Keywords

Introduction

The wheatbelt of Western Australia (WA) marks a disruptive force on an ancient landscape, an upheaval wrought by social and agricultural policies of the twentieth century that enrolled the dispossessive ecologies of sheep and wheat against the Noongar people and their country (Mayes, 2018). Tony Hughes-d’Aeth describes the wheatbelt’s creation as nothing less than “a vast and almost total destruction of a pre-existing lifeworld”—so stark that it is visible from space (Hughes-d’Aeth, 2017, p. 3). Its fragile soils have been subject to relentless tillage and burning. Salt creeps slowly to the surface in the absence of deep-rooted vegetation, evoking a bleak sense of “life trying to die or death trying to live” (Hughes-d’Aeth, 2012, p. 26). These scars only hint at a profound and lasting trauma that is at once ecological, spiritual, social and cultural. This trauma, rooted in the settler-colonial logic of capitalist agriculture that exploits the earth and people as resources for endless extraction, is a historical fact and colonial present—sustained through structural imperatives and technoscientific imaginaries that mobilize farmers, economies, ecologies and knowledge systems in its service.

This chapter asks what transformational possibilities might emerge in this seemingly unpromising landscape. Exploring the grounded practices of a broad-acre farming couple and their experiments with new ways of knowing and farming in the wheatbelt, I argue for the possibility of a less anthropocentric agriculture to emerge from within the temporalities of global supply chains. While their farming practices are imbricated in the messy realities and destructive tendencies of contemporary capitalism, and thus enmeshed in contradictions and susceptible to co-optation, Di and Ian Haggerty’s farming practice nevertheless suggests ways for resisting the hegemonic epistemologies of commodity agriculture and reveals something of the incomplete and “unstable commitments” of supply-chain capitalism (Tsing, 2009, p. 151). These instabilities of capitalism’s “blasted landscapes” are consequential, for, as Anna Tsing cautions, “progress still controls us even in tales of ruination”, and yet it is “not the only plan for making worlds” (Tsing, 2015, p. 21).

Regenerating at Scale

Di and Ian grew up on multi-generational farms in the wheatbelt but have worked together and separately in a range of agricultural businesses from the Kimberley to the southern reaches of Western Australia. In the early 1990s, they purchased a small parcel of degraded, inexpensive land next to Di’s parents’ farm. Cracks appeared in their own farming practices during the millennium drought, prompting a shift away from conventional agriculture. Today they seek to redress well-rehearsed fault lines of commodity agriculture: intensive chemical inputs, pesticide and herbicide resistance, declining soil fertility and crop nutrition, land desertification and salinization, diminished human health, biodiversity loss and climate change. The Haggertys, however, are motivated not by yield but by the regeneration of lifeworlds in the wheatbelt and beyond in ways that call into question the temporalities of “a productionist ethos that subjects soil care and … human–soil relations, to the extraction of future economic value” (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2015, p. 698).

The Haggertys are not necessarily striving to shorten supply chains or localize markets, though during the COVID crisis they began supplying a local miller and baker located 190 kilometres away in Perth. Their production system looks quite conventional—they use logistics infrastructure, agricultural machinery and financial systems similar to other wheatbelt producers. Their non-mulesed wool sells at a premium price in Europe, but their grain mostly enters undifferentiated global supply chains. The Haggertys’ farming enterprise now spans 65,000 acres through purchasing or leasing adjoining farmland as it becomes available. Scale enables them to bring more people onto the farm and teach other ways of feeling and doing farming. As Ian explains: “you take some time and you explain … what you’re looking at and what you’re feeling [and] what they think, what they see”. As such, farming at scale is a deliberate strategy to “build that community of connectedness with the Country”. Ian adds: “If you haven’t inherited [land], it’s really hard to get the capital, but … there’s lots of really good people out there that would love to get connected with the land and be farmers that haven’t got a chance”. Farming at scale also enables the Haggertys to observe and respond to how ecological processes such as water and nutrient cycling work across the landscape rather than on individual parcels of land. Newly acquired land, usually degraded and often saline, allows them to experiment across diverse conditions and soils.

