drought, and the policies, incentives and strategies that can be put in place to help prevent and protect against it. We look at the current Australian system, soil health, incentives for compost production, farm management practices, and the need to change our systems in order to better reward and support our land managers – the stewards of the earth. Joining us are former Governor General of Australia and current Advocate for Soil Health, Major General Michael Jeffery, and co-founder of Ylad Living Soils Rhonda Daly.

Thank you to Kellogg Garden products for making this episode possible.

Whether you’re starting a garden from scratch, sprucing up your planting beds, or mulching your favorite fruit tree…we have a natural and organic premium garden soil, potting soil, mulch, or fertilizer to help your project reach its best potential. Kellogg Garden products have been dedicated to meeting the needs of gardeners for over 85 years, and we continue to provide products you can trust! Visit their website here.

Photo by suburbanbloke / CC BY

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When it comes to drought, it seems that up until now, the drought relief packages were based on Exceptional Circumstances programs and included mostly financial support for farmers already in dire circumstances, with very little attention given to actual prevention of drought or preparing for drought before hand. However, there are some changes occurring now with the National Drought Program Reform that is starting in July, which recognises that drought no longer fits in the exceptional circumstances category, and will focus more on drought preparedness through providing training programs for land managers on risk assessment and financial planning and so on. But General Jeffery and Rhonda Daly, you both agree that a lot more has to be done. So General Jeffery, maybe you can tell us what you think is necessary for the public sector to do in order to actually prepare for drought and minimise the effects of drought on the Australian landscape?

General Jeffery: Well I think the first thing to do is recognise that at the present time, Australia doesn’t have a real national policy in terms of how it wants to look after the Australian landscape as a totality; that is, its river systems, its flood plains, its wetlands, its riparian zones; agriculture areas, grazing areas, mining areas and so on. And I think until we get a policy that spells out the need to have, perhaps as a light on the hill, to restore and maintain an Australian landscape that is fit for purpose – that is fit for all the things I just mentioned – we’re all going to be stuck doing itty, bitty things (and some of them quite important and quite good), but until we get an over-arching aim of what we want to do, with total state and local people all singing from the same sheet of music, I think we will be struggling, particularly when it comes to drought.

It’s getting that policy agreed to restore and maintain an Australian landscape fit for purpose; it has been knocked around a bit. And you can’t blame people, that’s the way people were taught and trained at the time, but –

Rhonda Daly: Don’t you think also that because they’re using water as a commodity – as an economic commodity – and so we’ve got this false economy coming in where we think we’re a rich country, but we’re actually deteriorating the landscape really badly. Short-term it appears that we’re not doing so much damage because economically we’re doing so well, but ultimately, the wheels are going to fall off that analogy for sure.

So Rhonda you’re saying that people involved have a very myopic view of the situation and focus only on the short term economic results, rather than the bigger picture, which I think is definitely the case in many other countries as well. And General Jeffery, you’re saying that we need to get all levels of public sector – local, national and state, to come together and agree on a national policy for restoring and maintaining the landscape. How would you propose we start?

GJ: Well part of the issue has got to be that, if we want to restore and maintain this landscape so that it is fit for various purposes, you’ve got to ask yourself, “What are the three key ingredients that will enable us to do that?” And it’s really about the integrated management of your soil, your water (that is, the hydrology), and the biodiversity – the plants and so on that you’re growing, whether crops or grasses, or what have you. So, good farming practice and land management practice, mining practice and everything else, depends on the stakeholders having a very clear understanding of the need for that integration, and understanding the art and science of doing it properly. And that’s where good farming practices and land management practices come into play.

My next question here was to ask you if you think soil is the most important factor for healing the landscape and therefore protecting against drought, but what you’re saying is that all three aspects, soil, water and vegetation, are all important?

GJ: Yes, I think we’ve got to talk about landscape rather than soil. Although I’m the National Soil Advocate, I think that’s a misnomer to a degree because it gets everybody focused on just looking at soil, when we should be looking at water and biodiversity. And Rhonda raised a very good point specifically on the water, where I think our focus in this country for many years has been in the wrong direction. We’ve always looked at how much water we’ve got in our rivers and streams and dams, and we then issued licenses, and so on, to users of that water. But the total amount of water falling on our landscape every year, if you take it as a hundred drops: only ten drops end up in the rivers, two drops end up in the dams, and another two drops end up as run-off off the roads and roofs – that’s only fourteen percent.

But that’s what we all look at – we focus on that because that’s what we can see. Where we’re missing is the other eighty-six percent that falls on the landscape, of which only about thirty-six actually gets into the soil where you want it, and the other fifty percent evaporates into the atmosphere because it can’t infiltrate.

And holding water in soils is a very important of drought management as well, which we’ve mentioned quite a few times in previous episodes. Rhonda, would you agree with that?

RD: I would agree. I would agree that there’s a huge amount of land that, as you say, needs hydrating – the wetlands and… But you know, truly and really I think that it’s quite sad that I don’t know whether they see that as the most important thing that they have to do at the moment. I think so much energy is going in other places. I truly don’t believe they know the workings of our environment and landscape, and what is the best way of getting it back – and spending the dollars to get it back into a healthy condition again.

GJ: I think that you really need political decisions at the senior level of federal and state to ensure a proper implementation of an appropriate process. So, I think it gets back again to this lack of an over-arching policy where we need to look after the landscape, and then the various ingredients that’ll make it work, and we discussed two or three of them earlier on.

Indeed. And what you’re saying is that it really is important for senior levels in government to take an active role in this, because there are big decisions to be made, and they need to steer the ship. But in terms of getting the research right, there are already wheels in motion, because just recently the Australian Department of Agriculture, Food and Forestry recently launched the National Soil Research, Development and Extension Strategy, which aims to secure Australia’s soil for profitable industries and healthy landscapes, and among its many goals, it aims to “improve communication and sharing of soil knowledge”, and “to adopt a national approach to building future skills and capacities”. SO this is definitely a step in the right direction and perhaps it will achieve some of what you are calling for?

GJ: Yes, I think that is a good step in the right direction, and as the National Soil Advocate, we were able to bring together an expert advisory panel of four of the nation’s top land management scientists, backed by another twenty or so scientists who support them, and we were able to input into that strategy, which was really about doing four things: quantifying our soil asset in respect to data and mapping, and what are our soil types, and how healthy is it. And then, how do we go about securing our soil by identifying and evaluating best practice by looking at soil structure improvement, soil biology, carbon and so on. And the third bit was to look at understanding our soils, which is the technical level: the training of our ag scientists, soil carbon sampling, understanding the hydrology of our soils, understanding the soil biology and so on. Then there was soil at the interface, which was really looking at the search on environmental impacts: understanding water capture and storage in soil. So I think that the RD&E (the Research Development and Extension policy) that was launched by the minister a couple of weeks ago is very much a step in the right direction and I’m pleased that we were able to have at least a little bit of an input into it.

