Peter Andrews is a controversial figure in the regenerative agriculture movement. He doesn’t shy away from saying what he thinks. Some others in the regenerative agriculture movement talk about how they are breaking paradigms and challenging beliefs. Peter Andrews doesn’t talk about breaking paradigms; he just does break paradigms. He is the true contrarian in the regenerative agriculture movement. That’s not to say he’s humble or gentle about it, either. He’s an old school, tough nut. His arrogance can get in the way, but that arrogance can’t be separated from the ingenious ideas that he has formed over the years.
Beyond the Brink was his second book, published in 2008. The first few chapters addressed some criticism he received after the publication of his first book, Back from the Brink, published 2 years earlier in 2006. Let’s go through the main two controversies that he addressed.
The first involved Aboriginal land management pre-1788. Peter Andrews’ books were long before Bruce Pascoe, Kerryn Walshe and Peter Sutton arguing over whether Aboriginals practiced agriculture. This was only covering the concept of burning Country and how that impacted the land. Peter Andrews argues while Aboriginal land management was destructive in the long term. He believes that it was a far better way of managing things than the Europeans have done in the past 200 years, but that it was slowly degrading the landscape. Apparently, this caused a lot of blowback after the first book, but it appeared to me an obvious fact. Reading books by Jared Diamond and Yuval Noah Harari reveals that Indigenous Australians weren’t alone – wherever humans found themselves, they damaged the landscape. The megafauna of several continents have been wiped out within decades of human arrival, likely without the hunters of these enormous creatures even realising it was happening. They were just surviving – feeding the family. Burning in Australia was a way of cleaning the landscape such that bushfires didn’t ravage communities – something us Westerners ought to learn from. It helped foster the oldest living civilisation on Earth, but it doesn’t mean it was good for the biodiversity of the continent. Instead of a wide array of palm trees and sedges, we now have a landscape dominated by fire-resistant eucalyptus and wattles. It’s less biodiverse than it was before, but that’s fine. We work with what we have. It appears the criticism was simply coming from people who like to fetishize certain cultures and foster a belief that they can do no wrong, probably informed by some amount of guilt about our white colonial past. Peter Andrews doesn’t blame current indigenous people for the practices of their ancestors, nor should indigenous folks blame current white Australians for the practices of their ancestors. Context is the key to building constructive futures, and truth-telling ought to be done on both sides.
The second controversy involved Peter Andrews’ scepticism about climate change being caused by carbon dioxide emissions. I didn’t even pick this up in the first book – I remember my impression being that Andrews was quite alarmist about climate change, almost in an arrogant and unhelpful way. In this book, however, he clarified his position that he believed global warming was caused by a lack of plants on the ground and local water cycles which have been destroyed. For someone ideologically convinced by climate change, these aren’t the sceptics that are worth convincing. Peter Andrews would have done more for combatting global warming than most people could conceivably do in their entire lives. It’s a blessing that he questions the science and isn’t convinced that the predictions made today will be made true in 30 years’ time. He is basing these things on years of experience on the land, not some dark hole of the internet.
I didn’t want to spend this long talking about the political controversies of Peter Andrews, and yet here we are. What I really wanted to talk about were my key take-aways from this book. I will summarise five here:
- Plants trees at the top of hills
Planting trees at the tops of hills allows for nutrients to be carried slowly down the hill. Cattle will camp under the trees, depositing manure and recycling nutrients from the bottom of the hill, creating a local nutrient cycle. Birds will do the same thing, perching and nesting in trees at the top of the hills and ridges. Deciduous trees are the best for this, as they will drop their leaves and contribute more carbon to the system. There are things to watch out for here, however. Certain trees, for example eucalyptus and pine trees, will produce allelopathic chemicals in certain situations which inhibits the growth of other trees around them. The remedy to this seems to be biodiversity – more types of plants and trees, including weeds, the better.
- Contour channels and mulch piles
Cutting in contour channels to slow water down as it moves through the landscape is another strategy suggested by Peter Andrews. He suggests piling mulch on these channels (not certain on the exact structure he suggests here) such that the nutrients from the mulch piles will flow on down the hill and aid the pasture down below. This is a strategy that I would love to employ on some of the slopes on our farm but need to do one of the Tarwyn Park Training courses to really understand how to do it properly.
- Just let the weeds grow
Peter Andrews’ views on weeds are also controversial, although not so much within the regenerative community. He believes that weeds ought to be let go wild. These weeds are there for a reason and are building biomass both below and above ground. For this reason, rather than trying to kill them off, we ought to let them do their jobs in the faith that they will not last long or do too much damage. This is the same logic as is applied when people talk about multi-species pastures – if you throw in 20 different species in a pasture mix, then only the species which are required by the conditions will flourish. For example, if you have a major nitrogen deficiency, you will see clovers and other legumes come up. If you have a compaction issue, tillage radishes and tap-rooted plants will go well. Applying this logic to weeds means that we ought to let them do their job, growing their biomass before mulching or slashing them off. They don’t usually grow well through their own residue.
- Native vs exotic doesn’t matter
Another controversial one. There is a thought in regenerative circles that Australian native plants and animals are far superior to exotic species, especially when it comes to trees. Peter Andrews doesn’t seem to think so. He acknowledges that Australian species have their advantages in being adapted to the conditions better than exotic species, but he also acknowledges an obvious reality: Australia doesn’t look like it does 200 years ago, as disappointing as that may be. Because we have a lot of exotic species around already, we ought to work with them and use them as tools just as we would any native species. Eucalypts and wattles have their place, but so may willows and oak trees.
- Australia was a wetland
This is a point that I need to look into further, both to understand exactly what Peter Andrews means and also to understand where he is taking this logic from. I believe he is arguing that much of Australia was a wetland before Aboriginal Australians arrived here many thousands of years ago. The task now is to rebuild that wetland so that our water cycles will flow more effectively and efficiently and such that we can be more productive and more environmentally sound.
That concludes my review of Peter Andrews’ Beyond the Brink. I would recommend this book, along with his previous book Back from the Brink in understanding the perspective of someone who has lived his life listening and learning from the land, building regenerative systems within the Australian landscape. I’m looking forward to doing some of the courses up at Tarwyn Park in the future.
Image: Photo by Emiel Molenaar on Unsplash