Alex and Laura's big adventure

Laura and I recently took a road trip to Bingara to visit our partners at The Living Classroom and other local folk to establish connection and build relationships as a means of developing the latest KSCA project “An Artist a Farmer and a Scientist walk into the bar…”.

Going places with apples. photo Alex Wisser.

As the title implies, the project will bring artists, farmers and scientists together to work on a series of projects that explore issues of sustainability and the challenges faced by farmers adapting to regenerative farming methods in NSW. The idea came out of the recognition that there was a lack of communication between farmers and scientists on this issue, verging at times on distrust and hostility. Perhaps, we thought, artists might be able to broker a more productive relationship.

Somewhere in the middle of nowhere. photo Alex Wisser

The three terms of the project title very neatly triangulate, each sharing similarities and points of difference with the other two. The scientist, for instance, participates in a level of abstraction as does the artist, but differs on the point of practicality – a quality for which art is not significantly known. The farmer, on the other hand, while not given as much to abstraction, is nothing if not a pragmatist. I realise that this is a highly simplified analysis, and would not hold up against the variety that exists within each of these fields, but I make it nonetheless to indicate that these three figures think about the world in very different ways, but with similarities or points of overlap. This project, for me, offers an opportunity to explore whether artists, for instance, can contribute to a conversation between the scientist and the farmer via a point of detachment from both of their perspectives. Is it not possible to look at our differences as that point of communication from which we can diversify ideas, instead of a point of irreconcilable conflict between two competing systems of thought and observation?

There is a story here, but we’ll never hear it. photo Alex Wisser

I am not a painter, but I understand quite intimately the feeling a painter must have before a newly stretched blank canvas. This blank field of potential stretching out in all directions, containing an infinite field of possible color, form and content is intimidating in its limitlessness.  It faces the artist as a blank slate waiting to receive its future, finite, final material form. When it is finished, the produced thing will have a singular irrevocable being. This project has something of this aspect to me, here at its beginning. It is not as neat as the example of a canvas, with its image of the tabula rasa conveniently denying all the antecedent histories and contexts that surround both it and the artist. The effect though is the same. I survey a vast field of unknowing. It might as well be blank, for all that I know of scientists or farmers, the political structures and cultures that they separately negotiate, much less the vast forces that are engaged when the worlds that they inhabit undergo change. I know even less how they will respond when brought together and asked to engage in the uncouth act of making art. Unknown are the names and the faces of the people I will meet, the sounds of their voices and the particularities of their personalities. It feels like I am on the verge of making art.

Alex Wisser 14/9/17

Eloise's Hats

What does a hat say about a human? During our New England road trip Eloise Lindebach saw the whimsy in our various head-coverings, and made this group portrait of KSCA members and some of the lovely people who showed us around.

“it’s all about the soil” (or humus, not hummus)

On our road trip to New England I (Eloise Lindeback) was immersed in all things soil and land management, learning first hand from Tim Wright and Glenn Morris whilst visiting their regenerative farms and soaking in the knowledge other KSCA members shared with me during the long car trips.

After meeting Glenn Morris at Futurelands2 I was excited to visit the farm he manages to see his strategic grazing management practices and his methods of slowing down the water across the farm. After a great feed of organic meat (Billabong is the home of FigTrees Organic Farms), we piled into the back of his ute and he showed us the swales he built, and explained the visible changes in the landscape since he started managing the property.

It was so great to see the positive effects in person on both Glenn and Tim’s land. I could see that soil was so much more important and interesting than just dirt on the ground, I was learning how vital healthy soil is. Who knew I could be more interested in humus than I am in hummus?!

Glenn Morris and KSCA members at the highest point on Billabong, the property he manages. 

Travelling in the car with Diego Bonetto was akin to having a botanical encyclopaedia in the front seat. Intermingled between listening to Czech Pop songs was a constant commentary on which plants and weeds lined the road, and we were able to stop and forage mushrooms for dinner:

It was a great trip of building relationships and exchanging of knowledge and definitely worth the drive.