That’s a pretty comprehensive strategy focusing on soils, and I daresay one of the first of its kind. And it will be interesting to see how it plays out in the future. But in the past, has soil and soil health has featured in Australian drought policy in any big way before now, or has it been side-lined?

RD: From y perspective I would think that in all of the drought policies that they’re putting into place, soil health is definitely featured, and not only soil health but the management practices as well. So, yes they are incorporating and recognising that soil health is a major player in ensuring that we hold more water in our landscape for plants in these drier times. So, I think they’re recognising that, but there just seems such a huge part, and chunk, that still needs converting. Because, I would say that there’s really only maybe two or three percent of Australian farmers who are actually really practicing regeneration of the landscape, and the rest is going as business as usual. And how do we get the business as usual people to understand the importance of their soil, not just for today’s farming and their productivity and profitability, but for future generations to come?

So, I think Australia’s got a really short term view of their soil health, and we tend to – and that’s because of economic restraints – but we tend to look at just the now. “What do we do now to make us a profit this year that will keep us on the farm next year?” And I think economics, with one in seven farmers owing more than half a million dollars, plays a huge role in farmers up taking these different methods of rebuilding our landscapes back to being healthy again. It’s very much on just paying the bills.

GJ: One of our policy drives in restoring and maintaining this landscape fit for purpose is to reward farmers fairly not just for their product, which is another subject in itself, but also as primary carers of the agricultural landscape, because they look after about sixty percent of the continent. And I believe that we need to reward farmers for looking after the landscape on behalf of twenty-two million urban Australians. Now as to what sort of thing you might do to do that, it can be varied: it might be designating part of the new land army that the Government is going to establish to plant trees on the ridges where a farmer wants it, or to get a cheaper bank loan if he’s going to fix his riparian zone, or a whole range of measures that are not hand-outs, but are provided with a definite outcome in view, which relates to restoring and maintaining that landscape so that it’s in the best possible condition. And I think if we’re clever we’ll be able to do that, and in part overcome the problem that Rhonda’s just raised, that so many of our farmers are in very, very heavy debt.

Right, which definitely won’t help. And on that note, would you say, General Jeffery, that if the new carbon sequestration methodology gets approved, that this would encourage farmers to change their practices? And for our audience, this new methodology is part of the Carbon Farming Initiative, which is a Federal Government initiative to enable people in the land sector to generate revenue through the reduction of carbon emissions by using approved methodologies. So, would this be a potential help for them?

GJ: Yes, I think that if we’ve got a climate change problem – and I believe we have – that’s going to exacerbate our ability to produce more food, and the only way we can help to adjust to that is by sequestering carbon into the soils. The big issue for Australia is going to be in the complexity of the legislation – all the criteria upon which farmers can gain access to that money. And I think we really have to have measuring systems for carbon that are set to business standards, not to scientific standards, so your means of measuring don’t have to be quite so accurate when you’re talking about commercial operations, and therefore can be a bit simpler in terms of a farmer then being able to access what could be a very important source of revenue; and also a very, very important source of helping to adjust to climate change, and perhaps to control it to a degree.

And touching on what you said before, about support payments not being hand-outs: I wonder about citizens in general, particularly urban dwellers, are they sympathetic towards farmers and their situation, or is there work to be done there to get them on board?

GJ: Yes, well another of our policy drivers, and I think it may almost be the most important, is to reconnect urban Australia with its rural roots. That is, reconnect twenty-two and a half million people living in cities and towns with a hundred and thirty thousand farmers and perhaps a hundred thousand miners, or something like that. Now, unless we do that we’re going to find an even greater gap and lack of understanding between the two. And of course, you’ll never get the political support that’s needed to look after our farmers and landscapes properly unless you’ve got voter support. So we have to have that reconnection.

And to do that I think there are several ways. The first is that we’ve got to get to the young people, and I would do this by setting up, for example, a school garden in every school in the country. Something that can  show a six year old, and then a ten year old, and then a thirteen year old, just exactly what the soil does, and how it’s composed, and how photosynthesis and transpiration works; and how you produce healthy food from healthy soil that leads to healthier animals and healthier people. So I think that is one simple way in which we can get urban Australia over time connected; and hopefully the kids will take these messages home to mum and dad, and that would help us get through to the adults at the same time.

But getting the adults on side, I think we’re going to have to use a little bit of stick and a little bit of carrot. The stick is going to be the global food imperative, because in my view we’re going to be pushing it, and I think we’re going to see a lot of social disruption and probably conflict impacting on hundreds of millions of people – and Australia will not be isolated from that. So what we have to say to our own people is that there are going to be big, big problems overseas, and whilst we have some problems in how we’re looking after our landscape here, we’ve also got the answers. And if we’re clever enough and fast enough, we’ll get those answers implemented pretty quickly. And not only will it ensure our own food-water security, but we’ll also be able to export some more food – but even more importantly, export knowledge, because even if we double food export, we’d only feed a hundred million, but if we exported knowledge we might be able to feed a billion.

I’d really like to stress the school garden idea myself as one of the best ways to get the urban population interested in nature. There are also things like community gardens and urban farms that can really help forge a connection. School compost schemes and education can play a huge part too, and I’d like to speak more about compost now, because we’ve heard a lot in previous episodes about the benefits of compost for soil health and drought protection. And Rhonda, you have a wealth of experience in the industry, and as a compost producer yourself, can you tell me what type of incentives exist for you that encourage compost production and use?

RD: That’s a really good question, and I’ve had to search my mind. On a smaller level, the council is starting to introduce green bins to collect compostable waste, and there’s recycling bins and things like that. But from a primary producer’s perspective, I don’t really know of too many incentives or initiatives where people will come – unless there’s a trial being done by Landcare or CSIRO, where they want to get the compost – for them to get into using compost or other biological fertilisers that are a little bit softer on the land and create healthier plants at the same time.

AORA is an industry body – the Australian Organics Recycling Association, which used to be the old Compost Australia – they are promoting it as much as they can, but I do feel as though there’s got to be more policy in there that is going to give farmers the incentive – and possibly there’s going to be a dollar incentive. However, I do believe that there’s going to be people who want to do it because they know intuitively that that’s what they need to do while they’re here on earth. However, the ones who still haven’t reached that calling yet, that maybe the Soil Carbon Methodology, or policies, will see them change over to something new.

