"I think it’s the most significant contribution to landscape restoration that I’ve seen in Australia." Professor David Goldney, Landscape Ecologist

On Jan 26th 2011 Peter Andrews was awarded Australia's highest public award. The Order of Australia Medal.

Climate change reversal is possible

ABC-RN Late Night Live, presented by Phillip Adams
Monday 19 August 2013
Download the ABC-RN interview Podcast

Peter Andrews OAM says the reversal of climate change, the most urgent problem facing humanity today, is possible. Bringing large areas back from environmental ruin are key to stabilising the earth's climate, and making sustainable agriculture possible. Industry needs to adapt but individuals are essential in this turnabout.

Interview Transcript
Phillip Adams
Grazier and horse breeder from Bylong in the Upper Hunter Valley of NSW. Alongside the epicentre of coal mining corruption is a farm that demonstrates how serious land degradation may actually be reservable.
You might have seen two episodes of Australian Story a few years back featuring Peter Andrews, who taught through his approach, cheap and simple, the very opposite of what everyone else believed. He was planting willow trees and reed beds when others were piously ripping them out. And he was planting weeds when billions were / are spent pulling them out. In the process he has restored streams and wetlands to the way
they were before European settlement. His farm, Tarwyn Park
is now the prime demonstration area of his system called
Natural Sequence Farming—about a new way of looking at landscape.

Phillip Adams
Peter, as a kid growing up in Broken Hill, what was it that you saw that got you started on this life journey?

Peter Andrews
Well, I was 3-odd years old and a massive storm happened. Broken Hill had smelters in the 1820 through to the 40s, and they burned ever tree within 50 miles of Broken Hill that they could get a wagon alongside, in fact anything that would burn went. And we had this great big open grassland, we had paddocks of 10,000 acres on the station with not a tree in them. And then, we had a major storm: a series of hot winds— Sydney got burnt, Victoria got burnt. We had this hot weather building and building and then, suddenly, we were condemned to an underground room because overheating was bad for children. Three hours later, I came outside and the place had gone from a grassland to a desert. And then I watched over the next few weeks, because it was the war and no fuel, or water or feed for 100 miles and those sheep got buried alive in dust storms. It set a thing in my mind: We should never let this happen again. This is just crazy.

Phillip Adams
What you also observed was what you call "incised rivers"—tell us what that means.

Peter Andrews
Ah, look, Australia was a beautiful landscape of filtered waters and grasslands and this 'incision' happened once the hard-footed animals came or in some cases the shepherds would drain areas to get better use of the feed for the short term. And, of course, this thing happened really very quickly. You look at the early reports of just the Murray River system. In the 1820s, the riverboats started. There were four of them. Within 10 years there nearly 400. And those boats went through and cut out the reed beds which were the filtering systems of the river.

Phillip Adams
So 'incision' turns them into something like gutters.

Peter Andrews
A scientist put it into good terms: "It was a stepped diffusion system of broadacre hydroponics."
That was Australia. And it then went to a plumbing and drainage system, which drained all of our health and fertility systems.

Phillip Adams
And when that happens you completely stuff up the fertility cycle.

Peter Andrews
Absolutely! You know we brought a few sheep out —just to show the fertility cycle, how much it had changed— and by the 1820s it was 6.5 million. 54% died in Federation Drought. But it took another 20-odd years, with a huge number more sheep than we started with, to get back to that figure.

Phillip Adams
Now, Peter, there's a lot of aspects to Natural Sequence Farming, but the great singular idea that you confront us with is that rivers shouldn't be allowed to rush passed. You got to confuse the issue a bit. You gotta block them.

Peter Andrews
[Chuckle] Well, Plato, and I just want to quote this because people think this is something new and amazing.
2500 years ago, Plato described exactly what I know this landscape used to do.
He said: "You must stop the drainage. You must filter the water. You must return the wetlands to their function."
That was when the Middle East was crashing to desert. We are headed the same way, and probably a lot quicker.

Phillip Adams
And is it possible to reverse this terrible mistake?

Peter Andrews
Absolutely!

Phillip Adams
What do you do?

