From the red soil of his hometown in the Western Australian outback town of Wiluna, Michael Jeffery very nearly became a farmer. He opted for being a soldier instead, serving in Malaya, Borneo and Vietnam, where he was awarded the Military Cross and the South Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry.
After a distinguished military career, he served as governor of his home state of Western Australia and Australian governor-general, representing Queen Elizabeth II, Australia’s head of state.
So he does not enter public debate lightly, but he is highly exercised by his latest topic: restoring Australia’s ancient soils.
Illustration: Mountain People
It was a world first when he was appointed by former Australian prime minister Julia Gillard’s Labor government as the first national soil advocate in 2012, and his term was extended under former National party leader and then-minister for agriculture Barnaby Joyce.
Since then, he has consulted with thousands of farmers, indigenous land managers, policymakers, students and interest groups across the country.
It has taken six years, but now he has a very simple message for politicians in his report, Restore the Soil: Prosper the Nation — Australia’s soil, water and vegetation should be declared national strategic assets.
“The emerging concept of ‘soil security’ also underpins the world’s six existential challenges: food, water and energy security, climate change abatement, biodiversity protection and human health,” he wrote to the prime minister’s office. “I believe that soil and water security will increasingly underpin global social stability and security.”
Some of the recommendations could be controversial for many of Australia’s conventional farmers. For example, Jeffery has urged governments to support farmers to embrace regenerative farming and cut back on agricultural chemical and non-organic fertilizer usage.
He believes improving soil health could help reduce carbon to neutralize Australia’s emissions. He wants to see properly funded agricultural education for Australia’s farmers and agronomists, as well as soil and water scientists — independent from companies with vested interests. He also wants farmers to be paid a fair price for food.
“It’s a no-brainer, there should be no political dissension at all,” Jeffery told the Guardian Australia. “Who is going to knock restoring agricultural landscapes? It’s about what comes out of the soil, like clean water, all our food, timber and fiber at a time when the planet, due to overpopulation and bad agricultural methods, is destroying it hand over fist.”
Improving soil health has the potential to neutralize Australia’s annual emissions of 600 million tonnes of carbon dioxide and would allow a more orderly transition to renewable energy sources, Jeffery said.
“The real fact is undeniable: Our country [has] continued to lose carbon due to poor soil and water management,” Jeffery said. “If we don’t go to regenerative agriculture, we will continue to mine soils, particularly of carbon. This is the great loss and it is not being admitted. If you continue to mine carbon, you are shot.”
“It’s not the total measurement of soil health, but it’s a good indicator and it facilitates the retention of water in soil — 50 percent of our rain is not getting into the soil and that is causing so much of the problem,” he said. “If we get agriculture right, we could pull down as much carbon as we are emitting.”
Jeffery’s intervention comes as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned that half a degree of extra warming would affect hundreds of millions of people and called for a transition out of coal power by 2050.
The Australian government has rejected that call. Australian Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack, leader of the National Party of Australia, has said that Australia should continue to exploit its coal reserves as his farmer-based constituency suffers through a drought, which in some parts of the country has continued for seven years.
Jeffery’s policy calls for “reducing or ceasing synthetic chemical inputs” as debate rages in Australia around the use of the common weed killer glyphosate, following a US ruling that found it caused the cancer of a terminally ill man.
National Farmers’ Federation president Fiona Simson said that glyphosate allowed farmers to embrace minimum tillage cropping systems, which she said are “one of the greatest advancements in agricultural sustainability in recent decades.”
More than 800 scientific studies and reviews, including numerous independent regulatory safety assessments, have affirmed glyphosate is safe and does not cause cancer, Simson said.
The product had also since 1974 been approved for use by every regulator across the world, including the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority, she said.
“By managing weeds above the ground, farmers can plow their fields less often — reducing greenhouse gas emissions and maintaining soil health and soil moisture,” Simson said.
However, Jeffery said that the debate over glyphosate, sold under brand names such as Roundup, reflect the need for independent government-funded research and education.
“We need independent research separate to that conducted by chemical companies. That’s why you need government-run research stations, in my opinion, with properly trained agricultural scientists,” he said. “We ought to know if it is good, bad, indifferent, OK in little bits.”
“If it is causing problems and people are being dishonest then there should be all hell to pay. It is a little like the banks doing things improperly while knowing it. I suspect, in part, if there are companies who do this, they may have to be held accountable for what they have done,” he said.
Jeffery also said that consumers and major supermarket chains, such as Coles and Woolworths, need to accept that farmers need to be paid a fair price for food, adding that A$1 (US$0.71) per liter of milk was “patently stupid.”
“A builder or a plumber or a doctor doesn’t get paid like farmers,” he said. “When Coles says we are driving prices down, in some cases what it does mean is they are helping drive farmers to bankruptcy.”
As the drought bites harder in the eastern Australian states, Jeffery said the combined effects of climate change, water mismanagement and land degradation means that looking after Australia’s agricultural soils is essential for the nation’s security.
Jeffery has made 10 recommendations, which the government confirmed were under “active consideration,” with the “fundamental aim of restoring and maintaining the health of the Australian agricultural landscape.”
They include a national soils policy with a permanent soil advocate, better education for farmers and agricultural scientists, a mandated school garden program and syllabus, funding for case studies in regenerative agriculture, funding for regenerative farm works and an annual report on the global state of soil, water and food from an Australian perspective.
The policy defines regenerative agriculture as “the application of techniques, which seek to restore landscape function and deliver outcomes that include sustainable production.”
This could include using more organic composts and fertilizers, slowing the flow of water, fencing off waterways from stock, cell grazing, feral animal control and direct-drilling crops into pasture.
Support could come in the form of tax deductions for regenerative farmers or the government part-funding regenerative work, Jeffery said.
“The object is to convince the average conventional farmer to change without being frightened, to show how you can go through a regenerative process and still be economically viable,” he said. “Farmers can’t do this by themselves — they need the support of government and the public to be the cleanest and greenest they can be.”
Jeffery said the education programs available are “generally not satisfactory.”
The policy states “there is a dearth of information in many areas, and product placement information only in others. Often the advice given is contradictory to best practice or considered by many farmers to be out of date,” he said.
Jeffery said government-funded research stations are “stressed and stretched” when there needs to be more fully staffed stations where farmers can access the best advice from agronomists, water scientists and soil scientists “who are properly trained.”
“That’s part of the problem, for example, the agronomists are often owned by a chemical company, so of course they are going to say you need more of our product,” he said.
While elements of regenerative farming have been practiced in Australia for decades, it has recently gained more mainstream attention, partly due to the work of Australian scientist and farmer Charlie Massy, who has been critical of “industrial agriculture.”
Jeffery said that while farming practices have changed over the years, he would like to see a stocktake of farming methods.
“I do not criticize industrial agriculture per se because it helped to make Australia a wealthy country,” he said. “[Farmers] did what they had to do at the time with the education they had.”
With better agricultural education, Jeffery said he believes Australia should play a leading role in showing the rest of the world how to manage inherently infertile soils in a difficult climate, while building land management knowledge to export along with food.
“If we doubled our exports tomorrow, we could feed 60 to 80 million people, but if we exported knowledge, we might help to feed a billion people,” he said.
At 80, his passion for the project is clear.
“I was always interested in farming and nearly became a farmer, but I think about our 10 grandchildren, whose lives I’m concerned about in that sense, and their parents and all our children,” he said.
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