So there may need to be financial incentives for some farmers to get them to start composting. And often compost producers will tell us about roadblocks or regulations that actually hinder their ability to run their businesses. Can you tell me about the situation regarding this where you are?

RD: Yeah, sure. It appears that our government supports recycling organic waste – so, reducing landfill, rebuilding soils and… However, the cost of complying with many of these regulations make it not worthwhile for a lot of companies to pursue. And I actually phoned Paul Coffey from AORA  today and asked him what’s going on, because he’s right on the ground level: and the EPA are at present trying to impose a new regulation that is going to put a huge financial burden on compost operations, where they have to have a bank guarantee, and it has to be supplied to the EPA saying that if the operation for some reason goes insolvent, then the money [is used] to cover the clean up of the site. Inevitably this is one situation where this happened. It’s going to cost some operations as much as one-point-five million dollars to have a bank guarantee sitting there, and, as Paul was saying, it will close down many, many operations. And the thing that they’re forgetting to see is that levies are paid to the EPA that could be used for these clean-ups.

So, this is just one of those regulations made in their ivory tower, they’re not really in touch with what’s out there, and it could cost the industry very, very dearly because less people will be wanting to go into composting and recycling these seventeen million tonnes of organic waste that we have.

I guess it just comes back again to having a clear and coordinated strategy so these things won’t happen.

RD: Yes. Well, it’s fortunate that we do have AORA there, and Paul spends a lot of time doing policies, and going to the EPA and working it out for members such as myself. So, definitely, these bodies are very, very important for the ordinary person like myself, because they’re there to ensure we don’t get so many restrictions and conditions on us that it makes it basically impossible do composting.

It’s definitely is an issue I’ve heard before, which once again seems to show that more coordination across different interests could really help. And what I’d like to focus on now is farmers and land management strategies. Because one of the key ways to make change happen is to demonstrate how it can be done, and General Jeffery, you’re Chairman of the non-profit organisation Soils For Life, which is doing great work to support farmers in changing to better practices and advocate for a change in how land is managed generally. And you have been researching case studies of farms that are using sustainable practices in order to spread the word, and the case studies are available online. But through your work with Soils for Life, could you see ways in which incentives and policies could encourage farm managers to change their practices and adopt more drought-resisting practices?

GJ: Well, thanks for those comments on Soils For Life, and of course, Bill and Rhonda are a very important component of the nineteen case studies. We just did nineteen initially because that’s what we were able to raise the money for, and we wanted to actually prove the concept, and well I think we’ve done that, and now we want to roll-out another forty or fifty – and then hopefully hundreds and then some in clusters. I suspect the encouragement to do that will be in showing those who are looking to make a change that, first of all, it’s economically viable. They’re not going to commit unless they can see a dollar in it. And to get that dollar I think we certainly have to do things in terms of how we’re looking at food in terms of pricing, and how we’re looking at rewarding farmers in how they’re rewarding the land.

But, maybe we’ve also got to look at a new definition of productivity, because so often, I’ll think you’ll find the bank saying to a farmer, “Well, to meet your debt obligation, you’re going to have to lift your productivity [muffled] by five percent next year, or whatever. And therefore the farmer then either has to put in a bit more superphosphate, or clear a bit more land, or put a bit more land under crop when he probably hasn’t even got it. And so, false pressure is put on him to lift his productivity, and the same might be true of pressures that may be imposed or implied by the two big chain stores that buy sixty or seventy percent of the produce.

So perhaps we’ve got to look at productivity again nationally in a different way. And if a farmer operating to ninety percent of what he saw as the traditional productivity, which was also degrading his landscape, but ninety percent productivity by his old measure keeps him in permanently good health and good shape, it is far better to look at a system that relates that sort of equation than a farmer whose been striving to do one hundred and two or one hundred and three percent – which he might do for twelve months or two years, and then his soils collapse on him and he goes broke, and the bank has to foreclose, and doesn’t get anything out of it either. Perhaps you see where I’m coming from – that we have to look at productivity in a slightly different way?

Yes, I think I get you, that the notion of productivity should also look at if the land is better managed and can sustain at the same level of productivity for a long period of time, rather than purely looking at the percentage of crop yield. But then, how would you envision we tackle situation with productivity, or protect our farmers from bank pressures and supermarket pressures and the likes?

GJ: Well again, I think it gets back to the policy, and about the rewards.  You see, unless we have these policy parameters in place, we’re going to have the same arguments – they’ll just continue. And the same problems will continue. So you’ve really got to get the aim right for what you want to do: you’ve got to get the soil -water strategic assets declared as such and managed as such; you’ve got to get farmers properly rewarded (and we’ve been through that); you’ve got to get urban Australia really understanding the importance of soil, water and biodiversity, and therefore the importance of farmers, so that if, for example, we might have to pay another half a cent for a kilo of carrots, or another two cents for a litre of milk to ensure that a farmer is properly rewarded for his product, then we pay it gladly. And if there are people that are disadvantaged, then there’s a welfare net to deal with that. But we cannot have farmers being knocked over with unfair prices simply because companies are competing to reduce, reduce, reduce; which is fair enough in principle, but why should the poor old farmer have to deal with that?

And then, we’ve got to refocus the science, so that the science properly supports the farmer in terms of measuring soil fertility, carbon sequestration…if we get all these things in place, then I think we will solve the problem very quickly. But until we do, along with our soils program, which is the practical and proven application on the ground, we won’t maximise the benefit.

I think that sums it up very nicely. And then, final question to both of you: how long do you think it will take for this coordinated approach and solid policy to come about and transform the landscape? Is there much more to be done?

GJ: I think in terms of what I’m trying to do and what Rhonda’s trying to do, I think we’re looking at about a ten to fifteen year programme. There is no magic light switch – you can’t just transform the whole of the agricultural society overnight, because you’re dealing with a hundred and thirty thousand very independent people with their own ideas, et cetera. But the big thing is that we do have the answers, and I think the global imperative…in terms of the opportunities that it provides for our farmers for, perhaps the first time in many, many years, to become sustainably profitable and environmentally sound is going to be there for us to take advantage of – if we can get the proper policy, and fixing the paddock policies in place.

RD: I totally agree with what Michael just said. And in particular, influential people like General Jeffery, who has so many doors he can open – we need people like that to open many more doors, and in time there will be more doors that will open, and people will be coming to us, and far more farmers will be wanting to change.

Soil Crisis #1: A Need for Economic & Political Change

This episode corresponds to Lesson 1 of our online course.

