Once rich with magnesium and life, Australia’s soils are running on empty — and so are we
You don’t have to own a farm to be part of the fix:
- Buy from regenerative growers at local markets. Ask how they treat their soil.
- Compost food scraps. Every peel or coffee ground returned to earth repairs a small piece of the cycle.
- Grow something. Even a balcony herb pot reconnects you with the living chemistry of soil.
- Support food literacy. Teach children that true nourishment begins underground. When consumers reward soil care instead of packaging, agriculture follows.
I live in rural NE Tassie, every spring dozns of fertliser trucks run around the paddocks dumping tonnes of Ammonium Nitrate, later in the growing seaosn chopper after chopper flies around dumping fungicide over everythingnone if thar address mico nutrient defiecy.
Faming is a little like mining each crop strips minerals from the soil…
Stocking rates on paddocks are fucing ridiculous for both diry and meat cattle, a slight dought and they yammer about the cost of feed bevase they have to have the perfect season to make it work
They all work hard as all hell in a physically demanding job.
I don’t have any solutions becase i don’t thik there are any until the entire shit show coallpses.
Don’t get me wrong, we grow some of our own, fruits and veg, composting out the ying yang etc but Tassie is a harsh funking msitreess, 3c forecast for 1 December
Don’t even get me started on the horror that is forestry.
All of this it true, I live in SW WA and it’s not quite so bad, a lot of people are scaling back herbicide use and optimising with rotational grazing etc. but even the most responsible land owners use literal tonnes of super phosphate, and that’s just the grazers, the vineyards, avocados, stone fruit etc all use huge volumes of herbicides, pesticides, fertiliser.
Our family farm is relatively responsible and as I take over more management I’ll be pushing a more restorative model but I have a lucrative second income. Our immediate neighbour runs a ridiculous stocking rate with his cattle and they are skinny cattle grazing on stubble, the crazy thing is that colesworth have begun penalising ‘overweight’ cattle so on average he gets a higher price per kilo than a farmer treating their animals humanely.
Industrial farming is a disaster. Small holdings are less extractive, less exploitative, and produce more calories per hectare. You can make a reasonable income on a small holding too, you just need to be able to buy the land, and if you’re not a millionaire or have family land that isn’t happening.