A visit to "Lana"

Here are the reflections of Kim Williams, Wollongong artist, who came along on the KSCA Road Trip:

“Lana” was one of the planned farm visits on a regenerative agriculture farm tour of northern NSW. Laura Fisher initiated this trip having received some funding through Sydney University. She was encouraged to use this time as an open-ended exploration, with the potential to forge future connections and collaborations across the “regen ag” community, and with New England based sustainability enterprise/charity Starfish Initiatives. To this end she gathered a bunch of people, mostly affiliated with the Kandos School of Cultural Adaptation. One of Laura’s overarching aims is to find ways of breaching the rural/urban divide.

I’m learning that it doesn’t matter whether you’re a sugar cane farmer, a cattle farmer or a fine merino wool grower: if you have healthy soil, many positive benefits flow from this most fundamental base. We visited “Lana” a 3,350 hectare cattle and sheep farm near Uralla on the northern Tablelands of NSW. Tim Wright and Suzanne Riley live in a stately old home which is third generation Wright family property. Children are elsewhere now, as are grandchildren, so it is Tim, Suzanne and their two working kelpies.

Tim Wright’s work has been written about in various websites and newsletters, but I will attempt to sketch my cursory understanding of his practices without referring to these more in-depth sources. At the core of his holistic approach to farming is the practice of “planned grazing”, where paddocks are fenced into smaller cells than conventional grazing paddocks, and cattle are rotated relatively quickly through the numerically sequenced paddocks, followed closely by sheep. This is based on the grazing patterns of these animals, balanced by the manure they provide for the soil.

Tim Wright demonstrates the rotation of cattle on his farm

Over a relatively short number of years, Tim has increased his stock, reduced his staff, and improved the quality of the pasture and the wool clip. The paddocks are now largely populated with native grasses, high plant biodiversity and healthy soils. The soil retains more moisture and is thereby less vulnerable to drought. To my untrained eye, the land looks good. There is a softness and fecundity to the landscape that belies its lack of synthetic fertiliser inputs.

Tim says, “I see myself as a caretaker, a steward of the land”. Over cups of tea and cake, he said “every time I walk out the door I’m making a decision which may affect the landscape”. He is wary of the big chemical companies – in his view these corporations are the ones making the millions at the expense of farmers who have been brainwashed into believing that fertilisers and pesticides are essential for a good yield. Tim learnt and built his holistic model of farming by questioning what he was doing. He did this by talking to other farmers. To him, everything in his model is a decision-making process. “Seeing the future [through a holistic model] is about a plan. If you haven’t got a plan [to rest land, for example] it leaves an impact.”

The KSCA team relaxes at "Lana". The author is upside down in the red jersey.

While Tim acknowledges the importance of all ground cover, he told us that grasses are more efficient than trees for carbon sequestration. According to his colleague, scientist Christine Jones, if the groundcover was increased by half, on just 2 percent of Australia’s agricultural land, it would more than compensate for CO2 emissions!

Tim’s outlook could perhaps be summed up by the words of his aunt, the poet Judith Wright:

"This land is not mine but me."

Reading the Landscape

On our KSCA Regenerative Agriculture Road Trip to New England, we visited three significant agricultural landscapes: two established farms (Tim Wright and Glenn Morris) and the in-transition land of The Living Classroom.

At all three sites, our hosts walked us around, drove us about in the back of utes, and showed us detailed maps of the land. We had a great time drinking in their wisdom of "land management", which is about intentionally designing complex systems and constantly monitoring them to see whether they are functioning as planned. It's about oscillating between radically different scales: poring over plans and documents, and having an embodied experience out there in the field.

Tim Wright's map of Lana showing sequence of stock movements from paddock to paddock in a holistic grazing system.

Eloise Lindeback visiting one of the paddocks at Tim Wright's farm Lana.

As someone who has followed the work of PA Yeomans for several years, I'm particularly interested in topography and hydrology - the way that the surface of the earth rises and falls, and the way that this local variation in altitude affects the flows of water over the land. Careful design of Keyline systems can hold water within the soil rather than having it run off quickly to the creek, and this relies on deep understanding of topography. I'm always really impressed by the successful functioning of dams in Keyline farming systems, with their ingenius overflow channels seeping into the land down-hill.

Nevallan - a farm by PA Yeomans - Detail of offset lithographic print by Ian Milliss and Lucas Ihlein, 2011

Looking at topographical maps, 3D models, and aerial photographs it all makes sense (and it helps to have the extra annotations and diagrammatic arrows on the page). However, physically "reading" the topography of the land itself can be more difficult.

