Personal inquiry takes NSW farmer on a new journey

In seeking answers to the innumerable questions posed by agriculture, farmers tend to turn to technology. For most of his decades of farming, David Marsh did too. But the 1982 drought, a by-product of the strongest El Niño event yet recorded, triggered a personal inquiry that has taken the central New South Wales farmer towards a different way of assessing value.

It’s not that he dismisses technology these days; just that he finds it less powerful than the processes of the living world, four billion years in the making.

Management of Allendale, Marsh’s 814-hectare property near Boorowa, NSW, has since the late 1990s moved by degrees from being techno-centric to eco-centric. The shift wasn’t motivated by latent hippiedom, but a deep, clear, ongoing investigation into what it means to live and farm in the 21st Century. It has required shrewd strategy and a willingness to cut free of the cultural expectations of Australian agriculture, which prides itself in progressive use of technology.

Read Matthew Cawood’s story on  The Good Land Project - “Simplifying Towards Complexity.”