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Yarnauwi Farm

~ Fleurieu Peninsula, South Australia

Yarnauwi Farm

Category Archives: reviews

Exploring the Fleurieu’s climate future

20 Saturday Feb 2016

Posted by Joel in ecology, livestock, planning, regeneration, reviews, waterways

≈ 2 Comments

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books, climate change, design, ecology, farm, future, livestock, permaculture, planning, southwestern Fleurieu, water

Handbook
2PercentSolutions

We’ve recently read a couple of books that have served as a catalyst to revisit what a future climate scenario might be like for the Fleurieu Peninsula, and how we can ensure the greatest resilience for our patch of ground. The books are two practical volumes on climate change, the first The Handbook: Surviving and Living with Climate Change, by Jane Rawson and James Whitmore, is a tour of practical household and community strategies for adapting to climate change in Australia. The second, Two Percent Solutions for the Planet: 50 low-cost, low-tech, nature-based practices for combatting hunger, drought and climate change, is a farming and land restoration-focussed collection of case studies collected by Quivira Coalition co-founder, Courtney White. For readers that may’ve grown weary of the political inertia around climate change, not to mention the vast scale of the problem, the practical, household-, community- or farm-scale focus of both books offers a practical way of re-engaging with the climate challenge. Two Percent Solutions serves as an optimistic companion read to the sometimes gloomy vibe of The Handbook, with its strategies offering scope for both climate mitigation and adaptation. Continue reading →

Book review: Going ‘Feral’ with George Monbiot

05 Thursday Nov 2015

Posted by Joel in ecology, regeneration, reviews, trees, waterways

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books, ecology, farm, history, livestock, revegetation, southwestern Fleurieu

17160008Our experience and vision for Yarnauwi has always sat in a tension between the wild and the cultivated. On one hand, we’re seeking to restore habitat long altered, while on the other, we’re determined to cultivate food, through both livestock and horticulture. It’s hard to say if one holds priority over the other, and, at risk of lurching into cliche, we try to ‘listen to the land’. Connor Stedman’s Essay on Soil in the 2015 Greenhorns’ New Farmer’s Almanac offers ideas that resonated with us, writing that to know how to be a steward of a landscape, “…it’s not enough to know the land as it is now. We need to dig below the recent surface and go deeper – find the older ecological and cultural stories of a place. It’s the wildlands that hold these stories, and it’s these lands that will return them to us if we know where to look and how to listen. An agrarian economy needs to tend, restore, and engage in a deep relationship with the wild as well as with the planted field” (2015, p. 35).

Stedman’s assertions provide a concise summary of our motivations for obsessing over the past ecological history of our particular patch, and theorising about the patterns that might’ve governed the landscape before colonisation. Fixated as we are on what was here before, there’s much to delight in in George Monbiot’s Feral: Rewilding the land, sea and human life (Penguin, 2013). In it, Monbiot confronts what he describes as ‘ecological boredom’ brought about by the absence of the wild, and asserts the need to ‘rewild’ our landscapes. His vision of rewilding is not one of meticulous restoration of past habitats, but rather letting landscapes return to their own ecological stability. Continue reading →

Book Review: “Sheepish: two women, fifty sheep & enough wool to save the planet”

19 Monday Oct 2015

Posted by sophie in livestock, reviews

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books, farm, Fleurieu, livestock, sheep

sheepishcover

“The primary purpose of many small farms is to provide an opportunity for open spaces, fresh air, scenic landscape, privacy, peacefulness, or other unique qualities of rural life. Others are looking for a good place to raise a family … Others farm because they want to live close to nature; many are stewards of the land by choice, because stewardship gives purpose and meaning to their lives. For them, farming is an expression of spirituality.”
– John Ikerd

I wanted to read a memoir about women farming, as I often feel intimidated about participating in male-dominated farming in Australia. But in many ways it’s probably just the usual intimidation felt by city-dwellers feeling our way in completely new territory – it has certainly improved over time as we’ve made connections with local contractors, neighbours, shopkeepers and felt more part of the local community.

I came across this light memoir by Catherine Friend, about a female couple who run a 50 acre farm in Minnesota, USA (same size as ours!). They run about 50 sheep, as well as a menagerie of other animals, and sell their meat and wool commercially. Lambing season for them involves about 100 little white bundles sproinging around the place, which is my idea of heaven, including many bottle-fed lambs from ewes dropping twins, triplets, and quadruplets. Continue reading →

Book review: Restoring rivers with ‘Let the Water Do the Work’

26 Sunday Apr 2015

Posted by Joel in ecology, regeneration, reviews, waterways

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

books, design, ecology, erosion, farm, permaculture, soil, southwestern Fleurieu, water, waterways

1950-ltwdtw-i

Weirdly, one of the elements we found appealing about our property was the erosion. In a fit of masochistic optimism, we were excited by the prospect of working to restore a degraded landscape to a level of ecological function, of seeing gully walls stabilised with plants and creeklines resounding with a froggy chorus. As we’ve explored the best strategies for managing and restoring these sections of the property, the advice we’ve received has often tended towards paying someone to think about it and do the work for us, purchasing expensive, industrially produced tools and materials, and utilising heavy machinery, all of which bring with them a substantial price tag. This disturbed us, because it seems to suggest that land restoration is the domain of those with cash to splash, and that those people or places without the necessary resources may just have to resign themselves to the continued collapse of their landscapes.