Temporalities of Regeneration

Despite its popularity in alternative food and farming movements, regenerative agriculture resists definition, as revealed by a recent review of journal articles and practitioner websites (Newton et al., 2020). Scholar and regenerative farmer Charles Massy, whose 2017 book Call of the Reed Warbler has been influential in shaping the discourse surrounding regenerative agriculture in Australia, defines it as a mode of farming that enables landscapes to renew themselves. At the heart of “renewal” sit the epistemological dimensions of agriculture. Massy contrasts the “organic” or ecological mind of regenerative farming with the “mechanical mind” of Enlightenment thinking that “paved the way for the rise of Capitalism” and its handmaiden settler-colonial agriculture (Massy, 2017, p. 40). Maria Puig de la Bellacasa argues that the mechanistic epistemologies and technoscientific temporalities of productivism follow a “linear imperative of progress” but also a “restless futurity” that continually generates crisis and seeks out “hope for salvation” (2015, p. 694). In the face of the existential threat of climate change, Matthew Kearnes and Lauren Rickards observe how regenerative agriculture and its commitments to soil ecology and carbon sequestration are laden with a “promissory logic and … high hopes for a brighter future” (2020, p. 71).

Many scholars caution that the microbial turn in soil science, even within regenerative agriculture, is not inured to instrumentalist capture. Emerging scientific interests in soil life promise much for reimagining other soil futures yet “retain a productivist orientation” that risks commodifying biotic worlds (Granjou & Phillips, 2019, p. 412). Krzywoszynska is hopeful about the possibilities of a probiotic soil consciousness for more resilient futures but remains alert to how putting soil biota to work fails as a disruptive force if it replicates “the same processes of alienation and exploitation that characterize the relations between capital and human labor” (2020, p. 231). If regenerative agriculture merely harnesses microbial life as a new frontier of cheap labour for productivist accumulation, it simply remakes soil life as a commodity in existing “circuits of production and consumption” (Patel & Moore, 2018, p. 23). In this context, it is perhaps unsurprising that Nestlé, the world’s largest food and drink conglomerate, is celebrating its investment in regenerative farming and its efforts at product reformulation to lower the carbon footprint of its processed foods (Nestlé, 2021). The revised narrative of progress promised by regenerative agriculture and circulating within global food regimes reveals an ecological modernism that upholds “the rationality of the market and the economic grammar of yield, consumer demand, ethical consumption, and neoliberal subjectivity” (Mikulak, 2013, p. 46).

Nonetheless, the processes of landscape renewal called for by Massy and the Haggertys operate according to a rhythm not easily subsumed into the input–output linearity of productivism, representing a fundamental “clash of temporalities” between understanding soil as a “slowly renewable entity” and putting it to work as an “accelerated technological solution” that preserves the futurity of productivist agriculture (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2015, p. 699). In her analysis of “soil care” among permaculture and biodynamic practitioners, Puig de la Bellacasa attends to how “care time … is irreducible to productionist time” and offers “an invitation to rearrange and rebalance the relations between a diversity of coexisting temporalities that inhabit the worlds of soil and other interdependent ecologies” (2015, pp 707–709). It is through this lens that I read the Haggertys’ natural-intelligence system as a probiotic practice that feeds into undifferentiated global supply chains and concomitantly seeks to decentre technoscientific temporalities and cultivate webs of multispecies care across landscape functions and scales.

Natural Intelligence as Probiotic Governance

The Haggertys are recognized leaders in an emerging regenerative-farming movement that takes a keen interest in the entanglements of lifeworlds. Their farming practices reflect a “probiotic governance” that Jamie Lorimer describes as “using life to manage life”; these are practices that seek to “transform the dynamics of the ecologies with which they are entangled, working from the bodies of animals out to the planetary concentration and circulation of atmospheric gases” and, in the process, diverge “markedly from the command-and-control logics of modern antibiotic approaches to human and environmental health” (2020, p. 7). The Haggertys’ probiotic practices begin with sowing a diversity of cash crops—wheat, barley, oats, triticale, plus fodder crops—using a conventional no-till drill seeder that injects worm liquid and compost tea brewed on their farm directly into the soil. This microbially active liquid helps seedlings produce a thick rhizosheath that creates a complex root network before their leaves reach out for the sweetness of the sun. Growing deep into sandy soils and acidic subsoils, these roots improve soil structure and aeration while sequestering carbon from the plant’s photosynthetic and respiratory metabolism. Even in low rainfall, they demonstrate remarkable capacity to source minerals, nutrients and water. Barley has proven particularly effective for rehabilitating saline soils. When a paddock is too saline even for barley, the Haggertys plant other salt-tolerant perennial shrubs and trees, providing habitat for insects and birds along with fodder for sheep. The re-emergence of native perennial grasses lying dormant in the soil signals that a paddock is regenerating.

