Love, Humility & Gratitude — A Farming Journey

Dianne (Di) Haggerty farms over 24,000 ha of land in the central wheatbelt of Western Australia with husband, Ian, and younger son, Mathew. They are working to rebuild soil in semi-arid regions and produce premium food, fibre and beverages, which in turn supports the nutritional and microbiological needs of human and planetary health. Their farming practice is known as Natural Intelligence Farming. Di is one hell of a busy woman with no time to pen an article, let alone sit still, and we didn't want to add another thing to her plate — so the words below are taken in part from the powerful presentation she gave at the Resource Consulting Services (RCS) Convergence in July 2022, along with a quick phone interview while she was on the road home.

Ian and I started off in 1994, we purchased 660 ha in the wheatbelt independently. We didn’t inherit our land so that gave us an interesting starting point but before we went onto the farm we had a business in the Kimberley at Derby, a roadhouse, and the reason I mention this is because it had a significant impact on us personally.

Ian spent a lot of time on the road with Aboriginal Elders talking about the landscape and their knowledge and relationship with Country.

So we started off with not much at all, which was probably good grounding because we didn’t have a lot to lose, it was a matter of having a crack and seeing how you go from there. We had a farm advisor come in the early days and tell us to get out before we got started because we didn’t have much chance of success. But we kept on at it and figured out pretty quickly we were going to have to do things differently. Ian often said, “If I was going to do everything the same as everyone else, there's no way I was going to be able to grow and survive with such a small farm in the wheatbelt.”

Over 28 years, we learnt how to do things differently, I guess. The most significant being how to take ourselves as being dictators or controllers out of the picture, to being part of the natural system, and that’s where the beauty can really occur.

We decided to do whatever we could — lease, agist, whatever to make it work — and opportunities started to present themselves.

So over 28 years we have been on 33 different properties whether leasing, agisting or share farming. The beauty of that has been our capacity and ability to see so many different situations and soil types and what the outcomes are of doing this in all different environments. It has built confidence that these natural systems function everywhere, — if, as Walter Jehne says, ‘we can just take the foot off the throat of nature’, magic happens.

A lot of the land we were working with was deeply challenged. There are a lot of issues right through the wheatbelt with salinity, soil capping, wind erosion and compaction.

A working attempt at a definition of Natural Intelligence Farming is a self-sufficient ecosystem where the caretakers are participants and enablers.

It’s about having the humility to realise we aren’t the drivers of this and that the natural system has really got it sorted. We take joy in being part of it and the wonder of what we can learn by observation.

Ours is a story of love and respect and gratitude. Our animals have been with us from day one, a self-replacing merino flock and they have been amazing. They have supported us to transform the landscape and ourselves personally. They just have this innate wisdom of landscape and how to return things to health.

With the cropping side, which is more Ian’s boat, we have removed synthetic inputs so as not to influence that natural system to any degree, and just do what we can to ensure there is a diversity of plants throughout the whole landscape as much as possible.

There has been a lot of loss of diversity in this part of the world, particularly in our cropping systems. We use natural fertility processes — compost extract, worm liquids — because a lot of the land we work with is severely degraded, some of the soils are only 0.3% organic matter so we need to give it as much support as we can to start with.

We’ve been extremely fortunate to have access to some amazing scientific people, including Dr Christine Jones and Walter Jehne, who’ve helped us to put the science behind what we were seeing. We are constantly seeing new species of native grasses come back. And more and more insects and animals are returning too.

In terms of the economics, we’ve never really focused on the money, never put that front and centre, just done what we felt is right and fortunately, we have hit some tough times but at end of the day it has worked out for the best. (Di showed a slide during this talk detailing how Prospect Pastoral Company has seen a 34-fold increase in land mass cared for and in farm equity since 1994).

Ian will tell you it’s just about being in the right place at right time - for us, it wasn’t about getting big. But the land kept coming and we thought we’d better say yes because it needed help and it taught us about landscape changes at a landscape level which was really important for us to understand.

We supply a bakery direct in Perth with our grain, Miller and Baker, and we test our grain for all sorts, fungicides, contaminants, pesticides, herbicides and it just shows us that the microbial system, that natural system detoxifies. We’re going into degraded, depleted, chemically hammered properties and from year one can test our grain and it's coming up clean.

We also supply an organic butcher in Perth and market our wool direct to Europe through a private arrangement because of the high quality of this natural system.

In a later conversation with Di, she tells us that when it comes to making investment work for regenerative farmers, all of us need to be thinking, and operating differently.

“For so long money has been at the top of the ladder, but that’s not how this works anymore. Money can’t do anything, doesn’t mean anything, if you don’t have the people and the knowledge to put in service of restoration.

It's not about power and being in control. It's the opposite.

We're all learning how to work with these natural systems, and we are all in it together.

What we need is co-creators, people who will come along beside us with the humility to enable the intelligence of nature to do the work.

To trust nature to do the work.

To be able to restore landscapes and grow premium food and fibre in the process is something pretty extraordinary, and it means working from the heart.”

This article is an extract from Regenerating Investment in Food and Farming: A Roadmap.