A few years ago I wrote this blog post about "seeing landscape" - and I asked how we can develop the ability to visually understand topography, following Yeomans' example.

Since our road trip, I've been thinking further about this. Beyond "seeing" landscape, I've been wondering how we can "read" landscape ... What if we imagine the paddock as a page?

When you hold a book in your hands and read the words, you can instantly see the whole laid out in front of you, and the connections between the components. Your eyes make a journey through a landscape of words on a page whose connections are clear and linear.

PA Yeomans The Challenge of Landscape and The City Forest Contour Map - Detail of Offset Lithographic print by Lucas Ihlein and Ian Milliss, 2011

However, imagine that your body is the size of a tiny comma on the page. Now you have to traipse across each letter to painstakingly piece together each word, each sentence, now a paragraph, and finally an overarching narrative. That's a bit like how it feels to be on the land - to be reading it from within, at a 1:1 scale.

I imagine that, like any form of literacy, it takes much time and practice to develop this sort of landscape-literacy.

COMMENTS:

1.  |

   May 23, 2017 at 9:07 am

   Interesting thoughts, Lucas. For me it’s the difference between embodied and rational knowledge – know-how and “know-that” (to use Gilbert Ryle’s terminology). We can “know that” such and such through facts and maps, but know-how and skills and virtuosity can only be developed in direct interaction with the landscape. I don’t think being the comma is a limitation. Our body is the best research tool we have. Still on the topic of different kinds of knowledges, the Portuguese language (and I’m sure other Latin languages too) makes a distinction between “saber” and “conhocer”. The former is for knowledge that one learns intellectually; the latter is for first-hand experiential knowledge and is used, for instance, when talking about knowing a person or knowing a certain place. I’m really interested in the idea of getting to know (or falling in love with) a place, as one would a person… heaps more thoughts, but I’ll save it for the campfire!

   Reply

2. Marco Cuevas-Hewitt |

   May 23, 2017 at 9:08 am

   Sorry, that Portuguese word should have read “conhecer”, not “conhocer”.

   Reply

3. Lucas |

   May 23, 2017 at 1:12 pm

   Thanks Marco – yes I see what you mean about know-how vs know-that, and the use of two different verbs in latin languages (in italian it’s sapere and conoscere).

   I wonder if knowing landscape is somehow a combination of these two modes of knowing? Perhaps that the know-how of experiencing landscape is enhanced/deepened through the use of know-that which maps and facts afford?

Visiting Bingara's The Living Classroom

KSCA's first night in the New England region was spent in Bingara, at The Living Classroom's bunkhouse (nothing like bunk beds to make you feel like you're on a road trip!). Here are Laura Fisher's impressions:

We were welcomed by Rick and Susan Hutton, Linda and Garry McDouall and Francis and David Young and Francis’ mother Barbara. All came from farming families or are currently manage farming properties, while also being highly dedicated to community projects in Landcare, the Arts and education.

A bit of backstory: several years ago, Rick and Garry and others had led a community initiative called Bingara 20/20. Like so many country towns in Australia, Bingara is struggling with a dwindling population (currently around 1000) and the challenge of creating employment for its community. 80% of the region’s economy is agriculture, predominantly grazing properties, but the number of people who are actually employed in agriculture is very very small.

The Bingara 20/20 visioning process was a grassroots ‘community consultation’ project that generated a set of ideas that have since been resourced financially (largely through the tenacity of Rick and Garry), and are being put into action. Is such a thing really possible??? Having distilled some core values from Bingara 2020 around sustainability, community wellbeing and economic prosperity, Garry and Rick managed to persuade the Gwydire Shire Council to back the plan. The four pillars for The Living Classroom are agriculture, education, tourism and conferencing (it is well placed geographically to provide this service to the region). And at the heart of it all is the concept of regeneration: regeneration of the community, and ‘regenerative agriculture’ as an ethos of farming in which soil health, water conservation and avoidance of chemicals are central. You can read about this in some detail in the Bingara Business Plan, prepared by Adam Blakester of Starfish Initiatives (pdf can be downloaded at this page).

