Reinvention starts from within
By Angus Deans
Many of our clients are earnestly looking for the “way” to perform their agricultural activities in a more healthy fashion for their farm environment. As such they are seeking answers from outside of themselves – usually by listening to or watching podcasts and webinars, by reading regenerative or organic / biodynamic style literature, engaging ‘experts’, or attending ‘alternative’ trainings and conferences. We may favour one of these methods or use any combination of, or all of, them!
To embark on this journey we have first identified that there is something that feels “off” about how we have been performing our growing until that point in time. Then we start enquiring into “what else is possible?”
The interesting conundrum in this space is that typically we have been farming, whether cropping or grazing, in a mechanical fashion; and now we are interested in doing things in a better way – in a mechanical fashion! There is a saying out there that you cannot solve a problem with the same manner of thinking that created the problem in the first place!
Notice I said the “same manner of thinking”. This is of utmost importance to our understanding here. We have been trained to think of our farming activities as a job, a mechanical process that we go through step by step in logical sequence to achieve, hopefully, the desired result (weather permitting) year in year out. This mechanical manner of acting creates a mechanical operator who we view as often as not robotically. Day in day out he/she should complete the required tasks because they are necessary without real concern for that person’s health, wellbeing or dreams. Somewhat depressing?
And that is how our land, and our productive outlook is looking when we are first driven to consider whether there could be a better way of doing our farming – somewhat depressed!
So what do we do then? We go looking for the ‘new but nicer’ way to do things -mechanically! We ask what practices we can change to make things better. “Same manner of thinking” stuff.
It takes an awful lot of courage to imagine that perhaps it is actually our manner of BEING that may be at fault. Once farmers were revered as the producers of the very sustenance that kept people both alive and healthy. They were artisans. They understood that their soil needed rest and the influence of various types of animals upon it even if it was arable. They were more in tune with, and connected to, their environment. The land was a living entity. Did it always work for them? Of course not. Mother Nature has a way of keeping us humble.
Nowadays with conventional mechanical farming farmers are no longer revered for production of good quality food. Typically they are regarded as producers of commodities. As such the farmers themselves are perceived as yet another consumable – and that is sadly how they often treat themselves, and their land.
To effectively change from conventional agriculture to a more regenerative style of farming requires us to reinvent how we think about ourselves, and our connection to the land we have stewardship over.
We come to know ourselves as an integral part of the environment and to feel how it would like to be treated. We also learn to start treating ourselves with the same respect and care – for our landscape about us is merely a reflection of our own inner landscape.
To do the right thing by the land and the plants and animals thereon, and the environment that encompasses it we have to come from a profound love. A love so profound that is sees no differentiation between any aspects of the Whole. For what we do to anything else we do also to ourselves.
With this new way of thinking we can change not just our own small world surrounded by the boundary fence of our property, but we can inspire change in the whole world. As numbers of such pioneers grow our climate will change, and people’s lives will change. We will bring flourishing health and vitality back into existence here in this beautiful land. We will understand that what we see on the outer is merely a reflection of that which is within us and we will dream up new ways of being in response to that. Are our actions taking us closer to where we are desirous of being? Or further away from?