The Haggertys attune themselves to dynamic ecologies circulating between the microbiomes of humans, sheep, soil and even the atmosphere in ways that exist within but also exceed the circuits of capital. Often regarded as a “dead, dormant, or inactive” dumping ground for carbon emissions, the atmosphere is “a habitat with actively reproducing microbial life”, yet it is relatively neglected in regenerative-farming circles (Klein et al., 2016). Di has learned that the atmospheric microbiome comprises bacteria and bioaerosols that, among other things, help clouds to nucleate raindrops, thus attracting rain to an increasingly inhospitable wheatbelt.

The Haggertys nurture radical aspirations to create a substantial corridor of diversified tree plantings that would connect their farm to other large-scale replantings further south, having recently leased more land at the southernmost point on their farm. This ambition requires time, resources and a certain degree of luck in accessing adjacent properties before they are snatched up by land speculators. They aim to cultivate relations of care at individual, regional and planetary scales between terrestrial creatures in need of refuge, forested landscapes and the atmosphere’s unknown microbial communities. This life web of multispecies care allows, Di explains, “all the soil microbes and the insects and the animals and so forth to have a refuge … when the season goes to shit and it doesn’t rain for the right period of time”. Over timescales that may exceed their own lives, the Haggertys imagine how trees might attract rain-making clouds and revitalize the microbial reciprocity of the soil biome, phytobiome and atmosphere. This attentiveness to multi-scalar, creaturely interconnectedness suggests, following Lorimer, how “managing microbiomes becomes a story of making kin across social and species difference” but also across temporalities (2020, p. 222).

Ovine Epistemology and Paddock Thinking

Where the Haggertys differ most from the broader regenerative-farming community is in their unconventional epistemic practices for acknowledging and responding to the more-than-human intelligence of sheep and even paddocks. Their natural-intelligence farming system developed through “hybrid epistemological work” that is informed by scientific literature in climate change, rumen health and soil biology, but also actively decentres mechanistic ways of knowing the world (Kearnes & Rickards, 2020, p. 83). Their unorthodox epistemic practices form an “unspoken discipline” that Ian admits they “don’t normally talk about because it’s not scientifically proven”. The Haggertys have experienced how unorthodox thinking is sometimes denigrated or dismissed as “unscientific spiritual talk” within productivist circles (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2015, p. 708). Far from unscientific, they have developed nuanced epistemic practices for making sense of the land, each in their own way.

Di, who manages the livestock, sees ecological renewal as co-produced through the nested microbiomes of sheep rumen, soil and, she hopes, the humans who eat her food. Her sheep graze and browse on fodder crops, trees and brush planted across the paddocks along with supplements of hay. Ensuring there is native vegetation in every paddock enhances the farm’s biodiversity and the dietary diversity of the flock. Sheep are the first step in a long process of soil rehabilitation, being fed the Haggertys’ own hay to avoid disrupting rumen stability as sheep move between paddocks. Their manure helps spread microbes; their bodies carry and distribute native grass seed. By keeping a self-replacing flock, lambs are exposed in utero to the flavours and nutrients of the paddock; learning to eat alongside their mothers inoculates the lamb’s undeveloped rumen microflora and cultivates an “intense knowledge” of their local environment, says Di. Over time, she has noticed sheep selecting from an increasing diversity of forage: “The animals seem to really blossom in their health, so that opened different thought patterns to us and just that interaction between their gut microbes and then into the soil was a lot better outcome”. Observing the sheep informs Di’s decisions about how to best support the intergenerational transfer of ovine ways of knowing, in turn further developing the epistemic capacities of her sheep.

