Farmscapes Land Management
Wetland, Northern Hawke’s Bay, where stock once went to dieare in the ‘overheads’ column undirected to that site, so doesn’t count in the Gross Margin analysis you use that includes the $500 one off cost of a fence! You may see the one-off cost, but not the perpetual savings made – you see the $500, but not the annual loss of $3000.The particulars of any one site are lost in the averages you presume. Never mind that the areas put in trees by farm foresters are not the average of any farm – they are those areas where low production, high cost, land use problems and environmental sensitivity all combine, and where woodlands and trees provide shelter and other benefits. A win-win, not a win-lose.We can design a landscape of synergies by building a self-organised, low-input, low risk, and profitable agro-ecological system. But first, you have to be able to see the picture smacking you in the head.Report after report by the professionals within agriculture used an assumption of uniformity and complete disregard for landscape patterns that simply isn’t true. You don’t get an either-or loss by putting woodlands in farm systems unless you are a complete idiot. I knew it wasn’t true.
I had grown up with a father discussing the consequences to land and stock from over-enthusiastic land clearances, as well as the importance of stock health and therefore the environment within which they ate and sheltered from the storms and the sun. I had been exposed to a few old and venerated farm foresters who had come back from the war and made a song out of some very hard land indeed. With trees.Yet all these agricultural farm-forestry reports going back into the 1970s coming out of the Department of Agriculture and the agricultural colleges that I collected all said the same thing – it can only be done at a cost. The opportunity cost approach to trees and wetlands within landscapes. All they saw was loss of opportunity and reduction in scale efficiencies of the ‘factory’.Where was the reference point to healthy landscape function, to healthy land, to good land management? I saw a similar unseeing delusion when researching and presenting on drought within farmscapes.
Many agricultural advisors simply saw drought as a function of lack of rain, resulting in less grass, so destock. Making the land sing by managing it as a system? What nonsense are you spouting?!When discussing drought, I did not start with the nonsense assumption that land is some immutable factory. I wanted to get across that there are things other than destocking that we can do.
We can make the land healthier, more whole! So we started by asking the farmers, “ What is a drought?” because if your farmscape.function. is such that no rainfall soaks in and holds, no roots reach far below 100mm, no run-off is checked by wetlands from whence it can be redistributed, and the evapotranspiration is running at 4mm/day, then you can have a drought a day after a 25mm rainfall. Farmers sat up and listened. Most consultants – the older the more rigid in their mechanical world – looked on suspiciously. Don’t ever believe that the better thinkers and observers are the professions.
PART A:NZ Flax in farmscapes and landscapesexplores the opportunities and practicalities of extended plantings of flax, within a broader landscape context:. Connecting corridors: noting the strongest opportunity for re-integrating flax into land management systems is to return harakeke to its natural habitat alongside.
As a general group, we are not, especially when hidebound by numbers over shifting qualities and connections in real time and space.Stop trying to simplify the land to some asinine machine of measured grass growth and stock and perhaps you’d be able to imagine something organic and alive.It was through looking at such technocratic agricultural reports purporting to ‘objectively’ consider the economics of trees within farms that I realised that their presumed ‘objectivity’ and professional ‘rationality’ was entirely premised on a false view of land. They simply did not understand. I know this may come across as an obsession of mine; but perhaps that is because it is so pervasive in our country. I see it in policy making, in the rationalisation of approaches that are the opposite of strategic in many primary sectors.Symptomatic is a focus on uniformity and quanta, treating land as a sausage machine where the presumed ‘efficiency’ of the scale of one thing trumps the potential synergies of many things; or where production is everything no matter the future, or the consequences both inside and outside a particular farmscape.We see in the ‘industrial’ structure of the New Zealand dairy sector. We see it in the renaming of these various primary sectors through which rivers flow, birds fly and children play as primary ‘industries’. The land framed as industrial factory.
We see it in the quite incredible lack of concern within the ‘industrial’ minds of the ‘professionals’ when the precious elements upon which the capacities and function of the land depend – nutrients, organic matter and soil – are washed down the ‘drain’ most others see as functioning streams. They may even – in their myopia – attempt to.justify. the need to pollute in pursuit of the gross production god, mining their future and present profit as they go.We see it in the belief in predictability and controllability rather than managing for the built-in resilience to the inevitable surprises and shocks; for the qualitative capacities and integrity of land. There is no need to ride the storm if there are no storms considered – let us assume there will be no surprises.