Episode eighteen: in this part one of a two part special, we speak with zero waste pioneer and industrial economist Robin Murray about the importance of soil as a basis for human economy, and the great chasm between what science tells us about soil’s role and the existing inadequate policies for soil management that has lead to a soil crisis. We will discuss the ways in which our current economic and political models of mass production have severed the link between communities and the soil, how politicians and policy makers are reacting, and how a new circular system might integrate soil management better.

Thank you to YLAD Living Soils for making this episode possible.

YLAD Living Soils is an Australian owned company formed to supply sustainable biological, organic and humus compost fertility products and programs that support the natural balance of the physical, chemical and biological aspects of the soil, lessening the reliance on conventional chemical fertilser inputs. Find more on their website.

Photo by Maurice Chédel / CC BY

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We’ve had a bad track record, at least in the west, with taking care of our soils, because even though our entire existence is completely locked into the soil, the link between soil and human economy is very rarely discussed. As an economist, could you give us some background into the history of our relationship with the soil and explain to us this link?

Robin Murray: Humankind has always had very close relations with the soil, but one of its problems is, as it develops, the tendency has been for a rupture to grow between them. So, one of the great divisions – we always talk about class divisions – well one of the huge divisions of human history is between cities and the country. If you take the great empires, one thesis is that empires have to feed themselves, and therefore they draw on their immediate environments in order to feed their central cities. But the tendency has been for them to deplete the areas around them so that gradually the quality of the soil decreases; and so they have to expand the empire in order to get to new places. So there’s a kind of diminishing returns that sets in and is one of the forces for them to go further and further afield in order to get both the food, but also the raw materials, and so on, necessary for it. And after a bit, to actually keep control of such a vast empire means larger armies and therefore they have to be fed, and it’s a cycle, which suddenly explodes. They get weakened, and a new empire starts up again. Or it just breaks open – as was the case in Europe after the end of the Roman Empire. It just broke up into smaller areas that had a different relation to the soil.

There are two exceptions to this pattern: one is China, and the second is Egypt. In the case of Egypt, why that was not affected in the same way is that their human waste was fed back and replenished the soil around them, mainly through the impacts of the floods, and the way the Nile flooded everything. And in China it was much more explicit: the human waste was gathered and has always, traditionally, been then used for fertilisation. And of course, in the early modern era here the same was true: in Britain, Cheshire and Hertfordshire became very fertile areas. And this was because of night soil, which was taken from the cities to the countryside.

And you could say that the WC was one of the big forces to rupture that connection between the human waste and soil fertility. So you’ve got the rupture growing so that now, as we all know, many people in the towns don’t know what a chicken looks like, or where milk comes from. And this is a terrible, terrible rupture. And at the moment, it’s not just the WC that stands between the humans of the town and the countryside; it is also supermarkets and these long chains of food distribution, which are also cutting it down. And so the question is, how to reconnect the two? Because they are connected – they are connected. We may not be aware of it, but we are part of the cycle. And if we deplete the soil because we take the nutrients from it without returning them to that place, we then either lose them, destroy them, put them in the wrong place, whatever… If we destroy the cycle between them – the cycle within which humans live – then, just like the Roman Empire, we will collapse from within.

In the past, we have tended to see the link as very much one where the earth is a source to be used – to be extracted from. Some people call this “natural capital”, and that we’ve been running down our natural capital because we haven’t been thinking how to maintain it. And in that sense, I think it’s been a bit-piece in the human economic drama. Whereas I think what is now being recognised is that they are very much more interconnected. The human economy – the contemporary economy – is going through enormous changes, and it’s moving from the twentieth century period of mass production to a much more complex, information-centred form of production and distribution.

Some people have called this, and I myself have called this, Post-Fordism. Fordism was the mass production, but we’ve now gone way beyond Ford. I don’t think I would call it “Google-ism” either, but it’s a quite different model. And this has great significance for our relationship with materials and with the soil; so that instead of looking at things relatively simply as linear flows, we are looking at them with much greater complexity. And as we see things more complexly, we see that, actually, the soil and earth fits into more complex systems, and cannot just be treated as an input, which is then producing an output.

I do think, as you say, that there is a change going on and people are beginning to realise the importance of managing the soil in a sustainable way.

RM: Yes, and as you may know I worked a lot in fair trade here, and one of the things I’ve learned – which has been a really profound experience – is that we have a nut company, which is called Liberation Nuts, and it’s owned by the nut farmers. And the ones who do cashews are from Kerala in India, and they’ve almost become our educators, because they come from a Gandhian tradition, and the Gandhian tradition is very much about connecting the human beings and the soil. They send us reading, and one of them is by, sometimes people call him Ghandi’s economist, which is a man called Kumarappa. And he said we have to deeply respect the soil and what it produces, and how we think about these two things. That whole Gandhian principle of changing yourself and then changing what is around you, and making sure that your technology is under your control and not controlling you – that was a voice that was drowned out by the period of mass production, in my view.

Now I think we’ve actually come to the other way, which I think is the Gandhian approaches, which our Indian colleagues follow. A striking example of that is with the Amish in North America. If you go to an Amish farm, there are no tractors and everything is done organically, and what is so striking is that this pre-modern form that the Amish have: regularly the productivity of their soil came out the highest in North America.

So these practices, but when married with modern information and communication technology – that’s the point, it’s not just to keep it like that – this is a very powerful recipe for thinking in a different way about how to produce the food for ten billion people. And I think you might say that the next revolution – the next agricultural, green revolution – is not going to be about seeds and plants and GM crops and so on, it is to be about the soil. And if we think of the soil as the object for revolution, through all these different means, then I think we’ve got a light in front of us to which we can direct our energy.

Do you feel that influencers, such as policy makers and politicians, realise the importance of soil when they approach waste management practices and agricultural policies?

RM: No. The answer to that from the British perspective and my experience here is that we’re right at the foot of Everest on this one. I’ve been involved for, what, twenty years on the issue of waste. It was very difficult to get waste pushed up the agenda, to get people to think about waste; politicians and indeed the press, and so on. Very difficult. When I started in the mid-nineties, I think our recycling rate was five percent, and it just was not on the radar. Also, to be an official in the local government in the waste department: this was slightly like being in the fire brigade; it was the kind of Siberia, in terms of the hierarchy. And so, how to get people aware of, in this case the negative aspects of waste – landfill, incineration and so on. These all had extremely negative sides, let alone the positive.

