Groundswell or Deep Earth?
It occurred to me this morning that the word groundswell was a good fit for those New Zealand’s farmers flexing their political muscles at parliament today. Groundswell works against nature, on the farm and in its politics. Groundswell for the most part represents the farmers who don’t care that much about the climate crisis, nor about nature.
The soil food web below is core to all life on earth, including humans and what we eat. It isn’t a part of conventional farming, and conventional ag usually has negative impacts on soil life and is degenerative over time.
A few thoughts on the context of today’s protest,
- there rural people (not just farmers) who are concerned about the direction of the government and the impacts on rural communities, and not all of them are right wing or climate denying or anti-Labour. We need to be looking at how to engage with them and their needs, because they are NZ citizens. They’re also increasingly part of an anti-government movement that may see Nact in power next year, but that is not inevitable.
- Food growing systems like regenerative farming, food forestry and philosophically embedded organics, all take into account the soil food web, and work with it to create systems of food production that are resilient and sustainable (or heading in that direction). Conventional ag is by definition degenerative.
- There are many farmers, including conventional ones, trying to do the right things and moving in the right direction. We should be supporting them. Let’s not forget about them in the noise today.
- New Zealand cannot keep producing export for food in the way we are currently doing. Eventually climate will collapse many of those farms with the increasing drought/flood cycles arriving with early climate change. Global shortages of oil, fertiliser and other high tech inputs will increase. Expect crop failures and thus shortages to become a norm globally, and I can’t see how NZ will be exempt from that.
- Highly industrialised farming systems are more vulnerable to extreme weather and climate events, because they aren’t working with natural cycles and instead impose human desires often in really inappropriate places (think dairy farms in hot dry places like Central Otago, or very wet marshy places like Southland). Regenerative farming works with nature and natural systems and is in the business of creating resiliency.
- Industrial farming practices that Groundswell want supported are also agin our obligations to the global community and all of life to drop GHG emissions and to increase biodiversity and ecological health.
This is how Groundswell want to be allowed to farm,
This is what we could have instead,
My suggestion is that the government and farming sector brings in subsidies for farms to transition to regenag, organics or similar. This supports farmer to keep farming, and puts ag on an immediate track to address climate change and restore ecosystems. The culture needs to change, money will help because many farmers are trapped by economics and a system that won’t support doing the right things.
New Zealand as a whole should pay for this (export earnings support our lifestyles), but there should be conditions on those subsidies.
In order to do that we need major research and development into regenerative systems, and we need to train/recruit people into key farm advisor positions.
If you’re pissed off with Groundswell, don’t worry about it, vote Greens next year. Here’s their agriculture policy, Farming for the Future. The more Green and Māori Party MPs we have, the more the culture will change towards life.