We measure the wrong things, assume too much, and disregard what really counts because of we cannot count it.This approach to analysis represents a disconnect between economic, social and environmental futures by either choice or by resigned acceptance of a false philosophical view as truth; one that sees only a land of averages, without variation, or pattern, or connection. Talk about the loss of opportunity because of the unexamined assumptions of narrow technocrats!
Talk about the inevitable reduction in resilience and the actual increase in uncertainty by building a system that presumes regularity!You shake your head at the obviousness of it all. It is like being told that the dog is harmless while it has its jaws around your arm. That is when I went searching. I discounted the bullshit figures to three significant figures. I wanted to know why they had this so wrong; why couldn’t they see? List of skateboard tricks.
What are they thinking that results in the rationalisation of nonsense? What is their life and education story that justifies the answer they want to hear? Do they even bother to question the norms? Did they actually bother and go out and ask a farm forester?I went searching for the refutation. I had received a wake up call – the professionals are not necessarily the wise. I even studied philosophy with a focus on environmental philosophy, ethics, and the history and philosophy of science as part of the quest, not for land use alone, but because there were all these other faiths trying in all innocence to rip the heart out of the world through what they presumed were rational means and the best of intentions.Thankfully, there are thinkers amongst all professions. They are the ones that are not afraid to stray from the mantra of “this is what we do.” There were excellent agronomists researching farmscape patterns in Invermay, outside Dunedin.
Gordon Cossens had production variation figures between paddocks. He insisted that the range of production was 100 percent plus/minus the mean, and said the same range of variation occurs within paddocks. And farm foresters nodded their heads when I raised it. You ask them why they plant trees and where, and it is in those particular areas that are a drain on the functioning of the.whole. farm; those areas that create problems. They do not deal in averages.
They deal in particulars of place, and how those areas relate to a wider view of the farm.Matching the PatternsThe secret to understanding why farm foresters do well from trees lies in the patterns as well as the combinations and alignment of those patterns. This is the alternative to the uniform industrial model of land. Production and feed utilisation varies with site. Costs do not spread evenly over the landscape; 80:20 principles hold often where most costs of this or that relate to a smaller proportion of the land. Eighty percent of woody weed control may occur on 20 percent of areas – usually gullies where the stock do not like to go.
The value of soil carbon in terms of soil health and production benefits is widely recognised in agricultural systems. However, carbon and biomass are quickly becoming valuable commodities in their own right, as seen by emerging carbon trading schemes. While the coverage of agriculture under any emissionstrading scheme is uncertain, the agricultural community are positioning themselves in readiness for such a scheme. A total farm carbon (TFC) map, providing an inventory of above- and below-ground carbon stocks, offers farmers and producers a useful management and decision making tool as they considercarbon emissions and sinks.Numerous models and calculators have been developed for estimating greenhouse gas emissions, with few also considering carbon sinks. However many models are restrained by their adherence to GHG accounting methodologies determined by national and international standards or rely on broad-scale stateand national data. These tools ignore both site specific conditions and the clear need expressed by farmers for accurate whole-farm carbon audits which include both carbon sources and sinks.
Conventional methods for determining both soil and biomass carbon are time consuming and costly.A case study, established on a UNE grazing property located on the Northern Tablelands of NSW, is being used to test the hypothesis that information derived from ‘conventional’ precision agriculture tools may be combined with other, possibly freely-available data (for example from landmanagement agencies) to create accurate farm-scale soil carbon inventories. It is proposed that a suitable model may be inverted for an a priori stratification of farmscapes to guide soil C sampling. A comprehensive dataset including radiometric (gamma ray spectroscopy), multi-temporal soil electromagneticinduction (EM38), under storey biomass (using CropCircleTM sensors), gross land use classification, a soil map, digital elevation model and aerial photography has been collated. Supervised classification was imposed on the dataset to create real-time “carbon landscape units” and regressionanalyses conducted to determine the correlations between the derived landscape units and soil organic carbon as measured from an array of soil cores.For landscape units on the mid- to lower-slopes, soil carbon was found to be moderately correlated with multi-temporal EM38 and Thorium (radiometric) count data (R2 0.50).
A second tiered classification based on land use (open paddock and treed areas) increased the correlation (0.60 and 0.98 respectively).Preliminary results suggest the application of airborne or satellite sensor-derived products may not only strengthen the robustness of the farmscape stratification process, but may also create a farm-scale carbon map which considers both above- and below-ground carbon stocks.