So, it took five years for us in this country to move to a point where it became a national issue, and it became a national issue very much because of the negative sides of the issues around – particularly about incineration. So always, and I think it’s been true of the environmental movement more generally, but very often (like with Rachel Carson), it is the negative effects which then get people involved. And we have to then think, “Okay, how could it be different?”

So the first way it happens is always local, because it is the local people who then realise that this is actually affecting them. And that is the basis, then, for saying there has to be some other alternative, and out of that, then, becomes an interest; but the next interest is in some form of recycling. But the way in which both the traditional offices, and to some extent the politicians, have then thought, is they thought “okay, well how do we prevent this from getting into landfill or, indeed, incinerators?” and they then have these targets for recycling – but actually (it’s a little bit like supply-push), they don’t really think “what is this going to be used for?” they just want to keep it out of their residual waste statistics; usually because there’s an increasing bit of a punishment for them in financial terms.

The idea that, actually, in relation to organic waste, that it is actually precious, and that this is a resource which you must produce with quality as if you are a supplier; that you’re actually responsible for the quality of your output…We want everything that one rescues from the waste to maintain not just it’s original quality, but all the energy and labour that’s gone into it – like rubber tires have been very well used for making basketball courts; glass has been used as a very good filtering mechanism – that’s an upcycling. And in my experience of much of the waste industry, the waste politics, and the waste management by public officials – this still (in the older generation) has yet to penetrate. The younger ones – this is who we found are the potential agents for change – they young ones, who are part of the new generation, some of them see it much more ecologically. They see themselves as, kind of like farmers of waste, as stewards of waste – and not of “waste” but they are what we might call “nutrient managers”, in relation to the organics side.

But still, you’ve got the silos of waste management, the silos of agriculture; very little do they meet, very little do they meet. And in Britain there has been more connection on the paper side, than there has been on the soil side. Soil and biowaste is still very much in the back seat here, and not even the Co2 implications of composting has been adequately taken on board – they do not become part of the discussion. So, my answer to you on that one is: there is still some way to go.

In order to affect change and influence policy makers and politicians, how do we act? Do we focus on local or national campaigns and debates?

RM: Well, I think that the way in which these big changes – because this is a big industrial change, certainly on the waste side, and possibly with agriculture there are certain similarities, certainly with the big industrial farms – when you’re changing, it always changes at the margins. This is where it happens first, because the big forces of the old system are not as strong. And so you get it coming up from the base, and I think especially in Europe and North America it has been the community movement that has, since the mid-seventies, really led the way in this. And then what happens is that the first impact tends to come at the local level. And local politics has been much more about waste politics than the national level, because it’s immediate and tends to be under municipal, provincial control. But once this happens, we then have a basis for moving it up to the national level.
It’s much easier in places, which have proportional representation, because, then groups (either green groups or specific groups around waste issues) can then get a representation politically. And this is why Germany, for example, has been one of the leaders in terms of establishing very much more satisfactory types of recycling or nutrient management – if you like, a new circular economy. I think this is because they have, not only proportional representation, but they have very strong Lambda, so that there’s considerable decentralisation. So, some of these Lambda, reflecting the work of the movements, then put these things into practice. And the results can then be seen, and they begin to join up, and then they are a force at the national level, which has to content politically with the interests of the old systems.

That’s what’s happened on the energy side, and it is amazing now that that is cross party. It started with the Greens, then the Social Democrats, and then the Christian Democrats took it on, and took the lead because they see the advantage, in this case, of the energy system for all sorts of interests who they represent, because it’s a distributed system. So local villagers and local farmers, and so on, all have an interest in that new system. The same thing is needed on the waste side: we have to re-integrate it and distribute the interest in this new system.

As you said at the beginning, these are big industrial changes we need to make in how we run things, waste management wise, or agriculturally. We’re essentially talking about a paradigm shift from our current economy to a more circular one – and do you think this new distributed economy will be able to integrate soil health and management better?

RM: Well, in principle I think it should. Amongst the features of the new economy, one is what we economists call the movement from supply-push to demand-pull; that instead of producing lots of stuff and then trying to persuade people to buy it, you’re starting actually from the people and thinking how do you supply all the different things that different people want. So, you’ve gone beyond the mass. Now, the moment that you introduce the circular, you realise that we can’t just stop at human demand because you’ve got to think of it as part of a cycle. And if we look at our demands on the production process like that: i.e. not pushing out, but thinking “right, how do we pull it round in a sustainable way?” we then get very different questions. And certainly when it comes to waste, we’re not asking not how to get rid of the waste, but how to ensure that it goes round, how do we pull it round in a way that is sustainable and enriching. That’s one difference.

The second one is that information technology has allowed us to manage very much more complex systems – that is one of its great features. And what has happened is, instead of trying to control everything from the centre, we’ve got the development of what is referred to as “distributed systems”. The German renewable energy economy is a wonderful example, how instead of having a power station, you have multiple power stations – people’s homes become a power station, the farmer’s part of a power station. There are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of power stations, which are then aggregated through smart grids and various other mechanisms, so that they produce as much, if not more, than a single power station. This is a completely different model.

Now, traditionally, farming and agriculture has been a distributed system. I grew up on a small hill farm, and the valley was full of small hill farmers. What has happened, particularly on the more fertile areas, is that farms have become larger and larger as the twentieth century mass production model is then applied to agriculture. But I think we are moving now into the possibility of a much more distributed system of agriculture and food growing, and soil care – that is what is possible. It’s not going to happen, it is a possibility, which would in that sense be similar to the energy systems developing in Germany, as against the UK.

And a third very interesting modern feature is that the so-called consumer is becoming part of production; we’re becoming prosumers. Well, we know about this with food, we actually have to cook our own food (or at least, we did have). But in more and more areas, whether it be health and how we look after our health: many of the modern issues, like chronic disease, like in diabetes ninety-eight and a half percent of all treatment is done by the person who has got diabetes or their family. The same is true in education; the same is true in transport. So now people are having to design systems so that we’re all actively involved. By the way, the computer of course is a wonderful example; computers are the equivalent of the textile mills of the nineteenth century, but in this case we’ve all got one. So, it’s a highly distributed system, and once you get people involved, then you have to think, “Right, what can they contribute? How should they contribute? How do they play a part in this increasingly complex system?” It’s a very exciting area. So, when we come to food and to soil: how do we ensure that the grievous divide between the city and the country does not become the chasm that is threatened, but is actually re-integrated so that we all play a part in this particular process?

We’ll get into detail about the ways we can organise our ecosystems and the strategies for change in part two, but to round off this part of the discussion, can you give me some examples of how people can play a part in this system, and the opportunities you see the paradigm being changed?

