A big one this week: a live recording at Floriade for the International Year of Rural Women, a genuinely unfashionable opinion about teaching kids to shoot, the enormous pile of farm labour that Australia doesn’t bother counting, and a viral photograph of wheat roots that neither side of the regenerative agriculture argument has quite got right.
#89 | Roots, Rights, and Revolutions: An Honest Chat on Traditional and Regenerative Ag – Agsolutely Fabulous
Floriade, and whatever an activation is
We’re doing a live podcast recording at Floriade, built around the International Year of Rural Women, plus some “activations” — a word I have agreed to in writing without fully establishing what it means. I have volunteered to judge cakes. Katja is the jam authority. They could not have picked a worse person to send to look at flowers, but horticulture is agriculture whether or not it ends up on a plate, there’s a substantial floral industry in this country, and plenty of people garden for the sheer joy of it. Not me. Never let me stop you.
My only real requirement is a warm tent. Cold ears and I are not compatible with public life.
Teaching kids to shoot is a life skill, not a scandal
A listener sent through an article on encouraging young people into recreational shooting, and I’m firmly for it — done safely, supervised, and inside a proper club structure.
Generations of kids grew up with a .22 or a slug gun, and what that did was demystify firearms. They knew how one worked, what it could do, and — crucially — they’d seen it take a life, sometimes with their own finger on the trigger. You do not treat a thing like a toy after that. City kids see firearms in games and films, where they read as power rather than as a tool that demands respect. That gap is a safety problem, not a cultural quirk.
Katja shoots pistol competitively and says the juniors at competitions are the most disciplined, courteous kids in the room — because that’s the price of admission. Play up in a shooting club and you’re gone. There’s no “but he’s talented” carve-out that certain football codes seem to run on.
One clarification we should make, because we glossed it on air: firearms licensing in Australia is administered state by state, and the age thresholds, minors’ permit conditions, supervision requirements and category rules differ between jurisdictions. The broad shape is right — independent licensing sits at adulthood and young people shoot under supervised permits through accredited clubs — but if you’re actually pursuing this for your kid, get the detail from your own state or territory firearms registry rather than from us. And whatever you do, buy proper hearing protection. I did not, and I have euthanised a lot of kangaroos with a large calibre rifle over the years, and I regret it daily.
The workforce nobody counts
Questions came in about labour law versus family farming, and Katja found the thing that should be the story: Australia does not collect national statistics on how many farm kids are working, at what ages, for how many hours, or during which peak seasons. Not for harvest, not for mustering, not for shearing.
That gap has consequences. It’s a large part of why childcare provision in agricultural areas is so badly matched to when we actually need it — there’s no data to prove the need exists. My nearest childcare centre is realistically Alice Springs, five hours away. And it leaves the industry defenceless in international arguments about child labour, because we can’t describe our own workforce. Some smaller studies exist, mostly triggered around drought, but nothing ongoing at a national level.
Related: in 2016 roughly 18 per cent of the agricultural workforce was recorded as unpaid family labour, and I’d expect that figure to rise, because more women are finally ticking the box that says they work in agriculture. Which brings us to the thing I will keep saying until I lose my voice. If you’re cooking for a stock camp, doing parts runs, walking behind sheep, or getting on the tractor because someone has to, you are farming. Not “home duties.” Not “just the wife.” We once sat down and costed out what the average farm woman would be paid for the roles she performs, and the answer ran into hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Stop discounting it.
Katja raised the harder version: adult children working unpaid on family farms into their thirties, forties and fifties. That is not a quirky arrangement, and where it comes with total financial dependence — no wage, all expenses paid, a house provided, and the whole lot conditional on never disagreeing — it meets the description of coercive control. It’s insidious precisely because it’s framed as generosity. If any of that lands close to home, please talk to someone you trust, or to a rural financial counsellor or legal service, and get independent advice before you make decisions about your future.
About those wheat roots
Someone sent through the image you’ve all seen: a man beside a perennial wheat plant whose root system is taller than he is, next to a stubby annual wheat plant. We concluded on air that it was AI-generated scare material. I’ve since gone looking, and I need to correct us.
The original is a real photograph. It comes out of The Land Institute in Kansas, where soil scientist Jerry Glover developed a method of excavating and preserving those enormous perennial root systems intact, and National Geographic photographer Jim Richardson shot the specimens on plexiglass in a stitched series. The plant is Kernza, a domesticated intermediate wheatgrass, and the research does back the visual — it produces substantially more root biomass than winter wheat. So the picture isn’t fabricated, and I’d rather say that plainly than let a wrong call stand. What’s also true is that AI-generated imitations of exactly this composition now circulate widely on social media, complete with the overalls-and-straw-hat styling that never existed in modern cropping, and that’s what set our alarm off.
The argument, though, stands. Comparing a perennial to an annual on root depth is not a like-for-like comparison — one has had a single season, the other has had years. And more to the point, we don’t eat the roots. Perennial pastures genuinely do open up subsoil, hold moisture and build carbon, and I’ll defend that all day. But a grazing system and a cropping system are different animals and you cannot lift a conclusion from one and drop it on the other.
The bit that irritates me is the fantasy underneath “traditional” farming. Traditionally, an enormous number of people starved. Are we going back to horse-drawn threshers? Scythes? Australia produces enough food to feed something like 75 million people, most of it exported, and that makes us a load-bearing wall in global food security — which is to say in geopolitical stability, because hungry populations get ideas about their governments. The trees came down centuries ago in Europe, where most of this lecturing originates. We are improving, constantly, funded largely by our own levy dollars through the RDCs: more yield, fewer inputs, less impact. Run a horse and plough if it makes you happy. Don’t try to legislate the rest of us back into the Dark Ages over an aesthetic.
On that note — Katja’s interview with Kim Storey drops next week, marking ten years of What Does A Farmer Look Like?, the self-funded coffee table project that set out to blow up the sixty-year-old-bloke-in-a-wheat-crop stereotype. I’m in one of the books and my kids are in the other. It’s beautiful work and she should do it again, because the industry has changed underneath it.
Harvest Her Power webinars
Three webinars with Boyce Chartered Accountants, ticketed, raising money for the Harvest Her Power residential event in Adelaide next year.
- 23 September, 10am — the budget and tax changes, and working effectively with your accountant and your bank
- 18 November, 10am — preparing for the next generation to take over
Format is a fifteen-minute presentation and then the rest of the hour is questions — send them in advance and anonymously if you’d rather, or ask live. I’ll be facilitating from the background.
Two caveats, both important. The capital gains, superannuation and inheritance measures being discussed are in various states of legislation and implementation, and the operational detail is genuinely unsettled — do not treat anything you hear, from us or anyone else, as the final word on how it applies to you. And everything presented is general information only. Take it home, then get advice tailored to your own situation from a properly accredited adviser before you touch anything. Do not gamble your future on a fifteen-minute slide deck.
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