Here are a couple of essential ideas:

"The Living Classroom's focus is on food quality and the connection between soil health, plant and animal health and human health."

"The Living Classroom aims to become a showcase of future agriculture, a centre for education, for experimentation and inspiration for all generations, and for all levels of learning." 

A beautiful symbol of this idea of regeneration is Bingara's one-of-a-kind Orange Festival. A long time ago one of the main streets of the town was planted out with Orange trees as a 'living memorial to Bingara residents who served at war'. Once a year the oranges are ceremonially harvested by the children of the town, with many additional festivities to boot.

The word ‘visioning’ was used frequently as the story of The Living Classroom’s establishment was told, and it was a word that we muddled over quite a bit. Given that KSCA is very interested in the future of land use, we are always thinking in a creatively prospective way - but developing big plans that are executed over several years and lead to big, tangible things: that takes a certain kind of drive. Interestingly, on our first night when we shared a couple of Futurelands2 newspapers around, Linda McDouall opened it to the page which featured Ian Milliss’ ‘Welcome to Kandos’ poster. She’d evidently seen it before, on the KSCA website, and looking around she said ‘who is responsible for this, are they here?, this is GREAT visioning.’ (Ian Milliss, if only you had been with us for this moment!). The fact that it had been created in a somewhat satirical spirit made no difference - the impression was that something similar was going on.

The next day we were given a tour of the site. A whole range of ecological farming methods and food cultures are in various states of development: swales have been created along Yeomans-inspired contours to retain water, and there is a Mediterranean garden, a bush tucker garden, and an area designated for a carbon farm. Here a baseline measurement of carbon levels in the soil will be undertaken by the CSIRO, and a spectrum of carbon sequestration methods will be tested and illustrated. Permaculture principles, childhood education and play, cultural storytelling – these are all informing the design of The Living Classroom.

Bingara represents the paradox of the country town in Australia. It’s a town surrounded by farms, servicing the New England region’s agricultural sector, but you’ll have a hard time buying local meat and local produce. This is because the farmers are part of food supply chains that are highly centralised, geared for the big supermarkets and export markets. We all scratch our heads and ask: given transportation costs for example, surely it’s more cost effective for some farms to serve the local community? As co-founder of IGA, Rick Sutton has seen the inner workings of the food marketplace and indeed tried to make that happen with local, grass fed beef – unsuccessfully. In the food system we’ve now created in Australia, profitability depends upon economies of scale: huge acreages (“broadacre” farming), monocultures, mechanised efficiency with the cropping cycles, centralised processing and abattoirs, and so on – delivering food to a Coles or Woolworths near you.

The Living Classroom shows up the absurdity of the system. Its ludicrously ambitious and yet totally common-sense aim is that within the next decade, it will indeed have established a large working farm that serves the local community.

KSCA ROAD TRIP

I (Lucas) am writing this from The Living Classroom, in the New England area of NSW.

A bunch of us from KSCA are on a road trip to explore regenerative agriculture and rural enterprise, and there's a lot of good stuff in this part of the world. The road trip came about after Futurelands2 last November - quite a few inspiring people attended from the New England area.

Laura Fisher got talking to Adam Blakester about the idea of a return match - where KSCA is the visitor instead of the host, and the idea ballooned from there.

On Monday night we gathered in Kandos at the CWA hall for a big dinner with local supporters of CEMENTA, farmers and artists. Then yesterday we had a long drive north to Bingara, where we once again had a great feed with the crew from the Living Classroom. This is a place that facilitates learning with a piece of land on the outskirts of the town of Bingara. The project involves an ever evolving site which was once a commons for grazing animals, and is now being collaboratively developed using regenerative farming methods. Today we're going to explore what's going on here in more details.

Later on this week, we'll visit:

• - Tim Wright's farm Lana in Uralla
• - Myall Creek Massacre & Reconciliation Memorial
• - A watercourse restoration project in Armidale
• - Adam Blakester's Starfish Initiatives (Adam was a speaker at Futurelands2)
• - Glenn Morris' farm "Billabong" in Inverell

Part-funding of the trip comes from Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney.

The Futurelands2 Newspaper

Hot off the press -->The FUTURELANDS2 Newspaper!

Get yer free copy this weekend at Cementa 17.