RM: Well, I think part of the food movement has been about this. So, the movement for urban agriculture is gathering and is stronger in some placed than others, but, the development of gardens on roofs – is it in North Korea, which is particularly strong on this? But Nicaragua is another example of where this has happened. But it’s happening now more and more, and San Francisco is strong on this. We have strong movements, and a strong tradition, of allotments here. So I think gardening, even though it may no be producing food, actually brings people in touch with the fact that you cannot treat soil as if it’s a machine; that you have to do this delicately. So, everyone is learning about this.

I think on the food side there are city farms and a big city farm movement, and the community garden movement here is growing. So I think there are very interesting ways in which that is happening. And then there are all sorts of ways in which farms are being opened up to those in the city – both to go to stay there and work there, or at least to visit. So I think that’s one of the big areas for reconnection.

Drought Special #2: A Mulching Guide for Farms and Gardens

This episode corresponds to Lesson 1 of our online course.

In this fourteenth episode, we’re speaking to agronomist and soil culture expert Bob Shaffer, and soil scientist and professor at UC Berkeley, Stephen Andrews about drought-proofing your farm or garden using mulch. The experts discuss best practices for choosing and applying mulch for water retention, the most suitable irrigation systems, the cost factor in drought-proof and area, and much more.

Thank you to Kellogg Garden products for making this episode possible.

Whether you’re starting a garden from scratch, sprucing up your planting beds, or mulching your favorite fruit tree…we have a natural and organic premium garden soil, potting soil, mulch, or fertilizer to help your project reach its best potential. Kellogg Garden products have been dedicated to meeting the needs of gardeners for over 85 years, and we continue to provide products you can trust! Visit our website here.

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EM: Hi Bob and Stephen, thanks for coming on the show. Now to start us off, I think it’s important that we distinguish between compost and mulch – for those out there that might not know the difference exactly. Stephen – can you please tell me what that difference is?

SA: Mulch is defined as a ground cover, so anything that’s covering the surface of the soil. And we don’t think of mulch as something that we actually incorporate into the soil, which we do with compost, so it’s important to recognise that compost is a soil amendment, and that mulch is a ground cover.

EM: Right, okay, so that’s the difference between compost and mulch – but is it true that you can also use compost as a kind of mulch as well?

SA: Yes, compost can be a form of mulch; it can be used as a ground cover. But often, and my recommendation would be (at least from the home gardener perspective), that you use compost and mulch together as a unit – as part of a system of protecting the soil. And that you would apply compost first, and then, to protect the properties of that compost, the living biology of that compost, you would want to apply mulch on top of that. And that would insulate the compost so it’s able to do its best work in contact with the soil.

EM: Mh hm

BS: Yes, very well put. And let me just say that, although I agree entirely that mulches and composts are different, however: mulches from woody materials or grassy materials, do become broken down in particle size, come in intimate contact with the sand, silt and the clay in soil, and become humus and/or soil organic matter over a longer period of time. So mulches, actually, are very effective at increasing the soil organic matter, or what can be called also the humus content of soils, even though they break down very slowly.

EM: Right so it acts a bit like a compost as well. And Bob, a lot of farmers in California are getting ready for the summer and are thinking of ways to combat the drought. Can you tell me what the key considerations would be when choosing a mulch to protect against drought – what should farmers know when choosing a mulch?

BS: Well, with drought in mind, or with wanting to have more water infiltrate into the soil – be held in the soil; one of the things that I do on farms is raise cover crops.

EM: Right – and just to jump in there – I just want to clarify for those who don’t know: a cover crop is a type of plant grown to suppress weeds, help build and improve soil, and control diseases and pests. They’re also sometimes called “green manure” and “living mulches.”

BS: Yes, and often times cover crops aren’t looked at as a form of mulch, or a source of mulch, but for me on farms, especially on larger acreages, it really is the practical and economical way to get mulch. Now, I’ll say this: with cover crops, I can choose the species that I want, I can plant them; and then manage the residues above ground, the green tissue, to where it’s a little older, and where it has a little more lignin. And then, when I mow this material and lay it on the soil surface, it has a longer half-life because it’s been lignified; and then, maybe most importantly, sort of secretly or quietly going on, is the decomposition of the roots.

So, the roots add to the humus level, the development in soil, the mulch laying on top and slowly breaking down…and between those two – both the roots decomposing and the mulch on top – we get a significant development of structure, water holding, water infiltration, and healthier roots to reach out to the water and utilise the water – by simply using a cover crop technique.

EM: Interesting, so cover crops are definitely a possibility. And perhaps you can list a few other mulches that are ideal for water retention on farms? Will your choice depend on the type of soil you’re working with, or?

BS: Well, it somewhat depends on the soil. I mean, certainly when we have a sandy soil, or light textured soil, mulches are even more desirable. However, mulches apply to all soils. Now, as far as accessing enough material on a farm situation, where we’re talking about maybe…even small acreages; it takes a lot of mulch to cover that three or four inches deep. Sometimes a farm will have access to larger amounts of woodchip, or some type of material that’s appropriate for mulches, but typically I grow the mulch onsite.

EM:  Okay, and is it only water retention that matters when it comes to mulching to fight drought – or are there any other considerations?

BS: Well, to me, again, if I can get more humus developed in soil – and that humus has the ability to hold a very, very large percentage of water…and recalling also that once the water is absorbed by humus, it’s released back to the plant much more easily than the water that is held by clay in the soil. So, my drive on farms for a number of reasons – including water retention and water infiltration into the ground, and then water retention…and released to the plant – is to increase the humus levels in soils.

EM: Amazing. So, yeah, there’s a lot of talk about the importance of humus going on now. And Stephen, let’s talk about gardens now. What would you say is important for gardeners to keep in mind when choosing a mulch?

SA: Yeah, where cover crops are an excellent application for farming in the residential and landscape setting, that’s probably not as practical because people would look at it as kind of weedy, or that sort of thing. So, using an organic form of mulch, such as recycled wood material, for example, or straw, cardboard, newspaper…these are all forms of mulch material that can be used in a residential setting. And I particularly prefer the sheet mulching technique, which is not only good for maintaining moisture within the soil, but also it’s great for weed prevention; it’s great for keeping the temperature moderated within the soil, and also it aids in the decomposition process to increase that soil organic matter content, which is so important. A one percent increase in soil organic matter content quadruples the water holding capacity of the soil.

So, sheet mulching is a very effective technique, and it’s kind of like making lasagne. You’d apply a one to two inch layer of compost, lay down some newspaper, straw or cardboard in a double overlapping layer; apply another couple of inches of compost on top of that, and then at least three inches of recycled wood mulch to protect that whole lasagne package that you’d created. And you can actually plant directly into that.