Being with sheep helps Di enter into a meditative state that opens her mind to the paddock. It took Di years to quieten her rationalist mind and cultivate a more nuanced intention as she stands in the middle of a paddock that feeds into global supply chains. “Too much pressure makes it go hairy”, she explains. “If you’re looking from a personal perspective of greed or whatever else, it’s going to go pear-shaped … It gives you more responsiveness to what’s going on around you instead of just bulldozing your way through.” She acknowledges that her financial stake in the land risks impeding her clarity in listening to what the paddock may reveal in that moment: “there’s some decisions that you’re making—and it is a big business at the end of the day—that you don’t want your own personal bias to influence you. You want to try and be open … The mind can lead you down paths that might not necessarily be for the best”. This “paddock thinking”, as I call it, fosters an epistemological intersubjectivity that acknowledges the land and animals as knowing and challenges Di to resist productivist temporalities and decentre their anthropocentric imperatives.

Ian, who manages the cropping, understands how easy it is to disconnect from the paddock when riding an enormous, air-conditioned tractor for spraying compost tea or harvesting: “in a 24-hour period, you can cover a number of paddocks—big area—and you just roll them all into one. But they’re all different”. He makes a point of jumping out of the tractor at the end of a run to ensure he accounts for these differences: “you’ve got to make a physical, conscious effort to take time out and look at each paddock—each area as an individual—because it’s too easy to bulk it all into one and think ‘oh yeah, while we’re doing that paddock, we’ll just blooming do that one in the middle …’ Two hours later, it’s gone, and what you did is not right for it”. Stepping out of the tractor allows Ian to note the paddock’s relation to wind, whether its perennial grasses are still green, how recently they acquired the land and its state of vulnerability. Like Di, he consciously makes time to connect energetically with the land so it can guide how he proceeds: “I can hop on a machine, and I do one row of paddock and know this is just not right … [I] fold up and go and put it somewhere else because the paddock will basically just about tell you”. Ian feels that a genuine commitment to “getting out of your own self” is critical for decision-making of this kind. Difficult to articulate through technoscientific rationalities, it partly hinges on a temporality that creates a space in which “plants can articulate and humans can listen to voices that function without language”, albeit always imperfectly (Meldrum, 2009, p. 331). Treating each paddock as a distinct collective enables the Haggertys to farm at scale without compromising the intimate relationality needed for the paddock to reveal something about itself. This alternative temporal approach, Di explains, means that “the paddock can unfold on its own terms. They show their strengths better. Some are better as diverse grazing paddocks, and others do nicely with growing a crop”.

The Haggertys’ successes in regenerating land allow them to function within global supply chains. Yet earning a living from the land entails a delicate negotiation between the interests of the paddock and those of productivity. Yield is essential to the Haggertys’ economic survival but forms only part of the story in how ecological worlds are remade. Ian explains, “Sure, we want to maximise our yield where we can, but you don’t maximise your yield at the cost of the environment. So, the yield really is the last thing on the list”. Other forms of accounting are needed to respond to the temporalities of a paddock’s vulnerabilities and lively capacities. The Haggertys have learned that prioritizing yield by forcing a vulnerable paddock into production too early can cause a whole crop to be lost and add years to a paddock’s recovery. In a “forced system”, as Di describes it, chemical inputs compress time to extract higher yields. Natural-intelligence farming produces alternative temporal obligations: “you’ve got to work within the natural processes of that land, and it needs time. Sometimes it needs time just to rest, so it means it might not have a crop in it. It might not have animals on it. It might just be plants … sitting there if the seasonal conditions aren’t conducive to growth at that particular time”.

The epistemic practices and temporalities of paddock thinking were profoundly influenced by the years the Haggertys spent in remote communities of the Kimberley. As Ian explains, “They [Aboriginal Elders] were displaced from the landscape, but their knowledge of Country—and how they looked at Country and what they expected from Country—they didn’t have high expectations of it … Those old fellows knew when it was going to rain, when it was going to be a good season, when it was going to be a bad season, what to do. Unless you’re a totally arrogant prick, you sit back and take notice of it all. It did really shape ... what we’re talking about: intuition, gut feeling, this connectedness”. The Haggertys make no claims as holders or practitioners of Aboriginal knowledge, but their encounters with Elders did provoke a realization that other ways of knowing are possible, destabilizing the hegemonic authority of the technoscientific expertise they once relied upon. Through their hybrid epistemic practices, they have learned to demand less of the land yet, in other ways, to ask much more of it—not in terms of yield but in what the land can reveal about itself.