Art, Agriculture, Land Use, Regional Economies, Soil, Botany, Ethics, Food, Weeds...

With contributions from Bruce Pascoe, Tracy Norman from Dungog Festival, Gilbert Grace and Klara Marosszeky, Meg Ulman and Artist as Family, Kirsten Bradley from Milkwood Permaculture, Ian Milliss, Simon Mattsson, Diego Bonetto, Joni Taylor from New Landscapes Institute and Genevieve Murray, Alex Wisser, Laura Fisher, the amazing chefs at Alfie's Kitchen, Stuart Andrews, Jill Moore-Kashima, Adam Blakester, Alex Wisser, Ian Milliss, Ann Finegan, Gerda Roelvink, Haydn Washington, Larry Towney, Michelle Hines, Jason Tuckwell, Ceane Towers, Kevin Williams, Lyn Symes, Mark Branson, Paul Newell, Dave Standfield, Lucas Ihlein ...

More about our contributors here

Newspaper published by Kandos School of Cultural Adaptation, edited by Laura Fisher and Lucas Ihlein, design by Fiona Hudson and Eloise Lindebäck.

HARD COPY NEWSPAPERS ARE AVAILABLE FROM:

NSW:

• KANDOS: via CEMENTA Festival - email Alex Wisser awisser@cementa.com.au
• SYDNEY: BIG FAG PRESS, GLEBE (only on Tues or Thursday).
• BATHURST: via Karen Golland (karengolland[at]hotmail.com)
• DUBBO: via Western Plains Cultural Centre
• ARMIDALE / NEW ENGLAND: via Adam Blakester of Starfish Initiatives, and The Living Classroom, Bingara.
• BLUE MOUNTAINS: via Ian Milliss (ian[at]milliss.com).

WA:

• PERTH: via Tim Burns studio: J SHED Fleet St Fremantle, 0410 083 446, email 3rddegree@pobox.com

If you would like to get hold of a copy of the newspaper and you can't access the above distribution points please leave a comment below and we'll be in touch to organise it with you.

ALSO - Check back soon as we'll post a PDF version of the newspaper and link to it here.

Cementa 17 - Marloo farm tour announced!

Well, we must have been well behaved and very good listeners when we all visited Marloo farm during Futurelands2, because Stuart and Megan Andrews are welcoming us back again for Cementa 17. During the festival, KSCA will be launching the Futurelands2 newspaper, sharing the progress of The Hemp Initiative (don't miss the cookies!), and we're chuffed to announce that we'll also be hosting another site visit to Marloo farm.

The Futurelands2 Marloo tour - with the land agleam from a night's heavy rain - was certainly one of the most memorable parts of that weekend in November. This visit will be to a new site: Stuart is now keen to show us how he's applied Natural Sequence Farming methods to a different spot on his farm.

We have 60 tickets available, and we will be travelling between Kandos and Marloo by bus. Eventbrite tickets and information can be found here! And if you need a refresher on why a farm tour is an entirely appropriate thing to do at a contemporary art festival, you can read about Natural Sequence Farming and KSCA's collaboration with Stuart Andrews here and here.

Futurelands2: Alex Wisser on cultural adaptation

Futurelands2 took place over a gorgeous sunny weekend in October 2016 with over 130 people participating. We will be uploading talks by each of our speakers in the very near future, but we'll begin by posting Alex Wisser's account of the idea of cultural adaptation, based on the introductory talk he presented at the opening of the forum. 

In introducing Futurelands2, the second public forum on our changing relationship to land, I wanted to give a little context to the conversation we would engage in over the weekend. The story of its inception, like any good story, can be told from any number of perspectives.  I thought I would begin from the perspective of an artist, and to speak a bit about how and why a group of artists would come to produce a public forum on land. As we hoped, we were able to spend the majority of our time talking about land and only a little bit of the time talking about art.  It was important then, I thought, to introduce art into the frame through which we perceived our subject.