EM: Mh hm, okay…

SA: Now, three inches of mulch is particularly important, because we really want to maintain that moisture content within the compost, and the decomposing cardboard or straw, or whatever it is. A lot of people don’t recognise it, but mulch itself – while it acts like a great sponge, and can hold a tremendous volume of water – it also can lose a lot of water to evapotranspiration.

EM: That’s actually an important point I wanted to bring up. For those of you who don’t know, evapotranspiration is when something, in this case mulch, loses water through transpiration and evaporation. So, how should you combat this?

SA: So, knowing what size material to use is very important, and there was a very good study done by the University of California Cooperative Extension several years ago that looked this. And it was actually found that yard waste – or what we call green waste – mulch is a very good source for home gardeners. It holds a tremendous amount of water, and it does a very good job at slowly decomposing and adding organic matter, or humus Bob was mentioning, back to the soil.

So, sheet mulching and using something like green waste, or yard waste, is a very good way to go…or recycled woodchips. And those woodchips should be somewhere between the two and three inch size range, in order to optimise the moisture holding capacity, and also the…we need at least three inches.

EM: Right, so three is the key. Is it the same for farms, Bob?

BS: Yeah, more or less. Three or four inches have been shown through many trials to be an effective layer for mulch.

EM: Great, and I’d like to talk a little bit and talk about that study you mentioned, Stephen. We know from that study that some mulches, such as yard waste applied 3 inches thick, can hold up to 2.51 inches per foot of water – which is pretty substantial. And it warned that sometimes mulches can soak up the rainwater and sprinkler water and it lose that water before it gets a chance to reach the soil underneath. What were the reasons for this happening – I presume it has to do with the amount of mulch applied?

SA: Well, that’s…yeah. It had to do with the size of mulch, the kind of mulch…yeah, it was kind of a complicated set of things, but the size and type were the two key variables there that were related to the moisture loss.

EM: Mh-hm.

BS: Yes, this is actually an important topic, because either on the smaller level – or on the larger level – mulches can interfere with light rains or light irrigations. I’ve put mulch on macadamia and on avocado trees, and a lot of times, in a dry farm system where they get light rains and the trees have trained their roots up into the upper layers of soil, when we go in and mulch rapidly – come in and just put three or four inches of mulch down – it seriously can set back the vigour of these trees, because they don’t get those light rains anymore.

Now, over a longer period of time, the system will balance out, the tree size will change, and the root structures will change and the mulch will become effective. So, one of the things that I do if I’m going to go to mulch is, I’m going to question…mulch a new area…I’m going to question what is my irrigation capacity, if any? What is my rainfall pattern? And try to keep from stressing the crop by providing more irrigation to the crop if I need to in the interim period while there is transition and adjustment to the new mulches.

EM: Okay, but I presume that adding extra moisture would be tough to do during the drought, no?

BS: Ah, it’s all doable. It’s all doable. And once again, in some instances, and in particular on some farms, taking a transition instead of a sudden change, tow, three inches of mulch, may be a good idea – depending on the circumstances.

EM: Right. So, what type of irrigation would be best suited for this type of situation, then?

SA: What I think people should be thinking about is drip irrigation and going with some form of sub-surface, rather than having a sprinkler type of system. And that’s the kind of irrigation that they were looking at in that study that looked at loss of moisture from mulch. So, I think folks should be looking at drip – so that the drip is actually below the mulch level and it’s making contact directly with the soil; that folks are making sure that they are monitoring their drip system and they’re adjusting it as the plant material grows; that they’re adjusting the flow rates based on the size and the developmental stage of the plant material; and, to the greatest extent possible, that they get that moisture into the soil versus getting it into the air through a sprinkler, where a lot of it is being lost.

EM: Alright, excellent, so a drip irrigation system is definitely the right choice, especially for drought. But going back to the mulch itself now: is there any types of mulch you would advise against using?

SA: Well, here in California, with drought we’re also concerned about fire. And it is possible for mulches to be quite flammable. Things like gorilla hair, for example, would not be a recommended form of mulch to use. I prefer recycled woodchip material that’s come from pallets or from construction projects, where the wood is clean, and then it’s been shredded up. Bark chips, for example, redwood bark chips would not be preferred – they tend to be easily floated away…. There was just a recent fire in Massachusetts, actually, at a wedding reception where someone threw away a cigarette into the mulch and it actually ignited and caught the vinyl siding of a building.

So, there are these situations where that happens, and there was, when we think about mulch in a residential setting, and in California where we have urban wild land fire, selecting the right kind of mulch, and how close it’s being used to a building, is important to keep in mind.

EM: Right…

BS: Also, I would say that with mulches, I’ve seen red cedar, or other highly aromatic type woods, if used fresh as chip around shallow rooted plants – I’ve seen them damage shallow rooted plants if it is a very aromatic type of mulch material. Also, I guess I would be cautious about mulches that came from plants that were chopped or chipped off of likely contaminated soils – this would be around some highways, or just some situations where a lot of herbicide or pesticide is used, and then we don’t like to take the mulch chopped from that area.

SA: Yeah, I would whole-heartedly agree with that. You need to know the source of the mulch. You need to know your mulch provider. And you should never be afraid to ask questions about what went into the mulch, the mulching process, whether it was treated with any kind of material. And this is particularly true in a residential setting if you’re using coloured mulches – you want to know what the provider used as the colouring agent.

EM: Okay, great. Brilliant tips, very useful to know. And let’s focus now on the strategy: would there be certain areas to priorities over others, or certain plants to protect first? Bob, say, in farms?

BS: Well, I would say that mulches are probably most appropriate where there is projected to be a lot of water loss from the soil, either because of low soil organic matter levels, or a lighter textured soil, or a certain drainage or exposure. Always when we’re talking about using onsite grown mulch, if that’s in conjunction with an actively growing crop, we want to make sure that we’ve picked the cover crop that we’re going to chop over to mulch carefully, as we don’t want the cover crop competing with the crop.

In terms of where we would apply mulches first, like I say, I think on lighter textured soils, on exposures where it’s particularly hot, or on slopes where we’re subject to losing soil – soil erosion, sheeting off the surface…so mulches are very effective at lowering the potential for erosion.

EM: Great, and Stephen, do you want answer from a gardens and landscaping point of view?