Regenerative Farming on Country

Regenerative farming at scale remains deeply imbricated within the global food system and yet, as the Haggertys’ farming practices suggest, it needn’t be subsumed within the temporalities of productivist agriculture. At the same time, not even the most ecologically benign agriculture can be prised from the colonial violence that reorganized webs of life across Australia. All agriculture—regenerative or otherwise—takes place on stolen lands. Regenerative agriculture cannot simply put Country, or boodja in Noongar language, to work in more ecological ways or be wielded as an epistemological tool for settler-colonial agriculture to think its way out of the mess of climate change. The push for ecological regeneration of the wheatbelt remains incommensurable with the Noongar pursuit of self-determination, land justice and spiritual healing (Tuck & Yang, 2012). Indigenous epistemologies have much to contribute to both regenerative agriculture and responses to the complexities of climate change, but Tony Birch cautions against Indigenous knowledge becoming “branded and packaged as a quick fix solution to climate change by retro-fitting it to suit Western society” (2017). However, Birch and others (Mayes, 2018) argue that growing concerns about climate change may also provide common ground and a shared agenda from which Indigenous communities and settler farmers might collaborate.

The Haggertys are clear that the project of healing Country through regenerative agriculture should not proceed without Noongar people. Di describes private land as an ownership model that operates according to false temporalities. “We’re only here temporarily”, she explains. “We need to look at different models of engagement of land and people.” At the time of writing this chapter, she was in the early stages of exploring a possible collaboration with a Noongar enterprise to establish its own business on her farm utilizing bush foods and other native plants she has cultivated.

Other opportunities for collaboration are emerging. Justin Wolfgang, who works closely with the Haggertys through his advocacy of regenerative agriculture in WA, notes that the scale of landscape restoration that many regenerative farmers aspire to is hindered by the lack of tree nurseries to supply them. The Noongar Land Enterprise (NLE) recently purchased a nursery, now called Boola Boornap (The Place of Many Trees), which will raise tree seedlings endemic to south-west Western Australia. As NLE chairperson and Noongar business and community leader Oral McGuire explains at the public opening of the nursery, “many of our sacred trees and sacred places have been lost. So, the replenishment of trees into the spirit of the land is such an important part of the restoration and the ecological health of boodja … we must do it with trees. Every tree that we grow is absolutely handled with the love and care of a baby” (Danjoo Koorliny, 2021). McGuire’s vision is that every Noongar nation will have its own nursery where values of sacredness, spiritual and ecological renewal, love, and care will be made visible and given expression within the context of economic development. McGuire articulates a hybrid set of epistemological and economic practices that are underpinned by Noongar cultural law and intergenerational responsibility and that exist within but are not easily subsumed by the temporalities of capitalist imperatives. The nursery enterprise might draw on networks and markets of settler-colonial agriculture and yet remain uncompromisingly organized around the healing of boodja. If successful, this NLE model of economic development would enable Noongar people to work and live on Country while also contributing to large-scale ecological restoration.

Conclusion

Through their hybrid practice, the Haggertys negotiate a constant contradiction: while yield is not their primary motivation, it is a structural necessity if they wish to enact wide-scale ecological transformations. They will not “destroy the system” (Tsing, 2009), but their farming is consequential, particularly if it serves to undermine the hegemonic influence of agrochemical industries in the wheatbelt. The epistemic pluralism of natural-intelligence farming does not merely put the soil to work in new ways. In resisting the temporalities of technoscientific productivism, webs of life are reorganized and practices of care are attenuated across timescales and species difference in ways that allow other interests in the landscape to surface. This offers cause for cautious optimism for how the “possibilities for a more livable world” might emerge, as Tsing suggests, even from within the wheatbelt’s most blasted landscapes (2009, p. 172). It might also suggest how regenerative agriculture could support an alternative hybrid economy that “valu[es] Aboriginal work and country” in ways that reflect the aspirations and imaginaries of the Noongar community (Altman, 2012, p. 21). The disruptive potential for collaborations in the wheatbelt ultimately rests on the extent to which sovereignty is acknowledged, settler epistemologies are decentred and, critically, Noongar strategies to work and live on Country are supported. As runaway climate change bears down on all life, these collaborations could carve out the space from which a truly counterhegemonic practice of regenerative agriculture might emerge in Australia.