Meet the Farmer Preparing for the End of Industrial Civilization

The industrial food system is an interconnected machine that requires a steady flow of energy, chemicals and fertilizer to keep the whole thing running smoothly. This system is resource hungry, ecologically costly and incredibly complex. And with that complexity comes vulnerability. As we head further into turbulent times, how do we transition to localised food systems that are far more grounded and resilient, that both feed communities and heal the land? This is a question I'm going to be exploring in many films to come, but let's begin this journey with seeds. Today I'm visiting experimental farmer Shane Simonson and his partner Andrew on their 40 acre farm in South East Queensland. Shane is working to create a living seed bank of hardy and resilient crops that require no inputs like irrigation, fertilizer, chemicals or machinery. The primary purpose of what I'm doing is to assemble a set of reliable landrace staple crops and that means that they can grow in the particular soil and climate and pest pressure that I have here with basically zero inputs and produce enough of a calorie surplus that you can build a whole society upon them. I'm a bit of a doomer when it comes to industrial civilisation, but I'm definitely in the camp that it could take generations for it to all unfold. I see this as like trying to weave some kind of lower level of complexity that our society can return to. How can people actually feed themselves sustainably in this part of the world? Yeah, that'll do. Okay, let's go feed the geese. Pretty much every crop that you could care to name, they all came from the hybridisation of two or more different species. Previously every little village in the world would have their own landrace variety of wheat or rice or maize that they had put together by getting strains from other people, seeing what did well and allowing them to hybridise and then selecting those hybrids that did best under local conditions. Those genetic resources that were accumulated over thousands of years of peasant farmers paying all of that attention to their crops got wiped away by the industrial revolution. Chemically supported and mechanically harvested crops could produce so much more. That allowed a very small number of people to get extremely rich, completely dominating the market for tradable crops. The industrial farmers, they would regularly have epidemics of plant disease appear because all of the wheat in North America was like the same. And a rust would blow over from Russia and they'd realise, oh no, we don't have any wheat that we can grow that can stand up to this. So they developed a habit of going to all of the surviving little towns in the middle of nowhere and taking samples from all of those landrace crops. And that's what's in the seed banks today, in little dry packets, in air-conditioned warehouses. That tradition needs to get back out into the landscape, so I'm trying to do what I can for this little part of the world. Once you've got one farm like this that figured out, oh, this particular variety of this particular crop, grown this particular way, you don't need irrigation, you don't need pesticides, you don't need fertiliser. You may not get the spectacular industrial yields that justify getting a giant tractor and sending it to market, but you get enough to actually support a community and a society around it. Every little bioregion needs its own community of people like me that are preserving and exchanging and experimenting with this material. I originally launched my blog as Zero Input Agriculture, which was a pretty provocative claim. And it's pretty much the principle of not irrigating, not bringing in fertiliser from off the farm, not relying on pesticides and not relying on machinery to make anything possible that's important. If I'm growing a successful staple crop, it gets no irrigation, and if a drought turns up, I just let the crop fail. Like, I would rather not have to deal with that. This is my most cultivated part of the property. It's my kind of test bed. And because I have the goats next door, every day I'm bringing them branches of trees to eat, and that leaves me a whole lot of twiggy waste wood. And I just put it all in a big pile, set it on fire, and then when it looks like it's mostly done, I'll get a watering can and I'll quench it to get as much of that charcoal out. I just pour it on the surface, and then I put a layer of goat manure on top, and the goat nutrients go into the charcoal and kind of, you know, charge it up. Over the years, I'm steadily improving the texture of the soil, which slightly widens the range of crops that I can grow, and it makes it a little bit more likely I'll have success with new varieties long enough to start breeding them and making them hardier for lower fertility conditions. When you do plant breeding, what kind of traits and qualities are you selecting for? I love direct sowing my seeds, so the ability to germinate in my soil when I want it to grow really vigorously and get ahead of the weeds, that's probably a really major factor. Then, pest and disease resistance. Ease of harvest and processing is important as well too. I mean, flavor, because yeah, there's no point growing a ton of something and then realizing that it's kind of gross. Another really important factor, so a lot of the varieties that are in circulation are for market gardeners, but those varieties are bred to grow really, really fast under ideal conditions and then crop all at once. And for a home grower, the only time that is a good trait is if you want to preserve that crop and it's like tomatoes, you want to make tomato sauce. But for every other crop, you want them fresh. So for me, the ideal crop is one that gives you a steady harvest over a long period of time. I've done many, many variety trials and I sound like a lunatic every time I try to explain to people how much transformation can happen in a short amount of time. It's really astonishing. You'll be stunned at like how hard you had to work before to keep things alive and how unrewarding it was versus plants that like really want to grow that are basically weeds that are useful. They're weeds that are in cahoots with humans is the way I look at it. Many years ago, I got my hands on a perennial cotton and was determined to learn how to spin it. So I found enough resources and tinkered away until I finally figured out how to make a beanie out of it. So this poor old sad thing, I've been wearing it to death for the last five years, I think. And it's about time for a replacement. So recently, I pulled eight varieties of that perennial cotton out of the gene bank and I've been growing them out in a variety trial. And this is one of the more promising ones. It grew really well and it's decent quality cotton. So I'm basically just going through the process of assessing all of those different varieties for their vigour and the quality of the fibre that comes out of them. But yeah, I'm hopeful that with a bit of breeding, we can come up with a zero input, sustainable fibre crop for this humid coast. Because yeah, most of the cotton has grown in much more arid conditions and is very dependent on huge amounts of chemical input and irrigation. It would be really lovely to start a cotton spinning culture locally as well to back that up. When I trial new things, it's like a 90% failure rate. Most gardeners are very emotionally attached to their plants. But when you are trying to grow crops to support your society so that you don't starve, you can't afford to have that attitude. Like the plant's job is to be strong enough to support you. If I plant something and it dies, I'm like, great, now I can plant something else instead. It's very easy to blame yourself, to think, oh, I should have done this better. I should have tried all of these other things. The relationship of you having to like bend over backwards to keep things alive is this very, very strange dynamic that's emerged, you know, just recently when we had all of these resources that we could throw at crops to keep them alive. Like if you figure out how to run around and helicopter parent those sick plants and kind of force them to give you a yield, you might miss out on the opportunity of realising that there's another kind of zucchini or a zucchini equivalent that does the same thing that grows completely effortlessly. Humans are a really, really weird species. We're fundamentally different from anything that's come before us in several important ways. The industrial revolution has been crazy, like absolutely crazy what we've done and achieved. It's not going to last forever. It's a transition phase to something different on the other side. And I'm really hopeful that we can use this opportunity to become the universal symbiont, that we can actually find a way to develop mutually beneficial, responsive relationships with every living thing on the planet. I think we have an opportunity to carry forward what we've learned from this really extraordinary time and give it lasting benefit, that it isn't all just a mistake and a disaster. We come out on the other side and transform into something that is only vaguely imaginable at this point. Humanity has probably tens of millions of years left on this planet where it will be hospitable for complex life. What are we going to do with it? What more fun than playing around in the garden? As we sat in the kitchen sampling Shane's assortment of quirky crops, I noticed behind us the cupboards full of store-bought rice and noodles and I felt glad that people like Shane have the foresight to be doing this work now while we still have a safety net. I hope that more people see the value of this work and begin their own experiments in the corners of the world that have lost this art. 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