There’s two things I really like about farmers.
They love a good yap, of course, and there’s plenty to learn.
When I was a know-it-all farmer, I was also working full-time (yes, there’s probably a link), so my hours were too precious for a wasteful bucolic cornering, and my kids knew the signal to come out and declare there was an urgent phone call.
But farmers also like to listen and if you attend any field day, watch the reception of the audience and even more, listen to questions that pop up as these over-worked providers of food and fibre squeeze out every morsel of information that they can on the clock.
The days of the clichéd cocky not wanting to try anything new are surely gone, and I think I saw the last of them when I tried teaching the sons of central Queensland cattle farmers that not everything needed to be cut down, sprayed or shot.
But it was difficult to do this with boys who would sneak down from the boarding house at night to ride yarded steers bareback for a laugh.
So, in class I gave the well-worn anecdote of the young son-in-law-to-be visiting his betrothed’s family sheep station for the first time and noticing that the Sunday roast had been cooked in two different roasting dishes, the lamb joint having been cut in half.
He inquired at meal’s end as to the reason and (let’s make this brief) the question got passed up the generations from his fiancée to her mother and then her mother all saying the same thing: “Well, that’s how my mother did it.”
Until they get to great-great-grandmother in the corner who turns up her hearing aid and settles it:
“We only had a tiny oven; we had no choice.”
It worked in the classroom; boys even took the story home.
In reality though, generational farmers have seen and known a lot about their land, so any whiz-bang technology that some upstart city bloke brings is always tempered with deep, local wisdom.
Farmers instinctively get this balance just right.
I have met too many city experts — interestingly some ecologists — who are ready to bang on about the negative environmental impact that farming has in toto without having ever set foot on a farm themselves.
They’re easy to shut up: don’t farmers want to pass on a working productive enterprise to the next generation and not a wasteland?
The idealists of course want a totally organic existence for all humans and can be held back only so far when they rant against chemicals, with the oft used: “my friend, everything is made of chemicals, including you; can we get rid of you?”
Trying to explain making enough food to feed the other 20-odd million people in the country (granted, not all of them are odd) and meet export targets so the country makes money is usually interrupted by city things — such as city intellect.
I listened once to an organic farming expert in a conference auditorium so packed full of ag science teachers that it made the nightly news for a week.
Clearly, it was in Hobart.
His descriptions were excruciating about how carrots are hand-weeded by the patsies who signed up — wishing they’d joined a different revolution — lying flat on a slow-moving platform (drawn probably by unicorns).
This home gardener never grows carrots for that reason.
The chap was charming — picture the charisma of Peter Russell Clarke with perhaps a few less “G’days” — and he punctuated his Q&A time with lots of self-deprecating laughter which was returned with stares.
And not because, back then, the what-goes-on-at-ag-conference-stays-at-ag-conference approach had us all in sunglasses after a decent pole-axing the night before.
We were after tangible answers.
Enter the next speaker, a de facto case for the affirmative farmer who knew his stuff.
Chemicals, graphs, safety data sheets, productivity as percentages (the other guy didn’t present a single number) and a demeanour that said: ‘let the grown-ups have a turn now’.
Our sunglasses were off by then.
Andy Wilson writes for Country News. He is a pre-peer review science editor in a range of fields and has a PhD in ecology from the University of Queensland.