Peter Andrews
All plants - each plant has an environmental function and if you brought in an animal, there is a plant that can compensate for the impact of that animal. And what enlightened me the most—I went from Broken Hill, where a major destruction had occurred, by the mines, but the land was quite resilient. Then, I got to the Hunter Valley, where it had been completely destroyed by 1900. From then on, many of the introduced plants that people knew repaired their landscape were brought into the Hunter Valley and it became a model to show that when you've done the wrong thing, the plants will fix it for you.

Phillip Adams
Peter, we live on one of the tributaries to the Hunter River, as you know, and we're not getting as many floods as we used to, but we're still getting them, and I am astonished to see millions of tons of soil just belting down, bringing everything with it. So much vegetable matter.

Peter Andrews
You know we have so overlooked some of the obvious things.
I was thinking of a simple example: You've got a glass with a quantity of water in it, and another glass with the same quantity of sand, and if you tip the sand into the water, the level rises. Yet we're pouring trillions of tons of our landscape asset into the sea, yet no one is saying that will cause the sea to rise. And, if you let ice melt and it goes into the sea, it actually shrinks. We know the two, but we are ignoring one of the most obvious issues, and focusing on something… I'm not sure. We just leave so many of the obvious things out.

Phillip Adams
You are eternally exasperated. To what extent did our indigenous predecessors get it right whereas we are getting it so wrong?

Peter Andrews
It took them awhile, in my understanding of the history. They came here and, according to some beliefs, they got into really big numbers. And they made quite an impact on the land and the megafauna disappeared. Then they got an equilibrium. But they had two rules that are critically important: They controlled their population and they managed their landscape. And they had the two in balance - in harmony. That's one of the most important lessons. And one of the things that our technology would allow us to do.
If you want to increase your population, you have to make more sunlight into product every day. It's a simple scenario!

Phillip Adams
You've talked a lot to Aboriginal elders, haven't you, about these issues?

Peter Andrews
They have a very quick capacity to see what I see in the landscape.
They don't have any problem, if I walk around with them and say this is that and something else, they've got their own explanation: It was the snake or the serpent did the job, but they understand the functions I'm talking about are there.

Phillip Adams
But you don't find you get the same response from bureaucrats. You walk around with them and they are blind to what you can see.

Peter Andrews
They haven't got a single clue, unfortunately, and my frustration is that they don't seem to want to find out as well.

Phillip Adams
The issue is going to intensify - get more and more problematic - more and more urgent with climate change.

Peter Andrews
It is urgent now. There is no question there is 'human induced' climate change. Iin rational figures, it is the disruption of the sun 'turning product' that is the biggest issue. If we realised that every person who has a pot plant can contribute to the reversing of that process.
Every time a plant manages water, it manages heat. All of those things are not in the debate today.

Phillip Adams
I would like you to now shock the listener by rattling off those figures you were showing me before—about the various contributors to CO2.

Peter Andrews
We can go through a daily, yearly - whatever, and we'll find a 60% recycled CO2 that was oxidised away from white ants and all of the processes that create the recycling of plant material. So that is 60%. And, of course, it's recovered - a lot of it.
15% at least is from our destruction of forests.
20% is our poor land / plant management in agriculture.
3% is industry, but there is a 5%, so industry is between 3% and 5%.
The critical issue is: Industry has to manage it's carbon. We all know that. It cannot be wasted at the present rate. But if industry knew that they had a 95% opportunity to reverse it, it would happen.

Phillip Adams
And you're saying that it is reversible? That good farming practices, that good agricultural understanding can in fact slow down the catastrophe or even stop it in it's tracks.

Peter Andrews
Well, if 30% —and many civilisations were mulch farmers once, and they were pretty much sustainable. They were well adjusted, so they weren't war-like and they got wiped out by the war-like mob that did the sort of things we do. And if we then mulched farmed... What I'm doing is giving you the fact that this is proven sustainable, high-producing process. We could be, if 30% of the world took that philosophy, we could be carbon negative in 2 years and back to pre-industrial atmospheric levels in 10 years.

Phillip Adams
Well, everyone is going to think you are a raving rat-bag to say that.