Thankfully, we came across the work of the likes of Craig Sponholtz, Brad Lancaster, Bill Zeedyk and Van Clothier, and in Australia, Cam Wilson and Peter Bennett. In their work, these thinkers and practitioners of water management and restoration, offer a radically different approach to watershed restoration. While they don’t flinch from the importance of technical understanding, they cultivate strategies that are based in the thoughful observation of those who are connected to a landscape, that utilise locally available materials, and that draw on community power to create modest interventions that can be tweaked over time. Rather than advising that landowners simply save up and pay an expert, their work seeks to empower communities to manage, monitor and maintain water in their landscapes through accessible, practical and locally-adaptable erosion control and water harvesting responses. In his foreword to Zeedyk and Clothier’s book Let the Water Do the Work, Courtney White articulates the characteristics of this approach: it is evidence-based, its affordability and relative simplicity make it accessible, it is based in ‘soft engineering’, challenging “the dominant paradigms of river and creek restoration”, it requires “humility, attentiveness and patience”, operating at the pace of the ecosystem, and finally, it’s at a human scale, flourishing with the participation of community, that offers “joy in companionship, in learning together, and sharing knowledge.” Continue reading →

Book Review: Growing a sustainable farm with ‘Farms with a Future’

28 Monday Apr 2014

Posted by Joel in planning, reviews

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books, permaculture, planning

In her book Farms with a Future (Chelsea Green, 2012), American small farm consultant, sometime-homesteader and former family rancher Rebecca Thistlethwaite offers a brisk, yet detailed, guide to building and running a sustainable farm business. Writing on a range of essential topics including marketing, land access, finance and business planning, equipment, soil and water management, record-keeping and human resources her writing is concise and targeted, supported by her own experiences together with a selection of excellent case studies describing how the principles outlined are expressed in the real world. Each chapter offers a discussion of key issues and strategies for sustainable farms, a case study and summary of short, sharp “Take Home Messages” drawn from the text. While it is necessarily written for a North American audience, and some US-focussed sections on regulation or financing can be skipped over, there is still much here to inspire Australian readers. Continue reading →

Book Review: Embracing an arid future in “Growing Food in a Hotter, Drier Land”

19 Wednesday Mar 2014

Posted by Joel in ecology, planning, reviews

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bees, books, design, ecology, food, permaculture, planning, revegetation, seeds, soil, trees, water

Years before there was talk of locavores and 100-mile-diets and omnivore’s dilemmas, I came upon Gary Nabhan’s book Coming Home to Eat, a personal account of his experiences striving to solely eat food produced in his home bioregion of the US-Mexican borderlands in southern Arizona. His observations as renowned desert ecologist and ethno-botanist redefined how I thought about food and sustainability and accompanied me on my own sustainable food explorations for years after.

I get the feeling that his latest book, Growing Food in a Hotter, Drier Land: Lessons from Desert Farmers on Adapting to Climate Uncertainty (Chelsea Green, 2013), may be another companion for us in our adventures on the farm. While Growing Food is as practical as its title suggests, it is permeated by Nabhan’s respect for the insights of cultures deeply connected to the land, and his belief that communities connected to their bioregion are the most resilient in the face of environmental change. Continue reading →

Learning the land with ‘The Biggest Estate on Earth’

12 Saturday Oct 2013

Posted by Joel in ecology, regeneration, reviews

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

books, ecology, history, kangaroos, permaculture, revegetation, soil, trees

In The Biggest Estate on Earth (Allen & Unwin, 2011), historian Bill Gammage describes a detailed vision of Aboriginal land management prior to European colonisation of Australia. While many Australians have a broad sense that “fire-stick farming” was (and is) a tool used by Aboriginal people, The Biggest Estate on Earth begins to fathom how finely tuned Aboriginal fire use was. With fire as one of a suite of tools, Aboriginal people across the Australian continent carved the landscape into a mosaic of ecosystems, each harbouring plants and animals of differing sensitivity to fire, each maintained to maximise ecological diversity and each nested within the other to increase the ease of hunting or harvesting. For Gammage, Aboriginal land management across the continent was directed by three main principles: “ensure that all life flourishes; make plants and animals abundant, convenient and predictable”; and to “think universal, act local”. Continue reading →

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