Kandos Projects talking about the impacts of coal on small communities and the environment. Futurelands2 expanded on this origin, diversifying the program to engage a wide spectrum of perspectives from economists to innovative farmers, Indigenous practitioners, philosophers, soil scientists and regional social entrepreneurs and included tours of a farming property and Ganguddy in the Wollemi National Park. This expansion was primarily due to the incredible energy of five artists and two academics (Ann Finegan, Laura Fisher, Ian Milliss, Gilbert Grace, Diego Bonetto, Lucas Ihlein and myself) loosely collected under the banner of a “fictional” educational institution, “The Kandos School of Cultural Adaptation”.  This circumstance also meant that the forum would reflect the central focus of concern for our nascent institution: Cultural Adaptation.

The term Cultural Adaptation refers to an idea that Ian Milliss has been banging on about for some decades now - that if art can be seen as an activity that functions specifically to adapt culture to the changing conditions of social reality, then any activity that changes culture can be seen as art. The paradigmatic example, first chosen by Ian, is P. A. Yeomans, an agricultural innovator who developed radical new ways of farming, and in doing so changed the culture of farming, and more broadly, altered the way we as a society conceptualized and thus interacted with land.  This is only one example: the idea of cultural adaptation applies across the span of human endeavour to any activity that changes culture, either in particular or in general.

This idea is exciting for an artist because it offers the opportunity for art to leave its white walled reserve and participate in the world not as rarified intellectual or aesthetic production, but as an embedded cultural practice that can be applied at any point at which change manifests itself across the spectrum of human culture.  If culture is coextensive with society, and as diverse, plural, and many faced, then why is it that we assume its change is only wrought within the specialized pressure chambers of high art and academia.  It seems to me more logical that if culture changes, it changes along all of its articulations, at every level, in every molecule and atom of which it is composed.  Should this not be where we apply our attention?  And if art has developed over the last 200 years as a specialized activity concerned with changing culture, is there not something that the artist can contribute toward these points of cultural change?  What would it mean to bring the conceptual repertoire, the strategies and methods for shifting perception and challenging convention developed within the specialized field of art, to bear on points of cultural change outside of it?   Is there not also something that art can learn from such encounters?

These questions inform the foundation of KSCA, and to a degree they were gratified at its inception. When I first met with farmer Stuart Andrews and presented the idea that he might partner his Natural Sequence Farming project with a group of artists, he naturally wondered why we would be interested to work with him. It was nearly the first thing out of his mouth.  He said up front, "I'm no artist" and I replied that we had approached him precisely because we considered him an artist.  He was not long in proving us correct.  The work he is engaged in on his property, Marloo, is an activity as essentially creative as anything performed in the studio.  His method is experimental and material. Ideas are applied to the land, tested, and evolved.  As with art, risk taking and failure are an essential part of the process.  But it’s the way that Stuart talks about disseminating the technique and the body of knowledge it generates that reveals his affinity to what is more traditionally known as art.

Stuart thinks about language with the same passion that he thinks about the land.  In contrast to the more oppositional approach of his father, Peter Andrews (who invented Natural Sequence Farming), Stuart often considers and works within the given parameters of existing culture, the language and policy landscape of the society he seeks to change.  Rather than directly challenge the status quo to an unlikely duel, he works with the existant legal and linguistic landscape to gain approval for his method and demonstrate its value to government regulators, policy makers and other farmers.  In other words he has adapted the principle of Natural Sequence Farming - that of working with the land instead of against it - to the arena of culture, changing the one as he would change the other.  If this is not the work of an artist, then I don't know what the work of an artist is.  In a sense, Stuart has anticipated the strategy underpinning our school of cultural adaptation, for what else are we doing when we take this existing word artist and stretch it over an object that does not conventionally carry its meaning?

How this concept of cultural adaptation will develop can only be discovered through its application to specific material and social contexts. Futurelands2, as our initial engagement, provided a forum through which artists served as hosts to a diverse range of perspectives on the human relationship to land. One of the successes of the forum was the diversity of voices that we managed to bring into dialogue, some of which were unavoidably in tension with each other. Land care is a contended field of endeavour with a long history of diverging horizons of concern, each with its own conceptual frame oriented by a particular relationship to land. At this point, it’s only an observation, but it occurred to me that perhaps what we had achieved at Futurelands2 was a moment of logical diversity, or logos diversity – a diversity of languages that coexisted in a relatively harmonious system of exchange and interdependency.  Like all such systems, they include conflict and competition, but are also most healthy or productive when this diversity is held open to the multiform of exchange available to them.