Peter Andrews
Well, there a few million scientists that also have to be considered raving ragbags.

Phillip Adams
I like ragbags. To me it's not a perjorative term. Some of my best friends are ragbags [laughter].
Going back to this argument, that all plants, not just farms on an industrial scale, even the pot plants on the veranda, flower boxes have an impact on the climate.

Peter Andrews
Absolutely! And it's not something that we shouldn't know. Germany has got buildings covered with plants, and they are carbon negative. People are obsessed with weeds. They are the fastest recyclers in the system, and the fact is they've all got a single characteristic: They produce as many seeds as they can and then they spread them as widely as possible. Some float around the air, others get stuck on animals, others float around in the water. In time and space, which is a proper scientific term for using sustainable understanding of landscapes, those plants would have been everywhere. We know that balloons go around the world in a fortnight. So do seeds. Admittedly, they change partially when they get to a new environment, but they still do the function.

Phillip Adams
But we're into virtual ethnic cleansing of weeds, aren't we? Weeds are wicked. They've got to be destroyed.

Peter Andrews
Its a very well constructed commercial argument because when a person does something destructive to the soil the weeds job is to fix it.
So, when you go and dig the soil up, which is really destructive—if you just put down mulch and grow, you wouldn't have a problem.
When you dig it up, your gonna get weeds because they are saying "this shouldn't happen. We're going to stop this soil being destroyed." And that means, we think, that the weeds are the problem, when, really, we're the problem.

Phillip Adams
So, in a way, regarding the weed as 'wicked' we're waging war on weeds. That was a big, big historic mistake.

Peter Andrews
And, it's been through every civilisation who have failed. We've got these wonderful ruins where amazing technology must have been at their disposal…

Phillip Adams
I have to observe that weeds do grow fast. And because they grow faster, they need more CO2 don't they?

Peter Andrews
Yes, they do. They're the best repairers we could possibly have. And they bring their pumps, their air-conditioners, their water managers. They are not water wasters. Most weeds actually feed from the dew every day. From that daily water which nobody considers.

Phillip Adams
Ok, I do a bit of weeding, hoeing, pulling out. But they are nasty, nasty things like Prickly Pear, Bathurst Burr, Patterson's Curse. Do you agree with that?

Peter Andrews
Absolutely! I find, and this is the thing...

Phillip Adams
Tiger Pear is my particular…

Peter Andrews
Well, I'm not so sure of some of them, but they must have had a role. And in fact what we need to examine is how that fits in. I don't know the solution to Tiger Pear, but all of these others, that are such bugbears, I've worked with. The Love Grass, Serrated Tussock —there is a very practical management system that doesn't require poisoning them.

Phillip Adams
They are all a part of the warp and weft of nature.

Peter Andrews
Absolutely! They're intent is when it gets to a desperate stage it's their job to hold it from going further.

Phillip Adams
Australia is very quickly draining its underground aquifers and this is going to accelerate with the CSG. Do you think plants can play a restorative role there?

Peter Andrews
I can guarantee you —which is the real basis of Australia's landscape: It eliminated the animals that disrupted the ability for plants to manage water. So it was the only model in the world that I know of on the scale that went from the tropics to the temperate zone where plants were able to do all of those things.

Phillip Adams
Peter, people can make a lot of money out of waging war on weeds and, you know, there's big bucks in the chemicals that are squirted on them, and so on. Your theory, of course, doesn't produce profits for farmers, does it? It's often much harder work.

Peter Andrews
No, no. Absolutely wrong. Farmers are only profiting the chemical producers. When I was a boy, my grandfather was accused of being a very mean business man because somebody came to him and said,"I can make you 6 pounds for every pound you invest with me."
And he said, "I'm not interested. I need 10 pound for me pound." That was the commercial return on agriculture at my grandfather's time. Today, if they can get 3 to 5% on the capital that they've risked, they all think they're doing very well. That is madness!

Phillip Adams
What about salinity? What's the answer there?