SA: If you want to take a strategic approach, I would look for those areas that are most weed-infested, or the areas that you’ve got little planting in at the moment, and focus on starting the mulch those first, and then being able to move in with California native plants or drought tolerant plants into those areas; making sure that you’ve got the appropriate amount of mulch, that three inches that’s going to help to keep the weeds under control and keep that moisture in the ground. And it is very effective on any kind of a slop situation for controlling erosion.

So, my strategic approach would be: think sheet mulching; think about it applying to the areas that you’re not heavily landscaped, or underutilising, or that you’re going to transition with plant material; then go to using plant material that is drought tolerant – particularly using California native plants, or wherever you are, the native plants that are particular to your watershed. And that would be the approach I would recommend.

EM: And, how much, or how often, should you mulch, and would it be good to blend the mulches, or?

SA: Well, from the residential perspective, really you don’t have to change the mulch up all that much. Once you apply it, if it’s particularly within that two-and-a-half to three-inch size range, that’s going to slowly decompose over time. If you’re wanting to freshen up the colour of it, or over time it’s going to oxidise in the sun and you want to be able to brighten that up, you can do a little top-dressing of an additional inch or so a year – that’s about what will get processed over the course of a year.

If you’re going to be adding compost as part of that process, you need to peel the mulch back, apply the compost, and then return the mulch back on top of that. It’s very important that home gardeners remember not to incorporate mulch directly into the soil; that compost is what we want to be incorporating into the soil, or leaving on the soil surface. But, woodchips – those kinds of things – should not be incorporated directly into the soil, so that we don’t cause a nitrogen drag situation.

BS: Well yes, those are great points, and I think the incorporation of mulch into the soil is a problem often times that I run into, either on farms or in gardens. One way or another, people can think that it’s better off to incorporate these materials, and they’re too woody. And, as Stephen pointed out, we can start to tie up nitrogen by incorporating too much woody, high carbon stuff too quickly.

EM: That’s an interesting point about the nitrogen – that it could possibly get tied up. Would you recommend replacing the nitrogen in the soil in that case, via fertilizers, say?

SA: Well, from a residential perspective, during drought conditions you never want to fertilise. Fertiliser stimulates new growth. New growth requires additional water, and in a drought condition when we don’t have that available water, that’s going to put the plants under tremendous stress, which will then invite pests…and so we just create this downward kind of spiral within the garden.

So, I would let the compost feed the soil, not the plants. Focus on making sure that the biology in the soil is getting what it needs. It is perfectly capable of moving all the nutrients around, the water around, and making sure the plants get what they need. And as part of that, I recommend that folks have their soil tested to know what they actually have in the ground. The idea of applying fertilisers every two weeks is great marketing, it’s great brainwashing, but it’s not good soil biology – good soil ecology. So, test your soil, know what you already have, and then don’t be fertilising during a drought: be applying compost and let the soil biology do the work of sustaining your plants through the drought conditions.

EM: Right.

BA: Those are great points and good comments. Now, plants, of course, to be most protected, they have their own mechanisms against – protecting against – water loss, and protecting against drought stress. Plants need to have, particularly, potassium and zinc, in addition to all the rest of the essential minerals. But potassium and zinc have a lot to do with how the plant circulates its fluids, and how it protects itself against drought stress, and so….

Yes, testing the soil, but also testing plant tissues is something we do where there’s crops in particular, because we’re raising crops for food, so we’re very interested in making sure that the crops have good access to minerals. Not over-fertilising is important, and by testing the soil, and then also testing the plant, we can determine what is missing, what is going to be provided by compost…. And, for example, compost will increase the K level – the potassium levels – and the phosphate levels; typically compost does not increase, or mulches do not increase the calcium levels in plants. And again, the calcium, along with boron and copper, help to make the plant harder and more resistant to pests, and also have a healthier root system that can be larger and healthier and pick up more water in the soil.

So, certainly anytime that we’re talking about farm, or garden, we want to make sure that we’re asking our questions sort of through the filter of all three primary cultural practices, which is: organic matter management – that includes compost, cover crops and mulches; mineral management, or what I would call, more accurately, mineral balancing in soil; and then also, tillage management. We look at the whole soil ecology, and ask ourselves: what will the compost and mulches provide? What is my soil sample, my tissue sample, showing? And what minerals might I need to replace to increase the plant’s ability to resist drought, and to make the root system so that it’s particularly large and healthy, and able to uptake water effectively, and to have microbiology on the roots that increase the plant’s ability to uptake water very strongly?

EM: That’s very interesting, very cool. So people should definitely test their soils first of all.

BS: Definitely.

SA: Absolutely.

EM: And finally, lets talk about the cost-factor: Bob, could you tell me roughly how much it would cost to drought-proof an acre of land, say?

BS: This is a great question. However, we have to know where we start. I work on some soils that have five percent soil organic matter in Northern California; I work on some soils that have one half of one percent. And those two soils could have different textures, meaning the amount of sand, silt and clay. Particularly clay in a soil will cause the soil – a lot of soil – to hold more water. So it’s a hard question to answer arbitrarily. On the average, I would say you’re going to spend, maybe less than one hundred dollars per acre for a cover crop; it’s going to cost me thirty-five dollars an acre to mow that cover crop; it’s going to cost me a little bit for seed – or the seed that was a hundred dollars per acre; there could be a little other costs in there possibly for assundries.

EM: Right okay, so under 100 dollars for the cover crop itself, 35 dollars to mow the cover crop, and possibly a little bit more for assundries – so on average it’s roughly a hundred and thirty dollars per acre to use a cover crop. And Stephen, finally, what’s the rough cost estimate for a home garden?

SA: Yeah, so for the home gardener, it’s generally, I would say, between thirty-nine cents and seventy-nine cents a square foot. Again, it depends on where you’re starting from. And that thirty-nine to seventy-nine cents per square foot is for three inches of a recycled wood mulch being applied. And the largest cost component in that square footage is the transportation cost. So, if you can find a local source of great recycled wood mulch, or yard waste material that can be transported, you know, for very little, then that cost is going to drop significantly. But the largest single component in the cost for the mulch is the actual transportation of it from one place to another.

But three inches is what you’d want to shoot for, and generally speaking in California it’s somewhere between thirty-nine and seventy-nine cents per square foot. Now, if you were to multiply it out for an acre, it looks like an astronomical amount of money, but remember we’re talking about residential garden, home landscape situation, so…thirty-nine to seventy-nine cents is about what it would cost.

EM: Alright, that’s great. And, well, we covered the basics now and unfortunately that’s all we have time for today, so thanks Bob and Stephen for coming on the show.

BS: Certainly

SA: You’re very welcome.

EM: Alright goodbye now!

SA: Bye!

BS: Okay, bye now, take care.