Peter Andrews
Well, salinity is an essential product for all living things. All forms of mineral salts are needed and, what was the major thing with the Australian landscape, plants managed those by lifting the balanced amount of salt to the surface and then the tissue of that plant, as it decomposed, supplied the food and the source of health for the next cycle of plants. We disrupted that. So then the water tables, which were so critically important to live in an evaporation-free water management cycle because they would seal the surface from evaporation, only draw up the water they need to transpire and to grow and do their little jobs that they had to do. So the water was 100% efficient in that first cycle under the natural system in the Australian landscape, and there were 10s of millions of hectares of land serviced like that.
We put in European agriculture. Roz Kelly did a survey on the use and effectiveness of that water, back in 1994, and found that 95% of the water was lost and less than 5% of it actually produced product.
That's why we are in trouble. That's why we have a salinity problem.

Phillip Adams
And weeds can help fix that too?

Peter Andrews
Absolutely! I wasn't aware of it until I went to the Hunter Valley. There were so many weeds there, I just wondered how you would manage it. But I'd had this enlightening visit to England, where a fellow said he loved weeds and he never took a plant out of the system. He was the most effective and healthy thoroughbred producer in the world.

Phillip Adams
Given we can witness governments around the world, from the United States to our own, bending their knee to facilitating an acceleration of damage to water, to aquifers, to farms, what can the ordinary person, whether they are in the city or in the bush do?

Peter Andrews
Just recognise that common sense and really basic functions are not part of any planning. We don't plan what the daily water does, what the dew factor is, what can be managed. We don't understand or plan the movement of water through our garden, which would make it a hundred times more productive and effective. Every man could do this, and it would make the sort of difference that would change everything we're looking at.

Phillip Adams
I've got to stop you right there because you used the term 'dew factor'. I used to marvel that no matter how bad the drought, there was dew in the morning. A lot of water in the air, isn't there?

Peter Andrews
It's the most important water on the landscape, and its the purest. It's in the air. And those plants you mentioned earlier, with the prickles on them, the condensation occurs first around those furry leaves, like Patterson's Curse, and the thorns that other things have got —thats their job. Their job is to harvest that atmospheric water and cover the ground when everything else has failed, to keep it in a state that, when it does rain, the recovery will happen.

Phillip Adams
Is your battle with educating the public or educating the government?

Peter Andrews
The government. We've made so many laws based on completely erroneous science. It is not science rigorously applied.

Phillip Adams
What should governments be doing? Don't look so exasperated.

Peter Andrews
The frustration is that "Yes Minister" is well and truly alive. And I was about to give it to the bureaucrats because they never make mistakes and if a mistake was made a hundred years ago it's going to be perpetuated as long as somebody doesn't put a blow-torch to them
Well, its about to happen. The visible evidence has been there. The science is now monitored from satellite. There are no places to hide today.

Phillip Adams
There was a time when Australia was a fascinating place to experiment with basic notions of democracy. We had the first labor government; very progressive with trade unions; women's voting. All this stuff. You'd like to see Australia used as a test-bench, wouldn't you? Regenerating the landscape of the world.

Peter Andrews
It already is. We've just got to have it recognised. In this landscape, from the days of the Aborigines and their knowledge, to the processes that were clearly able to be downloaded from the landscape of the megafauna prior to Aborigines, and then to the capacity for us to reinstate those processes for all forms of agriculture. It's all happening in small scale at the present time and it could go off at a massive scale.

Phillip Adams
And, by regenerating the soil we can sequester a hell of a lot of carbon.

Peter Andrews
Absolutely! It is not even a major problem, because the simple CO2 molecule turned with a few hydrogen molecules into the carbon that we all have to live, everything that moves, lives and grows has to have that part of the CO2 molecule. And the by-product, which we all need, is oxygen. And why aren't we focusing on some of these really basic and simple things? In fact, we're trying to bury what we call a toxic chemical, a toxic waste, when it's the two most important compounds for life.

Phillip Adams
And if we don't do this we'll have trouble feeding ourselves.

Peter Andrews
We're in trouble, almost, today. We saw in Asia a typhoon go in. If you want to put it in monetary terms or living-compound terms, that went into the sea in just that one storm, we can't afford to lose.

END